Playwright Guy Woods has his protagonist, Jon, wake up in The Sobcentre of the title, a mental health clinic of sorts, where he had been found abandoned on the doorstep unconscious a day or two earlier.
Jon (Kate Crisp) is much more unmannerly than anyone with amnesia and carrying no money or identification has any right to be towards Cathy (Amelia Paltridge), who owns and runs the private clinic. And there is a strangely robotic guard. So far, so intriguingly weird.
Cathy puts Jon into group therapy, where he starts to meet the patients (various roles including Desmond played by Alexander Holley and Sophie by Imogen King).
Interacting with the others causes things to come to Jon’s mind, but the memories that are triggered seem arbitrary and uninformative. As the action progresses, Jon merely comes across as manipulatively selfish with the veracity of a second-hand car salesperson. Cathy is zanily out of her depth intellectually with Jon and more generally with running the clinic, and the patients are no more than reductive confessional monologues.
As Woods’s text plays increasingly with surrealism, gravity loses its hold. An original score (composed and played by Josh Christopher) and some projected backdrops ornament the random memories and speeches, which become like bubbles floating attractively, mostly emptily above the horizon. There are some interesting things said about apologies, what people say against what they mean, or their intent in saying it, but bubble-like, they occasionally collide and burst or just bounce off each other, neither outcome generating the impetus needed to drive the plot forward or steer the audience towards understanding.
Disjointed narratives being a characteristic of surrealism notwithstanding, having sent the audience into the spheres of uncertainty, it is the playwright’s job to guide them down from their orbit to the mothership of purpose and comprehension, and here Woods is a tease.
Jon is put on mock trial with Cathy as judge, Desmond as a pedantic court clerk and Melissa (also Imogen King), Jon’s girlfriend, as witness. Instead of being the forum in which threads would be pulled together to reveal an illuminating conclusion, Melissa’s main accusation—apparently that Jon doesn’t take an interest in people and so is boring at parties—only slew any remaining hope for one.
It turns out that Jon rendered himself unconscious by hitting himself over the head with a spade. Perhaps Woods had been exploring what might drive someone to take such action.