Writer: Christina Carrafiell
Fluent aphasia is a language ailment often caused by brain injury or a stroke. The condition impairs the ability to comprehend what others are saying or produce coherent communication. The result can be a stream of fluent but meaningless speech and writing, replete with incorrect, inappropriate, or invented words. Christina Carrafiell’s 60-minute play Michaela’s Fluent Aphasia manages to evoke the tone of jumbled incoherence characteristic of the disorder. But beyond disjointed, surreal moodiness it is a struggle to understand what, if anything, Carrafiell is trying to get at.
It is 4am on a Tuesday. Thirty-something poet Michaela (Carrafiell takes the protagonist’s role here) has a cancerous brain tumour. Surgeon Will (Jake Mavis fresh from a fantastic comic turn in the Riverside’s recent Artificially Yours) urges her to have it removed without delay. The doc, who has been awake for 72 hours without even a cup of coffee for sustenance, is cheating on his wife and seems to be Michaela’s on-off fling. A clear medical conflict of interest here one might suppose (there is an alternative surgeon ready and waiting to do the op) but logic mostly disapplies throughout the piece.
Mulling over her options Michaela encounters fellow poet Julia (Delphi Evans) taking an early morning stroll at the hospital. Julia, who may also be a psychiatric patient, or a psychiatrist, or a speech therapist (it is never entirely clear) advises against surgery. Michaela equivocates and suggests going for a pint instead. Surgeon Will insists. “You’re a puzzle Will” says Theo (Alexander Marks) who is another speech therapist as well as a struggling artist.
“Something’s gone horribly wrong” Will tells us after the op. Michaela’s lingual cortex has been damaged. Her inner monologues are pitch-perfect but among the only words she can get out are “basket” and “bracket”. Can our hero learn to speak again? Endless repetitions of “a cat sat on the mat” await her.
Add into the mix a second narrative strand. “I’ve climbed over ten dozen highways to get to you,” Julia tells on-off boyfriend Theo. He loves her but “when I’m with you I want to die” so he decides to burn all his pictures of her. “I’m a sad, fat whale of a girlfriend,” says Julia. “You’re not a whale” replies Theo. Ouch. No wonder she throws a ballet shoe at him. Think absurdism minus the humour.
One supposes this all makes sense at some level but, as with Michaela’s communication, meaning struggles to surface. Atmospheric yes, but coherent, consequential, and accessible? Opinions will vary.
Runs until 1 July 2024
