Just Be Normal – VAULT Festival, London

Writer: Sophie Jackson

Director: Connor Pearce

Sometimes when playwrights create a work based on their own life, they rename the characters. That may be to keep their onstage and offstage stories separate. It may also be because an overtly fictionalised tale can more easily take liberties with history for the sake of the story.

For her debut play Just Be Normal, Sophie Jackson rejects such an arm’s-length approach. The story of her relationship with her older sister Emma, who is autistic, is played out with onstage characters named Sophie and Emma – and the sisters also play themselves.

Not that this prevents Jackson from occasionally taking liberties. “Not all of this happened, but all of it is true,” she tells us in her joint role as actor and playwright. Further attention is called to her occasional rejigging of the siblings’ history when Emma occasionally stops the show in order to call out some piece of dramatic shorthand.

Such narrative tweaks do streamline the girls’ tale to fit into its hour. Sophie, 18 months junior to her sister, is regarded as the “sensible one”, always relied upon by the sisters’ working parents to get her troublesome sister to school. The fact that Sophie has become a de facto carer for Emma seems to go unnoticed by anyone but the girls themselves.

The crux of Jackson’s story is that Emma’s autism went undiagnosed for some time. It is only recently that it was recognised that women and girls could even be on the autistic spectrum, let alone that autism may affect girls and boys in similar numbers.

Instead, Emma’s attempts to cope with her sensory overload at school, from always wearing large earmuffs against school uniform policy to venting her frustrations at the volume of her teacher’s voice with blunt language, paints her as a troublemaker forever on the verge of exclusion. Meanwhile, the focus on Emma and trying to cope with her difficulties means that Sophie’s own struggles with her mental and sexual health risk being overlooked.

Jackson gives both characters some poetic monologues that explain what is going on inside their own heads; sections are repeated over and over, the repetition emphasising aspects both of Emma’s autism and Sophie’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. That device is let down a little elsewhere in Jackson’s dialogue writing, where repetition feels more like an indicator of a need for tighter editing of her script.

Bigger flaws in the play’s presentation include a set design centred around two doors attached to a rotating wall, a prop which distracts from the actors far more than it contributes. Other characters’ voices, played in at a volume which sometimes drowns out the onstage performances, are sometimes not distinct enough from each other.

But the intimacy and honesty with which Sophie and Emma Jackson portray their mutual struggles go a long way to compensate for any shortcomings. You never know what somebody else is going through in their own head, Emma tells us; a little kindness goes a long way, so it is better to be kind to everyone. Just Be Normal offers a view into one family’s life that, in turn, opens us up to the possibility of being the kind people that the Jacksons, and everyone else, need us to be.

Continues until 17 March 2023