There is the famous quote from American writer Harper Lee’s classic novel TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD said by the lawyer Atticus Finch to his daughter Scout, explaining in order to understand another human being, ‘you’ve got to get to get inside a person’s skin and walk around a while.’
The production BIPOLAR EXPRESS takes audiences inside the skin, the world, of a young woman Antonia who suffers from manic depression and has a major manic episode whilst on a long train ride she takes from the city to visit her ex girlfriend Michelle in Hornsby.
The experience is discombobulating; her psyche goes rogue, racing through time, memory, blurring boundaries between conscious and unconscious thoughts. She shares the train ride with a group of passengers, both real and imagined, who interact with her, at times with caring and tenderness, at other times dismissively. The train journey is a physical journey and more relevantly a metaphorical journey.
The performance is interdisciplinary; a blend of text, dance and movement. The physically based work was by far the most powerful in conveying Antonia’s distress, her highs and lows.
Isabella Milkovitsch , with her creative team, choreographer Avalon Ormiston, composer and sound designer Maddy Briggs, lighting designer Jasmin Borsovsky and tech operator Eliza Dodd, evocatively created the stage world.
In to this stage world entered seven performers to weave their magic. Bianca Young who played the central role of Antonia also wrote the piece. The other performers were Phaedra Brown, Avalon Omiston, Grace White, Tom Evans, Isabella Ciappara and Naomi Belet.
A Shakespearean note to end on. In Act 5 Scene 3 of Macbeth, Macbeth despairingly asks a doctor, ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased’, asking if a doctor can help with psychic distress. Centuries later, yes, there are a lot of medications, for all sorts of conditions. The thing is, they don’t all work, and they don’t always work. And when they don’t work, we have to keep on, and hope, like in BIPOLAR EXPRESS, there are people around us, to support us.
BIPOLAR EXPRESS was a powerful piece of theatre. A Sydney Fringe Festival event presented by Flight Path Theatre with producer Phaedra Brown, BIPOLAR EXPRESS played for a brief season at the Flight Path Theatre between the 25th September and the 27th September 2025.
