What’s the worst that could happen when you throw hyper-intelligent people together at the very start of their careers and make them compete for totally arbitrary numbers which will affect the rest of their lives?

If you’re Dillon, a Cambridge student and aspiring filmmaker suffering from depression, you might find yourself attempting raisin therapy to quell the effects. You may frequently lapse into conversation with the personified abyss (whose voice sounds eerily like your roommate’s). You might, in a stroke of genius, pen a script about a clay-mation aubergine wandering through the Saharan desert… if you have to ask, you’ll never get it.

The Corpus Playroom’s production of Fix My Brain, a comedy produced by Lewis Brierly and brilliantly co-written and acted by Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor, is an incisively clever and unabashed glimpse into the psychological challenges of student life. The dynamic duo have achieved, if not the impossible, certainly the highly unexpected.

“An astonishingly honest portrait that will keep you in stitches from beginning to end”

The narrative follows their fictitious personas as Dillon seeks help for his depression in the unlikeliest of places, with the help of his medical student roommate, Ollie. The result is an astonishingly honest portrait that will keep you in stitches from beginning to end.

Mapletoft and Taylor’s fusion of a mental health theme with comedy is daring and ingenious. The dialogue is coruscating with witty repartee, and the chemistry which doubtless led them to co-write the play in the first place shines through at every turn. The two effortlessly create a free and laid-back atmosphere of comic spontaneity remarkable in any theatrical setting. Even the odd time they flub their lines, or wryly remark on their own mistiming, the slip is invariably hilarious.

“The dialogue is coruscating with witty repartee.”

The story astutely portrays the amplification of self-devaluing thinking which characterises depression, but it manages to turn this into the absurdity of comic exaggeration. By translating one type of magnification into another, the play paints a remarkably frank portrait through comedy. Presenting depression humorously doesn’t undermine it. In fact, it highlights the ability of comedy to convey truth even more powerfully than serious modes, by capitalising on our intuitive comprehension of irony and cheekily transgressing barriers of political correctness. Mapletoft and Taylor rate their own work PG (Pretty Grim).

But the play does not labour its psychological message. It showcases the outrageous camaraderie and rivalry between the two friends, as their tight-knit friendship braves a heated round of Settlers of Catan, a rather poetic film adaptation of a zombie apocalypse, and attempts to do embroidery and sudoku at the same time. The use of coloured lighting to differentiate between main narrative, flashbacks, and sketches is effective and gives the play an episodic feeling.

The comedians will see you now: finding the funny in depression

Altogether, an uproariously funny production, which highlights the strength and importance of friendship in a very entertaining way – this play is a must-see