I’ve never had an evening in the theatre quite like Ruby Wax’s Losing It. It’s a cross between Ally McBeal, a Whatsonstage.com Outing (every night) and a group therapy session – oh, and stand-up comedy, of course.

As in the American TV show, in which singer-songwriter Vonda Shepherd found her own fame providing the soundtrack to Calista Flockhart’s title character’s life, Wax is accompanied on stage by her friend and fellow medicated depressive Judith Owen on the piano, Owen’s soulful song snippets poignantly underscoring the emotional angst of Wax’s musings on the scourges of modern life – envy, busyness, fame-seeking – and her own downward spiral into mental illness.

As in a Whatsonstage.com Outing, the performance is followed by an illuminating Q&A – in fact, it comprises the entire, post-interval second act. And as in a group therapy session, experiences, advice and goodwill are openly shared.

Finally, as Wax fans might expect, there’s plenty of caustic comedy, about yummy mummies whose noses are so turned up they can look down their own nostrils, whose pelvic muscles are so Pilates-powered they can hoover up carpets, and so on.

It’s these stand-up style observational riffs that, while raising gales of laughter, I found least satisfying. And their dominance in the first half-hour slows the emotional and dramatic momentum of the piece. It’s when Wax reveals, with startling truthfulness, the personal that her experience becomes universal – the irony about her lifelong fear of not belonging is that it makes the outsider in us all identify most strongly with her.

So, not comedy, not cabaret, not strictly theatre, but a new kind of entertainment genre that breaks boundaries and taboos too while challenging the stigma associated with mental illness that now affects one in four Britons. A show about depression that’s far from depressing – on the contrary, it’s empowering.

In addition to their scheduled performances, Wax and Owen have organised sessions with mental health workers every Tuesday afternoon at the theatre, free to the public. As one audience member pointed out during the Q&A on the night I attended, Alcoholics Anonymous started 75 years ago with just two alcoholics and one meeting. These two brave ladies could be at the helm of something much bigger than a limited West End season.

- by Terri Paddock

There can’t be many – are there any? – comedians who decide to do a tour of psychiatric hospitals to try out their latest material before launching it on the general public.

Certainly, Stephen Fry, Paul Merton, Lenny Henry and Jack Dee, to name just a few, have all talked about their battles with depression. 

But Ruby Wax is currently making something of a career out of it and as a twice-times patient in a London celebrity-favoured clinic, she went on the road to Priory hospitals around the country to raise money for the charity Depression Alliance before embarking on the commercial tour that brought her to The Lowry last night.
 
Wax has suffered from clinical depression since she was 10, is a trained psychotherapist and is here trying to pull off the uniquely tricky balancing act of sharing personal insights into mental illness while presenting a show that is also entertaining and amusing.

With some help from singer-pianist and fellow sufferer Judith Owen she succeeds in spades. Wax has a lot to say and the show is by no means entirely about being “not right”. There’s quite bit about the ridiculousness of the cult of celebrity; about how us formerly genteel Brits have caught the American disease of in-yer-face; there’s a nice mobile phone joke and, in the funniest section of the evening, a mock lecture on how wives should behave in relation to the income of their partner.

Throughout, Ruby weaves her autobiography - from unhappy childhood, to teenage class ugly, on to the drug of celebrity and marriage and children.

She theorises that none of us really knows what we are supposed to be doing in this life - there is no definitive manual for being a mother or a father or a teenager - and thus universal confusion reigns.

The subject matter becomes even more honest as the second half progresses and it reaches a conclusion in which Wax candidly admits that the voices are still in her head but they are fading and she is learning to cope with them.

Owen’s music helps to underscore the words and she’s also a character for Wax to bounce off. It’s a mix that isn’t stand-up and not quite cabaret but something in between.

You don’t have to have had experience of clinical depression to appreciate the show – though from the number of people last night who were clearly familiar with the mind-altering pills Wax names at the beginning, plenty had been somewhere in the vicinity.

Ultimately it’s an uplifting and brutally honest couple of hours. And being honest about yourself and life is what Ruby Wax sees as the way forward for everyone.

- Alan Hulme