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Oh, Calm Down

Summerhall

Four stars 

 

OCD is the great misunderstood illness, with sufferers misdiagnosed and treated as a joke by many who should no better. Charlotte Anne-Tilley’s new play goes some way to redress the balance by way of Lucy and Claire, two women generations apart, but who go through very similar things. 

 

Lucy is in the last stages of labour, with the prospect of looking after another human blighted by the fact that she’s falling apart. Twenty-five years on, Claire is about to drop out of art school after being unable to cope with panic attacks. 

 

Anne-Tilley’s set up dovetails between Lucy and Claire’s parallel lives with a fluidity that sees Anne-Tilley as Claire and fellow performer Maddy Banks as Lucy double up in Ed White’s production as assorted mothers, grandmothers and lecturers. On one level these are peripheral characters, but in Lucy and Claire’s minds they become obstacles to living free of anxiety. 

 

What follows is both moving and enlightening in a play that highlights its theme with the sort of empathy that recalls an old school Play for Today. This is no bad thing in a sensitive study of a much-maligned illness in which the two women are revealed to have links that bind them together even more. 

 

Summerhall until 26th August, 3pm.


The List, August 2024

 

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