Psychiatric blues/oranges

Daniel Nelson

Blue/Orange

Image by Olivia D'Cruz

It’s just three people on a stage, two white psychiatrists and their black patient, and all they do is talk. But it’s totally gripping, from beginning to end.

Christopher has been picked up in a London market for odd behaviour, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, sectioned for 27 days, and will be released tomorrow.

Bruce, the earnest, principled junior doctor, thinks Christopher’s case is more serious: “Which is what I want to talk to you about today. Your diagnosis. This term, this label, and what it means, because the thing is, I’m beginning to think, now … it’s … well, it’s a little inaccurate.”

Bruce thinks Christopher should stay in the institution for further treatment. Consultant Robert, whose emollience can spiral into red-faced fury when his authority is challenged, wants him out in the community because Christopher’s not so weird, is unlikely to harm anyone, is destabilised because of his “culture” – and because the institution needs his bed.

What a brew: the clash between junior and senior and the shortage of resources in the health service, the arrogance of the consultant, the racism, the shifting uncertainties of psychiatric diagnosis.

And that’s just the two of them. Christopher, who sometimes has to wait offstage while the others argue, his fate entirely in their hands,  but is never out of view – never out of the institution – is equally capable of throwing spanners into psychiatric work, changing his story, shifting his ground and mood, reinterpreting words and phrases. Does he even want to leave the institution? Does he reallt see the orange as blue, and believe his father is Idi Amin or Mohammed Ali (the answer to which may impact on Robert’s research, which he hopes will put him on the psychiatric map).

It’s absorbing and entertaining, given life and fire by three wonderful performances and equally good direction. The realpolitik of health service funding is as pervasive as when the play was written, though the psychiatric controversies have died down a little – or perhaps shifted: I would like to know more about what has happened to the debate over the incidence of schizophrenia in Britain’s various ethnic communities, but I guess the job of theatre is to flag it up rather than investigate and explain it, especially given the ease with which audiences can do their own internet searches.

When you see a production as good as this you wonder why people waste their time on West End theatre.

* Blue/Orange is at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut, SE1, until 2 July. Info: 7922 2922 http://ww