God, the Devil and Me is a brave new comedy exploring and average teenage life… if you’re best friends with God and the Devil that is. Gabe Price will have to navigate adolescence with two omnipotent beings in tow.
Revelations will be made, loyalties will be tested, and the greatest reveal may not be world shaking, but more about Gabe himself…
Written and directed by Fionnuala Donnelly, God, the Devil and Me focuses on the character of teenager Gabe (Noah Edmondson), who shuts himself in his room with his best friends.
These just happen to be God (Neo Jeffs) and the Devil (Campbell Maddox), offering him constant niggling voices in his head. They are tolerant frenemies, unflinching sides of the same coin.
At first, this trio plays like a bizarre game show but moves into a more serious exploration of psychosis, something Donnelly has personal experience with. It’s an original way of tackling the topic.
The little voices that sit on our shoulders and tell us we are ok, or not, evolve through Gabe’s mental illness into a quirky comic play with barbed teeth.
His girlfriend, Sam (Charlotte Davies) can’t understand him anymore. His mum (Donnelly) is frustrated not just because he’s a teenage boy, and that’s bad enough, but because she’s scared she can’t reach him.
When you don’t believe in anything, it can be daunting to have the omnipresent one and the prince of darkness watching your every move. What if they don’t have your best interests at heart?
With a cast of six (Evelyn Lloyd comes in later in the story), this is a tight and thoughtful fringe piece, which uses games, music and education to explore what psychosis might mean to an audience and what it means to this particular character.
It isn’t just about the hallucinations he has, or the talking about things he believes to be real, but the tone and pace of voice, which convinces.
Many shows that have a mental health theme come against the block of being relentlessly downbeat. It’s easy to fall into that trap and pull an audience into the dark with you.
God, the Devil, and Me shies away from that, instead giving us permission to laugh at God, who has his hang-ups despite a natty white suit and an ability to be everyone at one, and at the Devil, who is tricked into giving his real name in a match of ‘Truth or Dare’.
It ends with a loose scene of resolution but I wondered if it could have dug deeper into the internal and external issues around Gabe’s therapy.
I understand the show is undergoing further analysis and exploration, so keep looking out for its reappearance.
God, the Devil and Me was part of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
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