Donna Franceschild never meant to write Takin’ Over
the Asylum, her hit 1994 TV comedy drama set in a mental hospital. Neither
could the American born playwright have predicted that the six-part series
would provide high profile break-out roles for its two stars, Ken Stott and a
young David Tennant.
The current production will also reunite Franceschild with Royal Lyceum artistic director, Mark Thomson. The pair first worked together on a profit-share production of an early play, The Sunshine Café, at the Etcetra Theatre in London back in 1989. They also led some workshops for young writers at the Cockpit Theatre around the same time.
Takin’ Over The Asylum, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, February 14th-March 9th; Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, March 13th-April 6th.
www.lyceum.org.uk
Franceschild’s new stage version, which updates the
action to the present day, already has a head start, with Iain Robertson
stepping into Stott’s shoes as double glazing salesman turned hospital DJ,
Eddie. Campbell, the patient originally played by Tennant, looks set to be
given extra edge by Brian Vernel, a second year acting student at Glasgow’s
Royal Conservatoire making his professional debut following a remarkable
performance in a college production as Macbeth.
“He’s pretty special,” Franceschild says in hushed
tones on a lunch-break from rehearsals of Mark Thomson’s co-production between
the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, and the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, “but they’re
all amazing. Everything tells you Iain Robertson shouldn’t be right for this,
but he just walked in and was. He’s just a phenomenal actor. If you see the
things he does, he just has this way of being so centred and real.
“It was always written for someone in their early
thirties, but Ken Stott was so fantastic we had to have him. We’re very lucky. With
the original Asylum, we felt like, what are the odds that you could put
together a cast where there wasn’t a weak link? I feel the same about this one.
Even the people who are playing what we call the second line loonies are
amazing to watch.”
Franceschild was first approached to transform
Takin’ Over the Asylum into a stage play several years ago for a production
that never worked out. She describes the current production as coming “out of
the blue. My agent knew, but I think wanted to spare me the disappointment of
it not happening again.”The current production will also reunite Franceschild with Royal Lyceum artistic director, Mark Thomson. The pair first worked together on a profit-share production of an early play, The Sunshine Café, at the Etcetra Theatre in London back in 1989. They also led some workshops for young writers at the Cockpit Theatre around the same time.
“He was very good,” she says, “even though he must
have only been about twenty-one. I’m a great predictor, and I said the same
thing about David Tennant, and I think we can agree I was right on that one
too.”
Whatever other predictions she makes, Franceschild
stresses that her stage play will categorically not be a cut and paste version
of the TV series.
“I didn’t want to go back to it unless I could
reinvent it,” she says, “so the first thing was to set it now, and the second
was to set it all in the hospital. I also had to lose some of my favourite
little plot-lines, but that was okay, because you have to learn to kill your
babies. I decided not to read the script of the original or watch it, because I
thought the things that are important and the things that I need are going to
stay in my mind, so I thought of the original as source material.
“Because of the passage of time, that was relatively
straight-forward, so then I had to make it work for the stage, because the TV
version was episodic. Some things changed in a really interesting way, because
I’m coming at it in a different way. Mental health as a topic has moved on, but
the stigma’s still there. That was important, but the landscape has changed.”
Inbetween her two versions of Takin’ Over the Asylum,
mental health issues have become a major part of Franceschild’s life. While
this undoubtedly comes in part from her own experience of bi-polar disorders,
she now describes herself as a campaigner.
“One of the issues that was maybe lower down in the
mix in the original and is much higher in the mix now is the issue of
employment,” she says. “That’s a huge hot-button issue now among mental health
activists, of which I count myself one. It’s this idea that, theoretrically,
they can’t discriminate against you because you’ve got mental health problems,
but in actual fact, of course they do. All they need to do is say there was a
better qualified candidate in the way that’s happened for years with black
people or women.
“Unless there’s a pattern, it’s very difficult to
prove that this is going on, so it’s a big issue now of the whole thing about
i.d. disclosure. If you disclose, you might not get the job. If you don’t
disclose, you could be in the job and, say for example, have an episode of
depression, and that will end up being a sackable offence because you didn’t
declare you suffered from depression.
“That’s a long way from celebrities saying they have
mental health issues, which I don’t criticise, but celebrities will probably be
alright. Somebody trying to get a job after being hospitalised with mental
health issues will probably find it much more difficult. I suppose what I hope
the effect of this play will be on some of the audience, anyway, is thinking,
not in terms of celebrities, but of people really struggling at the sharp end.”
Franceschild first came to prominence when an early
stage play, And The Cow Jumped Over The Moon, was picked up by BBC TV’s The
Play on One strand. The play featured a hospital DJ, which Franceschild joked
to director David Blair could be its own sit-com. Blair took her seriously,
eventually commissioning her to write what became Takin’ Over the Asylum.
“I didn’t want to do any more hospital drama,”
Franceschild remembers. “But most drama in one way or another is about being in
crisis, and people in mental hospitals are, by nature of being there, in
crisis. So I stumbled into it, and along the way became an activist, and I will
do anything to help de-stigmatise mental health issues. It’s much easier to say
you’ve got depression now, and I think we’ve moved away from the idea that it’s
a sign of weakness, but something like schizophrenia, we haven’t even touched
yet.”Takin’ Over The Asylum, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, February 14th-March 9th; Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, March 13th-April 6th.
www.lyceum.org.uk
The Herald, February 5th 2013
ends
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