A remarkable production takes us into the world of mental illness The Wonderful World of Dissocia Royal Court Theatre, London SW1

Dissocia may be described as a Wonderful World, but from the start of Anthony Neilson's highly theatrical analysis of mental illness, it is clear there is trouble ahead. Lisa (Christine Entwisle), a young woman in a rather old-fashioned frock, is tuning the top E-string on a guitar. On and on she goes, past the desired note, then continues on, up further and further, until the string snaps with a crack like a gunshot. At this point, a mysterious, quasi-Freudian watchmender turns up, and explains that in order for Lisa to feel better she must travel to Dissocia in order to retrieve a "lost hour", mislaid after a recent trip to New York. To get there, she must use a mysterious elevator that suddenly appears in her flat.

Like Wonderland, or Oz, Dissocia is a dream-world which has elements of reality in it that Neilson has dramatically tweaked to provide a fabulously surreal and fast-changing landscape. Following a set of crazy travel instructions, Lisa meets a range of loopy characters: a pair of "insecurity" guards, a scapegoat complete with horns and rope, and a cheery woman from the council (who is eventually raped by the scapegoat). The set is a giant, wallpapered void. This is Lisa's interior world, a world in which comedy and fear trade places without notice, where people are essentially incomprehensible, where everyone is frightened of the awesome Black Dog King, and where the best place to be is cuddling a soft polar bear. While singing about death.

If this all sounds a bit grim, it's not. There are loads of jokes, rose-petal confetti and a (nearly) flying car. Neilson, who also directs, has injected such a sense of daring into the first half, that we find ourselves rather enjoying Lisa's multicoloured world of dissociation.

There were certainly a lot of laughs from the audience, which, being a knowing bunch, got the references to Freud, Lewis Carroll, Monty Python and the Black Dog of depression straight off. Whether we were experiencing anything like what goes on inside the mind of someone suffering from mental illness is impossible to judge, and is perhaps not the point. Certainly in the first half, what The Wonderful World of Dissocia presents is an energetic, chaotic and witty assemblage of pretty much everything artists have thought about consciousness since Mr Freud first opened his consulting rooms and Alice fell down the rabbit hole.

The second half is arrestingly different, and in many ways far more convincing. Miriam Buether's painstakingly accurate design depicting a private hospital room is distanced from us by glass panels; we are very much outsiders now. Lisa is routinely woken up, dosed, patted, and put back in bed again. No more trips to the wacky world of Dissocia for us. This is the monochrome routine of the real world. Neilson has said he hopes the audience will "understand on a visceral level why Lisa is drawn to her condition", not just because Dissocia is so attractive, but because the alternative condition is so hideous. Certainly the grim, neon-lit atmosphere of the hospital is so lonely that one almost longs for the busily peopled chaos of Dissocia to return.

But this is an intelligent play, and so Neilson sensibly stops at letting the nutter run off with all the glory. In a passage that feels like an epilogue, he nails not just the pathetic helplessness, but also what comes across as the infuriating haplessness of the mentally ill. Jack James, playing Lisa's boyfriend, Vince, and Amanda Hadingue as her elder sister Dot have both clearly arrived at the end of their tether. They are as tense as Lisa's guitar string, but they haven't snapped. Yet. Their exquisitely nuanced performances reveal, in just a few lines of script, their sheer effort, frustration and stoicism.

For all Lisa's multicoloured frolics, it was the people without a passport to Dissocia who were, for me, the heroes of this extraordinary play. They also serve, who sit and wait by the hospital bed.

For more information, log on to: http://www.royalcourttheatre.com

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