Background Research into 'The Wonderful World of Dissocia'

The Wonderful world of Dissocia is a piece of contemporary theatre, that was written by Antony Neilson in 2004. The play tells the story of a girls life as she suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, which leads to her having her own little world inside her head, which becomes out of hand when she doesn't take her medication. As she goes through her made up world searching for a lost hour that she thinks that she has lost, she comes across lots of strange characters, which move her onto positive and negative paths. These people end up being her interpretations of people in her real live, which becomes clear to the audience in act two, as they see her in a hospital ward.

The main themes running through this play are how mental illness effects people, and how it can change not only the suffers lives but the people around them. Neilson shows this effect and theme using the topics of abuse and sexual assault to show her struggle to live a normal life. However even though these topic are very sensitive they do come as a shock and really get us and a audience thinking about how it can effect people.

Even though the play was written in 2004 by Antony Neilson, it was developed in 2002 by performing arts students on how they see mental illness and their views of it. Even though this play was written quite a while ago some of our society's beliefs have changed. For one example this play was written when technology was still not fully developed and understood by everyone. And with the rise with the internet and social media, now becoming part of every day lives, it would be different these day on how mental illness would pan out with all of this in everyday life.

If this script was to be written in this day, I think that Neilson would have made technology have a bigger impact on Lisa's life and her development of her illness. This may have come as help to Lisa if she was more in contact with her life and others around her and they might have known more of her and might have been there to help her. This change in everyday life shows how much just 10 years can make on someone life if something was to happen in the current day rather than then.