Chemistry review

Chemistry is a play about the chemistry between two young people who fall in love. But more importantly, it is about the chemistry between two young people who fall in love who have a chemical imbalance in their brains. Jacob Marx Rice’s Chemistry was the first in his trilogy of what the playwright refers to as his “Suicide Comedies” - preceding Coping and Cracks - that looked at mental illness through a raw yet comedic lens. 

On the surface, Steph and Jamie (Monique Fisher and Thomas Filer) could not be more different. She works in a pub with a signature look of an oversized Janis Joplin t-shirt, black stockings and Doc Martens. He works for the government, and wears fitted suits and ties, with pens in his jacket pocket and hair kept perfectly in place. However, they are linked by their mental illnesses and a chance encounter at a psychiatrist's office has the two entering into a passionate relationship. While Steph has been living with chronic depression for most of her life and is quite the expert on various medications and treatments, Jamie has only recently been diagnosed with unipolar mania after an incident in which he did not sleep for days, ended up with him tearing off sections of his skin.