OCD is the great misunderstood illness, with sufferers misdiagnosed and treated as a joke by many who should know better. Charlotte Anne-Tilley’s new play goes some way to redressing the balance by way of Lucy and Claire, two women who are generations apart, but are going through very similar things. Lucy is in the last stages of labour, with the prospect of looking after another human blighted by the fact that she’s falling apart. Twenty-five years on, Claire is about to drop out of art school after being unable to cope with panic attacks. 

Anne-Tilley’s set-up dovetails between Lucy and Claire’s parallel lives with a fluidity that sees Anne-Tilley as Claire and fellow performer Maddy Banks as Lucy double up in Ed White’s production as assorted mothers, grandmothers and lecturers. On one level these are peripheral characters, but in Lucy and Claire’s minds they become obstacles to living free of anxiety. What follows is both moving and enlightening in a piece that highlights its theme with the sort of empathy that recalls an old-school Play For Today. This is no bad thing in a sensitive study of a much-maligned illness in which the two women are revealed to have links that bind them together even more. 

Oh, Calm Down, Summerhall, until 26 August, 3pm.