All You Need is LSD is a quirky, intelligent and informative play from the production company Told By An Idiot. Beyond their eponymous self-deprecation (and perhaps precisely because of it), the company strives to create theatre that ‘inhabits the space between laughter & pain which exists in the real world’. All You Need is LSD, then, operates on the top rung of this ambition. 

It is a play on deeper reality and time distortion that distorts time freely and presents all manner of (un)realities. Self-aware and ripe with playful exposition, Leo Butler’s creation contains Leo Butler researching and writing the piece (his authorial voice arrives idiosyncratically from a few characters, from full scenes to meta-theatrical monologues from those ‘seemingly breaking out of character’). Plus, of course, appearances from the seminal figures of Hofmann, Huxley, Timothy Reilly, ‪The Beatles‬, Helen Mirren (naturally), Steve Jobs and, through frequent allusions, Alice in her really rather wonderful Wonderland. Is that land, I wonder, more or less wonderful than one in which LSD is discovered accidentally, multiplied, distributed and ultimately, confusingly shunned? Directors Paul Hunter and Stephen Harper take on Butler’s challenging, tremendously creative script with clarity and class. This may well be against all the odds wrapped up in the topic itself.

Now I’ve done my utmost to completely lose you, I’ll proceed to recall and ruminate on certain elements of the play.

Albert Hofmann discovered that if you combine Ergots (the hallucinogenic component of rye fungus) with alkalines in such a way, you form a small, synthetic material that can be ingested in countless ways to produce a quite remarkable visual and emotional experience. Yes Albert! He first went on this extraordinary escapade by complete accident after conducting an experiment and rubbing his eyes with the substance, five years after its first formulation at his Basel laboratory, 1938. This was, my kindly, warm reader, Lysergic Acid Diethlamide — LSD. Shortly after we learn this, Hofmann (Sophie Mercell, a vibrant actress here performing with a charismatic, punchy German accent) clambers over the smart set design and grips some silver handlebars, a reference to Bicycle Day — Hofmann’s first intended ingestion in 1943. With his lab-coat flickering atop stage hands, furry toys and swirling scenes unfold before Hofmann’s expression, half exuberant half vacant, mouth agape and eyes glazey. These scenes of absurdity are aided by manipulation of lighting and the cloth-heavy set; in frenetic scenes, heads pop out from canvas, a big silver wheel spins, acts as a partway, bodies fall through the proverbial rabbit hole and your eye flicks from one realm to another quicker than my prose. Reminiscent of what, I wonder?

Alas, Hofmann’s discovery is not the start of the play. The start of the play is figuring out where to start the play; there are remnants of Kaufman in the form’s self-awareness and self-depiction. Butler himself is played by the dead-pan, comically boyish Annie Fitzmaurice who interviews Professor David Nutt about the drug’s remarkable history, as well as its trials and tribulations.* Nutt is a neuropsychopharmacologist or some-such-other multisyllabic discipline (just kidding, he is certainly that). In short, Nutt (George Potts — the standout performer, for me) describes how ‘pleasure is defined as a bad thing’, and thus we trace the kooky tapestry of LSD history as he explains its revelations, remedial functions and potential pitfalls to a receptive and intrigued Leo. The ‘reality’ of the information comes into question, mind, as Leo eventually goes through hallucinogenic trials of his own and the script becomes patchier, smarter, simultaneously more complete and more chaotic.

Huxley. The Huxley of the play is an enviable, gruff, crimson robed intellectual that (without wavering) waxes lyrical about the drug and what it could mean for our dull little consciousness. He paces, but he does so slowly, assuredly, and his monologues, like his writings, refuse to shy away from celebration of ‘opening the doors of perception’. However much of a visionary Huxley was, this urge and this sentiment arrived in his lifetime with something of a taint: a reserved elitism, a conservative approach to its widespread use. In other words: only those that are smart and that will harness its wonders adequately should have access to the remarkable chemical formulation. In All You Need, Huxley’s first scene is staged as controlled, thoughtful and convincing. His second sees him catatonic, on his deathbed, flanked by his careful, crooning wife…’and it’s so easy, and you do it so beautifully…’ as his dying wish is granted and she injects the LSD into his fading frame. Butler’s handling of the character displays a great deal of admiration, of a subtle and sensual mind, but one that might not stand up all so well to 21st century scrutiny. 

Enter stage left Timothy Leary…my! The cast’s youngest, most enigmatic member — Jack Hunter — shouts a response to exposition on the 60’s counterculture movement early in the play, rising from his seat a couple away from me with ‘but that’s all hippie bullshit’, jolting the Tobacco Factory theatre to life. Thereafter, Hunter appears as a multitude of characters, and none are more outrageous, confrontational or caricatured than Leary. Such nuance was to be expected in a figure so divisive (Nixon once termed him ‘the most dangerous man in America’). A psychologist and impassioned proponent of LSD’s therapeutic use, Leary was staged as temperamental and insightful in equal measure, very boldly American and, at times, unreasonably angry. He was the man who popularised phrases such as ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ — the very phrase which forms the core message of a song later in the play. (Yes, there are musical turns. Butler’s no slave to genre). This particular jingle celebrated LSD’s expansive release — how, at times, its existence and appeal re: inner peace was driving a fiery, free faction of society, a balladic set of prophesying citizens. Leary was a revolutionary on this front. It is because of people like him that Butler’s play can have a functional narrative; one of convictions and conflicted confusion.

Steve Jobs emerged from the aforementioned zeitgeist like a ripe fruit, a sharp, focal light. Hunter, again donning a Stateside twang, took the role of Jobs on briefly, covering the man’s claim that LSD was up there with the most important things he’d ever done. The clarity he withdrew from that withdrawal allowed him to go on and, for all intents and purposes, change the world. No mean feat. Helen Mirren is a comic inclusion, as is the absurd motif of Lurpak butter. ‪The Beatles‬ arrive sporadically with fleeting comments on the wondrous drug. There’s even time for a cabbage to become a brain in the time it takes for one to outline LSD’s effect on the connections up there, how it encourages open, disparate thinking and wild connections.

These historical phrases and brief turns become further marinated in surrealism as Butler’s character tries to shape the play, the sprawling script, and make sense of the oppositional ‘War on Drugs’. And therein lies the opposition at the crux of the play. There you have conflict folks. There you have the age-old ally to narrative effectiveness. 

LSD’s renown is for exposing its user to something more tangibly, conceivably real — be it an emotion, an understanding, or a connection. Staged, this ‘mind-expanding’, hallucinogenic nature comes into its own. The drug opens the brain to the kinds of oddity that this play is ripe with. Butler and his Directors handle this obvious opportunity with real flair. I remember wondering for large stretches of the play how it is that some users ‘tune in’ and others are more prone to ‘drop out’. The age old question surrounding drugs. No one truly believes that they are solely destructive, do they? What All You Need does so well is incorporate numerous perspectives and wrap it in a meta-visionary narrative (Butler’s own). It’s a fine display of writing, stagecraft and creative non-fiction.
 

As Butler’s writing becomes more frenzied, more self-aware, there is a skit Doctor Who passage wherein alternative histories are visited and discussed. There was also a skit that involved Nutt making three separate monologues, fractured by the screeching and twisting of time, each responded to in the same way by Butler…’well it’s a good speech, if I can find a way of working it into the play’. Frankly, what the playwright does manage to include is impressive, playful, moving and rich with humour.

* The real Professor David Nutt was present at the performance, and afterwards provided some insight and Q&A responses alongside another of his research associates. The result of their research and of their scientific beliefs resulted in a somewhat dogmatic discussion, but not one I disagree with: repetitive minds vs. open minds (LSD is a remedy to anxiety and depression — rife topics in there here-and-now — as it switches off the organising hub of the brain, the ‘default mode network’). They further covered the micro-traumas of social media, the effective use of LSD in treating alcoholism, the fact that only 10% of politicians (there or thereabouts) are sympathetic to psychedelic studies, and the importance of psychotherapy alongside the drugs — to ‘guide you through the reboot’, so to say.