Athena Stevens’s new play, Diagnosis, is an unusually buzz-worthy project. Not only does it place a protagonist with cerebral palsy at the centre of its world, it comes on the heels of her suing The Globe for harassment and discrimination during her employment there.
An engaging one hour of drama circling the question of whether Stevens's character—'S/he'—is a credible narrator is therefore an offer well framed by her own narrative and the current climate of rupture and hostility that exists in some quarters of the arts.
A camera projecting the audience onto the set as the play’s ‘citizens committee' introduces a cut and dried aesthetic of surveillance that will see Stevens pixilated on the back wall and transcribed by AI software as she gives testimony to a police officer.
Given the darkness and gnarly subject matter of the piece, it is interesting and surprising to experience the simplicity of its story: S/he is taken into a police station near Embankment Station for punching a fellow clubber in the face. S/he believed he was about to do something terrible to the woman with him.
As her explanations unfold, with moments of humour, we learn tat S/he is seeing premonitions of strangers' future trauma in luminous signs above their heads. The premise is made tight by zeroing in on the walkie-talkie interruptions of an officer on the beat, whose evening of watching foxes rummage through Embankment’s bins takes a turn for the worse, as predicted. Stevens's character's warnings are cannily proved true in real time.
The piece is effectively a two-hander in which the caustic constable, fully inhabited by Che Walker, in turn berates, listens and ‘humours'. Stevens plays S/he with energy and full commitment. The fact that her monologue leads the action is a challenge to the audience’s preconceptions of what communication on-stage should be—her disability contributes to a different kind of delivery that insists we listen well.
The fact that Diagnosis is set in the future by roughly fifty years is neither here nor there, but does allow for the conceit of a full ‘citizen’s committee’ sitting behind the blue-screen of a fourth wall, as well as the high surveillance recording aesthetic that lends vulnerability to Stevens's character.
Stevens has created a strong dramatic prism through which to explore ideas of credibility, judgement, truth and human affinity. However, the question of what we are meant to take away from 'her' misunderstood warning signals remains. Perhaps there is scope for greater clarity in the future.