The Sweetest Swing in Baseball
The Royal Court, London

Mark Tyson

Older readers may remember the Joe Walsh classic 'Life's Been Good': 'Lucky I'm sane after all I've been through/I can't complain but sometimes I still do'. Are the rich, famous and successful deserving of our sympathy and concern? Or is schadenfreude the appropriate response to celebrity misfortune?

The central character of Rebecca Gilman's The Sweetest Swing in Baseball is Dana Fielding, a celebrated artist who loses her touch and winds up in a psychiatric hospital. Fearing that she will be discharged, she adopts the persona of the troubled baseball legend Darryl Strawberry, having read his self-help recovery manual.

Gilman avoids all the old cliches about psychiatric institutions, as well as art, madness and genius, but the nice, pragmatic psychiatrist does not have the same dramatic potential as the oppressive psychiatric system, and the artist who happens to be depressed is not as interesting as the artist driven to insanity in pursuit of an artistic vision. Nonetheless, the play offers a vigorous assertion of artistic independence struggling to come out; gallery owners, agents and audiences all take flak.

Dana is full of contradictions: she wants the safety and protection of the psychiatric hospital but she does not trust the psychiatrists or the treatment they offer. In her career, she wants to sell her work but is contemptuous of the industry that she is a part of. She wants to be recognised as an artist but is lacking in vision and inspiration. She would like to change her life but is not qualified to do anything else.

Rebecca Gilman and Gillian Anderson, living up to her star billing, manage to make a sympathetic figure of the egotistical Dana, but they win our sympathy for her as a human being. For an artist, being criticised, envied or worse, ignored, comes with the territory.

Till 15 May 2004.