Caro Meets Theatre Interview

Lauren Mooney: Still Ill

By | Published on Friday 4 November 2016

stillillkandinskyqa

We became fans of Kandinsky when we saw their much acclaimed first production ‘Enola’, and we’ve been following the work of the company and the careers of its founders ever since.
The latest show, created by artistic directors Al Smith and James Yeatman and producer Lauren Mooney, tackles the subject of FND, a surprisingly common illness that is not really understood.
To find out more about the show, I spoke to aforementioned producer, Lauren Mooney.

CM: Tell us about ‘Still Ill’. What’s the story, and who is it about?
LM: Still Ill is about an actor called Sophie (coincidentally played by an actor called Sophie – we honestly didn’t do that on purpose) who makes a bit of money extra here and there, including doing role-play for medical students. We wanted to introduce the idea of ‘performing’ illness really early on for reasons I’ll come back to…

Anyway, Sophie’s career is just starting to go somewhere, she’s gotten a job in a big medical TV drama, when she suddenly comes down with strange, debilitating symptoms that look like they might mean something is very seriously wrong with her – but when doctors investigate, they can’t find anything in her brain that might be causing them. So we follow Sophie on a journey into the world of Functional Neurological Disorder: an illness as commonly seen on neurological wards as MS, but which is barely understood and hotly debated.

CM: What’s the aim of the show? What themes does it focus on?
LM: The aim of the show is, in some sense, to start a conversation about an illness that’s surprisingly common, can be seriously life-limiting and yet has huge stigma attached. Most medical professionals agree FND is psychosomatic, ie, there’s nothing physically wrong with people and for some reason their mind’s causing their suffering – but not on purpose. The thing we wanted to reinforce is that there are huge numbers of people all over the world suffering from this thing that they feel like they can’t talk about, because people expect them to just ‘snap out of it’. We still have so little understanding of psychosomatic illness but clearly the suffering it causes is very real.

We also wanted to look at the idea that a lot of the ‘treatment’ for it, because it’s regarded as psychosomatic, revolves around the idea that FND has a specific ’cause’ or that a narrative can be found in people’s lives that explain its onset, and for some people that is the case – it can be clearly related to specific stresses or life events – but for lots of people it just isn’t. And so we wondered: what happens to those people? How are people supposed to get better when they’re being told there’s nothing wrong with them, and when they don’t have the ‘narrative’ that would allow them to own this illness?

CM: FND is a common yet still little understood affliction – is this play a response to a lack of awareness?
LM: Definitely, but it’s not a campaigning play, and although we’ve spoken to lots of FND sufferers we’ve also spoken to lots of different doctors, many of whom had wildly different ideas about what was most important to say about it. We didn’t set out to make something specifically to raise awareness, though hopefully that will happen. To be honest, at the start, we really just thought that it was fascinating, that the mind-body relationship it allows us to explore is incredibly interesting, and we were responding to that, really. More a feeling of ‘so many people have these symptoms and it seems bizarre that not many people know about it’ than ‘we need to change the conversation around this’, though both of those things are probably true now. At least, it seems clear from making the show that certain cultural ideas we have around ‘real’, ‘legitimate’ illness are causing a lot of suffering.

CM:How did you become aware of the condition? Why did you decide you wanted to create theatre about it?
LM: Our director James Yeatman’s family are almost all doctors, so I think he just wanted to get in on the family business really. I’ve been working with Kandinsky for just over 18 months but they’d actually started thinking about ‘Still Ill’ well before I came on board, last year, for ‘Dog Show’. (Dog Show was our last show which ran at New Diorama about a year ago. It was about a dog serial killer, which was quite a tough sell, but we had a great time doing it in spite of that.)

Originally I think James wanted to find out about conditions that were difficult to diagnose, and his brother’s a neurologist so he came to FND quite quickly. But theatre’s the perfect medium for this story really, for two reasons: firstly because some people think FND sufferers are pretending to be ill, or feigning their symptoms, like Munchausen’s sufferers – but of course they’re not, it’s an incredibly different thing, which is why we wanted to introduce the idea of ‘performed’ symptoms very early on in the show, so we can see when she is pretending and when she’s not, when she’s actually ill. There are lots of ideas of performance tied into the illness – and theatre, with all its suspension of disbelief, seemed the perfect medium to examine them. Secondly, people with FND feel quite observed I think, as they’re continually having to prove to people that their symptoms are real, that their suffering is real – and the ND stage has allowed us to create a very observed, very intense space for Sophie to exist in.

CM: What kind of research did you do before starting work on it?
LM: We spoke to lots of doctors, chiefly the very lovely Dr Tim Nicholson who has been extremely generous with his time, and lots of FND sufferers through leading patient group FND Hope – those conversations have gone on throughout the whole process of making the show really, not just at the start. And we read some excellent books, including ‘The Shaking Woman’ by Siri Hustvedt and the contentiously-titled ‘It’s All in Your Head’ by Suzanne O’ Sullivan. If anyone reading this wants to find out more, they’d be a good place to start.

CM: How did the process of creating the play work? It looks like a joint effort – was it devised, or did you all sit down and write?
LM: Yes it was a massively joint effort. I’m the company producer but also one of the writers – James and Al Smith and I all spent lots of days holed up together in the spring and summer thrashing out very rough ideas about the person the show was about, what her journey through the illness was like and who she was. We decided very early on that it was a ‘she’ – the condition overwhelmingly affects women, which I have very complex feelings about, and which nobody really seems to be able to fully 100% explain.

Anyway, after we did that we had a two week rehearsal process in June before an R&D showing for a lovely sold-out crowd at Incoming Festival. The actors devised around work the three of us had done and scenes we’d written to create a much better, more natural version of the show than we came up with between us! That’s basically how we work as a company – writing, devising, more writing, more devising and then a show. It’s time-consuming but at least on something like this, which is quite a contentious topic, you get a lot of time to interrogate your assumptions.

Anyway, after the R&D showing in the summer we went back to the drawing board and made the second half of the show the same way.

CM: The show is supported by Complicite – what is your relationship with them?
LM: We’re very linked in to them in lots of ways: James is one of their Associate Directors so they support the work he does away from them, as well as giving him lots of exciting jobs. He’s disappearing halfway through the run of Still Ill to start work on their Royal Court show for next year, ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture’ – lucky James! But some of their staff are on our Board, and they give us lots of time and all kinds of different support, for which we’re very grateful. Without them and the New Diorama Theatre we wouldn’t be able to afford to make work in the current climate, so we owe both of them a lot.

CM: Tell us about Kandinsky – how did the company come together? Who is involved?
LM: James and Al started the company ten years or so ago, I think, after they met at university. They made quite a few shows in Edinburgh where they were both living and studying, and it really launched their careers – Al’s just had a play (‘Harrogate’) on at the Royal Court and James is doing lots of directing with Complicite etc – so they worked separately for a bit, then reunited to make ‘Dog Show’ last year. That’s when I came on board, initially just as a producer, but I’ve gotten my hands on the creative stuff now too, which is one of the great things about the company for me – it’s a very open, democratic process and I was never made to feel like doing the work of a producer was incompatible with being part of the artistic process. Which is great.

We also tend to keep having the same artists back again – two of the actors and the musician in Still Ill were in ‘Dog Show’ last year, and they’re all incredibly lovely. We’ve discovered an odd, lengthy way of making theatre, but it seems to work for us, and I hope people like ‘Still Ill’ enough to let us keep doing it.



‘Still Ill’ is on at New Diorama until 19 Nov. See this page here for more info.

LINKS: newdiorama.com | kandinsky-online.com | twitter.com/Kandinskyonline

Photo: David Monteith-Hodge



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