Delay Detach

Delay Detach’s title makes reference to two steps in a four-part process designed to help “manage” those who suffer from borderline personality disorder. In Joanna Alpern’s robust but earnest and dryly comic two-hander, friends Sophie and Caitlin (Cara Mahoney and Amy Chubb) live an entire life in 55 minutes, as the ordinariness of mental illness—so often portrayed as either destructive or exceptional in the media and in drama—is firmly returned to safe and neutral territory.

Director Joanna Bowman does terrifically well to broach such an intricate and expansive relationship in under an hour. The protagonists meet as schoolgirls when Caitlin first sees a clinical therapist and the text skips forward through adolescence, young adulthood, middle age and elderly life. It’s an elliptical show that heaves with ambition and empathy, extracting every ounce of theatricality from these women's lives, and is performed with superb control and authenticity by Mahoney and Chubb.

Yet the text is crying out for more time and space. Trying to squeeze so much in, it falls back on occasional stereotypes relating to jobs and relationships. Without doubt, this is a fine piece of theatre, but the way in which the knotted thread which once bound these women’s lives frays, and is then mended, could be unpicked with more subtlety. Alpern’s sober and compassionate analysis of ruptured identity would be all the more devastating if it avoided rushing towards its conclusion after a polished 40 minutes.