Credit: Matt Austin Photography
A Pint Sized Conversation is a theatre piece on mental health in an unusual setting – the pub. Performed by Dylan Frankland, Rosa Day-Jones and Tobias Grace, it is an innovative and improvisational approach to engaging conversation about mental health through theatre. Using drama, lights, sound and choreography, the actors portray their lived experiences of looking after those with a mental health condition such as depression. The show has toured the UK since 2018, making its final stop on 5 December at Westbury-On-Trym, a suburb of Bristol.
We go to the pub for good homecooked grub, to socialise with friends and family and above all to relax. Walk into your local and you are greeted with the ambience of conversation, clinking glasses and pints being pulled. But what you might least expect to hear is conversation about mental health. So, you might be surprised if a group of young people walked in, set up and sound-checked the microphones, and they didn’t start playing music, but instead performed theatre. After all, pub regulars are notoriously creatures of habit; sitting in the same seats every night as the barman serves up ‘the usual’ without even having to ask. These people might initially be reluctant to engage in an immersive style of theatre but would then, especially if they were older men, “be hooked and go on to have a very open conversation afterwards”, as Dylan put it.
“This conversation should take place anywhere. People chat in pubs, so let’s have an open chat here”, Dylan started out by saying.
Drinks aside, Dylan placed a pile of brightly coloured Post-it notes on the table and said “write down three things that made you happy today”. He received a few quizzical looks. It’s strange how the mind can go blank at such a proposition. It is more of a challenge than one might hope. “Good marmalade to butter ratio on my toast this morning” was one happy thing declared by an audience member. “Spent less time on Facebook today”, was put forward by Dylan. It’s wonderful to marvel in the little things. However, I’m not sure that any of us was prepared for the gravity of what was to come.
Dylan, Rosa and Tobias began pegging notecards to string that hung in a square around each of the four microphones. Stigma. Isolation. Sadness. There were so many words and not one of them was positive.
If that’s how depression feels, the next segment described how depression is seen. Rosa sang Happy by Pharrell Williams whilst Tobias recited various definitions of depression – physical, mental and scientific. Rosa’s voice faded and was lost in Tobias’ words. It was as if each definition weakened Rosa until her voice no longer had any life to it.
They all began unpegging the notecards and read them out as they took them down. Then they sped up, speaking over each other. Dozens of feelings linked to depression flew around the room. It was overwhelming, loud and chaotic. I wanted it to stop because the noise was, as Dylan described it, “too much to comprehend or to express or to know or to define”.
I felt breathless just watching. Eyes around the rest of the room were fixed on the actors.
Then, suddenly blue flashlights focused on small cards outlining perceptions of depression. Dylan described his sister. They were in town and she was struggling to buy a birthday card. Because of her depression, she was unable to speak. Dylan tried to help but found it really difficult to muster the right words. In fact, he eventually said “no one cares”, which may have been unhelpful. What he really meant was don’t worry – no one else is concerned with what you are doing because they are focused on their own lives. Like so many of us, it’s hard to choose supportive words in these situations.
“That’s it. That’s all I could say”, Dylan uttered, looking at the floor. “She was struggling and that’s the best advice I could think of”. But Dylan is not alone in the tiredness he felt after helping his sister with her depression, standing in and speaking for her. He expressed his feelings of guilt for the times where he couldn’t help his sister. But one thing that helped, he explained, was when he told his friends and they supported him by giving him space when his sister rang to talk.
Tobias checked in, asking if Dylan was okay, if we were all okay in the audience. I was relieved that he did because I had absorbed so much of what had been said that I felt as if I was living in it. In fact, with that pause, a few people who had ceased eating their dinner began to eat again.
The sound of a heartbeat vibrated through the room. We were taken on a journey inside Rosa’s brain. Fairy lights were strung over Rosa’s body as she represented the cerebral cortex. Memory, language, perception and consciousness all reside here in the outer layer of the brain. Chugging sounds began as we travelled up the brain stem to the hypothalamus. Disco lights flashed. Sleep, wakefulness, appetite and mood are all regulated by this master clock. These systems, we were informed, are all involved in depression. So, it is incorrect to say that depression resides in one side of the brain only. Instead, it involves the interconnectedness and intercommunication between various different regions.
“The brain treats depression like physical pain”, Rosa said. If this is the case, then the suggestion that mental health and physical health are separate is untrue. After all, Rosa, Tobias and Dylan asked the audience: “where do we locate our sense of self?”. We do not do this exclusively through the mind or the body, but through physical gestures. So, “mental health is a misleading term”, Tobias stated. Physical health is on the cover of magazines, on fitness ads and in the Olympic games. Physical health is sexy. It’s desirable. “Poor mental health is like being locked in – no windows, no doors, just darkness”, Rosa detailed.
Rosa held up a bag of ready salted crisps. Crisps in a pub…makes sense. These were not for consumption, but instead signified the 5,300,000 Britons with depression today. More people worldwide have depression than any other mental health condition.
Tobias stood in a delayed train to Penzance and his frustration quickly turned into annoyance as time went by. “I should be home by now”, he thought to himself. He sighed, shuffling restlessly.
Rosa, as the train driver, announced “we are sorry for the delay, but there has been a fatality on this line. We apologise for the inconvenience caused and will try to get the train moving again as soon as possible.”
Tobias stopped for a moment and thought to himself: “Great Western Railway has had three fatalities in the last four weeks. They are a train company, but surely they should be better equipped to deal with it. Selfish, that’s it. Delayed by more than an hour. I was really looking forward to that programme”.
Later, Rosa described sitting and watching the seagulls diving like cormorants. She recalls a holiday some years ago, where she went kayaking in Wales with her cousin. One day long after, she was in Morrison’s and she received a phone call from her cousin, who expressed suicidal feelings. In that moment, perched on a wall in Morrison’s car park, she let her cousin know how happy she was to be talking to him again. She suggested that a GP might be able to help. He said no. He didn’t want pills. What about counselling? No, again, because that could have been costly, and he didn’t want to go private. One thing helped him above all and that was having someone who was constant, who could offer hope.
Radio bulletins featuring education, welfare and Brexit played in the background. Theresa May pledged to spend £2 billion on mental health services and yet today what we see is that “this is merely redirected funds”, Tobias emphasised.
“We are angry”, Dylan exclaimed. “We are angry that waiting lists for psychiatric services are too long… that in the eyes of society to struggle is to be weak. Mental health professionals are overwhelmed by the workload and lack of resources.”
And yet, those with depression are simply told to “get on with it. This is one of many careless throwaway comments.”
“What really pisses me of is that there is no answer. If we want to change the views of society, we need to change how we address mental health”, Dylan proclaimed.
In the final segment, Tobias described his relationship with his stepdad. When Tobias was young, they would bond over the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. But years later, they did not have that close relationship anymore. His stepdad, he suggested, might have had depression because he was drifting, not working but going to the shop perhaps and coming home again - lacking a sense of fulfilment. Depression affects the loved ones who see depression happening as well as those directly living with it.
Uplifting music played and Tobias, Rosa and Dylan relived their encounters with mental health. As the music continued, Tobias recalled that his stepdad was doing much better and had found passions, such as making models out of metal, Rosa’s cousin was doing really well, and Dylan had the space he needed. Their reappraisal was refreshing.
Dylan returned to the theme of lines that we saw from the string at the beginning and the way these lines connect us; just like the string, by being connected to others some of our tension is taken up. Mental health connects us rather than separates us. This was clarified when one audience member got up at the end and hugged all three of the actors. After the talk of depression and suicide left her tearful, what she wanted more than anything was to give a hug and be hugged.
The performance raised money for a mental health charity in Bristol and Gloucestershire called Off The Record, which offers counselling, meditation and talking therapy to everyone that needs it. Off The Record recognises that anyone can be affected by poor mental health, so you do not have to be “ill enough” to access help from it. It is there free of charge, should you need it.