Theatre: Possible Worlds

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Dir. Adrian Osmond

If I’m George, will you be Joyce?

George is brainless. Literally. A brilliant risk analyst who works out the kind of complicated sums in his head that most other people would require a small computer to solve, he is discovered, alone, sprawled on a bed in a spartan room, his skull sliced off, his brain missing.

This bloody opening to the Scottish premiere of John Mighton’s acclaimed play, suffused with black humour, sucks the audience into the cavity of George’s rapidly expanding mind and the labyrinth of worlds in which his love of a woman called Joyce takes over his consciousness.

At times a neurologist, at others a stockbroker, Joyce is the candle to George’s moth in this brief soiree of alternate realities. The police are flummoxed; the lab-bound scientist, played with sinister élan by Damien Thomas, is unnervingly creepy; and in the end, it all comes down to who can keep the strongest grip on what might be reality.

George’s wandering consciousness troubles him rather like the hazy memory of a night out on the tiles, magnified a hundredfold. What did he say and what did he dream? Is the other woman Joyce or does he just want her to be Joyce? What happens when only one person remembers these encounters? And who is to say we believe any of this?

Adrian Osmond’s atmospheric production is a darkly humorous concoction that plays with the odd plot-bedfellows of detective, horror, sci-fi and love story with the delicious hint of a fifties B-movie. The egocentric, human-oriented worlds question the limits of love and the imagination, suggesting that we are not among stars, but among minds.

Raquel Cassidy, as the multifarious Joyce, expertly creates a series of distinct characters, each with a defining personal tick. Stephen Hogan is convincingly disturbed as the somewhat infuriating George, sinking in a mire of confusion. Their relationship warps tirelessly between worlds and is sensitively played.

John Mighton’s play labours a little under the strain of trying to pack the possibilities of infinite variety into one hour, twenty minutes; and the clichés that define the limits of human experience can sometimes seem overdone. The set, a series of revolving spaces, is a subtly crafted interpretation of the limitations of the mind. Furniture is reused and remodelled, suggesting the continuity between George’s worlds, and both the importance and the boundaries of the imagination.

A stunning fractured lighting design complements the staging, and the audience is constantly assailed with the audible hints of life outside the box. At one point, the disembodied howls of animals subject to experiments of unknown purpose float through the walls into a laboratory full of secret cupboards and filing cabinets containing helplessly flashing brains in jars. There are moments, however, when the play becomes predictable, when loose ends are tied up just a little too neatly. It is almost as if the set cannot spin fast enough to blur the boundaries of the clichés with which Mighton explores human existence.

But this is a stimulating evening, whether or not you agree with the idea that an infinite number of other worlds exist, physically or in our own minds; for if our heads are full of possible worlds, we need to redefine madness. Déjà vu will never be the same again.

Possible Worlds opens the Six Stages Festival of Canadian Theatre and Dance and runs at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until 26th October.