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4 hours ago
3
Activist and playwright Athena Stevens’ latest play, in which she also stars, is an eerie and powerful work. Like much of her writing, Diagnosis explores the double sense of reality experienced by many people living with a disability – the gulf between the life they might lead and the one society expects and imposes on them. This dual sense of reality is taken to extremes during one pulsating night in a police station. After seeing strange messages light up above people’s heads, a woman who uses a wheelchair (Stevens) grows convinced a deadly flood is set to engulf central London. But will anyone listen?
The play is set some time in the future, when a series of supposed protections have been put in place for society’s most vulnerable citizens but have only made things worse. It’s a time when an AI computer program will read you your rights, yet when recited in a robotic voice, these rights only feel all the more unattainable. It’s a time when a witness statement will be filmed for extra security, but the video keeps warping so that the woman in question, rather than being faithfully recorded, is endlessly distorted and obscured.
Director Ché Walker, who also plays the interrogation officer, keeps things teetering on the brink of implosion. A throbbing red light comes in through a lone window and Julian Starr’s pulsing soundscape ratchets up the tension. It’s enthralling stuff for lots of the time, although the clawing atmosphere is a little stop-start. Full on one minute, gone the next. Maybe all the jolting is meant to unsettle the audience but I felt it diminishes the sense of impending doom.
The production is at its best when Stevens, who was born with athetoid cerebral palsy, settles into her mesmerising monologues. She plays a drone operator who spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen, scanning for cracks in the London underground. As this nameless character recalls her nights staring into the abyss, she takes on an almost otherworldly persona. She’s not quite with us anymore. Instead she’s with those drones. Rattling through the underground. Searching for signs of danger only she can see.
