I couldn’t resist seeing a play that is said to ask: ‘Are we the puppets of our emotions?’, and which is promoted with these assertions: ‘No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. They are what motivate our behaviour and influence our beliefs.’

No play is an argument, and although one of the writers is a neuropsychologist, this play is an articulate attempt to persuade the audience of what Kathryn Ecclestone and I call the new foundational epistemology of the emotions*.

Let me say at the outset that Mick Gordon’s and Paul Broks’ play is very entertaining. The cosy atmosphere of the Soho Theatre is well suited to a play with only four characters discussing their feelings, and there are some good jokes. The trouble comes when you start to think about the play. The four characters represent ‘Thought’ (Stephen, the Cognitive Behavioural Therapist) ‘Action’ (Lucy, Stephen’s Daughter and an actress) ‘Feelings’ (Anna, Lucy’s friend and a puppet maker) and a ‘Mirror’ (Mark, Stephen’s son, who appears to have a form of autism).

Mark is a character in the tradition of the wise fool. Unknowingly, through repeating their words, he exposes the other characters’ deepest thoughts, actions and feelings. Presumably that is why in his first entrance he appears trouserless: a gratuitous and uncomfortable moment of male nudity that is supposed to show his lack of any sense of propriety or convention, as well as subtly reinforcing the fact that his role is to ‘expose’.

The story is this. Stephen, the therapist, is a wanker; literally. He masturbates violently and dramatically while fantasising over Anna, who is his client. (For the curious, given Mark’s self-exposure, he is fully clothed with his back to the audience while doing this.) His lustful mutterings are over-heard by Mark. Lucy falls for an older man and gets pregnant: she is all action, no feelings or thought. Anna is all feeling and can’t act or think. Stephen can neither feel nor act. That’s basically it. The comic denouement is the stuff of a typical British farce, and it’s all good, if not exactly clean, fun! It is not really about emotion, it’s about frustrated human relations and the avoidance and pain of love. ‘On love’ would be a better title for the play.

The overtly ‘intellectual’ aspects of the play are not convincing or very interesting. For example, Stephen’s musings on the importance of human disgust – the horror of having to eat a chocolate in the shape of a turd – just distract from the difficulty the characters have in relating.  Or course we may not be expected to find his ideas convincing, but they do provoke puzzlement that distracts from the fun.

The blurb suggests that the theatre is an art form that is geared to the emotions because it is ‘an art form which creates and manipulates feelings.’ So how does On emotion manipulate our emotions? The prominence given to the Stephen’s loud masturbation scene suggest a contemporary and therapeutic message. The life of the mind, the intellect, is just masturbation, lacking emotion or action. There may be something in this at the level of platitudes about human relationships, but in the contemporary therapeutic culture in which emotions are valued over the intellect, it is a dispiritingly anti-intellectual message. My emotional response: wank on!

Till 20 December 2008

*Dennis Hayes is the author, with Kathryn Ecclestone of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. See the Culture Wars review, and a response from the authors.