Mental

Book excerpt: Description Mental is a short play of about 45 minutes in length set in a mental health day centre. It is a farce that looks at the failures of psychiatry and the oddities of mental distress. The play has three characters that are users of the day centre. It questions many of the assumptions of mental health and whether it should be considered a health problem at all, as opposed to a problem of living caused by individual responses to societal pressures. The characters also take on other roles such as bored/naughty school children and a harassed teacher, a GP, the Prime Ministers psychiatrist. The play includes rants, comedy, slapstick humour, a banner, an activist talking to the audience directly and occasional audience interaction. Near the end of the play the users of the day centre offer psychiatric drugs and ECT to the audience as if they were ecstasy or some other party drugs. Humorous and iconoclastic the play provokes questions on many aspects of the mental health system in early 21st Century Britain. About the AuthorJohn Hoggett has lived in Reading for nearly thirty years, has historical links to the artistic elite of the country and is immensely talented. He started out as a young hippy, working on organic farms, cooking bread and getting into the groove (man). John later became an Anarcho-Eco-Activist and was inspirational, in a small way, in the Newbury Anti-bypass campaign of the 1990's. He mixed this Earth Lover action with a penchant for performing in drag and flirting outrageously with cabaret audiences. His father once tried to strangle his stepmother and John has found his family "difficult." This makes his writing an interesting mix: personal, piquant, political, smutty in places, and at times lyrical. He grippingly tells the stories that obsess him and enthrals us at the same time. He immodestly once said of himself that he was the mongrel child of Julie Burchill and Quentin Crisp. Dear reader, you decide.