Fiona Moon, writer and performer, on A Brief History of Neurodivergence (Theatre interview)

As the Scottish Mental Health Art Festival (SMHAF) winds down for 2026, one highlight was at the Old Gym Theatre in Govan where writer, performer and community artist, Fiona Moon, presented A Brief History of Neurodivergence.

Containing her own experiences, her show grew from a successful 2025 Fringe appearance to Scotland’s foremost artistic festival of mental health. We got a chance to catch up with Fiona and find out how the show came together and what, now that the curtain has closed on yet another successful mental health arts festival, is hoped will come next for the show.

Let’s start at The Fringe. How did you end up there in 2025?

I got Keep It Fringe funding – a small funding pot for artists. I sent it off at the last minute and didn’t have the script written. I thought, I won’t get it, so I won’t have to do it! Then I got the funding. 

It was a very small window between finding out you got the money and when the Fringe registration closed so I had to now get a venue, without having a full written show – that was exciting! 

A venue did come back and asked, have you got a script? I don’t know why, but I said, yes, but can I get it to you tomorrow, because I’m away from my desk. I wrote a first draft and they took it. I am apparently really good with a deadline!

But you were still short of a script?

I had a starting line and nothing else. It was a good first line; the form came first and then the content. 

I started looking at historical stuff around disability laws and how disabled people have been treated in the last few hundred years, how we have gone from eugenics to acceptance to everything in between, so it didn’t start off as my own experience. 

I’ve done a lot of training around trauma and mental health and with my own experiences over the last nearly 40 years it was a subject that I knew enough about to feel confident making a start.

And you wanted it to be uplifting, not miserable?

It was really important that the show was funny, uplifting and felt hopeful. I didn’t want to tell a sob story. I’ve worked in theatre my whole life, but never been to the Fringe, done a solo show, any autobiographical work at all – completely new for me! 

You do learn a hell of a lot about me, but it’s curated. I thought if it flops, I never have to do it again! It weirdly went down well.

It became a success, despite the beginning?

I’ve been trying for decades to get something that gets this good a reception, and then the one time I’m not worried about all of that it goes really well! The programmer from Capital Theatres in Edinburgh came to see it and I did a couple of nights with them.

And it tries to show people what it’s like to be neurodivergent?

I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to make a show that’s chaos and you get to experience what it’s like to live with neurodivergence – completely absurdist. 

There are a lot of conditions people don’t realize fall under neurodivergence. I wanted to interrogate that idea of where you can say we’ve moved to acceptance or accommodation but there are other opinions that come with stigma. 

There’s a lot of interaction to balance the heaviness of the material without making it seem glib. My first dipping into my own stuff, that I’d kept secret for a very long time, I didn’t want it to be that exposing. 

Humour and games are a protective mechanism to keep the audience from getting too depressed. [You need] an open mind because it’s probably not the show you imagine it’s going to be.

Like the show itself, you wanted people to experience and explore as wide a neurodivergent narrative as possible?

It was important to me that I didn’t talk about different conditions. I didn’t tell people my exact diagnosis. There’s so much nuance, messiness, overlap and putting these things into boxes and trying to treat them in this medical model just doesn’t take into account the wide variety of stuff. 

It was important to me that I didn’t stand up by the end and go, this is my diagnosis and this is the lens. When we got reviewed by The Scotsman, which was amazing, lovely and positive, they cited me as having ADHD. 

I’ve had labels attached to me, and there’s always going to be some uncertainty in the medical model as to which categories I fall into, so I wanted to highlight the effect that that can have on people, particularly people underserved by medical research and affected by social or racial conditioning.  

We think we’ve gotten to a certain place and that’s great compared to a hundred years ago when Hitler was murdering autistic children and adults, but there’s still a lot more to it.

So why SMHAF?

I’d met the SMHAF team, and it felt natural to say to them after we’d done the Fringe and knew it worked in front of an audience. They felt like the most natural people to take it next.

What now?

I’d like to tour and have a bigger impact. I’m trying to get some funding to tour to rural areas or areas of deprivation, where they’re underserved in arts provision. The setup’s flexible and we shrink and grow according to the space that we have. 

I’m in the middle of making a workshop, an education pack, signposting documents, so that it can go out as a package – come and see the show and get a free workshop for schools and youth groups! That’s the dream.

A Brief History of Neurodivergence was at The Old Gym Theatre, Glasgow on 7th November 2026.

For future plans and to see if the dream is achieved check in here.