The mind is a very strange thing, and Anthony Horowitz wastes no time in helping the audience at the opening night of Mindgame in Eastbourne, to start doubting theirs. Not only through his superb use of language, and plot twists, but also through the use of a set which seems also to be conspiring against us.
We are in the office of Dr Farquhar (we are informed that “the q is silent and the h redundant, so the name is pronounced “Farrar”) and seated in the office is Mark Styler, a writer of serial killer biographies who has come to Fairfields asylum to try and get an interview with Easterman, a notorious serial killer. His path is blocked by Farquhar, who seems reluctant to believe Styler, but even more reluctant to let him leave.
The entire play is set in a single room, Dr Farquhar’s office, but the setting is anything but boring. The set has a playful design, teasing us and seeming to participate in the mind games played by the characters on stage. In fact, it sometimes comes very close to upstaging the actors, tempting us to play a strange game of “spot the difference” when we should be paying much more attention to the dialogue.
Mindgame is a very dark play, exploring murder, madness, and evil, and asking what motivates people to commit such terrible crimes but, in the best tradition of the thriller genre, nothing can be taken for granted. Whether it is the identities of the three main characters, the name of the Doctor’s pet Labrador or even something as simple as the height of a garden wall.
Soon, Styler is trapped in a nightmare world that’s full of references to other famous thrilers and serial killers. There are secret notes of warning, ear splitting disembodied screams, a faulty music system that comes and goes, and a very questionable snack! By the time we get to Act 2, the stage has undergone something of a transformation, even the wallpaper is playing tricks on us now, and giving the audience a palpable feeling of what it must be like to doubt the evidence of your own eyes – and mind.
The cast of three are made up of Andrew Ryan as the writer, Styler, Michael Sherwin as Dr Farquhar and Sarah Wynne Kordas as Nurse Paisley. They all work supremely hard and incredibly well together, really bringing their characters – whoever they really are – to life.
There is, however, a fourth star in this production and that just has to be the incredible set, designed by Sarah Wynne Kordas. Cupboards become corridors, then cupboards again, paintings seem to have life of their own and wasn’t that chair a different colour in act one?
Considering the subject matter of the play, and it does have some very dark moments, it would be hard to imagine that it offers a “fun night out” but, through Horowitz’s superb writing we find ourselves cringing and laughing in pretty much equal measures – now what does that say about the human mind?
**** Four Stars