Review: DIAGNOSIS, Finborough Theatre

You may not know Athena Stevens’s name, but you may remember her legal troubles: her allegations against Shakespeare's Globe of sexual abuse by a fellow actor and disability discrimination were widely reported in March this year. Now, after a period of what she terms “creative exile”, the Finborough playwright in residence is back with a stiflingly claustrophobic look at the disabled community’s relationship with the police, set entirely in a prison cell.

Stevens, who is a wheelchair user with athetoid cerebral palsy, plays an unnamed female character brought to a police station after assaulting a man in a “nitrous bar” (this play is set in 2035, when it’s implied that such institutions will be more commonplace), and subjected to a range of dehumanising treatment, including having her wheelchair manhandled.

She gradually reveals herself as a Cassandra-like figure able to predict an apocalyptic flood coming to central London, but cursed not to be believed. Additionally, and distressingly, she can see timers above certain people’s heads counting down to some trauma or life-altering moment in their lives.

It’s all a powerful metaphor for how easy it is for authorities to gaslight the vulnerable into submission, and the audience aren’t let off the hook either. Referred to by the cast as the “citizen supervisory panel” behind a two way mirror, where we can see Stevens but she can’t see us, we feel like intruders, complicit in Stevens’s mistreatment.

Technology on stage is having something of a moment, and has provoked many a reactionary thinkpiece, but Diagnosis is an example of how to do it well. Stevens’s character’s interrogation has to be recorded on account of her status as a “vulnerable person”, and videographers Lev Govorovski and Rio Redwood-Sawyerr cleverly play with camera angles and lens effects to reflect the ever-shifting power dynamics of Stevens and her interrogator. A mirror effect conjuring infinite versions of Stevens, during one of her more surreal monologues, sticks particularly in the mind.

Really, though, the anchor of this show is Stevens herself, who shifts chameleon-like from cowering terror to confrontation, to otherworldly reflection as she slips into visions of the future set to willowy piano music and hazy blue light. Her police interrogator, played by director Ché Walker, resists falling into blokeish stereotypes, and instead treads a delicate course between his character’s more-than-my-job’s-worth disregard for Stevens, and his mounting dread.

Given Stevens's powerful ideas, it’s something of a shame that the denouement – where the protagonist reveals why she punched the man in the first place – rehashes tired themes of disability under the male gaze, and veers slightly into poor taste by making the sexual assault of an unseen female character into something of a plot twist. Still, the visual and sonic frenzy that ensues when the protagonist’s prophecies come to pass makes up for this, conjuring pure apocalyptic dread.

Diagnosis is not a show with any real plot, but instead is a bleak vignette examining institutional ableism, perhaps inspired by Stevens’s own experiences of disability-related isolation within the creative industries. The audience leaves with a sobering reminder that the processes designed to help vulnerable people actually render them more isolated, and give them everything except the autonomy and voice they deserve.

Diagnosis plays at the Finborough Theatre until 7 June