It might have been a spoiler to reveal this play includes a panic attack, except we are told by way of a pre-show warning that it will happen – and if we need to leave, we may, and we will be welcome to return. This has the interesting effect of creating suspense within this dramatisation of a mundane life: sleep, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, repeat… We are primed to watch for some cause or causes for the foreshadowed effect.  

Of course writer/director Rosie Glover and her creative collaborators offer more than just that repeated routine over the hour. We engage with a blend of objective truth, subjective ‘reality’ and a range of theatrical devices that we need to decode while moving past our inevitable urge to assess and judge towards growing understanding and empathy.

Isadora Lao’s set design, within BATS’ Random space, is festooned with hanging and strewn fabric in many shades of white, enclosing a fish tank holding a video screen, a dangling clothes rack from which mostly pale clothes hang, and a stepped pile of mattresses – on top of which someone sleeps beneath a dark green duvet.

I cannot help but wonder if ‘The Princess and the Pea’ is being referenced, but since the Director’s Note says we’ll be “seeing [Casey’s] life from the perspective of someone struggling with anxiety and depression,” I doubt it. Unless our potential judgement of Casey as ‘a hypersensitive millennial snowflake’ is being offered as a point of departure on our impending learning curve.

The images screened in the fish tank, as a prologue to the play, suggest a train journey from somewhere rural and wet. This evokes a dream and, we will later discover, elements of where Casey has come from. This and other video sequences have been compiled by Finn Holland, who occasionally enters the space with a camera on his shoulder to augment the action with live-feed close ups, projected onto the fabric above or fed to the fish tank screen.

Laura Gaudin’s Casey is happy to see the light of day. There is definitely routine in the way she prepares to go to work. And are we to take it as objective truth that she goes to work in a pale blue nightie, albeit covered by a tan overcoat as she leaves, or is this artistic licence? Her bus ride to work is readily accepted as such when she holds on to a clothes hanger while telling us this is her favourite part of the day, and why.

That she welcomes alternative input to counter what usually clutters her persistently thinking brain is the first indication of a mental health issue. We are left to wonder how things are at work and what she does there … Throughout the play Joel Ewan’s variegated piano music sound design works in the background or as a dominant force, often pitching harsh high notes against ominous low ones.

Back home, Casey breaks into a product promotion routine by way of introducing us to the prescribed medications at her disposal. As the play progresses, she usually dives for the pills in a state of anxiety – invariably heighted by the ringing of a phone, which she rarely checks to see who is calling before she turns it off. (There is nothing like an unanswered phone to produce anxiety in an audience and provoke judgmental questions: couldn’t that be someone who cares about you? What if it’s urgent news about someone in your family? Does Casey have a family? Is no-one there for her or is she shutting people out?)

Now call me pedantic but the script supposes a landline phone with caller ID – Casey will mention that detail when she reveals, later, she knows who is calling – but the prop used is a cellphone which we all know IDs anyone you have made a Contact. I guess we could accept it as another dramatic convention. Perhaps the script was not tweaked to make it a cellphone because that would have raised questions about why she didn’t take it to work, or charge it, or turn it off, or let the battery die to avoid getting stressed by it. As for the question of interactive apps and other stress-inducing social media … I can’t help thinking some interesting options could be explored if it was a cellphone, even if Casey refuses to use any of its features.

(Spoiler alert, because it’s a spectacular surprise) In the absence of real-world friends, Casey has a close relationship with a large Mattress – twice the size of her single one – which comes dancing to her in her dreams, all dark eyelashes and full red lips, ‘wrangled’, as the program puts it, by Austin Harrison. Her laundry seems to be in the too hard basket until using it as ammo for a clothes fight offers a childlike fun alternative. It is after a particularly romantic encounter under a full moon and twinkling stars that the panic attack comes. (Ends)  

Despite having established the convention of addressing the audience directly, Casey also talks a few times to a DSLR camera on a tripod, telling someone about her life here, painting a romanticised picture of herself staring out her window “all melancholy like” and even claiming she’s as “good” as she hopes the person she’s talking to is. But she never turns the camera on or off, although she is careful to remove and replace the lens cap. So when she mentions she has depression and qualifies for prescription pills, we have to deduce she is not really telling this person that. Later we can infer who the communications were probably for – or would have been, if she had really recorded them.

And still the harsh-buzzing phone remains unanswered, the pills are taken, she goes to bed – and dreams. (Spoiler alert, because there is dramatic value in revealing this late in the play): It think it’s Mattress she talks to about not “doing the friendship thing”, having an ordinary family back home and having had a few friends at school, one in particular … She also talks about why people have given up trying to talk to her. (Ends) And she confides she knows who it is that keeps calling.

Although it emerges she has become self-aware that obsessive love for something that doesn’t exist (in a sensate state) is not healthy, she still can’t answer the phone – until a dream takes Casey and her love sailing and fishing in a wonderfully evoked sequence the sees her let go of her fantasy. So next time the phone rings, she answers it – and an important truth gets told that leaves us optimistic for a positive outcome.

While it is tempting to think Rosie Glover has some personal experience of what she has made this play about, the fact she has worked closely with colleagues and friends to create Don’t Wake Me Up and bring it to fully realised production, proves she is light-years away from Casey’s situation.

Laura Gaudin inhabits the central role with an assurance that, in a good way, is the flipside of Casey’s lack of confidence. Austin Harrison brings delightful animation to the inanimate friend. Their performances, Isadora Lao’s lighting and costume designs, Joel Ewan’s sound design and Finn Holland’s camera work, conspire with Glover’s script and directing to immerse us in Casey’s life while provoking us to ask pertinent questions.

In retrospect, it’s possible the things I find puzzling in the mix of conventions are there for good reasons. Either way, there is no doubt I – and others, I expect – leave Don’t Wake Me Up with a deeper awareness of this form of mental illness and greater compassion for those in its thrall.

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