Broken Colour, a new work written by Nina Pearce, directed by Michael McCall and presented by The Blue Room and Same Cat, tackles the subject of mental illness and coupling in the modern world. It aims to take an insider’s look at a manic episode, to make it understandable to outsiders who have never suffered such a crisis of the spirit.
Pearce deconstructs the interior of a manic episode just enough to take the fear out of it for her audience without demystifying it completely. She expresses the strange poetry that exists within the mind of a person suffering from this type of mental illness, from seeing colourful auras around people, to drawing significant connections between events and thoughts which most “normal” people would chalk up to coincidence, and applying personal meaning and symbolism to random objects. She juxtaposes this against the story of a couple who are at an impasse over starting a family, and attempts to draw a parallel between the two stories, which I’m not sure came across fully in execution.
