THE ALMIGHTY SOMETIMES – Bladwell Productions

Thanks to organisations like Beyond Blue, Headspace and the Black Dog Institute, there is growing awareness of mental health in Australia but all of the stats and increased awareness in the world don’t penetrate in the way experience does.

The Almighty Sometimes, a play being performed by Bladwell Productions at the GPAC over the next few days, tackles the topic deftly, sensitively, subtly and yet powerfully with an experience that people who have lived through something similar will recognise and connect with, and that people who haven’t will gain a new awareness and appreciation from.

Written by Australian playwright Kendall Feaver, The Almighty Sometimes tells the story of Anna, a young woman who was placed on anti-psychotic medication while still in primary school and who, as she reaches adulthood, bristles with the need to be medicated, as she simultaneously struggles with her relationships with her mother, and her psychiatrist, and a burgeoning new relationship with Oliver.

As a child Anna was blessed with precocious writing skills and she believes her medication is now restricting her ability to write. Against pretty much everyone’s advice, Anna attempts an unmedicated life with disastrous results that affect all around her.

The Almighty Sometimes is a powerful play with exceptionally sharp, fast and engaging dialogue, and which won Kendall Feaver the 2015 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting – the largest playwriting competition in Europe. It’s a compelling piece, offering a rare insider’s view to mental illness, the desire (and difficulty) to fit in, the sense of otherness, the experience of being judged, the impacts of living life medicated or not, and the effect on those around you.

Guiding the dialogue is a straightforward narrative that offers the audience a complete journey, including enough backstory to inform the story, and an ending that thankfully doesn’t attempt to tie everything up in a happy-ending bow, but which nonetheless leaves a sense of hope.

It is, in short, a great story… but it’s the performances of its gifted ensemble that provide this production with its luminosity and power.

One of Goulburn’s leading actors Michelle McAleer, provides the solid backpiece to the performance, continuing to offer professional and sage advice in the face of emotional, angry and frustrated barbs from Anna and her mother Renee in a measured and note perfect performance. The role requires the psychiatrist to clearly care while maintaining a steely, professional distance, a tricky balancing act pulled off with aplomb by McAleer ensuring the focus remains on Anna and not her treatment.

Ash Telford, a newcomer to Goulburn stages, plays Anna’s budding love interest Oliver without cliches and with an open and welcome curiosity and willingness to step into uncharted territory – revealing, as the story progresses, issues of his own. Telford’s comfort on the stage adds significantly to the realism of the scenes and the pairing of Telford (as Oliver) and Kody Lewis (as Anna) is so convincingly and agonisingly cute that there is an unstated urging by the audience that they somehow work things out together. 

Marianne Powles, a regular presence in Goulburn productions, most often behind the scenes as a musical director, director and musician, provides (in my mind) one of her strongest ever performances as Anna’s mother Renee, a caring but conflicted mum who has placed much of her life in service of her daughter, who clearly cares but whose best intentions often end in an over-reaching crossing of the line as the balance between sacrifice and control blurs. Powles is especially powerful in the second act with an agonised performance that grows in intensity, running the gamut of emotions as she is exasperated by not knowing what to do next. It’s a performance that makes you wish she stepped in front of the curtains more often.

But the centrepiece of the show is, as it should be, Kody Lewis in the lead as Anna. This is Anna’s story, and Lewis inhabits the role so thoroughly, leaning into the anger, the mania, the despair and the sorrow so completely that it must take some time after the show to regain her composure. My heart ached and there were tears as she experienced some of the worst of her times.

Kody manages to deliver all of the rapid-fire mouthfuls of Anna’s dialogue without missing a beat, even as it meanders through a range of emotions and levels of intensity. It is a searingly brave performance for any actor to surrender themselves to, especially such a young performer, and yet she moves so seamlessly through her various emotions and moods that none of it appears artifice. Kody has, in recent years, grown from nervous quiet-as-a-church-mouse back-stager to a show stealer, and this performance must surely mark her as one of Goulburn’s most gifted, versatile and courageous young actors, right up there in the forefront of her gifted acting family.

Plays typically include a number of big dramatic moments but this has so many that the agile cast is continually kept on their toes, but through (no doubt) pains taking rehearsal, individual skill and crisp direction from Zac Bladwell, the responses and deliberately overlapping dialogue provide an intensity that holds the audience until they are breathless. As with his previous shows, Bladwell keeps the stage essentially bare to let the performances remain the focus and his use of strobing effects and matching sonics (sparingly) ratchets up the intensity at particularly poignant moments to provide a peek into the “otherness” of mania. As an audience member you find your heart rate increasing to match it adding to the engagement of the story.

Bladwell is also to be praised for his uncanny ability to select shows that will engage and move an audience and showcase the power of theatre.

This is, in every respect, a performance that the script deserves and which underscores the significance of mental health as an issue society needs to better understand.

This production doesn’t merely “touch on” mental illness, it places it front and centre, providing a much-needed case study for those who have only a vague understanding, and simultaneously an utterly recognisable experience for those who have lived with it. The cast and production team have created something that is sensitive and yet powerful at the same time, and thanks to the company’s commendable policy of keeping all tickets affordable (no tickets over $20) they have ensured that it is accessible to all.

It examines the sense of feeling alien and other than, the genuine fear of masking and losing one’s creativity under medical treatment, and the shared experience of those living with a person with severe mental illness.

To convey the experience of mental illness can be akin to describing colours to a blind person or asking a husband to walk you through what it’s like to give birth, and made more complex because every experience of mental illness contains a different mix of chemicals, aspects and experiences. But this play, and these performances… especially that of Kody Lewis… do an exemplary job of taking people inside the bubble.

From Anna’s initial adorable and unexceptional quirkiness and awkwardness, built to a blown out frenetic loss of control which Anna, even as she pushes loved ones away, is aware of but completely powerless to control, the performance shows the graduation from someone recognisable and familiar descend to an experience most have never had. Oliver’s fledgling openness to Anna’s traits, growing to frustration, Renee’s achingly unappreciated determination to assist Anna despite the relentless barbs and personal attacks as she reaches her own limits, and the professionalism and calm of Vivienne binding it together… these elements in this production provide as realistic a window into a particular experience of mental illness (from the perspectives of both the person experiencing it and their inner circle affected by it) that theatre can offer. If you have a heart, it will make it ache.

Some plays entertain, which this surely does too, but The Almighty Sometimes by Bladwell Productions also matters. It’s about something. It peels back the mystique, attempts to dissolve the stigma and gives an insight into the realities of a life in which control is fleeting and a perpetual battle. It’s confronting and messy and uncomfortable and most of all real.

First and foremost, this is a powerful piece of theatre. It’s a thought-provoking show that will affect you, which is the role of good theatre. I found it, perhaps influenced by a number of personal reasons, one of the most emotional theatre experiences I have had and I’m sure others will too.

Bladwell Productions has again delivered a moving, memorable production that doesn’t just help you see something you may not have seen before, it allows you to experience it. But in a country where suicide accounts for more deaths than any other cause for 15-45 year olds, it is also an important show that provides a valuable glimpse into mental illness and a chance to better understand what it’s like to experience it.

The Almighty Sometimes is running at the GPAC in Auburn Street Goulburn from November 3-5 with three nightly shows and two matinees, tickets available here.