crackers by cmfwood
18:45 7-12 Aug 2023, The Royal Scots Club (Venue 241)
Unsettling exploration of society’s uneasy relationship with mental ill-health.
Will is a popular, well-respected GP. He’s happily married to Mhairi, a teacher and they have a daughter, Lyra, who’s about to leave school for university. But when one of Will’s teenage patients commits suicide, Will’s world starts to unravel and he’s forced to question everything he thought he knew.
crackers is a new play by Edinburgh-based writer cmfwood, exploring the stigma attached to mental ill-health. “I started writing this script pre-pandemic,” says Wood, “and in lots of ways, it was interesting to see how the pandemic turbo-charged progress with unravelling the stigma. When we were all trapped at home, we were suddenly asking each other how we were – and really meaning it. Post-pandemic, as the shared threat recedes, it feels as if we’re sliding back into that same awkwardness around that topic. It feels like we’ve gone backwards rather than forwards.”
Over the course of the play, it becomes clear that Will’s daughter, Lyra, has her own secret. She was diagnosed with depression when she was 12 but asked her mother not to share her diagnosis with Will. As part of her research, Wood approached Scottish mental health charity, Penumbra, to find out whether this situation was realistic: that the stigma attached to mental ill-health was such that it would divide close families. “My conversations with support workers revealed that these situations aren’t infrequent. Parental expectations can be hard to manage at the best of times and high expectations coupled with low understanding can be a pernicious combination.”
The production, from long standing local Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group, features a cast of ten ranging in age from 14 through to 80. “A new script is always a brilliant excuse to explore a topic and reflect on the writer’s perspective alongside our collective lived experience,” says co-director Claire Morand. “The play tackles some tough themes and we’ve tried hard to create a safe space in the rehearsal rooms that allows the cast to delve into society’s attitudes as well as understanding our own attitudes in more depth. We can’t wait to share the result with our Fringe audiences.”
Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group will also present a second play this Edinburgh Fringe: John Godber and Jane Thornton’s Shakers, a feisty look at gender, misogyny and social mobility among four cocktail waitresses. Both crackers and Shakers will be performed at the Royal Scots Club, Venue 241, 07-12 August.
crackers by cmfwood
18:45 7 – 12 Aug 2023, The Royal Scots Club
★★★☆☆ Strong performances
Tom Ralphs for All Edinburgh Theatre
★★★☆☆
Jacqueline Wheble for Theatre Weekly
“explores the challenging subject of mental health unflinchingly and with compassion.”
EGTG 