I’m always a little nervous when I know that mental illness is going to be depicted on stage. Will the performance be true to the behaviours of someone with that illness, without being overcooked, or dehumanising, or insensitively one-sided to the character as a complex whole? Society both impulsively jerks and deliberately angles its face away from the ‘mad’; anyone who disturbs the phlegmatic status quo of sanity. When we are made to look (and pay to look) at its representation on a stage, as an attendant collective, so much seems to be at stake. I’m sure anyone with a history of mental illness in their family feels much the same.

Tom Conroy and Nadine Garner in Tell Me I’m Here, Belvoir, 2022. Photo © Brett Boardman

Such was my natural, background anxiety walking into Belvoir St Theatre for Tell Me I’m Here, Veronica Nadine Gleeson’s fearless adaptation of Anne Deveson’s memoir of the same name. Published 30 years ago, the book is a heartrending family account centring on the Australian broadcaster’s son Jonathan, who goes from a carefree child to a tormented young man, diagnosed in...