Mental

Every August, a different building is designated as the place where theatre-lovers go to confront injustice. In 2010, a play about sex-trafficking (Roadkill) brought punters to a dingy flat off Leith Walk. Last year, an end-of-terrace in Wester Hailes hosted a piece about domestic violence (Our Glass House). These performances seem to level an accusation at conventional theatre – they claim to present suffering in a way that’s more authentic, less of a performance, than a stage play. They aim to educate theatregoers about an evil, to shock them into seeing their complicity – even to change their lives. They are heartbreaking but come with a risk: they tempt us to congratulate ourselves for simply turning up and feeling sad.

The journey to the “secret location” has a theatricality of its own, whisking us out of our complacency into the carefully-managed space where the encounter happens. There’s a nervy air among the people clutching tickets for Mental who convene at the Pleasance. A fleet of black cabs removes us from the festival scene and after ten minutes we arrive at a grey tower block.

This story of a young man’s experiences in psychiatric wards and the anticapitalist movement is more fraught than most site-specific performances because it’s not performed by an actor. We find James Leadbitter curled beneath the duvet. He rouses himself and talks us through his hospital case-notes and police records (well done him for getting hold of these), which are projected onto the wall. 

On the one hand this is a performance, and one that effectively relays a sense of the crushing effect of mental illness. Leadbitter accompanies his script with a repertoire of expansive gestures, and conjures an atmosphere with vinyl records. The juxtaposition of these strikingly similar documents, police notes and medical files, is an elegant critique of the state’s relationship with unconforming individuals of all kinds. But the instructions we’re given for how to behave around Leadbitter exceed what’s normal for theatre. I can't take notes, for example. He shakes with emotion as he relates this agonising spiral of suicide attempts, ordering himself to see the story through. The piece exists in a place between theatre and – what, exactly? Group therapy? For him or us? Perhaps this discomfiting indeterminacy is a credit to Leadbitter and director Kim Noble (a comic and artist who five years ago threatened to jump off George IV Bridge at 3am unless his audience turned up to prevent him).

Under the name "the vacuum cleaner" (“cleaning up after capitalism”), Leadbitter makes Banksyish counter-cultural street art – we sip from Starbucks mugs with logos tweaked to read “proFuck Off”. More significantly, he participated in protests at power stations and fielded the first call from the BBC about the death of Ian Tomlinson during 2009’s G8 protests. For his pains he was spied on by the police, who branded him a “domestic extremist” (the doctors gave him a different tag: “borderline personality disorder”). These look like the actions of a principled person working to prevent global warming. So is the same grievance, the same feeling of being at-odds with the world, behind his political life and his broken-heartedness? How did Leadbitter compare to his fellow-protesters? Most simply, why does he think he is the way he is? It’s frustrating that Leadbitter doesn’t address these questions. He never deviates from the chronicle of his outward circumstances and his mental state. He treats anarchist meetings and hospital stints alike through the lens of his own anguish.

The show will end happily, Leadbitter reassures us when his story is at its bleakest, because it will end with him sitting here in bed talking to us. He seems to be suggesting that telling his story has given him a way to cope with the world. But if this is a story of art's power to heal, it's a conflicted one, too inward-looking to give cause for celebration. It would be interesting to hear more about Leadbitter's other current project, in which he invites mental health patients to put forward ideas for a healthier care system – but he doesn’t dwell on that here. As for the protesting, Leadbitter says that part of his life ended with Tomlinson’s death. He couldn't pit himself against the world any more.