Diagnosis evaluate – mesmerising drama takes double requirements to extremes

Activist and playwright Athena Stevens’ newest play, wherein she additionally stars, is an eerie and strong paintings. Like a lot of her writing, Diagnosis explores the double sense of fact skilled through many of us residing with a incapacity – the gulf between the lifestyles they may lead and the only society expects and imposes on them. This twin sense of fact is taken to extremes throughout one pulsating night time in a police station. After seeing atypical messages illuminate above other people’s heads, a girl who makes use of a wheelchair (Stevens) grows satisfied a perilous flood is ready to engulf central London. But will any person pay attention?

The play is ready a while one day, when a chain of meant protections had been installed position for society’s maximum susceptible electorate however have handiest made issues worse. It’s a time when an AI laptop program will learn you your rights, but when recited in a robot voice, those rights handiest really feel the entire extra unimaginable. It’s a time when a witness commentary might be filmed for additonal safety, however the video assists in keeping warping in order that the lady in query, fairly than being faithfully recorded, is forever distorted and obscured.

Director Ché Walker, who additionally performs the interrogation officer, assists in keeping issues teetering getting ready to implosion. A throbbing crimson mild is available in via a lone window and Julian Starr’s pulsing soundscape ratchets up the strain. It’s spell binding stuff for a lot of the time, despite the fact that the clawing surroundings is slightly stop-start. Full on one minute, long past the following. Maybe the entire jolting is supposed to unsettle the target audience however I felt it diminishes the sense of approaching doom.

The manufacturing is at its very best when Stevens, who used to be born with athetoid cerebral palsy, settles into her mesmerising monologues. She performs a drone operator who spends numerous time in entrance of a pc display, scanning for cracks within the tunnels of the London underground. As this anonymous personality remembers her nights staring into the abyss, she takes on a nearly otherworldly character. She’s no longer slightly with us anymore. Instead she’s with the ones drones. Rattling during the underground. Searching for indicators of risk handiest she will see.