Sinead O'Brien and the Fringe performers exploring mental health

Irish storyteller Sinead O'Brien.

Go and see Sinead O’Brien at this year’s Fringe and you’ll experience one of the world’s oldest forms of storytelling combined with one of its newest. O’Brien describes herself as ‘a wandering storyteller and theatre-maker’, and is a gifted teller of the ancient myths and legends of Ireland. But she’s also part of a trend that is absolutely of the moment – candid, autobiographical shows that are explicitly about mental health.

In No One is Coming, which debuted at last year’s festival and returns this year for a limited run, O’Brien vividly and candidly describes the disorientation of growing up with a mother who was living with severe mental illness, but alternates these stories from her childhood with Irish myths. “In the end it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense why it moves from mythology to personal story,” she explains, “but for me it makes sense in that it creates the atmosphere of my experience as a small kid, where I didn’t understand what was happening. You would go to school and everything was normal, and you’d come home and something had happened. It’s like in a dream, with a dream logic, when someone is, you know, not well. It was this feeling that suddenly something changed and we find ourselves in a completely different world.”

As a storytelling technique it’s very effective, not least because, in a show that delves into obviously traumatic memories, O’Brien and the audience are periodically allowed an escape into something less personal and painful. It also helps No One is Coming not to fall into what we might now call the Baby Reindeer trap – exposing a vulnerable person to public scrutiny without their consent.

For a year now I’ve been interviewing performers like O’Brien about their experiences of making candid autobiographical shows about mental health – a phenomenon that really took off in the theatre and comedy world around a decade ago and is now so widespread that the Mental Health Foundation has created a new good practice resource, Performing Anxiety, to support artists who want to explore this subject. Through a podcast, 60-page publication and an evolving set of guidelines, Performing Anxiety also documents, through dozens of in depth conversations, how the Edinburgh Fringe in particular became a hothouse for stories about mental health, and how performers gradually learned how to tell these stories without exposing themselves or those they love.

“I think, naturally, when we’ve developed new language for things in a cultural way, it becomes really prevalent, especially with something so hidden, so taboo, so unexplored,” says performance artist Bryony Kimmings, who was part of the first wave of these shows with 2015’s internationally successful Fake It Til You Make It, in which she addressed the subject of her then partner Tim Grayburn’s depression; Kimmings later explored her own mental health in an equally personal follow up, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch. “I think, once you’re allowed to say something, there will always be an explosion of people saying it,” she says, “because people are like, ‘I didn’t know we were allowed to.’ It’s such a revolution inside people’s minds.”

The explosion Kimmings describes was, in part, triggered by some high profile suicides – most obviously comedian Robin Williams, whose death coincided with the first week of the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe, as most of the UK comedy industry was gathered in one place, but also those of British theatre-makers Adrian Howells and Ian Smith who died the same year, Howells in March and Smith in August as the Fringe began. As two industries simultaneously grieved, shows about mental health began to receive considerably more attention from audiences and the media, in turn prompting other performers to contemplate the state of their mental health. It has been a prominent theme at the Edinburgh Fringe every year since then. Since 2017 the Mental Health Foundation has been running a Fringe Award in recognition of outstanding new work about mental health, which returns this year.

Kimmings, back this year as one of the creators of Show Pony at Summerhall, has become something of an authority on making autobiographical work about mental health, and we spoke for over three hours about lessons she learned, and mistakes she made, along the way. “I think if you’re really taking it seriously, you almost have to take your own experience outside of your body and look at it with a really pragmatic and almost forensic eye,” she says. “If you can’t be objective about it, I would say that’s when you know you’re not ready.”

This is echoed by playwright Laura Horton, who is in less personal territory this year with Lynn Faces after addressing her experiences of compulsive hoarding in a very personal 2022 debut, Breathless. "I find it really useful to use some of the more painful things that have happened and write about them,” says Horton. “But I think the crucial thing is that you do it when you’re at a stage when you feel like you’ve dealt with that yourself. I don’t think it’s therapy. I worry when people are working through things and writing about them and they’re very raw.” Or, as Sinead O’Brien puts it, quoting Sahand Sahebdivani of Amsterdam Storytelling Festival: “It’s important that you’re making art from a scar but not an open wound. I was only sharing stories that I had been through in therapy and talked to enough people about, and wasn’t something that was actively causing me distress anymore.”

O’Brien debuts a new show this Fringe. A companion piece to No One is Coming, Hero/Banlaoch explores her relationship with her father, who she regarded as a source of stability and sense as a child trying to cope with an unpredictable mother, but later understood to be an unreliable narrator due to his struggle with alcoholism. “For a long period of time my father had blackouts, he doesn’t necessarily remember everything he did,” she recalls. “So that was a real thing I had to work out, how much of these stories can I believe? How do I reconcile the relationships that I have with each parent?” Like much of the best creative work about mental health, it is a story about trauma, told from a place of healing.

Hero/Banlaoch, Scottish Storytelling Centre, 5.30pm, until 25 August. Sinead O’Brien also performs No One is Coming at the Storytelling Centre on 7 and 18 August at 8.45pm. Performing Anxiety can be found at www.mhfestival.com/performinganxiety