The Wonderful World of Dissocia

Currently playing at the Royal Court, the Wonderful World of Dissocia really is a wonderful piece of theatre. It is a game of two halves. In the first, we see Lisa Jones (played by Christine Entwhisle) descend into psychosis, her inner mind made physical on stage, as she visits the land of Dissocia – it is a world of floor to ceiling carpet, a barrage of colour and noise and craziness – like Alice in Wonderland with sex and drugs says writer and director Anthony Neilson perhaps a little hopefully. The second part is very different, with Lisa drugged up and confined to hospital – the stage is shrunk in all directions, the colour scheme all white, the action slow, sketches of near nothingness, flickering in and out. This is as much a realisation of Lisa’s internal world as the first act. Particularly effective are the heightened sounds: of footsteps along the hospital corridor; of Lisa’s pills rattling in a little plastic cup. We learn that the psychogenic fugue state of the first act was the result of Lisa choosing not to take her medication. At the end, colour returns to the stage to leave us “in little doubt” (says the programme) that Lisa will return to Dissocia.

The bloke behind me found everything in the first act incredibly and irritatingly hilarious – he would laugh loudly and pompously for much longer than was necessary, often drowning out the actor’s next line. For me, the skill of the play was that for all the madcap fun of the first half, there was always a reminder of something perhaps sinister, certainly disturbing – it was all a bit too frenetic. Conversely, many in the audience grew restless and fidgety in the second act, but I found there to be a quiet, formalistic, minimalist beauty to the staging.

Nielson’s play veers close to a number of potential pitfalls – that it might glamorise or patronise mental illness, or that it might revert to cliché and dogma in questioning the treatment of the mentally ill and the behaviour of others to them. These are skilfully negotiated, not by avoiding them but by allowing complexity into the play – for example there is warmth and humanity to the hospital scenes despite the dramatisation of Lisa’s sense-deadening medication.

The genius to this play was that it was sufficiently open to allow one to extrapolate its themes to the wider question of the modern malaise – mental fracturedness as metaphor for societal brokenness – the boredom of everyday life that causes so many to seek their own kingdoms of Dissocia in the form of binges of drink and drugs and sexual debauchery. It exposes and manipulates an audience weaned on trite mock-surrealist comedy that finds hilarity in meaningless random associations, where mad and crazy are terms of endearment, an audience in need of constant sensation and stimulation, that have lost the ability to sit quietly and to concentrate on quiet things, that have lost the ability to think.