Her Raving Mind ***

We meet EL (Fenia Gianni), dancing frantically to club music.

During the course of Her Raving Mind, we are drawn into EL’s turbulent journey and at times it’s not for the feint hearted.

Her childhood was deeply troubled. She frequently felt invisible, desperate for her father’s attention. Her mother should have been her role model, source of comfort and rock. Instead, she appears to have been vicariously reliving her youth through EL, even seeing her as competition. EL’s friends saw her as cool; whereas EL had other ideas.

Her mother’s own insecurities are relentlessly projected onto EL. EL is nagged about her figure, at times eating voraciously by way of response. The mother has unattainable ambitions for EL: dance, athletics, academic excellence and scholarships. EL is gaslit, is placed under intolerable pressure and begins to lose friends. She feels scared, alone, neglected, angry and ashamed.

It seems that the emotional abuse suffered in those formative years casts a long shadow over her later life.

But EL finds herself a little in her twenties, going to parties and raves. She meets a man and a relationship blossoms. However, she has fallen into the trap of idealisation. When she falls pregnant, another, darker, side to him emerges – he is controlling, denigrating and abusive.

She gives birth to a daughter, but fractures have taken hold. She continues to suffer various forms of isolation and trauma, culminating in a violent conclusion.

Gianni is a bold and adept performer. She tells EL’s piercing tale of survival empathetically and with emotional commitment. EL’s tale of narcissism, control, misogyny and abuse is depressingly all too familiar.

Not all of the staging choices land. The breaking of the fourth wall mid-production serves to unnecessarily interrupt the narrative and the audience perhaps did not feel in a safe space when invited to participate in a rave. Nonetheless, setting aside these uneven moments, there lies a powerful and emotionally affecting production that would benefit from greater nuance and refinement.