Review: Polar Bears

Polar Bears is a debut play by Mark Haddon, author of the bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It’s an ensemble piece about the family dynamics around Kay, a woman with bipolar disorder.

Can a writer without bipolar disorder legitimately write about it without being accused of tourism? In this case the tourist’s snapshot is a family portrait. Most narratives about manic depression are biographical and they aren’t about ordinary people but focus on the chaotic creative lives of legends such as Spike Milligan, Vincent Van Gogh or Virginia Woolf. These stories foreground the manic maverick: the significant others servicing the great genius pop up in bit parts but as Andy Rickell says elsewhere in this issue, human life is about interdependency.

In Polar Bears we get to see how very different characters interact with Kay. And she might not even be a creative genius! Well at times she reckons she is, but contradictory scenes leave room for doubt.

In fact everything that happens in Polar Bears leaves room for doubt. Has Kay been killed by her husband’s kindness, her putrefying body stashed in the cellar, or is she in Oslo promoting her award-winning illustrated children’s book?

These contradictory scenes make unreliable narrators of all the cast. Someone is deluded but is it Kay, or her loving but resentful husband, or her cynical brother, or her mother who needs her as a project to work on? This seems like a clever way of putting the audience in the shoes of a person doubting their own perception of reality.

Other contrivances are less smooth. It might be a handy rhetorical device for Kay’s husband John to be an academic philosopher but at times it seems like an excuse to shoehorn in a load of research on Nietzsche.

Having bipolar disorder “in the family” means that it’s not just the mental health of the people carrying the gene that are affected. Polar Bears touches on the taboo of “carers” wishing death to the troublesome disabled loved one but might go too far in almost justifying domestic violence.

Initially I was dubious about the old pun in the title but with extremes of give and take, loving a person with bipolar disorder can be tricky, making the identification with an animal that kills by hugging seem fitting.

Perhaps the observant visitor can pick up on things we natives miss and it’s sometimes interesting to see how others see us and our differently mental but undiagnosed families.

Kelly Mullan

• Donmar Warehouse until 22 May