"We are this three pound lump of jelly. But it's not necessarily me is it? I want to be happy. I want to work hard. I want to not shout out swear words on the street. I want to sleep. It must know this. It must want that too. If it's me. But. Here I am, where my father held me on a climbing frame and I can see my shoes on the bar. Here, how much I like meringue. Here's my respiration control. Here's my impulse to kill myself. Here is my controlling that impulse. “You're disgusting. And you're only going to get more disgusting. It's too late. This all gets worse and you can't even cope with now.” Shhh. Let's not. “You're like your mother.” It's too hard. Other people manage(!) And still. “You can't do anything. You can't work, well you could but you're lazy. This is the best you're capable of looking now and it’s shit and you're decaying. Look at your teeth. And everything everyone says about you is right. And you're weak and you’re a coward and you’ve ruined people’s lives. And you should have done it a long time ago and you never will now” Just put some clothes on and then we'll go from there. “It would be better.” Just put on some pants. Then we'll deal with the next bit. Just do that. “It would be better just to stop.” But people love you. “No they don't. Even the people who love you hate you because you're hurting the person they love.” Why can't you stop? Where are you? Where are you?!"
The Effect, 2012.
This, drove me to tears.
The power of theatre is something one can never deny; it breaks, it empowers. It is more than a stage, a play, a script and everything else that can be physically seen. The theatre is an omnivorous entity that engulfs you, and strings you to every single emotion and action that's happening on stage right at that very moment. The stage is a magical box that extends beyond itself and connects to whoever's around it.
I'm glad The Effect fully understood this beauty of theatre and wonderfully depicted the battle of minds, mind and lives through a storyline of love and science. Every single day, we are constantly battling with ourselves and at the same time, with the rest of the world. Our brain tells us what we want to believe, or is it that what we believe in turn tells us what's right or wrong. Knowledge, interpretations and matter of Science and truth; one thing for sure is that we'll never know what exactly is right or wrong. Is love a matter of just chemistry? Or does it take way more work that just, a feeling. Does conscious work hand in hand with what we call emotions, and our understanding of the world has always got to be connected to the matter of Science. Is Science, really everything about the truth of matter and is the truth, always Science?
There is, however, one thing for sure: The definition of everything around us is never definite.
"I love you, Lorn. And it’s not romantic cos that’s when lies start and it’s not family, because that’s this wonderful genetic trick. I just. I’ve built a bit of my brain round you. And it’s important to me."
The Effect wonderfully portrayed the issues of Depressions, Science, and Love all into a 2-hour play. It never fails to amaze me how this power of theatre to deliver multiple thoughts and abstract interpretations all within a script leads to how powerful communication, framing and words can be.
And of course, how this "three pound lump of jelly" is more than just multitude of regulations and thoughts. The mind, is a window, to the unlimited. It is probably the most abstract thing to ever exist in this universe. Just as the play suggests;
"When the brain goes wrong, there are symptoms and there are physical causes, as with anything else. But because we think with our brain we struggle to frame it as the complex piece of biological machinery it is. We’re happy to have heart transplants and liver transplants but we can’t imagine a brain transplant. Because nowadays we think our soul is in there. But that sense of ‘us’ is only a small part of what’s going on at any moment."
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