A Night with Psychosis
A new play with a twist or two.
Jen is a schizophrene.
Around 3% of people experience psychotic episodes, but what is psychosis? How does it look and feel and sound? Would you even know if you were in it?
You could ask someone who knows, perhaps? Someone like Jen. As an award-winning playwright and schizophrene who has spent the past decade working on a play about her experience, Jen should have the answers.
But who wants to come and see a play someone’s been working on for ten years? Sounds kind of intense, right? Don’t stress. A Night with Psychosis is intense, but it’s also a powerful, funny, multi-layered metatheatrical experience that includes creatively embedded access.
Come and join Birds of Paradise Theatre Company for A Night with Psychosis.
Presented by Birds of Paradise Theatre Company
Written by Jen McGregor
Directed by Robert Softley Gale
Dates
1st and 2nd April 2027
Studio Theatre, 22 Potterrow, Edinburgh EH8 9BL
Tickets on sale to the general public from 17th November 2026 at 11am.
Content warnings
Suicidal ideation, depictions of psychosis, bereavement, parental death.
Age 14+
Show details
Running time: TBC
Creatively embedded access throughout.
Access
A Night with Psychosis uses Creatively Embedded Access, so access is built into the staging, design and performance from the start. We will share full details of the access provisions soon.
Visiting the venue
Capital Theatre provides information about access at The Studio Theatre here – Access at the Studio Theatre
Team
Resources for Support
This production covers themes and content including suicidal ideation, depictions of psychosis, bereavement, parental death. As Jen outlines below, she wished to develop this work in part so that psychosis, in particular, can to be understood and accepted as a part of the human experience. Here we are listing some organisations and resources if you want to learn more or if you need more immediate support.
MIND – https://www.mind.org.uk/
Hearing Voices Network – https://hearingvoicesnetwork.co.uk/
SMAF – https://www.mhfestival.com/
If you ever need support at anytime or more urgently both the Samaritans and Breathing Space exist to provide immediate support.
Samaritans – www.samaritans.org
Breathing Space – www.breathingspace.scot
From Jen
“A Night with Psychosis has had a long journey to the stage.”
I began writing this piece under a different title, Unfinished Demon Play, while being mentored through Playwrights Studio Scotland in 2015. The result was a play about my experience of coping with grief through hallucination, featuring my then-30-something self looking back at what I’d been through at 21.
In 2024 I decided to revisit it. It was coming up on ten years since I had written the first draft. I had entered my 40s and was having an existential crisis because my parents were 50 and 52 when they died, which to my schizophrenic brain means this is probably the final decade of my life. That’s when I had the idea of adding a new perspective to the piece every ten years, turning it into an ongoing documentation of my experience.
I want [psychosis] to be understood and accepted as a part of the human experience. I want it to be easier to access help when we need it. I want those of us who live with it to be able to find each other, which is easier if we’re not treating it like a shameful secret. And I want us to be able to make our own art about it, because I absolutely cannot sit through another piece where psychosis is just a plot point that magically resolves in service of a happy ending, or where we’re the monster of the week.
I believe in the power of theatre to open up conversations. And I believe that there are others out there like me who want to see psychosis stories told by people who have experienced it directly.
Jen McGregor, writer
Photos
Poster by Might Fine Designs
