London Fringe Festival: ‘Recovery Show’ talks about mental illness, road to recovery

London Fringe Festival is in full swing and before the festivities end on Saturday there’s one show you’ll want to grab tickets for.

According to the official website for the festival, Recovery Show brings together “seemingly disparate themes into a powerful story of personal and political recovery.”

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“It’s a solo performance in which I portray three different characters, but they’re really the same character in many ways,” said Clara Madrenas, playwright and actor in Recovery Show.

“This character is trying to fumble their way through the process of what it means to recover from trauma, from catastrophic illness, from psychosis and from genocide,” she said.

The play is based on a trip Madrenas took to Rwanda in 2013. Her partner was in the intensive care unit in a near-death situation, but Madrenas had an obligation to go to the African country to study how media influences genocide for her masters in media studies.

At the same time she was having psychotic symptoms.

“It all kind of came to a head in Rwanda.”

“[We were there] about 20 years after the genocide happened. We were interviewing survivors and going to memorial sites which are already very intense experiences,” said Madrenas

“On top of everything else there were these things going on in my life that were a little hard to take,” she said

In the play, Madrenas tells the story of how she handled those issues — everything from acute psychosis to catastrophic illness to genocide — and the road to recovery.

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Recovery Show is 55 minutes long and runs daily at 7:30 p.m. at Hacker Studios, located at 179 Dundas St.

Tickets are $15 and can be purchased online or at the door. There are only 45 seats available each night, so Madrenas says to get your tickets early.

London Fringe runs until June 9 and features over 200 international and local acts.