Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
“There’s going to be a public enquiry,” says the
under-pressure boss of a failed institution at one point in Scottish Youth
Theatre’s new devised show created and performed by this year’s
seventeen-strong ensemble. “We’re off the hook.”
Given SYT’s turbulent last six months in terms of
surviving public funding decisions, such insights might well apply to organisations
infinitely closer to home that affected SYT’s livelihood. As it is, Vent is a
play that looks at the very prescient topic of mental health. Ross Mackay’s
production does this, not by dramatised confessionals, but by setting it in a
landscape that could have been dreamt up for Black Mirror by way of Westworld.
The Vent of the title is a hi-tech state-of-art centre
to which people with mental health issues are referred. Once in residence, the
patients effectively role-play their assorted anxieties. These are brought to
life by a regiment of robots who play all the other parts, taking each scenario
to extremes. So a suicidal teenager is cajoled into squaring up to his more
confident self; a harassed young mum finds out what would happen if she drowned
her screaming baby; and a girl who ties herself up in knots with debt learns
the power of talking to others.
Things don’t always go to plan, as Vent’s
Frankenstein’s monster of co-counselling morphed with assorted radical
therapies comes under official scrutiny that leads to the aforementioned public
enquiry.
This is all deftly realised by Mackay’s well-drilled
cast, with various scenarios woven together and linked by Vent’s hapless
manager Phil having a crisis of his own inbetween sparring with the centre’s
deceptively wise janitor George. This makes for much levity inbetween the serious
and all too recognisable situations on show. In the end, the letting off of
steam that Vent provides may not solve things, but as George’s parting words
hint at, the mess the patients are dealing with is not of their making.
The Herald, July 25th 2018
ends
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