Brief Limited Intermittent Psychotic Symptoms are exactly what they say: times when someone suffers from feeling elements of mental ill health, often extreme. This is a very personal journey by Mansfield as she uses circus skills to try and give insight to how these events have affected her. There is a lot here to illuminate her telling of the tale—theatrically, the use of the phone call and people’s names, the taking out into the crowd of the sacrament of her body and blood, when she believed she was Jesus, and the way in which projection is used to show times when she was growing up, thus making it very personal.
Her use of circus skills at times has limited effect, purely because it is a chaotic connection to the narrative. Perhaps that is the point. We are to take the chaos and understand that whilst in the midst of psychosis, nothing makes much sense. The problem is that the audience are not experiencing the same psychosis—therefore it truly does not always make much sense.
It leaves an element of frustration, because as a storyteller Mansfield is very good. Her style of engagement is both effective and hints at much more than she is sharing. There are elements of fanciful illumination—like the zoomies—which are left hanging because we are trying to nail them onto a frame.
What really does work is the effort put into engaging with the audience. There is also the work with the phone, where we really get the paranoia and the unstructured relationships in her life.
Her upbringing seems very ordinary and loving, making the point that there is not presented any real form of trauma to explain things. The idea of trauma is left to one side, which works exceptionally well in realising that this is a condition which is indiscriminate.
The circus skills seem to be stuck on rather than organic. This is a shame, as they could be better integrated into the piece to show not just the chaos but the way in which structure and order was found by Mansfield as she emerged out of individual manias and found some sense of purpose.
The setting and the use of theatre arts is good. I really loved the use of projection, and having the cloth with the hospital bed behind it kept our focus on the idea of how things were being projected by her ill self onto her life, whilst the shadow of hospitalisation was constant. Lighting is also used to great effect, as there are times when opening up the audience needs that. I just wish that there was a better reasoning behind that which was being explained in terms of B.L.I.P.S.
The section which could be awesome but struggled was "Fucked or Funny". Halfway through, Mansfield seemed to lose confidence in it, and I am still not totally sure what qualified as each category. I didn’t really laugh until I opened my pencil case, and by then nobody else in the audience could have seen the funny side of it. (I overpaid for a pencil case sold at the end of the show, and inside was a note from the authors telling me how much it cost—was I fucked, or did I find it funny?)
This has the feeling of a show in development which needs further cooking and more developmental time. Once some reflection and work go back into it, then I think it has the real potential to do more than highlight the condition—it could truly blow your mind.