The Wonderful World of Dissocia
Royal Court, London

Dolan Cummings
posted 5 April 2007

Anthony Neilson's play - premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 and now on tour with the National Theatre of Scotland - is not dull. This means at least it has passed Neilson's first test for theatre, as explained in a recent Guardian article urging young playwrights not to be so boring. If his injunction not to be afraid of emulating West End spectacle, up to and including the use of songs, makes earnest theatre-goers nervous, however, they can rest assured that The Wonderful World of Dissocia is more Sarah Kane than Ben Elton.

Not that it looks it, or feels like it. On one level, the play owes more to The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, with Lisa Jones (Christine Entwisle) as the innocent but relatively sensible protagonist meeting a series of weird and wonderful characters who exhibit adult neuroses and complexity without the reassuring mystique of adult responsibility. These include the 'insecurity guards', who worry that their uniforms make their bums look big, and respond to Lisa's protestations that they must mean they're 'security guards' by arguing that if something were secure you wouldn't need to guard it. Word play is a persistent theme: Lisa also meets a redundant scapegoat, who explains her minor posterior insect infestation by telling her, 'Time flies, when you're having fun, tend to cluster round your bum'.

And the word play, oddly enough, is central to the play's realism. Because word play is about undermining conventional logic by applying different logic, and this is just what is happening in Lisa's mind. While Lisa is clearly mentally ill, the basic pattern will be familiar to anyone who's ever been delirious with flu. The Wonderful World of Dissocia immerses us in Lisa's rather more extreme condition, allowing us to experience her enjoyment of it as well as her suffering.

In short, Lisa is convinced that she's been feeling out of sorts because she's lost an hour, so she travels to the mysterious kingdom of Dissocia in order to recover it. Just as in dreams, though, the narrative has a knack of changing direction; one scene has no responsibility to follow from the last, and accordingly events flow from Lisa's own passing fixations rather than any objective structure. If anything, Neilson imposes too much narrative consistency by holding to Lisa's search for her lost hour and to the war in Dissocia, but perhaps this is necessary to convey the sense one has at any given time in a dream that one is involved in a coherent narrative. The audience has to share Lisa's perspective, rather than viewing her experience objectively as a series of tangents.

Still, the play is undoubtedly spectacular, a shot at total entertainment even. Neilson says that while he has no desire to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he does want to see the flying car, and indeed The Wonderful World of Dissocia features that very thing. Lest you be disappointed, though, I should make clear that the car doesn't really fly, or even appear to. As is usually the way in theatre, we are asked to use our imaginations, but then presumably we wouldn't be there is we weren't prepared to do that. The play's real 'flying car moment' - in terms of theatrical jouissance - comes just before this scene, but it's more subtle, and a nice surprise, so I won't spoil it.

Ultimately, though, it takes the very different second act, in which we are confronted with the grim objective reality of Lisa's illness as she is hospitalised, to give real meaning to the carnivalesque first act. Rather than leaving the theatre simply chuckling at the funny bits, or perhaps reflecting that the songs weren't actually that great, we ponder Lisa's dilemma; whether to take her mind-numbing medication, or yield to the Siren voices of Dissocia. After all, life, like theatre, should not be boring.

At the Royal Court till 21 April 2007, then touring.