Creating a play that stretches the bounds of sanity and portrays an imbalanced psychological state is a difficult balance to achieve. It's all too easy for the concept to descend into farce, lapse into incoherence or simply come off as impenetrable madness. In the case of I Am Yours, it's never quite clear where the line of sanity is supposed to be drawn, and whether the story is supposed to be horror, comedy or drama.
The odd plot revolves around two sisters, Dee and Mercy: one an irresistable artist, the other a shy, affection-seeking wallflower. Dee's obsession with her 'animal' seems to haunt her and leads her to alternate between hot and cold, several times in a single scene, with her besotted but broken husband Mack, who Mercy also pines over her. Thrown into the mix is the lonely landlord Toilane, who impregnates Dee during a one-night stand and is hen-pecked by his aging mother to claim the baby after Dee unceremoniously kicks him out.
There are enough moments throughout I Am Yours that make it clear there are some good ideas behind the performance, however they are so obscured by the inconsistent tone and muddled and unclear backstory that it becomes difficult to follow and impossible to really care about the characters. This is a shame as the cast are clearly invested in the roles, especially Cait Irvine, whose impassioned performance as the frantically schizoid Dee remains energised and fascinating throughout.
Unfortunately, it simply never holds together, as the actions of characters alternate between the unrealistic, to the ridiculous, to the frankly bizarre, all of which could have been perhaps mitigated by grounding it in the underlying plot strand that hinted at some form of demonic presence lurking behind character actions, but which, like most of the other plot strands and character motivations, simple dissipates away as the events culminate in an unsatisfactory payoff.