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Overview
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You walk into Q Theatre to find a naked man curled up inside what seems to be large, sealed plastic bag. You’re not really sure how he’s breathing, but you hope he’s fine. This mood of concerned unease remains with you throughout the show.
Not Psycho a story of a psychotic breakdown. There's an archetypical runaway mother character, a girlfriend constantly pinging off drugs, a victim, potentially imaginary projections of a psychiatrist, a film crew and Stasi-like interrogators. Sex and violence fluctuate while the plot spirals into a cobwebbed mess.
Not Psycho's narrative is hard to grasp, with far-flung occurrences knitted together using key, strong visual and verbal cues delivered by an outstanding cast of actors. There are also some tangential references to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but none of it successfully grounds the plot into something comprehensible.
Mostly this is because Not Psycho does not care for a three act structure or any storytelling logic. The play actually gets contorted to the point where the past talks to the future (and the imagined), and sometimes they just talk over each other in a mess of words and actions. It’s in these dizzying scenes that some of the rawest material gets lodged, said dryly without emotional ado. These scenes, alongside other moments in the play, are conceptually powerful - but perhaps director Benjamin Henson slightly over-prioritised the strong delivery of concept in favour of story on too many counts.
But then again, perhaps that's the point of the play: to remain very open to interpretation and/or to emulate the feeling of a psychotic breakdown and/or to explore subjectivity. In those regards, the play is highly successful and can give itself a good pat on the back for a job well done. Another extra pat on the back for each of the actors (Edwin Beats, Julia Croft, Virginia Frankovich, Kevin Keys, Donogh Rees and Bryony Skillington), who were all bravely brazen and memorable. It takes guts to confidently hump another person across a stage, get starkers in front of an audience all the while being highly complex, believable and vulnerable characters.