Camden Fringe 2024
Because
Unshaded Arts
Genre: Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: The Cockpit
Festival: Camden Fringe
Low Down
At the beginning this is a quite confusing story and it slowly morphs into a very disturbing play. This quality of the work is exactly what makes it so powerful.
Review
It is customary to start a review with a summary of what is happening in the play to give the reader an idea what the play is about. To set a scene, so to speak. However, for this production that is nearly impossible. I am not really sure I know what went on in that last hour. I am so muddled, I even got on the wrong tube train. The intensity of Because has made me hypersensitive to noise and light. I can’t cope with my seat neighbours having a conversation. While I put my custom made earplugs in, I am contemplating how weird or maybe famous, I would look putting my sunglasses on at 10pm on the Jubilee Line.
It starts harmless enough. Jade, a man in his mid 30s is at a therapy session or at least I think he is, with hindsight maybe he wasn’t. He has tried to self-diagnose already and he is quite hostile to his therapist. He has a tendency to talk to himself and has started to self-harm.
Now, you might think we all talk to ourselves from time to time. As will become very clear over the course of the play, this is not that kind of talking to oneself. This is not the odd ‘oh, you idiot’ when you spill the milk. This talking to oneself is dangerous.
Jade hears voices. Only he doesn’t realise he is hearing voices. When he says he talks to himself, he really is talking to himself. Himself as an Alter Ego, who acts as another person. They discuss, argue and tell each other off. The other Jade’s lines are recordings that are played in. It is a disembodied voice that sounds exactly like Jade. (Hassan Govia plays both parts) Sometimes it is hard to keep them apart. Both Jades act out imaginary scenes between Jade and people he knows. For example his mother. Disembodied Jade is supposed to take her lines, but then real Jade takes over.
Some scenes are dreams, well nightmares actually, and even here disembodied Jade has a role to play. The dreams are threatening. The nightmares are intense and always end with violence against Jade at the hands of Jade. This was all triggered by the death of another Jade. A former classmate who died young of causes yet unknown. And people speculate. Was it suicide or was she murdered by her long-term partner Damian. We actually never find out, but this incident sets of a whole series of imagined scenes and nightmares.
They give us glimpses of Jade’s life. It is never said out loud, but we get the feeling Jade is maybe closeted gay. He tries to suppress this fact by living celibate. It slowly emerges that Jade blames the other Jade, his late female former classmate, for all his misery. She was talking bad about him and he lost all friends. The boy he really liked stopped talking to him when Jade got involved. It was Damien, Jade’s partner of 17 years. Our Jade calls the other, dead Jade a ‘bitch’ who ruined his life, but then he also wants to be like her. The situation is confusing. Jade is confused and through him, so are we. It is hard to keep up. Hard to keep reality and fantasy, real conversations and imagined conversations apart. One gets lost and one gives up trying. There came a point when I thought: ‘Whatever, I am not trying to make sense of this anymore. It is such a mess I can’t order it.’
I looked at my watch and saw there were 20 minutes to go and then it would be over. It would be over for me, but not for Jade. If Jade was a real person, it would go on and on and on, day and night. It would never stop. At one point Jade’s worlds collide. He is with a friend and his Alter Ego chips in. Real Jade wants him to shut up so he can concentrate on his friend Maya (voiced by Mariah Yarjah and like all recordings played in as an disembodied voice). So he shouts: ‘Shut up!’. Maya is confused, offended. Jade is struggling to explain what is going on. No, he didn’t mean her.
And that’s when we realise, this is the life of someone who hears voices or has intrusive thoughts. An eternal confusing cacophony. You can’t switch it off. It is an onslaught of unwanted thoughts. In Jade’s case all things ‘death’. A negative, downward pulling whirl. The sufferer has never a chance to hear himself think as the expression goes. All thoughts are confrontations with others. The intensity of being in this state was exhausting for me over the space of one hour. I cannot even begin to imagine what suffering this brings to someone like Jade in real life.
Hassan Govia has not only written this intense, overwhelming work, he also performed it with a deep commitment that maybe only the playwright can bring to such a play. He was helped by the director and dramaturg Rebecca Goh. Both have created a work that makes us experience the life of someone who is hearing voices. It is incredibly powerful. After an hour I am a wreck. I want the voices to stop. They are driving me insane.
Watching ‘Because’ is difficult and does not make for an entertaining evening. However, I think it is very didactic. By playing out what is going on in the head of a person with intrusive thoughts or who is hearing voices we get an insight we would not have been able to get any other way.
