Ruby Wax
Since Ruby Wax burst onto our television screens alongside Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Tracey Ullman in the 80's flatshare sit-com Girls On Top, it sometimes seems that she has become part of our sitting room furniture. Familiar, loved, but sometimes taken for granted. The brash American whose lust for life, searing wit and unembarrasssable public persona endeared her to our collective hearts, always appeared up for any challenge, be it raising money for Comic Relief or interviewing Imelda Marcos for her own television show. In between, she was script editor on Absolutely Fabulous.
But anyone arriving at Norwich Playhouse last night expecting a night of stand-up comedy obviously had not done their homework. Ruby Wax is now a tireless campaigner raising awareness about mental health issues. The title of the show is Frazzled, derived from the title of her last book, A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled. For the uninitiated, mindfulness is a self-help technique that can improve wellbeing and perceived health, and is widely taught to sufferers of depression and anxiety. And Ms Wax is well qualified to talk on the subject. And has done. Her first show, Losing It, was based on her experiences as a sufferer of clinical depression. She later went on to gain a masters degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy from Oxford University.
So this was very much a show for and about the '1 in 4', the proportion of our population estimated to suffer from one form or another of mental illness. The first half of the evening involves Ms Wax in effect interviewing herself, a clipboard or pre-written questions providing the prompts for her to extrapolate into the physiological and environmental causes of anxiety, and explain some of the techniques for dealing with it. We are collectively invited to participate in a number of mindfulness exercises, and in between are thrown amusing titbits and raconteurial anecdotes as bait to periodically lighten the mood, but also to hold the attention of anyone who was still just expecting an evening of stand-up comedy.
However it is in the, albeit shorter, second half of the evening that Ruby Wax excels. Seated at the edge of the stage, she invites questions from her audience, and it is the spontaneous and generous responses that each question elicits that exude genuine warmth and compassion. Most, if not all, of these unscripted questions come either from workers involved in the field of mental illness, or from sufferers themselves, and some of their stories are desperately moving. Each one is received with honest attention and empathy.
The evening concludes with a brief song and dance 'routine', which serves to lighten the mood sufficiently for us to exit the auditorium, but the real messages from this show will stay with us far longer than any final image of Ruby Wax performing the hula to Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
