The Garden of Unearthly Delights – The Box, Sun 23 Mar

Based on her best selling book of the same name, Ruby’s play takes us on the journey of her own struggle with mental health, using minimal props and prompts and maximum pathos!
What would you do if you were living a seemingly full and successful life only to find yourself feeling shallow and always seeking attention? Well Ruby Wax decided to undertake an odyssey of mind expanding adventures including a 30 day silent retreat, swimming with humpback whales and entering a Christian monastery. At the other side of these life altering epic adventures Ruby found herself sinking into a deep and dark depression. But then some people will do anything just to get attention won’t they? As if to prove her own point she asked the audience for a standing ovation before the show had even begun!
The show skilfully weaves in and out of time and place, structured around therapy sessions involving Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Brave and funny indeed!
Tracing her trauma back to supercritical parents, seemingly incapable of loving their child, this is Ruby Wax at her most  raw, brutal even, but most of all, honest and more often than not she cuts through to the heart of things really quickly. This show questions the very core of who we are. How did we become who we are and maybe: are we who we think we are anyway?
Ruby Wax has an uncanny ability to get laughs around any subject and whilst most would know her from Girls On Top or her involvement with the Comic Strip and Absolutely Fabulous or any one of her own tv shows, i suspect she now has a whole new audience as an author, lecturer and advocate for mental health and mindfulness.
Ultimately, we all see ourselves as being at the centre of the universe. All things revolve around us. How could it be otherwise? And that’s as pathetic as it is true. But maybe that’s only a problem if we cant have a good old belly laugh at the absurdity of it all.