The Divided Laing, Arcola Theatre ★★★★★

This year marks fifty years since the establishment of R.D. Laing’s asylum at Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow, and at East London’s Arcola Theatre The Divided Laing celebrates the anniversary by revisiting Laing’s radical and revolutionary psychological experiments.
Or rather, Laing visits us. Patrick Marmion’s The Divided Laing is a fictional fantasy of drug-induced time-travel, where Ronnie Laing (Alan Cox) finds himself in a future much like our present, a place where it is considered ‘radical’ to restrict one’s mobile usage to simple phone calls. Alongside a motley crew of characters, some fictional, some not, Ronnie’s trip is anchored in history but in no way restricted by it. The Divided Laing, like the theories of Laing and the Philadelphia Association, is an exploration of how to get by in an ‘un-get-by-able’ world.
The play begins slowly with a press interview about Ronnie’s aversion to current techniques in psychiatric practice, with brief interjections about marmite sandwiches and potential Sean Connery appearances. With the future of Kingsley Hall threatened by external critics, Ronnie’s reality begins to bend and blend with prophetic visions of the overly medicated, the ‘prisoners of psychiatry’. The first act ends on a high (quite literally), with anti-psychiatrist David Cooper (Oscar Pearce) painting a pessimistic but startlingly accurate portrait of the future.
The production lacks the psychedelic plumage the text suggests, and the complexity of the subject matter is slightly stifled by a static stage. The fixed arched French doors of Kingsley Hall provide the only visual interest in an otherwise simple set, and the hallucinatory shifts in time and space are only half-executed through lighting and sound.
The strongest moments of the play occur in the second act. Ronnie is forced to face his own life choices through conversations with his future self and with his past mother. Kevin McMonagle, recently seen in the National’s People, Places and Things, makes a lasting impression as the other Ronnie, and Cox’s performance is most sincere during his final sermon.
While The Divided Laing shows us the extent to which the world’s gone crazy, it fails to fully explain how best to manage the crazy world in which live. Nevertheless, it is at its best when displaying the real humanity behind R.D. Laing’s project: to provide a ‘refuge for the shattered to put themselves back together again into the shape of their own choosing’.