This isn’t what she usually does, Ruby Wax confides in the preface to her show; this is a play. And so an expectation is set that I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was does not, alas, meet. This autobiographical show is a companion to Wax’s recent memoir, recounting her worldwide adventures in pursuit of enlightenment, which lead our narrator – unexpectedly – to a mental health clinic. The ingredients are here for a telling narrative, in which Wax’s outward searching gives way to an inward quest. But those ingredients aren’t assembled effectively, in a show that too often feels like one disconnected globe-trotting anecdote after another.
Those anecdotes – told by Wax in pink pyjamas, with an office chair, table and laptop for a set – can be entertaining in themselves. Whether struggling with the strictures of a meditative 30-day retreat in Marin County or taking up residence in a Yorkshire monastery – but not so much, understandably, when rescuing Afghan refugees – wicked, self-mocking Ruby knows how to raise a smile. But even then, the quality of the jokes is distinctly variable: see “I shit myself” as the punchline to two separate tales of whale-watching in the Caribbean.
The problem is that Wax has set the compelling opening scenes of her play (directed by Alison Summers) in the clinic where she’s receiving treatment for severe depression. The globetrotting stories are told in flashback, which invites us to parse them for clues to her mental condition – clues that are seldom forthcoming. That makes all the comic detail Wax stuffs in (character sketches of macho whalers; random trips to the doctor; relieving herself by the side of the road en route to a book reading) feel extraneous.
There’s no great revelation about our host’s mental ill-health, but more detail about its origins in her parents’ flight from the Nazis, and her harsh upbringing in the US. Wax concludes with a statement of her own rootlessness (“wherever I’m standing is my home”), which makes some retrospective sense of the meandering paths the show has trod. At the time, though, it does feel like a lot of meandering.