Is Clair crazy or is she a bright twenty year old with no outlet for her quick intelligence? Bright opens with Clair in a psychiatric ward, where she is about to be sectioned, describing to Pam her Blakean experience of walking through a thunder storm. Anxious for her safety outside the institution, Pam, the senior registrar, commits Clair to a vortex of events that leave her emotionally and physically vulnerable and anything but safe. Railing at the injustice of being kept against her will until she can prove her sanity, Clair is left to the care of Suki, the young, well-meaning houseman. 
      Enter Dave, the dolt of a boyfriend, who is utterly out of his depth in trying to do anything to help Clair and who eventually lets her down by being persuaded to bribe her with CDs to take her medication. Andrew, as the long-term psychiatric patient, brings some light humour with his wry observations on the system. But who are the crazies on the psychiatric ward, the consultant who kicks the door of his BMW in a rage and lectures his patients on impulse control; or Pam, the cynical and ultimately morally bankrupt NHS employee who is so exhausted by the futility of her job, forever answering phones and bleepers or attending to "more wrists" from her patients, that she lashes out at the irritatingly calm Suki? There is a touch of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest here and it makes for some good drama. 
       Lyndsey Marshall as Clair crackles and fizzes with energy throughout the play. She brings a nervous energy to the wit of the script and pathos to the role, so that from early on you are really willing her to get the hell out of the place as quickly as possible. Bright deals with dark subjects, the corruptness of institutions, powerlessness, betrayal, rape and madness. But is Clair crazy? I don't think so.
Louise Page