Joe Penhall, now in his mid-thirties, has been writing plays for a decade. His biggest success has been Blue/Orange, which premiered at London's National Theatre in 2000, transferred to a West End run, and understandably won the Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards for Best Play. The Intiman Theater has mounted a stunning production that is fully the equal of the London original.
The play takes place in a modern National Health Service psychiatric hospital in London. Behind a consulting room, designer Matthew Smucker has covered a huge black panel with a mass of tangled white wires appropriate to a work dealing with mental illness. A black patient, Christopher, expects to be released after the standard 28 days of observation, but Bruce, his young psychiatrist fresh out of training, believes his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia warrants further treatment. When Robert, a senior consultant in his mid-fifties, arrives, he maintains that Christopher suffers only from Borderline Personality Disorder, something between neurotic and psychotic (and, besides, the hospital is short on bed space). Christopher claims he is one of the 30-odd children sired by the murderous Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin. He also asserts that the oranges in a fruit bowl are blue. (This notion comes from the opening of a 1929 surrealist poem by the French writer Paul Eluard: "La terre est bleue comme une orange" [The earth is blue like an orange].)
Now amiable, now angry, Christopher as played by Sylvester Foday Kamara is a superb pawn. Bruce, while worried about his future career, is stubbornly intense in Ian Brennan's hands. And Laurence Ballard's megalomaniac and witty Robert is concerned about whether he will finish a book and gain a professorship. Eventually one wonders whether the two doctors really care about the patient. Their protracted verbal battle leaves the impression that they are both as bonkers as poor Christopher.
A thoroughly engrossing production of a fascinating script.
