Ruby Wax, Losing It – review

Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Ruby Wax in LOSING IT
Ruby Wax in Losing It at the Menier Chocolate factory: ‘splendidly rude’. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

It's now such a commonplace for anyone off the telly to do a stint in the Priory, rehab and psychiatric clinic to the stars, that we rarely stop to think about the story that led them there. Former inmate Ruby Wax first performed this show, a bittersweet history of her own breakdown peppered with insights from her recent studies in neuroscience, to an audience of fellow Priory patients, and has since toured it around mental health facilities before bringing this version, directed by Thea Sharrock, to London's Chocolate Factory. If that sounds dauntingly like group therapy, don't be put off. Wax is as splendidly rude, brash, acerbic and outré as you'd expect, but she is also, at times, surprisingly tender, self-deprecating and serious, her self-confessed ego both fed and tempered by the presence of singer-songwriter Judith Owen, who makes an admirable straight woman and contributes a deliciously melancholic soundtrack. Mental illness, Wax asserts, grows from the confusion of having to live life without an instruction manual. Her solution is honesty, humour, self-acceptance - and medication.