Bread & Roses Theatre – until 22 October 2022
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
4****
Sammy Trotman – a genius or a madwoman on a stage? After watching her painfully funny performance about her mental health, you’ll probably be none the wiser, but it’s one hell of a ride.
Trotman uses spoken word, movement and comedy to portray the inequity of mental health provision – she is white and rich so her parents could pay for treatment – and the labelling and victimisation of people. Gleefully announcing that she has a disorder now that she has ticked enough boxes, Trotman veers between childish tantrums (always checking that she has the audience’s attention) and introspective admissions (with a lovely running joke about melancholy music accompanying these quieter moments).
Jake Rix intuitive direction and Trotman’s bravura performance allow the audience to forget that this is scripted and just follow the shifts in tone and fall under the spell of the sociopath on stage. The traumatic effects of her time at boarding school and the toxic masculinity of her family are all explained and acknowledged as reasons for her attention seeking – wanting to be liked and to fit in, her narcissism making her want a caregiver she could lure in – and her daddy issues are hilariously exposed in an anecdote about an ex “he was an amazing babysitter”.
The nurses in the psychiatric hospital, where she started working on her stand-up, are memorable caricatures straight out of Victoria Wood – although Trotman acknowledges that they were markedly more southern than her portrayal. Her assessments of the doctors she has seen are scathing but well-deserved, and very, very funny – with a special mention for her power ballad to “All the men who tried to fix me and made me worse.”
This is no pity party, but a clever, insightful and funny glimpse into the mind of a narcissistic sociopath that should give Sammy all the attention she craves. Well deserving of a longer run.