Writer: Sammy Trotman
Director: Jake Rix
For a narcissistic emotional manipulator, the stage is perhaps the perfect location. That’s certainly the case of Sammy Trotman, who has turned her ongoing mental health issues into an hour of stand-up, poetry and physical comedy that is both enlightening and infuriating. Thus, it seems, it is not a bad distillation of Trotman as a whole.
An ongoing theme in That’s Not My Name is her disagreements with her psychiatrists – people she compares to observers of car crashes who then proclaim to know what the people in the vehicle have gone through.
And Trotman has had many encounters with the profession, not least through her admittance to a psych ward for her borderline personality disorder and alcohol addiction. Aware of her own privilege, she betrays a sense of guilt at the cost to her parents of her private treatment – but then, she admits, “if you break something, you should pay for it”.
Throughout, Trotman presents her own behaviour as that of a truculent toddler – giving away chocolates before hurriedly reclaiming them, or having a screaming tantrum with occasional breaks to make sure she’s being watched. Her longest relationship of five years lasted, she admits, in part because he was an “amazing babysitter”.
For a topic which could accompany its introspection with a lot of gloom, Trotman keeps matters light, often by use of self-deprecating language or by breaking character. Any time a confessional starts getting too serious, she has to break off to ask her sound engineer not to underscore it with a sad cello solo, while she interrupts her own impressions of the nurses on her psych ward to explain that they were not actually the brassy Northerners she is portraying them as.
By the end, the performer notes that, as a scripted work, there’s an element of fiction to everything she has presented. Whether that’s true or not is just one more question about a complex individual that remains unanswered. Is she psychotic, or a genius? That, she says, depends on whether you believe her psychiatrist or her God complex. But That’s Not My Name presents a more well-rounded answer: perhaps they’re both right.
Continues until 22 October 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Enlightening
