Ruby Wax: Sane New World review – mirth and mindfulness in standup’s seminar

I’ve seen a lot in comedy, but I’ve never ended a show as a participant in a (not remotely ironic) mindfulness workshop. Suffice it to say that Ruby Wax’s Sane New World isn’t comedy – or theatre, for that matter – in any normal sense. But what’s normal, anyway? Wax argues in this hybrid confessional-standup-lecture that we’re all afflicted to various degrees by mental health problems, the more so for living in the 21st-century western world – with which our brains are poorly designed to cope. But Wax has a solution she’s here to tell us, and the newly acquired qualifications to back it up.

She invites a round of applause when she tells us about her master’s at Oxford: it’s that kind of show. Studying neuroscience was Wax’s way of combating her own depression. It taught her that thoughts – specifically the self-hating voices in her head – “aren’t facts, they just come and go”, and that “we can change the wiring in our brains by changing how we think”. Wax discusses this “neuroplasticity” with the zeal of a convert but also with generosity of spirit. She seeks to convert us, too, with an interactive exercise in “thinking about thinking” at the end of the first act.

The second act is an audience Q&A, and I found it more engaging than the first – which, situated between seminar and showbiz, isn’t wholly satisfactory as either.

Not a great deal has been done to fashion Wax’s learning into entertainment. The disquisition on brain science is interrupted by gossip (a tangential anecdote about the reality show Celebrity Shark Bait) and errs towards simplification or grandstanding. At one point, Wax implies we were better off as peasants, because back then we didn’t all feel so entitled. Then there are dubious observations, such as: “If you’re not accepted on Facebook, it activates the same part of your brain as physical pain.”

Not all of us, meanwhile, will share Wax’s readiness to dismiss external (social, economic) causes of anxiety and depression, or agree that mindfulness is the best way to deal with them. But she’s undoubtedly doing a lot of good with this show, particularly in the discussion section, when she’s intimate about her own experience and more nuanced about the value of meditation. At its best, her critique of the cult of busyness and her conviction that we can change ourselves for the better feel highly therapeutic.