Playing to a full house, American comic Ruby Wax brought her new show Frazzled: A Guide to Mindfulness to Pontio on Friday night.
The show is an interesting hybrid of light comedy and seriousness rolled into one. The first half was very much a one-woman show (barring one persistent heckler) with Wax reclining in her armchair, reading from a clipboard of prepared questions about her experience of mental illness and how she uses mindfulness in her every-day life. She offered several beautifully worded thoughts about the awesome power of our brains and how we are still so unsure how to use them properly. ‘It is like having a Ferrari on top of our necks but nobody gave us the keys.’ Wax didn’t hold back from sharing quite intimate details of her own lifelong struggle with depression, punctuated by hysterical anecdotes about her childhood with a mother who suffered with obsessive compulsive disorder where everything in the house had to be exactly parallel including her grandmother who had fallen down the stairs and broken both of her hips…
Mental illness is something which, in accordance with statistics, twenty-five per cent of her audience will have first-hand experience of and yet there were very few moments in which the jokes misfired or seemed insensitive. Wax is simultaneously brash and compassionate, she understands the seriousness of the subject, but equally, she was there to deliver us comedy not a psychology lecture. It is a difficult balance to strike but she delivered perfectly. The atmosphere was at times one of sober respect but more frequently the theatre erupted in laughter at one of her trademark off-colour, seemingly unrehearsed quips about Donald Trump’s tweets or why gazelles have such a monopoly on nature documentaries.
At the end of the first half, the audience were invited to take part in a short meditation, guided by Wax herself. The intention was well meaning, but trying to focus on your own heartbeat in a theatre full of people shuffling and coughing was somewhat futile, but it gave people a useful introduction into how mindfulness works.
After a long interval (throughout which Wax signed copies of her book), the show transformed into more of a Q&A session for the second half, in which the audience could engage Wax in discussion. Several audience members raised their hands, though I would have expected more intellectual debate from an audience so dense with psychologists and neuroscientists, but Wax was sensitive and interested, sharing more personal insights, anecdotes and offering advice to those who engaged with her. Perhaps the most bizarre element of the show occurred right at the end, when seemingly without prompt, Wax left the stage and reappeared dressed in Hawaiian hula accessories and performed an impromptu dance accompanied by Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. We all laughed, what else could we do?
Unarguably, Frazzled is a heartfelt, hysterical and at times heart-wrenching show which the audience seemed to love, myself included.
