Writer and Director: Elaine Kline
Mental health, and specifically some people’s mental ill health, is a part of life of which we seem to be significantly more aware now than in years past. Yet some conditions are still not widely understood by the general population, leading to stereotypical impressions of sufferers.
For Boston-born actor and writer Elaine Kline, her own mental health deteriorated significantly when, at the age of eight, she and her family were involved in a major car crash. Even before then, though, Kline – who by her own description was an “odd duck” as a young girl – may have had a genetic predisposition, with her parents forever debating which side of their family was “the more normal”.
Kline describes and visualises the crash effectively, but the aftermath is her major concern. She is candid about the panic attacks she experienced upon returning to school, and some of the mechanisms she devised to try and defer them, from taking herself out of class to walk around the campus to drawing at her desk (nobody checked the drawings, so they did not notice the “dark shit” she sketched, including her own grave).
Introducing her diagnosis of Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Kline introduces a recurring theme of PowerPoint-like slides that go into detail about mental health conditions and their impact. While this helps to assert the credibility of her descriptions, it also detracts from the more interesting tales from her own life. Kline pivots effectively from a clinical, TED Talk-style delivery to her own experience, but the personal moments stand out most.
As Kline got older and hit puberty, her anxiety began to manifest as OCD, and as her coping mechanisms became ever more extreme, her parents had to seek out-of-state inpatient support. This resulted in several stays at an adolescent psychiatric unit in Wisconsin. In some of her tales covering this period, Kline begins to elide detail. Anecdotes feel half-formed, trailing off into what feels like inconsequence to the audience while still clearly impactful for Kline herself. It is perhaps a byproduct of attempting to distil her life, a serious examination of what various mental health conditions are, and the realisation that young girls and boys often face different diagnoses, all into an hour, but it does feel as if the latter end of Kline’s piece isn’t quite as deftly structured as its first half.
We do get some realisation from the adult Kline that, on top of her mental health issues, she may also be on the autism spectrum – and a reveal that her parents rejected doctors’ attempts to fully diagnose autism earlier in her life, reasoning that she already had “a full plate” of things to worry about given her anxiety, OCD and PTSD. The writer-performer touches on how her self-diagnosis as an adult helps her understand herself better.
Yet by the end of A Full Plate, she still seems to be holding back. Elaine Kline’s life experience holds much to interest and enlighten about young people’s mental health. Still, a sense of reserve holds the piece back from offering as much as it could.
Reviewed on 17 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
