When we are very lucky in the theatre, drama smashes into life and holds a mirror up to us.
Such is Joanne Ryan’s In Two Minds. Here Ryan examines a situation, a relationship that has no national, no political, no religious distinctions. It’s human. It’s for everyone. It is brittle, brutal, loving and forgiving.
Many of us have outgrown our childhoods. Things that happened in our parents’ home have been eliminated or replaced in ours. It is easier to go back and be the child that juggles that familiar relationship. As adults, we dance around this fissure. It’s more difficult for them to enter your world than for you to go back. You have none that balance of power for years.
As we watch these two women enter the space, there is this undefined tension from the very first moments. In Two Minds has the addition obstacle of a mental health issue.
Mother has come to stay with Daughter while an extension is built on her own home. Mother is trying to regain power, and Daughter is trying to maintain it. Some of the things that were sacred in the growing up home have changed for Daughter in sometimes small and sometime profound ways.
“I keep the shoes in the hall.” “Aren’t you afraid they’ll be stolen?” “No one is going to steal your shoes, Mother.” Later in the conversation, a tactless remark from Mother about putting her luggage in the hall as well hits home but is ignored.
Tensions ebb and flow, mostly profoundly as Mother’s mental illness intrudes. The one scene at the extreme is frighteningly realistic.
There seems to be a repeating debate about how long the renovations are going to take. Mother says months, Daughter says weeks. But we see in Daughter that unacknowledged cringe that says both "Mother is exaggerating" and "please, not months". The room can no longer be claimed by either woman. Both are compromising.
The collaboration between the director, Sarah Jane Scaife, and the actors, Pom Boyd as Mother and Karen McCartney as Daughter, is champagne. Scaife seems to have applied the lightest of directorial intrusion. McCartney’s reaction is so easy to read and yet she hardly breathes. Boyd has the delicious and difficult task of flowing into and out of mental illness. Most of the time it is just bobbing below the surface. It is only in one scene where we see the two women at extreme odds. It is a powerful and scary scene.
We have all been there in varying degrees. It could be the picture of dementia or Alzheimer's or normal growing pains. Here we are dealing with a bipolar Mother. Compromise is needed but never defined by either party. This is a very dense and difficult play to sit through that has been mastered by Ryan and Boyd and McCartney and Scaife.