Review: The Misfortunes of a Spy and Her Mystic, Greenside @ George Street – Olive Studio

We open with Eve (Akaina Ghosh) and her boss (Deirdre Lovejoy) reviewing the file for a new case, someone whose life Eve is meant to infiltrate as a friend, to monitor and report back on. “Just think of it like any other client,” says the boss, but Eve has her doubts: the client relationship is supposed to be based on trust, and in this case, the target won’t even know that she is a client. So, we know Eve is not typically a spy, and throughout the show we hear repeatedly that she’s “not a clinician” – then what is she? 

Eve first meets Meda (Joy Donze) in a faux-chance meeting at a bus stop, where Meda dreamily discloses that she’s bleeding under the lunar eclipse – the blood moon – a good opportunity to shed unwanted parts of the self. She says, and demonstrates through visceral noises that draw the biggest laugh of the night, that she likes to take an “active” role during her period, really pushing the blood out. Meda is either a typical new-age woo-woo modern mystic receiving ‘downloads’ from spirit guides and setting up light shields to protect herself from energy vampires, or she’s experiencing manic episodes and psychosis. (Or possibly both.) It’s not exactly Eve’s job to figure out which, but it is her role to give information to the clinicians who can. As she and her client grow increasingly close, Eve finds herself questioning what it means to have the client’s best interests at heart.

Donze, who has also written and directed the show, raises interesting questions about who has agency to decide which spiritual beliefs and worldviews are ‘legitimate’ and which are signs of mental illness, when figurative language crosses the line into risk of harm to self or others, and what appropriate interventions to make. There are also explorations about how power, reputation and cold hard cash can shift the dynamics around when erratic behaviour is ignored and when it’s seen as a potential threat to be controlled – and by whom. I found myself struggling to suspend my disbelief from the get-go, because I couldn’t credit a situation where any legitimate mental health agency would deceive an at-risk client in this way: that seems like a great way to get booted straight out of any licensed professional body, as does Eve and Meda’s increasingly intimate relationship. It’s a weakness that the show presents these moral tensions as personal dilemmas only, while glossing over any external accountability mechanisms. 

I enjoyed that the structure of the piece had a slight film noir vibe about it, dealing as it does with moral ambiguity and a sort of detective mystery: we don’t find out until the end what Eve’s actual job is. This final scene, though strangely positive in emotional register considering all that happened before, could also be interpreted as echoing the systemic corruption that is a hallmark of film noir.

At times the performances feel a bit flat, perhaps because there’s not a lot of room to get around the four chairs they’ve placed on the stage, and the trio are subtly but clearly trying not to thwack into the front row. However, as Meda, Donze is a trouper, dynamically whirling about the stage despite a very real leg injury which she’s handily woven into the script. Ghosh’s quietly resonant warmth, as Eve discovers her growing feelings for Meda, is charming. Lovejoy (the boss) is at her best when questioning Eve’s growing perception bias towards some of Meda’s more eccentric beliefs, or persuasively arguing for her to overlook the clear conflicts of interest she’s asking Eve to engage in. 

Flawed as some of the premise is, this is an intriguing piece of new writing that’s worth watching.

Written and Directed by Joy Donze

The Misfortunes of a Spy and Her Mystic plays at Greenside @ George Street until Saturday 29 August as part of EdFringe.