“Piskie”, Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Venue: Summerhall Cairns
To 26 August
Venue 26
Duration: 60 minutes
Suitability: 12+
Tom Shortland in Edinburgh
16 August 2024
**** Four-star review
A captivating, original, and nostalgic play about grief and imagination, that searches for magic among the hawthorn trees of Dartmoor, written and performed by Lucy Roslyn.
The opening transports the audience to a psychology lecture (not a huge leap of the imagination, given the show’s venue is the Cairns Lecture Theatre). However, the lecturer is doomed in this hour to experience a sudden mental breakdown.
Aristotle famously supposed that the pleasure we derive from drama lies in the joy of learning; perhaps then a lecture would be the most efficient form of theatre? Here, there is plenty to learn from, and it is consistently sprinkled with humour and emotional impact. From the beginning, it is never dry or esoteric, and begins to break down gradually, with her personality and echoes from her past seeping through the cracks. Memories, tangents, flash-backs (and unsavoury remarks about the tyrannical head of psychology) begin to invade the space, culminating in a hallucination: Ouida’s childhood imaginary best friend.
Funny, idiosyncratic and charming, Lucy Roslyn exudes reams of enthusiasm in the role of Ouida Burt. With no fourth wall, Roslyn fosters a palpable connection with the audience, capitalising on the intimacy of the venue to weave a colourful web of case studies, storytelling and Devon folklore. The veil between audience and drama is thin.
The premise is imaginative and compelling, and the first half of the play is engrossing. Unfortunately, the writing displays from some rough edges. Dr Burt’s descent into madness is made excessively clear: we are told “I’m unravelling” rather than simply shown it. Later, the climactic moments rely on a kind of repetitive, nostalgic sentimentality that not everyone in the audience can get on-board with, perhaps for want of any gritty complexity. And finally, the ultimate sense that everything will be okay seems somewhat artificial when one considers that, after her malignant mental health issues are revealed, Ouida never resolves to get professional medical help from anyone (other than herself). As a result, you may feel cheated out of a truly satisfying ending.
Piskie’s greatest strength, however, lies in its inspiring perspective on imagination. Quoting the 1950 film Harvey, Ouida tells us: “Fantasy is the difference between a photograph and a painting. The photograph shows only the reality. The painting shows not only the reality, but the dream behind it”. Sharing the ethos of her work passionately, she demonstrates an infectious empathy towards her patients who suffer from psychosis, a condition, she tells us, whereby the mind’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality is compromised. Slippage from the world of reality into the world of fantasy is convincingly depicted as something that could happen to any of us. The othering stigma that tends to surround psychosis is refreshingly and triumphantly rejected.
This is the newest in a sequence of four shows written by Lucy Roslyn and directed by Jamie Firth, and the third in which Roslyn herself has performed. It is fitting that an exploration of the powers of the imagination — both healing and destructive — should take the form of a play, a collective act of shared imagination.
[Photo above courtesy of BoonDog Theatre]
