Writer and Director: Dee Taylor-Thompson
Plenty of well-established acts use festivals of theatre to showcase their work, but the chief virtue of these festivals, especially the Camden Fringe Festival, is to provide a home for new and untested work. The Camden Festival was established in 2006, and has hosted, supported, and encouraged a huge diversity of acts at a considerably smaller cost than the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One of the consequences of this is that some shows are more works in progress than the finished article. Seeing new work has risks attached as well as the excitement of discovery, and Dee Taylor-Thompson’s The Mind of a Narcissist offers both experiences.
There is at its core a substantial and consequential play, discussing consequential things, offering insight into real relationship issues. It’s a play that sets out to tackle hard issues and has a fine central performance from Nicki Rochford, making herself scary and obsessive with admirable intensity. She is, however, considerably more powerful than her acting fellows, which skews the play more to the narcissist than to her victims. The only competition she has is from the author Dee Taylor-Thompson, who takes on the character of the Narcissist’s mind. She makes it a dark and forbidding place to visit.
The play operates on two levels: a sort of cut-price Freudian overview, which is dispensable, and the story of an orphan brought up by her mother’s sister, in a relationship at once caring and cloying, loving and suffocating. It is not only much more interesting than the framing narrative, it offers possibilities for her cast to shine.
There is the heart of a fine play here, a nuanced, original take on a relationship becoming toxic. That play is well served by Nicki Rochford’s striking performance, a spider at the centre of a web that encloses and suffocates everyone she purports to care about. Stripping away some of the surrounding wordage, and concentrating on a cast of actors with the stronger material to work with, would make this piece shine brighter.
Reviewed on 4 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
