Head/Case

By Robert Iles - 15th Oct 2004

Ron Hutchinson’s Head/Case is a powerful piece of work looking at two women coping with different head injuries. Tracy, an innocent bystander hit by a brick whilst caught in a protest in Northern Ireland, has frontal lobe damage and has lost the connections between words and objects, between herself and the person she sees in the mirror and between what she wants to do and what is socially acceptable to do. Julia, as English as Tracy is Irish, has lost the ability to feel emotion and involvement, she can no longer find the motivation to care and has to drag every thought, movement and word from deep inside her; when coming out of coma she got stuck part way.

It is through Tracy that we see the world. A world of confusion and dislocation, or knowing things are not right but not quite why they are not right, of being able to read “I am me” in your notebook but not being able to make that most personal of connections. Tracy is at once both scary and pathetic, she cares with a passion about such things as how to sit whilst Julia cannot even care if she lives. We see Julia circling Tracy like a distant moon, watching detachedly but unable to pull herself out of the gravitational attraction. And then there’s Jimmy, a laugh a song and the typical Irish rogue.

The staging is sufficient to the needs of the play with some lovely touches for the observant. Played on the long thrust of the Swan Theatre there were problems for some people sitting in the front row but for most of us it was spot on.

Claire Cogan’s portrayal of Tracy is a quite stunning piece of acting. A real tour de force performance that takes us by the throat from the moment she appears and brings us to laughter and tears. It is such a credible performance that when she went to commit suicide I had to stop myself leaping up to save her., I felt I really was watching someone who had reached the limit of what they could take. Sarah Cattle’s Julia is a much harder character to get inside, it is a mostly physical performance but one which commands Julia, and us, to listen, to wait through those gaps, to will her on to drag the next word, however banal, from her throat. Jonjo O’Neil’s Jimmy is very confidently played. The interaction between himself and Tracy, particularly during the second Act when they act as one, is extremely well handled and he is never less than convincing.

This is not an easy play. You are watching people coping with being destroyed, who are not going to get better, not going to ever be the people they were before, there is to be no happy ending. Whilst Tracy and Julia may learn to cope they will always be ‘acting’ normal, trying not to look like damaged people. Caroline Hunt is to be congratulated on a genuinely moving production.

Robert Iles