By FRANCIS TILL
Complementary colours, like blue and orange, sit opposite one another on the colour wheel. Juxtaposed, they trick the eye into seeing each as more vibrant than either would otherwise appear. Something like that happens in this award-winning work.
In Joe Penhall's blue/orange we have literal oranges which appear
brilliantly blue to psychiatric patient Christopher (John Katipa), a damaged, dreadlock-wearing, Caribbean-accent-bearing, council-flat-dwelling, young black man who claims, convincingly and for a substantial portion of the play, to be a son of Idi Amin.
Christopher has ended a 28-day observation stay at an English NHS facility and his doctor, Bruce (Paul Glover), an earnest naif in the crumbling system, has decided Christopher is a paranoid schizophrenic and should be committed indefinitely.
To validate his diagnosis, he brings in a senior consultant, Robert (David Aston), whose antagonistic concerns reflect the patient-indifferent administrative agenda of the system.
The two doctors argue.
The critical history of this play contends it is about race and madness. This presentation is not.
Narrowly, it's a polemical examination of a particular health care system and the marginalisation of patients, and consciences, within it.
Broadly, it's an examination of mastery within a soulless bureaucratic structure. In either case, race and madness are handled as catalysing devices: captivating, illuminating, details that could be altered without structurally changing the play.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, neither Frayn's Copenhagen nor Reza's Art, to which this play is often likened, were profoundly about nuclear physics or minimalist painting.
Here, the often witty text falls short of Frayn or Reza, but the three well-realised performances carry a lot of water a long way.
As it has been elsewhere, the work is staged in an approximation of the round. Director Paul Gittins allows the staging to emphasise dialogue, not always happily.
The set is appropriately spare while costumes and lighting are redolent with subtext.
