Mind games

Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall enjoys the dubious status of a modern classic. A black mental-health patient, Christopher, is about to be freed from a clinic but his cautious young shrink, Bruce, wants to keep him under observation. His senior colleague, Robert, thinks a dose of the big bad world will help to cure the nervy, delusional Christopher, who claims Idi Amin as his father and insists that all oranges are blue. He’s clearly unstable and though he’s highly irascible he hasn’t yet threatened himself, or anyone else, so he deserves his freedom. It’s the kind of knife-edge conundrum faced by clinicians every day.

Then, a twist. Robert professes support for R.D. Laing, who argued that insanity was a fiction, a form of cultural libel, used by the self-deluding majority as a pretext to lock up outcasts and weaklings under the guise of compassionate assistance. With Christopher as a lab rat, Robert hopes to test a new theory that bipolarity among black men is fomented by white prejudice. But first he must oust Bruce and take over Christopher’s case. Battle commences.

Robert sets about poisoning Christopher’s mind against Bruce without the slightest regard to the effect these head-games might have on a man with a fragmenting personality. When Bruce is heard quoting Christopher’s description of himself as an ‘uppity nigger’, Robert pounces. He accuses Bruce of racially insulting a patient. More twists follow in this astonishing script which takes the audience on a two-hour white-knuckle ride. Never for a moment is it clear which way the action is heading. Will Bruce redeem Christopher? Will Robert be exposed as a closet racist? Will Christopher grab that pencil and stab somebody in the face?

One of the glories of the play is that it embraces so many genres without settling into the traditional boundaries of any particular category.