Going to Bedlam is a terrifying experience, just as it must have been for the inmates and visitors when this inhumane hospital for the insane existed. The warning on the programme sums it up – ‘this show contains nudity, violence, foul language and dark themes.’

Chaos surrounds the audience, actors move around and behind you, musical instruments make the craziest of sounds also in and around you, you witness torture, rape, murder, suicide and are powerless to stop it, just as out potential ‘hero’ poor Dr Thomas Baxter is powerless to stop the brutality within the hospital’s walls.

Along with the young and impressionable Baxter (Guy Langford), we are taken inside, escorted by the exterior statues of Melancholia (Jean Sergent) and his brother Mania (Milo Haigh), to meet the inmates. The staff are as dangerously insane as those who’ve been committed – actually to be fair, some of the inmates are wrongfully imprisoned and saner than their jailors.

Their and Baxter’s main hope is Dr Gordon Battie (Kate McGill), but against him is the bleakly evil butcher and rapist Cornelius Crooke (Emmett Skilton in top form). He preys on, among others, the lovely blind Luna, movingly portrayed by Romy Hooper, who captures Baxter’s attention and affection.

There are other nightmares too; Veronica Brady’s movements to quite a perky little number in honour of the rapist and abortionist Peter the Porter were deeply disturbing. 

Eli Kent is a masterful writer and a fearless Robin Kerr has taken his script and created something remarkable. Kent and Kerr, and the brilliant musicians Erika Grant, Isaac Smith and Amanda Maclean, have between them created a New Zealand Threepenny Opera. It’s Dickensian-bleak, with fleeting moments of hope, some of the loveliest music backdrops some of the saddest lyrics and situations. 

This is tough theatre, it’s not something enjoyed per se at the time – rather like the movie District 9, it’s sensory overload and so full of meaning that your brain can’t both absorb and process it all at once.  Bedlam is long, you want to get out but you can’t, just like those inside. Afterwards, you’ll find yourself thinking about the play and all its many layers.
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After all the frivolity of such recent comedies as Le Sud, The 39 Steps, and Four Flat Whites in Italy Eli Kent’s latest play, Bedlam, brings us back to bleak reality with its story of a young doctor who learns about the pitilessness of life in the notorious London asylum in the 18th century.

As Eli Kent writes in the programme his play is not a study of mental illness but about the different ways people react to atrocity. The doctors have either given up or just do the best they can or turn a blind eye to the atrocities. The idealist Dr Thomas Baxter is sorely tested when he attempts to treat a young woman, Luna, with decency and compassion.

It is a melodramatic plot but when it is told in Robin Kerr’s strong production with his tireless cast it has all the demonic energy of Hogarth’s famous engravings. It is played in-the-round with the audience broken up into eight blocks seated on the most uncomfortable steps I have encountered in any theatre. Take a cushion.

For most of its 90 minutes the story-line is clear and persuasive but every now and then because it is played in-the-round words are missed, particularly in the songs, and one key scene was, for me, entirely invisible because of the people sitting in front of me.

The excellent songs (Weill-like at times but also 18th century pastiche) and the tremulous music (composed and performed by Erika Grant, Isaac Smith, and Amanda Maclean) are performed with great gusto by the bare-footed cast who dance to Milo Haigh’s frenetic choreography with a supple athleticism.

Guy Langford as Dr Baxter, Kate McGill as Baxter’s superior Dr Battie, Romy Hooper as the blind, pathetic Luna, and Emmett Skilton as the sadistic Cornelius Crooke are all excellent in the central roles. Jean Sergent as Melancholia and Milo Haigh as Mania introduce the play and remain throughout as "The Brainless Brothers" weaving in and out of the action, always threatening.

Two nights ago on TV we saw, amongst other contemporary horror stories of psychiatric treatment, a photo of nurses holding down a patient who was about to undergo ECT. Plus ca change…
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Bedlam takes us to 18th century London, to the Enlightenment at the cusp of the Age of Reason, and mythologizes events at the notorious Bethlem Hospital for the mentally ill, colloquially dubbed Bedlam.

Inspired, the director’s note tells us, by the Bethlem Hospital panel in Hogarth’s Rakes Progress series, to which the artist had added "This is England", this dystopian Bedlam stands as a metaphor for any society out of control and raises the question: are we ever in control?

A Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School ‘Pitched Project’, created by The Playground Collective as a major production to launch the professional career to MTA Directing graduand Robin Kerr, it declares Kerr to be a truly creative director. Supported by several development workshops, Eli Kent has written a non-naturalistic play with songs – incorporating original music by Erika Grant, Isaac Smith and Amanda Maclean – which is staged in-the-round with an ensemble cast playing multiple roles.

Kerr sees it as "a story of crushed hope" that shows how idealists who strive for a better world come to accept "the breadth and severity of the chaos that surrounds us" by "insulating ourselves from the horrors and injustices that occur within our reach each day."

Designed by Liz Carpenter, the space defined by four structural pillars in the vast basement area of Te Whaea is edged with hard wooden bleachers guaranteed to numb your bum: Bedlam’s patients suffered in their ‘bear pit’ and so must we (take a cushion). Otherwise the props, costumes and other design elements are excellent.

Hanging from fretted pillars in an evocative environment of eerie live sound and murky light (designed by Rachel Baker), the ‘Brainless Brothers’ – Melancholia (Jean Sergent) and Mania (Milo Haigh), created it seems from cracked plaster – introduce us to Bedlam. Their opening song, as with most throughout, is strong on mood but subverted by acoustics that cause key words to get lost in a space where they vie with instrumental sound and chorus voices. Some soft-spoken speech also disappears into the black holes beyond the arena …

We discover the depths of Bedlam’s dysfunction along with idealistic new assistant, Dr Thomas Baxter (Guy Langford), who declares, "Together we are going to clean up Bedlam!" But actually he does little more than observe and become increasingly horrified and judgemental. His apparent powerlessness, and that of others, is the major focus of the play.

The names bespeak their characters. Dr Johnathan Savage (Veronica Brady) wilfully ignores the chaos that pervades their inept attempts to deal with the mentally ill. Dr Gordon Battie (Kate McGill) works hard on the minutiae in order to avoid the big picture. Dr Haring ‘Harry’ Graves (Tim Carlsen), who went to school with Baxter, just gets on and does his job.

Hence the rogue Mr Cornelius Crooke (Emmet Skilton), who used to cut hair for a living and now abuses the contents of the medicine cabinet as well as the staff and inmates, is given the run of the place for his bizarre experiments, like attempting to pacify a patient with a blood transfusion from a lamb. His bloodstained apron is a graphic image throughout.

The one case Baxter attempts to investigate and treat is that of Luna (Romy Hooper), a blind teenager who thinks she has been there since she was about five. One of the play’s most powerful sequences arises from a moment of tenderness, of compassionate love, that is so alien to Luna her reaction suddenly throws Baxter into the position of being seen as the biggest monster of all.  

On the gruesome side, Crooke’s torturing of Baxter while crooning ‘Ten Little Indian Boys’ is spine-chilling. Later, playwright Kent knocks us off our moral high ground by allowing Crooke to challenge the hypocrisy of those supposedly in charge: "There is no line! Even Hell has principles." Fortunately none of this lets Crooke off the hook; he does get the hang of what he has done.

Earlier, in counterpoint to the corruption around her, Luna’s gentle song, as taught by her father, offers a welcome oasis of tranquillity, before becoming a significant clue as to her heritage and the mystery of why she is there at all. The shocking outcome of her story reads as inevitable: innocence has no chance of surviving here.

Punctuating the central plotline are major ensemble songs, splendidly choreographed by Milo Haigh, which I think tell whole stories about other inmates. But for all their theatrical value in presentation the content (as I said above) gets lost, which is a shame.  

Other aspects, like allowing the aristocracy to visit the ‘freak show’ in order to raise money, are not given their dramatic due, which may either be a factor of in-the-round staging or of trying to cram too much in without blending it into the main storylines.

Achieving dramatic resolution in a play whose characters remain in denial is a challenge. Some attempts to tie up the various plot lines seem to get a bit tangled, unless my increasing physical discomfort was usurping my concentration.

Nevertheless, when magistrate (and author) Henry Fielding (Skilton again), who founded the Bow Street Runners, tries to exact some sort of justice for the systemic atrocities, the way the doctors go about apportioning and avoiding blame is compelling, giving us a "where would I stand?" moment and allowing us to contemplate the true nature of responsibility.

As producer Eleanor Bishop notes, this work will continue to evolve. Meanwhile Kerr and his team are to be applauded for taking on a creative challenge of this scale, and Toi Whakaari is to be commended for creating the ‘Pitched Project’ opportunity.
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