BURN (Old Vic)****

 

By Aashiq

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qs2WIHVSiU

Available until: Unknown

This play was actually produced and filmed in 2019, in response to the changing attitudes to mental health and addiction. I didn’t know that when I first watched it. The emotions and situations the character, played by Weruche Opia, seem to describe the current situation so well. The need to stay in motion, as many people have done with their exercising and baking. (I didn’t get into all that. Me and ovens aren’t the best combination. I’m not too bad at the actual cooking part, but not so good at remembering to switch the thing off.) The feeling of being overwhelmed. Of not quite knowing what was going on. I honestly thought it was written in lockdown till I read the video description.

That kind of freaked me out a bit at first, that writer Sheila Atim was able to describe the situation we’re in now, a year or more before it actually happened. But then I thought… how new is out situation, really? We all talk about the world being different and in lots of ways, it is. Obviously, it is. But a lot of the feelings people have been having in response to the pandemic, they aren’t new. It’s happening on a much larger scale, but there are always people losing their jobs, wondering if they’ll be able to get another one. People struggling financially. People watching those they love becoming seriously ill and, in some cases, dying. People feeling trapped and afraid and not knowing what kind of future they will have. COVID might be new, the universality of it might be new to most people, who probably won’t remember a previous global crisis, but some things aren’t new at all.

That’s why we can watch plays about things we’ve never experienced and have some understanding of what the characters are going through. We might not know the situation, but we know the emotions.

The play opens (and closes) with Weruche Opia sitting on a chair in the centre of the room. The first thing she says is a question, one which immediately gets our attention and curiosity. A very really clever device by Sheila Atim, both in terms of engaging the audience instantly and enabling her character to explain, in a natural way, exactly what she’s doing.

Weruche’s character has come to see a counsellor or therapist (I don’t think that’s a spoiler as it’s made clear very early on). She doesn’t know what to say at first. She kind of dances around the subject and gets no help from the person they’re talking to. Counselling, in particular, can be like that. Talking into a blank space. Occasionally, you get a faint echo back, which might or might not bear some similarity to what you’ve just said. More often not, in my experience. They tend to respond to what they expect me to say rather than what I do say. It’s frustrating at best. If people don’t hear me, if they just hear the person they expect me to be, do I even still exist?

Weruche’s character talks about people in general, but she’s also talking about herself, trying to get around to her reason for seeking support. It’s painful and powerful and compelling. The images in the words. The uncertainty and fear, at first just in the words, but then in Weruche’s voice too. I really like the fact this story is presented as a monologue as that was my experience of therapy. You reach out for help and nobody is there. In this monologue, there is literally no-one there and I, for one, was excruciatingly aware of that.

This is a great piece of writing which is believingly and movingly acted and it could hardly have been more relevant if the character had said: “It’s 2020 and the world is being torn apart by a virus.” Her world is being torn apart by something. That’s enough.