SYNDROME. To 27 April.

London

SYNDROME
by Kirk Wood Bromley, based on a concept by Joshua Berg

Finborough Theatre To 27 April 2002
Tue-Sat 8.30 Sun 4.30pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval

TICKETS 020 7373 3842
Review Timothy Ramsden 21 April

A powerful solo about a medical condition reaches far beyond its specific subject.We love telling each other about our aches, pains and tropical diseases. But we rarely aspire to New York actor Joshua Berg's achievement in performing Syndrome, the play he commissioned from U.S. playwright Bromley about Tourette's syndrome. Tourette's involves overpoweringly compulsive physical and vocal tics. Berg should know. He's got it.

Meet him offstage and you'll find an intelligent, articulate person who might seem to have a cold and no handkerchief. The first part's true. Yet a handkerchief would be useless; there's no virus. It's his version of Tourette's - though the condition's popularly presented as involving involuntary outbursts of obscenities, that's something showing itself in only 15% of Tourettians.

The script avoids such sensationalising, at least in respect of Tourette's, but in Berg's high-energy, swift-moving performance, it certainly creates the sense of being caught in a compulsion (ironic in a way: for 90 minutes Berg has to suppress his own symptoms while displaying Egon's different manifestations).

This ever-present syndrome's impact – Tourette's offers no relief - is intensified by the environment. The Finborough's floor and walls surround Egon with a chalked maze of phrases listing dozens of symptoms, possible treatment sources (Beckerian Death Therapists the most unlikely sounding), and chapters for the life of a Touretteian –beginning with the realisation that I am not the only one. These are rewritten as the action develops his efforts to wrest back his life from what he calls the Tourist in his body.

Alongside this, there's his family – the play is framed by answerphone messages from Egon's parents. He traces the onset (Tourette usually begins between ages 2 and 15; for Berg/Egon it was at 11, though he was 26 by the time the symptoms were diagnosed) back to an obsessed homing-in on the sound of his father's lips smacking repeatedly come mealtimes. A devastating moment brings his father's final note of rejection, blaming the condition on his wife's family.

Neither self-pitying nor sentimentally glamourising, Syndrome no more needs a pre-interest in Tourette's than, say, King Lear does in divvying up the family property. It's about an individual's struggle, very literally, to come to terms with himself. Surprisingly, if aptly, compulsive viewing.

Egon Covert: Joshua Lewis Berg

Director/Designer: Howard Thoresen

2002-04-23 10:55:24