Pi Theatre delves into mental health in writer Enda Walsh’s Medicine
Physical comedy, dark comedy, surrealism, musical theatre, and absurdism all show up in the play having its Canadian premiere in Vancouver from June 14 to 23
Nyiri Karakas (left), Jay Clift, and Genevieve Fleming in Medicine. Photo by Emily Cooper
Pi Theatre presents Medicine from June 14 to 23 at Vancity Culture Lab
IRISH PLAYWRIGHT Enda Walsh’s Medicine is about a man with mental illness who lives in an institution, but the play runs the gamut of styles and sentiments, according to Pi Theatre artistic director Richard Wolfe, who’s directing the play for the company. Although the work delves into the character’s trauma, there’s plenty of lightness to it as well.
“I was attracted to this play because it has a huge range of styles,” Wolfe says in a phone interview with Stir. “It moves through farce to physical comedy, dark comedy, surrealism, musical theatre, and absurdism. It incorporates all of these styles into this one evening with a throughline all packaged in a cohesive story.
“It’s a dark comedy,” he adds. “I would expect and almost guarantee that every person who comes will laugh and there’s a very good chance everyone will tear up at some point. This is the range of the story. It’s funny but it’s also sad at times, but it ends on a hopeful and redemptive note. It doesn’t end in any kind of nihilistic or dismissive way. It does kind of offer the antidote to this crazy world we’re all living in and all suffering from.”
The New York Times has called Walsh “one of the most fiercely individual voices in theatre today”. He first shot to fame in 1997 with his play Disco Pigs, which won the George Devine Award and the Stewart Parker Trust Award. In 2007 and 2008, he won Fringe First Awards at two consecutive Edinburgh Festivals for The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom. His 2008 biopic, Hunger, told the story of the final days of Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands and won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Heartbeat Award at the Dinard Festival of British Film, among other honours. He worked on a musical called Lazarus with David Bowie. Medicine premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2021 before transferring to the Galway International Arts Festival. Pi Theatre’s production of Medicine marks its Canadian premiere.
“I really enjoy work that can be described as theatrical,” Wolfe says. “There’s an impressionistic, poetic, almost dreamlike quality of the artistic experience that Enda Walsh likes to explore rather than something that’s very clearly polemic. He’s very concerned with how people are treated with brutality, how people are treated badly. He says he’s been writing the same play for 25 years and that generally is about people who have a hard time living in the world as it is; they’re harmed by the world or have a hard time dealing with it.
“He also writes love stories, too,” Wolfe continues. “There’s a big dollop of love in it, in the sense that while other people can be the poison that harms us, other people can also be the medicine that can make us well and live in a healthy way, and that’s how the title fits the piece. We see a person who is harmed by other people. We hear him tell his story as a way to reclaim his narrative, but we also see how some attention and compassion can be a treatment for the condition he’s living in.”
Joining actors Jay Clift, Genevieve Fleming, and Nyiri Karakas on stage is drummer Stephen Lyons, a Juno-winning artist who plays with the band Fond of Tigers. As part of a program called Close Encounters in partnership with the Kettle Friendship Society, there will be a post-show panel discussion on June 16 after the matinee performance, led by the organization that helps people living with mental illness; a cast and crew talkback happens after the evening production on June 18. (Wolfe notes, too, that 2 for 1 Tuesdays are back and that Pi will always aim to accommodate viewers who don’t have the financial means to buy a ticket.)
“There’s commentary on mental health, but it’s couched in poetry and dreamscape and theatricality,” Wolfe says of the play. “He explores those themes but it doesn’t feel like he’s on a soapbox shouting at people. He uses a formal structure and poetry to paint this darkly comic, surrealistic picture of what can happen to an individual who’s not like others and to depict how they can be damaged and forgotten. This character is forgotten in an institution. He’s institutionalized as a young man and stays there his whole life.
“There is a lot of physical action in the piece, so it’s not static but it’s a very full experience,” he says. “And when people leave the theatre I expect they will be compelled to discuss their experience with each other, which is one of our values at Pi—having that kind of discourse that can be generated by art. We share a kind of psychic pain globally; so many people are tied together through the Internet and we hear about a lot of psychologically stressing events. How do we survive it? How do we deal with it? The answer as presented in this play is through compassion, and connectivity, and tolerance, and kindness, so I feel that people in the end will leave the theatre perhaps with that idea in mind that there is a way to live that can help us navigate the brutality.” 
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