This harrowing one-man play begins with projected news footage showing the victimisation of young black men by the mental healthcare system, then zeroes in on one example – aspiring boxer turned mental health patient Jake ‘Mental’ Hughes. Playwright Rodreguez King-Dorset has Jake going from straightforward addresses to the audience to manic lapses, but most importantly acting as a grim spectre of how the mental healthcare system in this country fails black and ethnic minority patients to a fatal degree.

Whilst Jake’s fantasies of being the next Muhammad Ali are vividly reconstructed, what is contained within them is a blunt account of how violence and excessive medicating from doctors and nurses have reduced him both physically and mentally to a shambling shadow of his former self.

The most powerful moments of King-Dorset’s script are contained in Jake’s raging at an inquest against the so-called medical professionals who treat black and POC lives as expendable as he attacks their excuses and strains to tell the real truth that they want unheard. Whilst there are a few isolated lighter moments, such as an escape attempt led by Jake and other inmates, the overall focus is necessarily grim, with the fate of a female Asian patient friend of Jake taking greater focus.

King-Dorset matches his script’s energy and fury in his performance as Jake. His physical range, going from hobbling across the stage to euphorically demonstrating his boxing skills, is only matched by his emotional breadth, with calm lucidity giving way to unrestrained anger as he unleashes Jake’s anger at the system that oppresses him every step of the way. However, King-Dorset is at his best is portraying Jake’s vulnerability as he pleads to his mother, revealing that there are more sides to the character than the aggression that would lead racists to dismiss him as a ‘scary black man’.

‘I Am The Greatest!‘is an excoriating attack on the ways in which the institutionalised  mental healthcare in this country fails and in many cases kills BAME patients. King-Dorset is an incredible talent both as a writer and as a performer who doesn’t hold back on conveying the disturbing reality of this issue to audiences, whether they like it or not.

‘I Am The Greatest‘ has finished its Fringe run