The Atawhai Festival was created in 2015 to “raise awareness of issues that affect our mental health and wellbeing. The festival has a solid aim to destigmatise mental health and addiction problems through changing dialogue and perceptions around the topic and create tangible support networks to encourage self-care for those engaged in the performing arts.” It is through Taurima Vibes Ltd that this Auckland show comes to Wellington.

Verbatim theatre, like it or loathe it, comes loaded with a volatility – these stories are someone’s life. Like the extraordinary The White Guitar there is an added energy when one of the onstage performers exist within the tale told. Fittingly this week, upstairs in the Heyday Dome is Kate Jason Smith’s performance of her mother’s story: I’ll Tell You This for Nothing.

For Actor/ Writer Daniel Goodwin, Breathe began as a spoken word poem and now sits somewhere between verbatim and performance theatre. Auteur Borni Te Rongopai Tukiwaho (he, after all, crafted the lights, set, costume, sound and AV) and producer Gemishka Chetty, alongside writing mentor Gary Henderson, have brought Goodwin’s alive.

The monochrome costumes (white t-shirts, black yoga pants) and the set (two islands of rostra, stretched muslin cloth as a cyc for projection) are about as black and white as this production is going to get. Pieces of paper and colourful balloons abound, and throughout, cast members (other than Goodwin) create flowers out of blue or red paper. On entry The Avalanche’s ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ blares from the screen and speakers. Frankly, apart from a sense of being of this being a production on tour, this could be any high school performance.

The show starts, and then starts again. Goodwin isn’t happy with his cueing. This ensues a conversation about starting, about theatre, with everyone having an opinion. Names of cast – “I’m not an actor” – are tossed around, as is the meta-theatricality, the 4^th wall having been destroyed by the start. Or is the 4^th wall there? Some conversations are purely intended to be between the cast as they ‘work some things through’.

What follows is a somewhat linear narrative of Goodwin’s life growing up with an illness. There is no surprise here, it’s part of the publicity. At the box office we are given the obligatory trigger notice with one beautiful difference: the notice informs us, not that this show involves the subject of schizophrenia, but that this show involves the subject of Daniel’s experience with schizophrenia.  

We see memories of childhood, both with emotional content as well as adult-based reflection/ understanding; Goodwin’s interaction with the health system; living; and coping with living from low and high emotional viewpoints.  

This is a difficult show. The narrative/ subject can jump at any point. There are manic moments that seem over-played. At several points some beautiful poetry and prose don’t seem to be given their full worth. More than once low volume from an actor can make it difficult to hear. We careen from very free-flowing banter to somewhat stilted cueing.

Mid-way I am feeling this is a bit shite. I want to like this play. I know Daniel. I suffer from depression. I want to feel deeply that there is some kind of transcendence or happiness. I don’t get it. And then I do.

The transcendent beauty of this play/ production is that is doesn’t quite work the way I want it to, because that is what it is all about. This growing frustration/ fractiousness is what Goodwin, Te Rongopai Tukiwaho, and fellow cast Ben Moore, Anjula Prakash and Camilla Walker, have been working towards. The sudden light changes, voice-overs, meandering choreography that is sometimes pre-empted, the videogaphy, all add to the whole bringing diverse yet sometimes crude textures.

The play itself promises, literally in the script, no relief, no ‘somersault out of the wheelchair’ moment, no Hollywood magic ending. While the volume problem is probably unfamiliarity with the playing space, I get a visceral sense of the bedlam and frustration (both internal and external) that this dis-ease brings. The self-doubt, lack of control, conflicting and debilitating anxieties don’t bother with the niceties of life and appropriateness.

A spectacular display of this is Schrödinger’s Kyle – my name for the character that does/doesn’t exist whom Daniel may/ may not love. Real? Fantasy? – or perhaps a coping mechanism. What is real when you don’t get the usual/ normal indicators? How much this must wear any psyche down. So, when Goodwin ends the play the way he does (spend your money and find out) with that look on his face, there’s a very real and deep silence from those on the outside. Stripped of those terrible three words he always hears (again, go see the play), we have nothing to do but be receptive to what he wants to say. 

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