Rae Mainwaring was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) twenty years ago. She was frustrated by the limited, and negative, depictions of her condition, so she set out to correct this and create a piece of theatre that is joyful, positive and uplifting. Bright Places, originally developed in 2019 as part of Birmingham Rep’s Foundry new writers’ development scheme, is the result.
The title refers both to the white patches on the MRI scan that show the brain scar tissue which causes Rae’s symptoms and also the bright places she escapes into in order to cope—dancing and TV.
The set consists of a white flat at the back onto which captions and other images are projected, plus various blocks to sit or stand on and a clothes rail for quick changes. A cast of three, Lauren Foster, Aimee Berwick and Rebecca Holmes, who is herself living with an MS diagnosis, play Rae and a variety of doctors, friends and the disease itself. After the actors introduce themselves, someone says, “this is a serious piece of small-scale, subsidised theatre,” and they go into the main narrative.
The three actors dance to Baby D’s "Let Me Be Your Fantasy", the music glitches and stops and Rae learns that her MRI brain scan has revealed damage to the myelin sheath around her nerves cells, which causes MS. It is progressive and incurable, but the form the disease takes, and the speed with which it progresses, varies from person to person. She is twenty-three years old.
Rae goes through something like the five stages of grief as she learns to live with her condition, starting with denial. She thinks being an invalid might be rather romantic, like a character in a Victorian novel, until she is wiped out by her next relapse. Maybe she could be a Paralympian instead, but exhaustion is not conducive to elite athlete training. She fantasises about going to live in Paris, but she can’t work and she has to move back in with her parents.
On a good day, she can still go on dates with boyfriends, but not when she has a relapse. At times, she wants to use the disabled seat on the bus, but she’s worried she doesn’t look disabled enough and people will think she is a fraud. Disability is a social construct, and she can’t reconcile her own condition with what the term ‘disability’ is taken to mean, so the self-loathing and depression set in.
Her friends want to help, but suggestions of more exercise, or less exercise, Alexander Technique, CBT, reiki, a vegan diet and a dozen other alternative remedies do nothing to help, although that doesn’t stop her trying them.
She discovers there is a limited vocabulary with which to describe her symptoms. It’s a bit like trying to talk about depression: everyone gets depressed, but ‘feeling depressed’ isn’t the same as depression. Similarly, ‘feeling tired’ isn’t the same as the utterly debilitating exhaustion she experiences during an MS relapse, which is more like, in her words, being "embalmed in concrete".
As a last resort, she joins an MS support group. She is the youngest person there, and everyone else is in much worse health than she is. She leaves the meeting depressed and afraid.
She finally starts to rationalise her condition and her own responses to it. She revisits the specialist to gain a better understanding of what MS is and how it will affect her. She gains perspective, she tells herself, “I am a person with MS. I am not MS.” Her life would have had joys and heartbreak without MS, and it still will, but now she’ll have MS as well.
The show is well-acted in Tessa Walker’s lively and energetic production. It provides a comprehensive education in what MS is, its causes and symptoms and the difficulties people with an MS diagnosis face, both physical and emotional.
It’s not the most innovative piece of theatre I’ve seen in this field—people like Bryony Kimmings, Caroline Horton and Selina Thompson do this kind of autobiographical work better—but that’s not the point. What matters is to be seen, and it will, I’m sure, be a comfort to people living with MS, and their friends and families, to see the condition represented on stage.