BLIPS – Brief Limited Intermittent Psychotic Symptoms. If these episodes are a part of your own life, how might you explain them to other people? Well, you could download an article from a medical journal. You could just describe your feelings, your experience.
Or you could do as Margot Mansfield does in her powerful show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and try, through the energy of her intensely personal performance, to immerse her audience in a direct experience of her reality as she lives it. This is not an easy show – a jarring, jangling soundscape assaults the ear. Margot confronts us with some of her deep fears and Siri-regulated paranoia.
And she uses her circus skills to create striking physical images of precariousness and of life only just in balance. The driving need to keep things in frantic motion just to stay upright.
Such an emotional and brutally honest performance could overwhelm…. but Margot, with circus instinct, deftly employs humour to keep us in balance. Hugely recommended.
Michael Hannah, Dundee, 15 August 2024