Insight trickery. “I’m a liar”, Fellini once said, “but an honest one”. Bereft of a reason to begin his film, Guido feels himself a fraud, leading his cast and crew on. Maya and the magician hold out to him the possibility of a way past his director’s block: the liar might after all be capable of truth, the fraudster of authenticity. Asa Nisi Masa is a rallying cry. It has the power to make pictures come to life, to make tricks real. Even, perhaps, to make films begin. Laura Thomas Simon Annand Theatre Family rules Published Online May 13, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S2215-0366(15)00229-1 Rules for Living National Theatre, London, UK until July 8, 2015 502 The National Theatre’s new play Rules for Living is Alan Ayckbourn on acid. At one level, it’s a fairly standard middle-class farce—a family brought together for the traditional Christmas to horror and hilarity all round. Yet prize-winning playwright Sam Holcroft subverts this narrative by locating the action in a highly stylised set where the rules the characters live by flash up on a scoreboard above their heads, to be followed, over-ruled, and finally (in some cases) rejected. Edith (Deborah Findlay), the matriarch of the family, is a woman who insists that the family Christmas is spent together, that the order of events is carried out with military precision, and that fun is had by all. This drive for perfection is made worse by the anticipated arrival of her husband, Francis (John Rogan), who has been ill but is “fine, now”. Francis deserves “the best Christmas”, we are told, although it is unclear to the boys and the audience what exactly has happened. Edith has two adult sons, both solicitors. Adam (Stephen Mangan) and his wife Sheena (Claudie Blakley) are both preoccupied with the mental health of their teenage daughter, Emma (Daisy Featherstone), who suffers from chronic fatigue due to “pathological feelings of inadequacy”. Sheena is portrayed as a sensible choice of partner for Adam, but her affections have drifted elsewhere, to Adam’s brother Matthew (Miles Jupp). Although he loves being a solicitor, and obviously feels that he has a chance of moving his emotional intimacy with his sister-in-law to a full-blown affair, his actual partner Carrie (Maggie Service) is a histrionic actress—a larger-than-life character, whose insistence on jokes matches Edith’s obsession for “having a good time”, and has rather invited herself for Christmas. Much has been made in the press of the scoreboard device, a Brechtian way of subverting narrative by shifting subtext into text, making the audience more aware than the characters of what they are doing. We can see, for example, that Matthew must “sit down to lie”, setting up lovely moments of anticipation as Carrie fishes: “does your family like me?” As the anxiety increases, and secrets threaten to explode, the characters’ rules become more complicated: Carrie must not just “stand to tell a joke”, the scoreboard and then the action tells us, but must “stand and jig”. The insight that we cling to our rules for dear life at moments of anxiety, often to our cost, is very precise, although the joke wears rather thin. Similarly, the boardgame of Bedlam—governed by rules that each player must deduce from the others’ actions—starts brilliantly but becomes somewhat laboured. The play regains its humanity, however, with the eventual appearance of two characters, hitherto unseen but central to the plot: Francis and Emma. The sons’ desperate attempts to find out exactly how ill their father is are ignored or seen as fussy in the first half of the play, building our expectation of what may or may not have happened. Francis’ absences— through his work as a High Court judge and extramarital affairs—have coloured family life, just as Emma’s absences, through the bedroom-bound “energy envelopes” that she needs for chronic fatigue, are shaping that of the next generation. The paralysed, speechless, breast-gasping monster of Francis that eventually emerges in a wheelchair shocks the characters into seeing some truths, at long last. Similarly, the angelic Emma’s appearance shocks the regressed adults to think once more, to work together on a desperately simple “goal” towards her recovery. The innocence of her character contrasts sharply with the darkness of Francis’ character, a black-and-white doubling that serves a dramatic function but at some cost to a nuanced account of human agency. As therapy becomes more discussed and fetishised in popular culture, as it was in the early part of the 20th century, we can expect it to appear more explicitly in the arts. Here the play’s beauty is that it fails to come down one way or another on whether cognitive behavioural therapy is a pathetic attempt to say something about family madness, an unethical act when family pathology can so easily become trapped within one individual and dreams, fears, successes, and failures can be repeated across the generations, or a useful practice that might just well save Emma. However, when the audience left the play, it was not cognitive behavioural therapy that we were talking about, or even the function of rules in our own families. No. It was rather the glorious, messy, furious, chaotic delight of one of the best food fights ever (no exaggeration). It was the fate of that turkey whose smell enticed us just as it was hacked, murderously, hypnotically, apart. Because, at the end of the day, messy is more compelling, isn’t it? Jay Watts www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 2 June 2015