Crackers written and directed by Claire Wood for the Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group, explores the challenging subject of mental health unflinchingly and with compassion. The subject is handled with sensitivity never veering into tokenism or exploiting the tragedy.
The actors all give convincing performances and characterisations are strong. Particularly Anna Davies who plays Lyra and gives such a nuanced performance, portraying a character trying hard to mask her inner struggles. There is an engaging scene between Will the GP played by Alan Patterson and Imogen (Torya Winters) who plays his feisty, long standing friend or is she something more? However this strand of the story is not fully explored.
The set was simple but represented the family home and a surgery using all the space available within the constraints of the setting. However the set changes between the short scenes did slow down the action and this allowed the tension built up in a previous scene to fade. A more dynamic transition between scenes with continuous action may have improved the flow of the story.
With some clever lighting moments from Gordon Hughes and an ominous sound scape which never overwhelmed the action a sense of unease is created whenever Will hears the voices of patients he feels he has failed. Theatrically, these moments are very powerful but at times the dialogue that carries on despite these voices started to lag and the pace and energy dropped, especially when the scene involved more characters.
Crackers was under an hour but packed a lot of themes and stories into the time and it was a large cast of characters. Several of these characters felt underdeveloped and were only present for a few scenes and at times you weren’t sure how they related to the main family.
It is heartening to think that a community theatre group is forward thinking enough to produce new writing that explores complex ideas. Many of the audience reviews have praised this production for presenting a story about mental health issues with honesty as there doesn’t seem enough coverage in the arts. There were big, complex themes to explore within Crackers and perhaps there were just too many to cover properly for the length of play. It would be interesting to see if the playwright Claire Wood continues to develop this promising one act into a full length play.
