Honest, raw, spit and hysterical laughter

Who has the power to keep a patient in a place they don't want to be? How can words create chaos, confusion and frustration? These are questions that the performance Blue/Orange raises.

Can you manipulate a person into suffering? Where is the line between care and control? How many thoughts can you drill into a defenseless head? Who are we when all that is left are other people's thoughts and opinions?

Blue/Orange is written by Joe Penhall and is a performance that takes a critical stance towards psychiatry. Even 25 years after its first production, it is still relevant. Director Terese Mungai-Foyn's version, staged at Oslo Nye Teater, is modern, and brings out the critical questions about the world around us in an interesting and entertaining way. There are several aspects that make this performance exciting and not least worth seeing.

Through the play we get to know a psychiatric patient named Christoffer. He is forcibly admitted after being picked up by the police and we meet him after 28 days in the hospital. There they have found out that he insists that oranges are blue and that Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda, is his father. He rejoices that it is his last day, while his psychiatrist, Bruce, is not as happy. He believes that Christoffer should stay so that he can be properly diagnosed and receive the right treatment before he faces everyday life again. In order to make this decision, he calls in the supervisor, but the supervisor has a different opinion. The supervisor believes that there is nothing wrong with Christoffer, on the contrary, he believes that the best medicine is for him to go home again. These disagreements lead to major conflicts that follow the characters until the very end.

The first scene sets the mood for the entire play. Characters reminiscent of doctors flutter around in the background, while Christoffer flitting around in the foreground with a large orange. It seems as if Christoffer is imagining the doctors' behavior, that through his eyes they behave like birds. Or is this exactly what is happening? The doctors do not know what to do with the patient, how to help, and so they rather fly around like leaderless birds. In the background, you can see a curtain being pulled back and forth. Back and forth. As if the doctors are flying in and out, without anything changing or helping.

Public courtship on a tight budget

In December 2024, the Oslo municipality decided to reduce its allocation to Oslo Nye Teater by 37 million kroner . The minimal use of props in Blue/Orange is a reminder of this, but it also provides more focus and space for a spellbinding play. The performance is also a credible insight into psychiatry, with little support and minimal objects that can be used to harm oneself or others. Thin fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling that are reminiscent of hospital lamps, providing a bluish, white, sickly light over the gloomy scenes.

The costumes are also minimalist, but they have managed, with a modern look, to breathe new life into the 25-year-old play. With pink wigs, hospital gowns and nail polish, the characters become something completely different from the images I have seen from other stagings. For example, the costumes seemed more realistic, with suits, ties and identification cards, in a production directed by James Dacre at the Ustinov Studio in England in 2021. In Terese Mungai-Foyn's version, the characters' visual style may be more interesting to a more modern audience.

Agents in an increasingly sick affair

The play is performed in English, which the director explains in an interview published by Oslo Nye that she wanted to open it up to a larger audience. In some scenes, however, the two doctors switch to Norwegian, while the patient Christoffer is the only one who speaks only English throughout the performance. It seems that the two doctors speak Norwegian to distance themselves or to rise above the patient, one of many means that highlights the power play between the characters. The use of Norwegian can also be interpreted as the doctors' "medical language" that the patient (or other non-Norwegian speakers) do not understand, as if they are also patients at the psychiatric hospital.

The performance uses several sounds to emphasize the setting. There are alarms that howl, curtains that are pulled back and forth and other noises that you would find in a psychiatric hospital. Music that I have not heard in theater before is also used. Like a mixture of electro pop, with a rich, but perhaps somewhat disturbing soundscape. It seems that the music does not quite fit the setting, as if it is out of place as a forcibly admitted patient. As if you are constantly interrupted, but still follow the intensity of the scene that emphasizes the situation.

Projectors are also used as a device in Blue/Orange, to highlight different scenes. In one of the scenes, it seems as if the projector is being used to illustrate the passing of the days, where a time-lapse of clouds moving in the sky is shown on a curtain behind the actors. The projector is also used during another scene, where everything that happens on stage is mirrored on the curtain behind. The only difference is that the entire image is black and white, grainy and distorted and it is difficult to see exactly what is happening. It is as if we are seeing the world through the eyes of a patient.  

Both the stagehands and the "seat-distributors" at the theater were wearing medical coats when we arrived at the theater. The voice that called us out for a break also seemed specially made for the play, which gave a holistic expression and a feeling that we in the audience were not only the audience, but also patients at the Blue/Orange mental hospital.

Power struggles and mental exhaustion

The play shines a spotlight on the dark side of psychiatry, and in particular how the number of beds determines whether a patient can stay or must leave. It particularly highlights how the lack of proper protocols leads to conflicts within the hospital, which in turn leads to stressed patients who do not know what will happen. Should one stay or leave? The fight for the patient's trust transcends all reason. Who can brainwash the patient into their way of thinking, the fastest and best? Who has the biggest trick? Who has the most power?

The struggle between the doctors for power over the patient is a clear theme in the performance. The power struggle is an ever-present figure that shadows the stage in the cold of the problems that psychiatry is in. The tug-of-war is symbolized through the use of a small red voodoo ball, verbal rages, enticing and legislative words, outrageous and involuntarily controlled body language, and in uncomfortable and uncertain facial expressions, and in loud arguments and confident gestures.

The body language of the actors shines brightly from the small stage and brings out the characters in a completely unique way. With both brutality, honesty, spit and hysterical laughter, they show a side of psychiatry that is quickly forgotten. They bring out characters that you rarely see on a theater stage with credibly portrayed honesty that sticks with me as a spectator and that does not let go until long after I have left the theater. Where I often experience in other performances that the mimicry is too small, here it finds a good balance throughout the entire performance. The dynamics between the three actors also remain at their best through this fierce tug-of-war for power and speaking time.

The power struggle leads to Christoffer no longer knowing what he himself means or thinks, he has been stripped of everything that is and could have become him. Who are we when all that is left are other people's thoughts and opinions? I don't know if Christoffer was sick when he was placed in the hospital, but I'm pretty sure he left sicker than he came in. And so he leaves, with his blue orange in his hands, from a place that has left him more uncertain than he was, unaware of what awaits him out there.

This performance wrapped around me like a heavy blanket all the way home and is a performance I will never forget.