Maenad. Camden People’s Theatre.

Part gig, part performance art, part poetry reading, Elena Sirett’s Maenad, is a bleak, brutal, and brilliant third-person meditation on a bipolar person’s relationships with men, sex, addiction, and themself.

The show’s unnamed protagonist, based ostensibly on Sirett, describes themself as being occupied by two contesting personas. The “Empty One” is lonely, purposeless, and unrooted. Devoid of the ability to find emotional connections with others they imagine “I’ll be someone if you touch me or love me.”

Their alter-ego, or dual personality, the “Maenad” inhabits a life of literal Bacchanalian excess: pills, cocaine, copious amounts of alcohol, multiple sexual partners. Their existence is “a series of minimum wage jobs lined up like so many faked orgasms”. They are not so much a non-binary queer woman as “a gap with attractive meat around it.”

Sirett’s, whose character looks like Cabaret’s Sally Bowles on acid (close shaven head, leopard skin blouse, gossamer filaments of blue make-up flaring out from their eyes) describes the experience of living with these two fiercely competitive individuals inside their head. It is like being in a library where “the shelves are sagging under the weight of the sense you can’t make of yourself”. There is “a pane of glass between me and the person I should be”.

The character unpacks props from a suitcase to represent their life experiences: a purple wig, a copy of Euripides’ The Bacchae, penis-shaped glowsticks, a psychiatry textbook, photos of actors from slasher films. It is a striking personal pantheon of the things and people that influence the myths they create to explain who they are.

Sirett’s imagery is often cruel and violent. They describe self-harm and the experience of living with pica, an eating disorder that, in their case, means eating paper and Pritt sticks. This is not for kids. But there is metatheatrical humour here too: the performer periodically steps out of character to explore arcane details of Greek mythology (“what the fuck is a Maenad anyway” they ask and answer).

Sirett’s beautifully crafted poetry is sometimes slow and reflective. At other times the words spew out like an erupting volcano, with the character maniacally tripping over their words. Thoughts begin logically, then stumble off into meaningless nonsense. They describe their songs as folk-punk, although there is a hint of both rock and country-style guitar in them too. The singing style is breathless, urgent, and full of fury.

“This one is different; they are not a woman in the same way as other woman” Sirett’s character says about themself. The same could be said about this show, different, but 60 minutes of near-perfect fringe theatre.

Writer: Elena Sirett

Director: Katie Overstall

This review first appeared in The Reviews Hub.