Leah Harvey in The Wonderful World of Dissocia at Theatre Royal Stratford East
(Picture: Marc Brenner)A profane, madcap, Alice-in-Wonderland trip morphs into something much more profound in Anthony Neilson’s weirdly compelling 2004 study of mental instability. I’ve rarely seen a play made up of two such tonally different acts: and here a succinct and moving second half contextualises and clarifies the ragtag, playful first. Emma Baggott’s revival is grounded from beginning to end by a fine central performance from Leah Harvey, focused and magnetic amid external and internal disorder.
Harvey, who uses the pronouns they/them, plays Lisa, apparently a young woman in a modern city: our only anchor in time or place is that she listens to an iPod. Lisa is dispatched by a watchmender to the abstract world of Dissocia to find the hour of her life she lost when returning from New York. The watchmender drinks urine, by the way – other people’s, not his own – and Dissocia is reached by an imaginary lift that goes sideways, as well as up and down.
