A musical about mental illness, trauma, love and family is a brave concept for musical theatre, and Next to Normal is not for the faint-hearted. For some, the imagery could be triggering and a little close for comfort. Unquestionably, this rock musical sends its missiles directly into the auditorium as we witness the sharp, shocking breakdown of a bipolar mother in her comfortable, suburban home. The question is how such turbulent territory lands, as it's a challenging watch, steeped in unresolved pain.
Written by Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics), it was a multi-award-winning Broadway hit in 2009, and now the British première transfers from the Donmar Warehouse (August 2023) to the West End for this latest run.
The piece is based on the Goodman family, who are thrown into the stuff of nightmares as Diane (Caissie Levy) battles against her condition, haunted by the ghost of her son, Gabe (Jack Wolfe). The fallout for solid husband Dan (Jaime Parker) and her daughter Natalie (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) is an excruciating daily heartbreak as they desperately cling to the ideal of normality, while crisis bites at their toes in every domestic moment.
The cast are superb. As Diane, Levy embodies brilliantly the physiological response to anxiety. She jumps on the breakfast bar, throws herself into the arms of her long-suffering husband Dan, turning everything into a song, bringing notable hysteria into both actions and voice. One minute she’s stealing her husband upstairs to have sex, the next she’s making sandwiches for her (imaginary) teenage son who died as a baby. There’s a lot going on for Diane, and the premise here is that the pills are controlling her life. Diane misses the high “mountains” and the lows. Such decision making comes at a high price in this narrative.
Parker makes a fine, long-suffering Dan, balancing out his sheer bewilderment and lack of understanding in terms how best to support his wife alongside a practical attempt to gain control of the spiralling marriage. Eleanor Worthington-Cox paints a convincing portrait of angry, hurt Natalie who has lost her mother who is a shell of her former self and really is barely in existence, let alone attending her school concert recital or making lunch. She is literally the unseen child.
The piece veers towards the melodramatic, but Yorkey’s narrative is clever in that it keeps interest, and Kitt’s lively score keeps the audience from ripping out their hearts, and as the plot thickens, the score plugs into hard rock, country and pop.
Longhurst’s direction brilliantly depicts the disparity between the perfect, suburban, two-storey set and deep pools of sadness that lie beneath the polished wooden kitchen surfaces, clearly marked out by Chloe Lamford. The use of a revolve transports the audience from the family kitchen to doctors’ offices and the hospital. Ann Yee’s choreography pulls out the melodrama in the characters, from Diane’s jerking and spiralling about the kitchen counter to Gabe, who hovers menacingly over her, as if the stuff of nightmares, which he probably is.
While it is deeply troubling and moving to watch the undoing of Diane as she spirals into mental chaos residing in a hallucinatory nether world of dead babies and manic behaviour, the messages are unclear. Is the narrative suggesting that it’s quite possible for mental illness to be overcome without the pills, to be free of medicalisation and thus liberated from the prison of brain fog and apathy? The piece seems to suggest that flushing pills down the sink and confronting history is by far the most likely route to recovery.
The drama also asks us to think about how we love and what this means in terms of well-being and pain. How do you love, and feel loved in return, when you are creating havoc and destroying the lives of the people you love? In terms of dramatic impact, there is little to hold the audience, and the interval break, directly after Diane is carted off for electric shock therapy, comes as jolt. As Dan is left clutching a bloodied sheet at the end of the first scene, we shuffle off for ice creams. It feels discombobulating to say the least.
Luckily, the musical's strength draws on the humour running alongside all this gushing pain and agony. Even in Diane's bleakest moments, her journey is bittersweet and tinged with sadness and humour in equal measure. Levy plays on this mercurially, so even when deep in song, her plight is visceral and believable. It is a genius performance that carries the show, burning a mark of unsettledness into our brains, with many unanswered questions hovering into the night and wounds left gaping wide open.