A Nation’s Theatre Festival is showcasing an assortment of work from UK-based artists, with an eclectic programme at Battersea Arts Centre ranging from scratch pieces on a ‘pay what you can’ basis to full touring works.

This Room by Kent-based artist Laura Jane Dean sits effectively within BAC’s architecture: a room in the old town hall theatre is stripped almost bare to reveal and pay homage to its own biography.  This Room exposes the conversations, questions, decisions, and interactions that occur in a therapy room, usually confidential and unknown to the outside world. Supported by the Wellcome Trust, demystifying and raising awareness of mental health is a current and timely subject for theatre.

This solo piece is text based in the form of a personal lecture. It juxtaposes narratives written in formal language about medical conditions with the acting out of those conditions, the rational versus the emotional. Dean’s performance soon becomes more than a lecture, evolving into a lived experience of anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and how that feels. This is layered with a rational and philosophical questioning and understanding of what is happening both objectively and phenomenologically. The sophisticated awareness in the speech bridges the medical and emotional text. An intense hour unfolds with brief moments of lightness which could be extended to balance the heavy content.

Dean acknowledges the here and now as she smiles and greets us on arrival and takes the audience back and forth between relocating in time and geography to her therapy room and the existing room in BAC where we are referred to as the subject. There is a tension that underlies this piece, a fear or awareness that obsessive compulsive behaviours are pressing, urging, impulses that could manifest at any moment in all of us. These might be the ones described in the lecture, such as worrying that the house will burn down because the oven is left on, or Dean’s personal responses to her pairs of tights for, either repulsed by them or obsessed by thoughts of wringing her neck with them.

The design consists of a square space framed by lines of light along its boundaries, dressed with a table and boxes, a notice board, microphone and chair. The audience seating is arranged along three sides of this space, mirroring the boundary of the light. The space feels sparse and clinical like Dean’s succinct and matter of fact portrayal of her struggle.  Eight forms pinned to a notice board and four storage boxes containing envelopes of reports and multiple pairs of tights make visual the notion of categorisation, of putting people into boxes, numbers into charts and charts into statistics, dehumanising the subject at each step. Dean takes the audience through the cognitive behavioural therapy she undertook to combat obsessive compulsive disorder. The space that becomes her therapy room gradually becomes our own as the fourth wall is repeatedly broken and we are encouraged to reflect on our own experiences.

A short interlude between each section sees Dean question the audience against a set of statistics in her hand. Statements about worries or urges are set against the percentage of women and men who experience them. As more men are said to imagine having sex in a public place than women, we giggle and glance at our neighbours to see if their hands are raised in admission as well. This brief promise of humour is starkly contrasted by two brave viewers raising their hand in admission to experiencing the urge to slit their wrists or throat when seeing a sharp knife. It is at this point that the walls of safety built up around us by humour are shattered in one fell swoop. It’s an intimate and frightening moment.

Dean subtly adjusts her text between conversation, narration, and something progressively rhythmic. Not quite a song but more than a monologue, the ‘I want to know things’ poem has an ebb and flow to the voice, a regularity in its repetition and a sense of knowing in its unanswered questions. This section describes what Dean is searching for, her thoughts and feelings while living through her OCD. Matched by a simple chase between suspended yellow bulbs and darkness and a light trickle of piano notes, the subtlety of the work is where it is at its most poignant and strong. Melanie Wilson’s soundscape sets up an interplay between Dean’s thoughts and her live speech which is key to communicating the barriers and tension that develop out of fear.

Timely voiceovers put into words the unsaid, the pressing questions of a once silent voice. This is the voice that Dean could not speak out loud at the time due to social expectations or fear; it is unedited and brutally honest. The repetition of ‘I’ and ‘you’ is exposing and confronting as the subjects of the speech swap between herself and her therapist and I can’t help but feel under the microscope from beginning until leaving the building. The repetition of ‘You are…’ for example, ‘You are petite, you are wearing clothes’, brings the very-absent therapist directly into this room.

Entirely relatable, the piece creates a thoughtful and contemplative space. Dean leaves us in her current state of ‘not knowing if I’m better or if I want to get better’. She doesn’t want it to be easy but it could be easier. We are all heavy, with the world on our shoulders. I have an impulsive need to hug her but she is gone. Maybe it is me who needs the hug.

Reassembled, Slightly Askew describes Belfast-based artist Shannon Yee’s overwhelming personal journey in and out of surgery while hospitalised due to a brain infection. It continues through to rehabilitation and a realisation that the social and emotional self will be forever altered… slightly askew. The piece touches on the world around the patient, the medical professionals who care and treat her, and her steadfast relationship with her partner.  It carefully portrays Yee’s wavering navigation through both the event and its consequences, and reaffirms a faith in human beings’ ability to heal.

The form of this piece makes it an immediate success. Handed a consent form by two performers dressed in medical uniforms, I am sat in a waiting room for my treatment, a hospital wristband is attached, and coats, bags, and identities are left behind. Audience members are led to their beds in a large, stark hospital room on the first floor of Battersea Arts Centre. I feel entirely in the hands of the two nurses in this cold empty environment. The transition into the intimate world that Shannon Yee has created is well facilitated by the nurses who balance their roles and their patients’ needs as nervous viewers in a way that reassures, enabling the audience to fully immerse themselves in a piece that calls for extreme vulnerability.

The rest of the piece seems simple, participants lie in their bed and listen to audio through a set of headphones. The complexity is in its construction which allows Yee to explore the geography of site and senses in altering, dislocating, and disorientating ways. Integral to this affect are the blindfolds we are given and the binaural technology used to create the work. Without sight, images are conjured up in the mind, evoked by a chaotic and multilayered soundscape. Our perceptions of space and of movement are altered and senses of feeling, hearing, and of movement are heightened. There is a science behind this swirling moving world of voices, medical machines, and fuzziness. Working with sonic artist Paul Stapleton, the piece uses two methods that make it innovative and fully immersive. Binaural recording techniques, which allow artists to situate sound recordings ‘in space’ around listeners’ heads, creates the illusion that we are in fact inside Yee’s mind, have taken her place, and hear her voice as it if it were our own.  Speaking bodies also move and interact within the space around the listener whilst a technique called diffusion moves sound in and out around space also: it’s a strikingly full-body experience of sound as we lie, immobilised in our beds.

What this creates is theatre that is disorientating, unsettling and disquieting, as well as calming and comforting in the bedside manner of Yee’s partner and the blanket that tucks us in.

Complex emotional responses echoing Yee’s experiences are cleverly, thoughtfully generated.  Our bed becomes the entire world: it is safe, yet often constricting like a prison and regularly invaded by noises both recognisable and alien. The relative safety and passivity of the patient generates a reluctance to re-enter the outside world and emphasises the trust that is given ultimately through powerlessness.  There were four points that became almost unbearably panic-inducing, but safely dissipated, giving listeners a taster of their own fears and emotive responses.

The sound score feels disorientatingly physical:  sensations of air popping and blowing around your head and footsteps in crunchy grass above you, invasive bee-like buzzing and the powerful sound of a baby crying are emotive sensations that open up personal narratives and interpretations. I was convinced throughout that people were moving about the room (though I was assured afterwards that this was not the case), that the bed shakes, and the end of it was knocked by someone – your sense of reality versus the constructed landscape of sound is truly shaken. The heightened vulnerability created here, means that tiny vibrations in the floor boards feel like waves: I was lost, a small falling stone in a deep ocean of sounds and imagined images.

Innovative in its method, and informative and educational in its outcomes, Reassembled, Slightly Askew intimately connects medical professionals with patients in terms of empathy as well as art to make sense of personal trauma. For audience participants who enter this theatrical induced coma, it feels like a ritual in which audiences pay homage to everyone who has suffered in similar ways.  This generous production goes a long way to opening up a dialogue about the experience of serious illness that allows participants to begin to truly consider it whilst respecting its gravitas.

Protein Dance’s director Luca Silvestrini collaborates with musical director and performer Orlando Gough in a piece that seamlessly layers speech, movement, and a cappella singing into an all-encompassing spiritual experience. The all-singing, dancing, talking, and waiting ensemble of eight dash about our tables to serve the audience in a constantly churning kaleidoscope of floor patterns. Somewhat akin to the shapes plotted in Renaissance court dances, which sought to mirror the cosmos and find perfect harmony, the performers undulate and circle around side aisles of dining tables framing a central performance space. The studio is transformed into a dining room and then into a cathedral dedicated to the worship of food. Framed by a raised microwave at the altar and the kitchen clock at the opposite end, the acoustics tie this ethereal world together, bathing audiences in harmonies that make for tingling spines and dropped jaws.

The subject matter starts in the everyday: the routine and the habit of eating. It quickly descends into the depths of the social and emotional conditions that are so tightly interlaced around the act of eating. Sometimes dark and referencing horror, often sensually infused with tantalising text and innuendo, and consistently silly, each scene is abundant with content. The Meat Song sees performer Donna Lennard leaving a smear of blood along the shiny, white tiled wall as she sings with the purest of voices. Full of quips and quibbles from juices to pomegranates to marinating loins, the songs cover a myriad of topics. The lyrics highlight the muddle of mixed messages surrounding food, from health facts to cooking instructions and forbidden items to the notion of choice, demonstrating the contradicting information that influences our relationship with food today. Little ditties such as Don’t Eat That, Eat This, feeding like birds to feeding a child, all form content for speech, movement vocabulary, and narrative. The dance of the slaughter house begins with two female performers’ heads on plates. It becomes macabre with a clumsy, ungainly weighted plod carefully intertwined with a sense of noisy chaos, a subtle tension between compliance and panic, voice and movement.

As a miniature course is served up to each table of viewers, we are invited to enjoy a sensory experience by our waiters. Rolling a cherry tomato down your face before you pop it reveals flirtatious, sensual, and silly responses as audience members join their fellow diners in a joint eating exercise following simple instructions. Each micro-meal, revealed under a bright white spotlight as if beamed down from a deity, provokes  taste, textures, and social metaphor. Unwitting diners close their eyes, count down their chews, and are given permission to swallow or feed their neighbours in a cacophony of innuendo and metaphor.

The scene where performers Martin George and Louise Sofield sit across from each other on a table for two exemplifies the form of the piece as a whole both in structure and beauty. The two central diners are encircled by a chorus of breaths, notes, and words. Their conversations, thoughts, and reactions both spoken and unspoken are sung or danced in stark juxtaposition with the couple’s static posture and stilted silences. The meal frames larger issues as tempo and text increase and repeat, erupting in climatic tableaus and one-liners. After sudden silence and stillness, the scene transforms to that of an elderly man being spoon-fed. Now caring and the end of life is the focus with guttural noises, hiccups, and a poignant kiss giving this simple moment both beauty and gravitas. This sort of detailed build and seamless transformation is what the piece does well and often.

A series of rituals highlight personal stories where food is consumed under emotive circumstances, taking the audience through compelling highs and lows. The constantly revolving content feels like an indulgence in sensory experiences and the pleasure and sparkle in the performers’ eyes as they busy themselves around their diners make performer-audience relationship feel powerfully intimate. Often sexual or sensual, the scene climaxes bring to mind the sense of ecstasy that Baroque artists strived to capture, such as Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa. This is reiterated by the spiritual references that are played upon throughout.

After the microwave dings and dessert is served, the piece ends with a prayer-like narration of a list of ingredients that it contains, deconstructing  what has just occurred and clearing the plates ready for the next service. Senses heightened and appetites aroused for more, May Contain Food with its rich, fast moving text could easily be seen again. The acapella soundscape mastered by the ensemble is in constant transition meaning that voices move in and out of audience space and this ethereal surround-sound ties the work together. It may contain food but the product is far more than the sum of its parts.

Two robust, muscular, black men compete on a Nintendo Wii as the audience trickle in, feeling like voyeurs entering someone else’s home. Performers Soloman Israel and Samuel Nicholas inhabit a comfortable and homely set, designed on an axis, cleverly incorporating two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The partitions come to a point at centre stage where figures weave in and out of doors and openings that reveal intimate night time scenes and hide them when the break of daylight transforms transparent gauze windows into opaque wallpaper. A stopped clock reminds us both of the transience of time and of time standing still within these four intercepting walls.

The strongest character in the piece is the absent mother, whose voice by Michelle Asante echoes through an answer phone recording. We follow father and son (Israel and Nicholas) through a linear narrative of grief, written and directed by Natalie Ibu. Each scene depicts a recollection of memories and the difficulty in attempting to carry out an everyday chore whilst burdened by intense emotion. Father and son perform in parallel, either in entirely opposing worlds, unintentionally disrupting each other’s routines, or working together in mutual appreciation of their personal journeys.

The narrative carefully depicts scenes that anyone who has any sense of love or loss will easily recognise in their own stories. Making the table for dinner, boiling the kettle for tea, and going to bed are moments that are chosen thoughtfully for their mundane banality and framed as absolute hurdles to be overcome through new ritualistic habits. Particular movements are highlighted by an intuitive soundtrack that projects the everyday into extreme focus. Helen Skiera’s composition of worldly noises and abstract sounds invoke the piercing enormity of simple actions that forms a constant theme throughout.

A powerful dance solo by Nicholas emerging from washing in the bathroom is charged with energy as we watch a sudden burst of sharp isolations from behind. Cleansing turns into fighting as repetitious washing gestures, jumps, and leaps fill the spot where he stands before the mirror with a sense of bursting frustration. Repeating this for longer might allow a tiny snapshot to become more powerful.  The breathy, rhythmic, beat-boxing panic attack ends before it becomes scary or absorbing.  The stark reminder of death by drawing around objects with white chalk happens only once. Staccato isolations performed in silhouette behind the gauze, the rearranging of the table, the use of sign language, all burst with complex everyday and dance vocabularies that are intriguing to watch, full of content, and over all too quickly, before they fully transform into ritual.

The best and most poignant moments in this piece are sporadic, making it feel bitty and over descriptive, when Israel and Nicholas have the physicality and expressive qualities to perform to a more physical extreme and point of exhaustion. A shift away from naturalism and towards the physical embodiment of emotion and ritual, already there in the dance phrases, would take this piece to a powerful, unsettling, unnerving and emotive highpoint.  Take away the set, limit the endless props to a sheet, a mug, and a piece of white chalk, and set the task of performing the entire piece with the body – two men, two solo figures, one duet. This would transform the work from a naturalistic interpretation with a splattering of movement to one that maximises the emotive content of the complex physical vocabulary already there.

As it stands, i know all the secrets in my world describes with humour and care the isolation and ownership of pain. Through disruption of each other’s rituals, each character’s pain is their own. Pain is timeless, chronic, but passable with humour, humanity, and a father/son bond. Israel’s powerful duet as father with his wife’s dress draws the piece to a memorable close. Washing, wearing, fighting, worshiping, carrying, wringing, screwing up, and finally cloaking himself in this white cotton shift: father dons the wings of an angel or the cloak of a superhero and finally manages to lay the table with his son.

Rhiannon Faith’s Scary Shit is a collaboration with Maddy Morgan and psychotherapist Joy Griffiths. Faith and Morgan’s performance draws on autobiographical subject matter that emerged during therapy sessions as part of the creative process. The duo uncover a darker side of womanhood that is rarely thrown into light with such disarming honesty, facilitated by their ever-evolving and empowering friendship.

A little tipsy and a little befuddled, the audience are confronted by an abundance of fluffy pink props in a trashy engendering of space. At this point it could go either way as both Morgan and Faith repeatedly break out of the fourth wall, explaining the decisions and meanings behind each of their interrupted, or ‘failed’ performance phrases. As Morgan painstakingly pumps air from a foot pump into Faith’s face mask at her command, I wonder if a codependent relationship will unfold. They boss each other about, helping and hindering in a way that reveals the motives behind each friend’s actions. Their dysfunctional relationship translates well into a dysfunctional performance. The true success is how both performance and friendship evolve into an honest and moving embodiment of womanhood, affecting for both male and female audience members.

The show is structured by a series of vignettes in which the duo alternate between starring and supporting roles. Each section is formed around a subject that arose in therapy and is framed by thoughtless antics or the authoritative voice of psychotherapist Joy Griffiths from recorded sessions. Scenes are named around fears: Fight or Flight, Knot Dance, Phone Dump, Scary Shag, I Haven’t Had My Smear Test. The reliving of autobiographical narratives creates a purging or rewriting of memories in a phenomenological sense. On talking to Faith she explains how the exhausting climaxes appear at different points in the show on different nights according to her own emotions in the moment.

After a scrappy start, as Morgan begins to dance, these girls mean business. The Knot Dance translates sailor’s knots to anxious tummy knots to a vivid depiction of the physicality of infertility. Morgan’s evocative dance phrases tantalise the audience in snippets and give integrity to the performance. With each one, we feel her pain, frustration, and confusion at the topic in hand. Their gravity is made stronger by their framing. Faith’s set-up using humour, silliness, and storytelling makes for a powerfully revealing form. When one dance phrase is repeated, the second time with the addition of Faith’s narration, the I Haven’t Had My Smear Test poem transforms from an abrupt and aggressive series of gestures into a dynamic expression of irrational fears and complex imagery.

Transitional moments for the pair’s friendship arise when Morgan abandons her role as Faith’s assistant on stage. We see her vulnerability, which Faith is also forced to consider. The suspended balloon tied in rope, like a buoy, shields Morgan’s face while Faith has to lie on the floor to speak into the abandoned microphone. Dancing behind the buoy creates a sense of anonymity: Morgan’s head is replaced by knots of rope in a struggle to identify what or how she feels. Shaking, twitching and wringing hands morph into acutely nuanced tremors that run through Morgan’s body into an articulate movement vocabulary when her voice fails her.

By frankly recalling real experiences both serious and trivial, their consequences are heightened. The result of thanking someone for an unwanted dry-hump, for example, throws into stark reality the social constructs that created both this action and the response to it. The piece is full of content that prompts viewers to question gender roles in society. It appeals to every woman and hopefully opens the eyes of every man. Dedicated to their cause, Faith and Morgan continue this interrogation at the bar, drawing unlikely people together in frank conversations as the night draws in. I am left with a powerfully abiding image of the pair sat on their pink bench after Morgan’s eventual break down. Out of nowhere, in the highlight of a breath, their bodies, slightly tilted to one side in perfect harmony, are so in tune that for those few seconds I hold my breath with them too.