Counter Culture

Click here to buy tickets

★★★★★ There are musicals that send you out humming the tunes; others leave you thinking about the people you’ve just spent two hours with. Next to Normal belongs firmly in the latter category, and Bare Productions’ Scottish premiere makes that clear from the outset. The music matters, of course, but the real force of the show lies in something more uncomfortable: watching a family who love one another desperately yet are steadily worn down by grief, illness, memory and the things they cannot quite bring themselves to say.

It’s material that could easily slip into melodrama, but this production finds something far more grounded and human. Much of that comes from Briakaih Flore, whose performance as Diana is extraordinary. She brings a raw, unfiltered emotional honesty to the role — funny, difficult, loving, angry, frightened — and painfully aware of what is happening to her. Her voice carries the weight of the character’s inner conflict, and in songs like “You Don’t Know”, the sheer force of her frustration and despair is almost overwhelming. Later, “Didn’t I See This Movie?” becomes a razor‑sharp moment of clarity and panic, delivered with such intensity that the room seemed to hold its breath. Flore doesn’t just sing these songs; she inhabits them.

The consequences of Diana’s illness ripple through the entire family. Dan (Greg McCafferty-Thomson), the husband who has stayed, is trying to hold together something that may already have changed beyond recognition. His devotion carries real sadness: staying is not framed as heroism, and love is never presented as a cure-all. He can care deeply and still misunderstand; he can be loyal and still make mistakes.

Natalie’s position may be the most quietly devastating. She is physically present but emotionally overshadowed by someone who is not. She wants the ordinary things young people want — attention, independence, love — while living in a household whose emotional gravity continually pulls everything back towards Diana and Gabe.

Gabe (Zac McGuire) himself is one of the musical’s most ingenious creations. He is not simply a memory; he is memory made flesh — grief, idealisation and unresolved pain walking around the stage. What  the family remembers, refuses to remember and needs to forget is always in tension.

Henry (Ollie Hall) offers Natalie (Kelsey Mackenzie) a glimpse of life beyond the family’s orbit, though the musical is far too intelligent to suggest that another person can simply arrive and rescue her.

The refusal to offer easy answers is central to the show’s power. There are doctors, treatments, medication and therapy, but Next to Normal rejects the comforting idea that someone will eventually discover the correct solution and everything will return to normal. Even the title disputes that possibility: what exactly is “normal” after something has fundamentally altered a family? Perhaps the best anyone can hope for is something next to it.

The musical also understands that grief can become architectural — a structure a family builds its life around until removing it threatens everything else. When does remembering become destructive? Can forgetting be an act of survival? How much of ourselves is bound up with the version of the past we choose to preserve?

These substantial themes are carried through music rather than delivered as lecture. Kitt’s score moves between rock, pop and more intimate passages, allowing thoughts that might sound artificial in dialogue to break free emotionally. At its best, the music gives characters permission to say what conversation cannot express.

The show also resists dividing its characters neatly into the damaged and the healthy. Everyone here is carrying something; everyone gets things wrong. Diana is not simply her illness; Dan is not simply “the man who stayed”; Natalie is more than the neglected daughter; and Gabe is far more complicated than a ghost from the past. They are people trying, failing, reaching towards one another and retreating when reaching becomes too painful. That complexity is why Next to Normal works.

A lesser musical might insist that love conquers everything. This one knows that love sometimes coexists with anger, exhaustion and failure. It understands that someone can love another person profoundly and still be unable to save them — and that the desire to save someone can itself become part of the problem.

There is hope here, but it is hard-earned rather than brightly packaged. The possibility at the end is not that everything has been repaired; it is that life continues, people change, and perhaps they can begin to live with what cannot be undone.

Bare Productions have chosen an ambitious work for a Scottish premiere. Next to Normal asks a great deal of its performers and more than usual of its audience. You cannot simply sit back and let the songs wash over you; it asks you to consider illness, responsibility, bereavement and the strange ways love can sustain and trap us. It was clear from the audience’s reaction — many visibly moved, perhaps recognising their own losses and grief in the story — that the themes struck close to home. The standing ovation at the end was not polite enthusiasm; it was gratitude for a piece that had genuinely affected people.

The title may suggest something less than normality. By the end, though, you begin to wonder whether “normal” was ever a useful destination in the first place.