The play seeks to demonstrate that attempts to combat psychosis through the prescription of mentally sedating drugs are hardly conducive to the titular eradication. Instead of this prevalent treatment method, the play advocates a relatively simple solution called Open Dialogue. “It’s the idea that people speak or cry out for help,” Woods says, “and they’re listened to and they then enter into a dialogue about that illness, rather than being automatically medicated.”
The Eradication of Schizophrenia takes its lead from the successful implementation of Open Dialogue in Finnish region, Lapland. Now, in case you’re already yawning towards the exit, the play isn’t a clinical exposition of this breakthrough psychiatric practice. Rather, Woods and Haynes (who are joined by Ben Grant and Nicola Gunn for the play’s Melbourne run) extrapolate Open Dialogue in a farcical, comic manner.
“Open Dialogue’s totally un-dramatic,” Woods says. “It’s so successful at defusing tension and psychoses and stress that it makes for a very bad play. We wanted to make a good play full of tension and dramatic conflict and so on.”
There are a few key distinctions between the Western Lapland depicted in the play and the real Finnish location. First of all, the narrative isn’t actually set in Finland, but a “non-specific Western country” that “isn’t Finland”. Furthermore, the psychiatric professionals of the play aren’t yet privy to the merits of the aforementioned way of working with psychoses.
“We wanted to be in a country that knows about it, but isn’t capable of doing it yet themselves,” Woods says. It could be England, it could be Australia it could be America. I think we were more interested in the accuracy with the people who are ill, than the performance of the therapist. My therapist’s actually a very bad therapist.”
A breakthrough discovery of Open Dialogue does eventuate in the play, but it’s not courtesy of this incompetent shrink portrayed by Woods.
“Because the main character refuses to take his medication, him and the other characters accidentally discover some of the ways of working that happen in Finland and have to engage with the story and find the narrative of what the problem is and unlock the trauma memory.”
The Eradication of Schizophrenia is the first play in a planned trilogy for Woods and Haynes, all centred around mental health issues. By exploring this topic in a dramatic manner, they’re seeking to communicate how the imposition of ‘normality’ in Western societies – geared towards capitalistic productivity – effectively shuns whatever can’t be snugly put in a box.
“The difference between eccentricity and madness is often a label that’s dished out by somebody who’s incapable of tolerating uncertainty,” says Woods. “What we try to show is how close [schizophrenia] is to supposedly normal behaviours. It’s like so close to exuberance and so close to chaotic thoughts and so close to comedy – in the way that comedy juxtaposes ideas that don’t normally go together.”
Just to plainly clarify, Woods and Haynes aren’t a couple of entrepreneurial psychiatrists utilising theatre to endorse a zany new treatment method. In fact, they only came across Open Dialogue quite recently.
“It came from our family stories,” Woods says. “We’d had experiences involving mental issues. We were devising a play about families and inevitably drew on our own experiences. Then as we looked into what the mental health environment was like now, that’s when we found out about the Lapland people and that sparked this idea of championing dialogue. We realised we had a great affinity with that because we’ve been working with dialogue for 25 years or so and found it to be a really rich vein of inquiry for ourselves.”
OK, so we’ve established that The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland has a fairly bold premise. But the actual way the play’s performed is another level of ambitious. In order to provide audiences with a sense of the auditory hallucinations experienced by people with psychoses, Woods and Haynes came up with an entirely novel staging format.
“We’re basically playing two plays in the same room at the same time, to two audiences,” Woods says. “There’s a wall between those two theatres, but it doesn’t stop the noise travelling from once space to the other. So the idea is that you’re watching and hearing a play, but at the same time you’re hearing another play as well. And the same’s going on for an auditorium on the other side of this wall.
“So you get this tension, almost like a kind of conflict between the two groups of people and how they respond and initially it’s quite frustrating and chaotic.”
Perhaps this performance method is a little hard to get your head around, but that’s precisely the point. See, life itself isn’t always a tidy sequence of coherent experiences.
“It is a very complex topic and we wanted to honour that,” Woods says. “We didn’t want to do some sort of banal simplification of the experience. We wanted it to be as complex as the topic.
“We live in a chaotic scrambled world, let’s embrace that rather than denying it and trying to simplify it and categorise things.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
