Full of angst and fear

There was an outpatient from Fort England psychiatric hospital who used to visit us when we were students at Rhodes.  He would walk up the terraced lawn to the verandah of our digs to ask for money, food and clothes.

We would give him what we could, and engage him in sporadic conversation for, although he was in rags, he was gentle. He used to ocassionally come and just sit on the lawn, without ever asking for anything. I think it was a respite from the dust and hustle of Joza township. As often as not, he would talk to himself. Sometimes he would mutter things in Xhosa in his own voice, at conversational volume, but just as often, he would use different voices. Sometimes that of a girl or young woman, and then switch to the voice of an old man. He had a host of different characters in his head.

I remember one day in particular when he acted as a coy young woman who was being wooed. He switched seamlessly between the wooer and the wooed, his characterisations good enough to give an Andrew Buckland a run for his money. He didn’t know we were watching, or if he did he didn’t care. He was speaking to the voices in his head. He provided consumate performances. And then he would wander off down the road without a word or a wave goodbye, completely lost in his world.

I don’t know what mental condition he suffered from or what he had experienced in his life, but he was clearly mentally ill.

More recently, there’s a woman I know who lives in a rural town who is becoming increasingly mentally ill. From what I can discern, she is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia but refuses to seek psychiatric help because she is convinced she is perfectly sane. What she wants is the people who are persecuting her through “remote neural monitoring” to be exposed by the media.

I visited her earlier this year when I was passing through that part of the country, in the vain hope that I could convince her she should seek help. But to her, I was crazy. The world she has constructed to rationalise her paranoia is real to her, it is me and everyone else who are deceived.

Like the man who spoke to the voices in his head, on the whole she appears calm and composed. The only tell that she is not sane is the fact that she tells the same story over and over again, sort of like a 45 minute record on permanent loop. A question may cause the needle to jump but it’s still the same record. Otherwise, if you have a sympathetic ear, she’s quite convincing.

But before all the above life experience, I read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in my late teens (I had literary pretensions) and although it was tough going, I recall being struck, about halfway through the novella which is written in the first person, that the protagonist, the Underground Man with whom I had come to sympathise, was insane.

As a journalist I have also interviewed prison inmates and people who have suffered horrendous trauma, all of whom have appeared rational and measured and it is only on reflection, when unpicking their statements, does the suspicion arise that they are, predominantly through adjustment to brutal circumstance, mentally ill to some degree.

The point I’m trying to make is writer and performer Jannes Erasmus and director and designer Quintin Wils’s depiction of schizophrenia I saw in Smaarties did not ring true. I admit my experience of people suffering mental illness is limited and I have not spent time visiting psychiatric wards, but there was the distinct feel of the amateur in this work. Not in terms of staging, which was visually appealing, even if leaning a bit heavily on the Roger Ballen/Die Antwoord aesthetic and comprised of theatrical tricks, but in terms of the common perception of what madness looks and sounds like.

It was full of shaking and trembling and jerking and tensed sinews and erratic unfinished sentences and flashing light and staccato switches between different personas. It was overwrought, way overwrought, and full of angst and it felt insincere.

There was no stillness, no reflection. There was not a moment for us to enter into the character’s inner life. In what was a spectacle of madness thrown at us, there were no surprises. A few tricks, yes, but not one single surprise. And if the aim was to disturb – I certainly hope it was not an attempt to illuminate the nature of schizophrenia – it failed completely. I saw far more disturbing performances on the front lawn of my university digs.

—Steve Kretzmann