There can be few stranger sights on the London stage this month than that of James Wilby, former poster-boy for those exquisite 1980s Merchant-Ivory Brit-flicks, simulating a sex act.

The sandy-haired, still trim Wilby plays Stephen, a middle-aged cognitive behavioural therapist, who at one crucial point gets over-excited at the thought of his young patient, Anna – and writhes away in elaborate ecstasy. Although Wilby has his back to the audience, it’s one of those toe-curling scenes where you don’t know where to look or what to think.

If it wasn’t for the flagrant seriousness of the project, I’d be inclined to regard this either as an ill-advised bid by the actor for belated credibility or an act of gratuitous provocation on the part of Mick Gordon, who directs. Yet the unsightly scenario, however overstated, does slot into the overall argument of the piece, which is that human beings are far more the puppets of their emotions than they would like to believe.

In his consultations, Stephen exudes a calm confidence in the ability of people to overcome negative patterns of behaviour using the tools of rationality: “Take charge of the head and the heart will follow”, runs his advice to Caroline Catz’s Anna, a puppet-maker mysteriously prone to outbursts of rudeness and rage. Yet even as he pieces together the source of her troubles, his own equilibrium begins to unravel.

With Broks, a neuro-psychologist, on board as creative partner, the danger was that On Emotion would become too academic in tone. If anything, though, the evening errs too much on the side of the straightforwardly – even schematically – comprehensible.

It seems rather too convenient, for example, that Stephen’s grown-up son, Mark (Mark Down), is autistic. His regressive identification with Star Trek, especially the feeling-free Doctor Spock, signals his dramatic function: he’s there to remind us that, if the dominant role emotions play in our lives is potentially frightening, an incapacity to express emotion would be extremely troublesome.

Still, the show does exactly what it promises to do – it makes “essay” on a fascinating, and to some degree fledgling, branch of understanding. With a beautiful soundscape, from Igor Gostuski, a luminous star-field backdrop and sporadically spellbinding puppetry by the actors from the Blind Summit company, it succeeds in moving you to thought, sometimes to intense feeling, and in its spirit of open-ended inquiry, to further reading on the subject.

Source: The Telegraph / Dominic Cavendish – 18 November 2008