I did what any self-respecting, “only with the lights off”, stiff upper lipped Englishman would do. It was the only decent thing to do, given the circumstances. After all, I thought, what harm could possibly come to me? I was in a car. He was on shank’s pony. Foot traffic nearly always beats motorised, in a court of law. I went through it all in my mind immediately after I turned the corner. Replayed the whole moment back through, in an attempt to synthesise the image and contextualise it. In other circumstances it would be possible to do so. Had I been driving within a stone’s throw of Glastonbury at festival time or had stumbled on an illegal rave or passed a religious cult on their annual picnic, I might just have been able to rationalise it. But I wasn’t, so I couldn’t. So I drove past, without stopping, making a scene or trying to ascertain his mental health is what I did. What else would one do, if you saw a man marching along a deserted country lane, quite forcefully, with only a rucksack and a pair of walking boots on for company? Everything else was swinging in the breeze quite naturally. I couldn’t Adam & Eve it.
One option would have been to swing the car around (excuse the pun!) and take a double check. Not to satisfy any voyeuristic intent, of course, but to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated. It was pretty vivid and felt real, yet so damn bizarre, for a Wednesday afternoon, in May, in England, that I convinced myself I hadn’t actually seen it. We’ll let Freud psychoanalyse the ramifications of that one! I wondered if this is what a decline in mental health feels like? The beginning of a condition. Trust me not to get nubile Swedish au-pairs, twin sisters at that, in my paranoid delusions! Odd too, that this last week I’d been working so closely with a project concerning mental health that I began to dismiss the whole crazy episode down to some delayed reaction. I’d been working with Wooden Hill Theatre in collaboration with Social Work students, care users and care givers in a piece of Boal inspired forum theatre called “Project Vena – A Piece of Mind” which was designed to encourage the Social Work students to begin to appreciate seeing situations from multiple perspectives in a training scenario. What has happened before is that they would apply a text book approach during training, completely shy away from any role-play based scenarios that they might encounter, only to then be unleashed into live practice where they would then begin to hone their craft! Within our theatre model we remove the role-play element, which causes them much consternation, by providing the dramatic input ourselves. We don’t ask them to be care users, or partners, or policemen or landlords or annoying neighbours or any of a multitude of characters they might encounter, but just that they are Social Workers. The relief when this is explained to them at the beginning of a training workshop is tangible, perceptible by the collective sigh and relaxing of shoulders which we witness time and time again. The workshops are skilfully constructed in a way that draws out of the participants a high level of interaction, before they even realise that is what they are doing. Collaborating with us was what the text books like to call “an expert by experience”, but which he likes to call, “a recovered patient”, namely Clive Travis, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. If you get the chance, his website is worth looking at, here: http://www.paranoidschizophrenia.co.uk/
What feels most rewarding about this work is that it is helping to remove, (as Clive states in his website) one of the most destructive barriers to recovery and/or treatment, and that is one of stigma. Here, using an applied arts model we are slowly feeding the care system from below, changing attitudes and increasing awareness on a number of issues. Next month sees me going into a mental health unit on which bullying is said to be taking place.
It feels pretty groundbreaking to actually use theatre practitioners to engage with people in unorthodox ways to address behaviour and perceptions –certainly Clive feels it is, globally, an innovative approach. I know there are many exponents of Forum Theatre – in this country and elsewhere, so that might be a tall claim, but for now it feels right, important and constructive – nothing of which I achieve in my day job.
Now I just have to work out how to deal with the stigma of seeing naked men on country lanes...
