The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland

Ordinarily, emerging from a show in a state of bewilderment suggests some sort of failure, either on the part of spectator or show. Something has been lost in translation. The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland, however, cultivates just this kind of bafflement. Confusion, paradoxically, is the route to a sort of clarity.

Inspired by a dialogical form of therapy developed in Finnish Western Lapland, Ridiculusmus’s show ambitiously layers two simultaneous performances, separated by a thin wall. The audience is split down the middle, half of the spectators on each side of the division, before swapping places halfway through. Watching, therefore, we see and hear one performance, while the shadows and muffled sounds of another distractingly haunt it.

It’s no easy viewing—or listening—experience. The two halves of the play, which periodically synchronise and overlap, involve the same characters: a family with a mother and son suffering from psychosis, and a psychologist who may or may not be hearing voices himself. Identities and mental states, however, are fluid, making it even harder to piece together what Ridiculusmus present us with.

But once you surrender to the hypnotically strange viewing experience, Ridiculusmus’s doubling technique has an extraordinary effect on the senses. The chaos and uncertainty of hearing voices is created for the audience, who have to filter through the cacophony of competing sounds while frantically scrambling to decode these intersecting stories. All of a sudden, the internal dissonance of mental illness feels a whole lot easier to fathom.