Medicine review – Domhnall Gleeson despairs in absurdist institutional limbo
Traverse theatre, Edinburgh
The Edinburgh festival’s theatre programme begins with Enda Walsh’s flamboyant and funny new play about a man receiving an inappropriate form of drama therapy in a psychiatric hospital
Ever since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we’ve liked to imagine the staff who run an institution might be crazier than those in their care. That’s certainly the case in Enda Walsh’s premiere, which kicks off the theatre programme of the Edinburgh international festival in a collaboration with Landmark and the Galway international arts festival. Flamboyant, funny and surreal – right down to a Dalí-esque lobster costume – Medicine is set in a hospital that keeps its patients in a self-perpetuating limbo in which they are never satisfactorily diagnosed and so never cured.
Related: Enda Walsh: ‘All my plays are about people who haven’t been loved or looked after’