The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
Margot Mansfield’s life is a circus, in every possible way. At age 19, she started experiencing B.L.I.P.S. (brief limited intermittent psychotic symptoms) like paranoia, acute weeks-long insomnia, delusions of grandeur, and the notion of being able to save the world via a circus show.
Years later, with her mental health (mostly) under control, the Edinburgh Fringe show B.L.I.P.S. is Mansfield’s attempt to do that last bit for real. I’m not sure that this one will save the world, necessarily, but it is an effective and novel expression of what it feels like to be suffering from psychosis, or the symptoms that signal its approach.
In the multi-disciplinary performance, Mansfield (with director Jess Love) explains what B.L.I.P.S. are and shows us what they look like. The show’s real artistry is being able to show us what they feel like, too.
It seems that a major factor of them is a bad case of insomnia—and not your general-grade, I-can’t-get-this-song-out-of-my-head insomnia. We’re talking cases that go on for weeks, with violent tossing and turning and some major zoomies (Mansfield shows this part with an entertaining, if chaotic and ultimately unsettling, dance number).
And then there’s the blue cars that Mansfield says are following her. Sometimes it’s the same car over and over, and other times it’s any blue car, and Mansfield is frantically trying to get the license numbers down so she can go to the police. And that’s before she decides she’s Jesus (an off-key parody of Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag”) or the notion that if she pays $50 for a 50 cent pencil case, her money will multiply somehow (probably don’t try to make that make sense).
All these stories are interwoven with real home videos from Mansfield’s childhood. Can we see in young Mansfield the problems she has ahead? Or is her seemingly benign, even idyllic early life why her parents initially think the solution to all these problems is “just getting more sleep,” as if it were even that easy.
The show goes back and forth between Mansfield talking and singing to us live in the room and various recorded audio sources, including interviews with her family capturing their perspective on some of these stories. And that’s a lot of where the circus elements of B.L.I.P.S. come in. Mansfield is a skilled gymnast, able to turn handstands on tiny towers of bricks into a commentary about trying to hold things together as the world around her feels increasingly volatile. The aforementioned insomnia zoomies? Those come to involve lots of contortion and flips.
Knowing the show involved circus elements, I was expecting more flash and opulence. But that’s not what B.L.I.P.S. is after. It’s a novel use of the art form, frankly, to show the precarious, unpredictable, and sometimes unnerving inner world of someone going through a mental health episode. And Mansfield is truly talented. One wishes the show were in a larger venue so we could see what she can really do. And the production isn’t wholly without flash. There’s a finale number with very sparkly rings that was pretty impressive.
Mansfield and Love have also ensured that the show is informative, too. A delightful fake gameshow segment titled “Fucked or Funny” lets us know that three out of 100 people will experience a psychotic episode within their lifetime. That’s a statistic I certainly didn’t know, and feels like one of which we should all be aware. And also, sleep deprivation causes more car accidents than driving while under the influence. I’ll let you decide which of the categories those factoids fell into.
If B.L.I.P.S. is a little rough around the edges, maybe that’s the point. Mental illness—specifically psychosis—isn’t pretty, and doesn’t fit neatly into any box. It’s also not something people who suffer from it tend to talk about very much, making this offering a noble one. Mansfield is not afraid to open up and be painfully vulnerable to an audience sometimes mere inches from her face.
As she says in the show, she’s tired of being told she’s brave, and asked if she’s OK. Though she does share that she now has medication to help when she can’t sleep, and is getting better at clocking the warning signs of an oncoming episode, B.L.I.P.S. is not a feel-good story of overcoming adversity. It’s Mansfield telling you what it feels like, what it looks like, recording the all-too-often taboo in a unique and emotionally authentic way.
One hopes Mansfield gets some measure of catharsis out of it, but I’m all for expression for expression’s sake, too. It’s an indelible experience that feels very specific to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and I count that as high praise. Where else are you going to see a solo circus show about psychosis?
B.L.I.P.S. is running at Summerhall’s Old Lab through August 26. Tickets are available here. See photos from B.L.I.P.S. below.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
Margot Mansfield in B.L.I.P.S.
