Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 1 February 2013, and touring

SOMETHING extraordinary happened to the late Tommy McHugh.

HE WAS an ordinary Birkenhead bloke with a bit of a shady past. He’d had scrapes with the law when he was younger and had subsequently made a living as a builder and odd-job man. Then, at the age of 60, two blood vessels burst in his head. When he awoke a week later from a coma, lucky to be alive, he found himself possessed by an irresistible urge to create.

Having never shown any artistic interest before, McHugh had suddenly become a compulsive painter and poet. He produced hundreds of artworks, was given to talking in rhyme and discovered untapped reserves of sensitivity.

Paul Cunningham and David Toole (photo Eamonn McGoldrick)

Playwright Danny Start befriended him and saw the potential for a play about his rare condition, known in the neurological profession as “sudden artistic output syndrome”. You can see his point. Not only is it a bizarre and intriguing story in itself, but it raises questions about the nature of identity, the possibility of changing personality and the mysteries of the mind.

Fascinating stories don’t always make fascinating theatre, however. In particular, plays about the brain are frequently too inward looking to have much dramatic punch. They depend on random medical events over which the protagonists have no control, making them passive players in their own story. Even the mighty Peter Brook ended up more reflective than dynamic when he staged the curious true-life medical stories reported by Oliver Sacks in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

So it is with Start’s play, In an Alien Landscape, for Scotland’s Birds of Paradise. He positions the fictional Albie Quinn in a kind of dream world, drifting between the moment of his double brain aneurism and his rebirth as an artist, with mental journeys back to his youth and his fraught relationships with his hard-as-nails father and his forgiving wife. Into the mix, he throws the voice of an alter-ego and of an American doctor who has suffered a similar brain malfunction. The effect is poetic and impressionistic, but also bitty and low in forward momentum.

We already know the most amazing part of the story – that a builder woke up one day as an artist – and none of the background detail changes that or tells us what happened next. Still, in Julie Ellen’s production there are three good-hearted performances from Paul Cunningham as Albie, and Morag Stark and David Toole as the voices inside his head.

© Francis McLachlan, 2013

Links

• Birds of Paradise