Music, memories and the mind

Yesterday I went down (no, make that up - up a very steep hill, on my bike) to Jackson's Lane in Highgate for some neurology theatre - not of the surgical kind but a performance of the play Reminiscence.

Inspired by a case study published by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, the play tells the story of elderly Mrs O'Connor, who, following a stroke, experiences temporal lobe seizures accompanied vivid auditory hallucinations. Although she recognises the songs she hears, Mrs O'Connor can't put her finger on where she knows the melodies from. Through these seemingly familiar "experiential hallucinations", she re-lives events that she believes are buried memories from her distant past.

As far as I was concerned, a key aspect of the play was how Theatre DaCapo approached a dry medical case study and transformed it into an engaging piece of theatre. Instead of depicting the story of Mrs O'Connor through the objective view of the neurologist, the whole case study is portrayed from the perspective of the patient, bringing an altogether more human angle to the case study.

Thus, the onus was on the theatre group to represent effectively the subjective, difficult-to-quantify experiences of a neurology patient. In order to do this, the five-man group of actors used clever staging and a myriad of props and visuals.

In scenes such as the one shown here, actors popped out from between the folds of a giant white backdrop, portraying in this instance the characters Mrs O'Connor begins to see as her hallucinations gather more sensory components. In another scene, the actors, posing as doctors, appeared in the windows within the backdrop and bounced neurological terms off each other, depicting Mrs O'Connor's disorientation at the mass of medical information she was being bombarded with.

Folk songs - reworked in a classical style and performed by the actors - and the pitching and swaying of the scenery indicated when Mrs O'Connor was experiencing a seizure.

I was also interested in how the play was going to depict the neurology that underlines the case study. In the scene shown here, a dish of jelly was used to represent the brain and the affected region scooped out with gusto to demonstrate how the seizures and hallucinations could be cured by surgical removal of the damaged part of the brain.

One of the issues raised by the play is whether the hallucinations Mrs O'Connor experiences actually reflect real memories, or are false and are in fact the result of Mrs O'Connor's psychological motivation to come to terms with her past. This issue was one of many debated in a a panel discussion after the play in which the audience quizzed the director Michael Callahan, clinical psychologist and Mind Hacks blogger Dr Vaughan Bell, and actors Ian Harris and Katie Pattison. During the discussion, we touched on whether the verity or not of our memories is important - although they may be revised through telling at different points in our life, they still represent an important part of our identity.

It was a refreshing change to learn about a clinical case study through such an imaginative and well-realised play rather than from a journal paper.

• Reminiscence will be performed at 8pm at Jackson's Lane theatre until Saturday 20th September (matinee 2pm Wednesday 17th September). For tickets, contact the box office on 0208 341 4421 or buy online at jacksonslane.org.uk
  

(Thanks to Theatre-DaCapo.co.uk for the photos)