Edinburgh Fringe 2024
B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield and Jess Love
Genre: Circus, Performance Art, Theatre
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Five years ago Margot Mansfield – bubbly, confident circus performer and acrobat with an irreverent sense of humour – was felled by sudden onset psychosis. Unable to sleep and convinced she was being watched 24/7 Margot experienced the terrifying ride of this personality changing disorder. B.L.I.P.S. (title taken from the name of the syndrome diagnosed) is Mansfield’s owning and telling of her own story.
Review
A circus acrobat balances on a wobbly pile of wooden blocks, knocking the tower lower and lower as the audience watches uncertain if this trick will go horribly wrong, a telephone rings over and over with a discordant jangle, lights flick on and off across the stage. On a muslin screen home movies float like memories hard to grasp and voices overs from Mum and Dad relate the dreadful day their daughter broke down.
Mansfield uses all these storytelling devices and more to show you what living with sudden onset psychosis (BLIPS) is like for Margot, the person living with the distress, and for their family and friends. BLIPS is what happened to Mansfield the professional performer in 2019 and she uses her considerable physical talents to try to share with us the horror of the situation she was plunged into. One of the symptoms is an inability to fall asleep so exhaustion and restlessness combine to produce paranoia and abusive behaviours, we see Margot repeat the same backward and forward somersaults over and over, at first controlled and elegant and then increasingly ragged. It is a hard watch but a perfect illustration of distress.
At other times the techniques miss their mark – despite her physical prowess Mansfield is quiet vocally and some sequences like the ‘funny or f***ed’ game show are a great idea which fall flat. A 10am show at Summerhall is a tough gig but by leaning into our reluctance to join in and ratcheting up our discomfort then perversely these elements could be more successful. The projections of dictionary definitions (‘what is hope?’) are a clever way of exploring how words are pretty useless at helping a patient and professionals can trap you in a diagnosis; better to find your own descriptors. Practically however if the words were audio described too it would make the production more accessible for all.
BLIPS is a thoughtful addition to the canon of works in which solo performers use their art to give us insight, full of individual sequences which are entertaining and emotional. Strangely for a show by a circus performer it lacks a driving narrative arc and jeopardy – where was the Big Top build up to the biggest trick of the night, the will she/won’t she make the hire wire act moment? All the elements are there but maybe on its next outing a reworking can juggle them into a more coherent whole.
