Towards a Poetics of the Mental Health Play
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This study traces key developments in theatre’s engagement with mental health since the Anja Drautzburg 1970s. It introduces and applies the concept of the ‘mental health play’ as accurate and timely in addressing the way mental distress and mental illness have been brought to the stage. The study argues that the theatre is a central calibrator for refl ecting developments Towards a Poetics of the Mental Health Play and tensions in, as well as attitudes towards, mental health care, and thus opens up a domain that still has stereotypes and myths attached to it. Theatre’s representations of mental distress inform and shape cultural production and vice versa. Mental health plays are central in encouraging and fostering conversations about mental health, and Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie they thus intervene in ongoing debates. Due to its interdisciplinary approach, this study Band 12 contributes to and extends existing research in multiple fi elds, including theatre and science, performance studies, and the medical humanities. 2020 ISBN: 978-3-86395-459-8 Universitätsdrucke Göttingen Universitätsdrucke Göttingen eISSN: 2512-6970 Anja Drautzburg Towards a Poetics of the Mental Health Play Anja Drautzburg Towards a Poetics of the Mental Health Play This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. erschienen als Band 12 in der Reihe „Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie“ in den Universitätsdrucken im Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2020 Anja Drautzburg Towards a Poetics of the Mental Health Play Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie, Band 12 Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2020 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at <http://dnb.dnb.de>. Dissertation, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Contact Anja Drautzburg E-Mail: [email protected] This work is protected by German Intellectual Property Right Law. It is also available as an Open Access version through the publisher’s homepage and the Göttingen University Catalogue (GUK) at the Göttingen State and University Library (https://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de). The conditions of the license terms of the online version apply. Typesetting and layout: Anja Drautzburg © 2020 Universitätsverlag Göttingen https://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-86395-459-8 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2020-1327 eISSN: 2512-6970 To Ursula Drautzburg and Alexander Scherr Acknowledgments I am grateful and indebted to a great number of people for their support in com- pleting this book, which is a revised version of my PhD thesis. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my first supervisor Prof. Dr. Barbara Schaff for her invaluable advice, crucial input, and constant encouragement. I am equally grateful to my second supervisor, PD Dr. Kirsten Sandrock, for her helpful feed- back and guidance when I needed it most. Many thanks also to Prof. Dr. Karin Hoff, who kindly acted as chair of my doctoral committee. Thank you to everyone at the English Department of Göttingen University, particularly Dr. Vanessa Künnemann, Marleen Knipping, Dr. Anca Radu, Gülsin Çiftçi, and Anna Savitskaya. I would also like to thank the editorial board of the Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie series, in particular, Dr. Frauke Reitemeier, for the generous offer to publish this study. I thank my family, Christian and Martina Sarada Drautzburg, Miriam Half- mann, Nina Liewald, Anne Wibbe, Charlotte Ryland, Cécile Roche, Svenja Frank, and Corinna Jörres for their love and care, as well as their constant support in navigating the choppy waters of my academic and personal life over the years. Last but not least, I thank wholeheartedly the one who always knew, Alexander Scherr, for everything. Table of Contents 1 Introduction: Contextualising the Mental Health Play .......................................... 11 1.1 Terminological Considerations: Differentiating Between Discourses of Madness and Mental Health ........................................................................... 15 1.2 Literature Review .................................................................................................. 26 1.3 Aims and Structure of this Study ....................................................................... 29 2 Mental Health Drama as a Counter-Discourse to Psychiatry ............................... 35 2.1 Considering the Perceptual Practices of Psychiatry and the Theatre ........... 36 2.2 Introducing a Foucauldian Approach to Madness .......................................... 37 2.3 Theatrical Language versus Psychiatry’s Rational Language .......................... 38 2.4 Staging Otherness ................................................................................................. 40 2.5 The Stage in the Round as Heterotopia ............................................................ 45 2.6 Chapter Conclusion .............................................................................................. 51 3 Staging Domesticity: The Gendered Underpinnings of Madness in Mental Health Drama .................................................................................................. 53 3.1 The Desiring Woman as Hysteric in Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind (1985) ........................................................................................... 57 3.1.1 Ayckbourn’s Theatrical Perspective on Madness .................................. 59 3.1.2 Hysteria Revisited ....................................................................................... 61 3.1.3 The Family Doctor as Flawed: Medical Authority Undermined ........ 67 3.1.4 From Domestic Farce to Mental Health Play ........................................ 70 3.2 Mental Distress and Domestic Confinement in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991/92) ..................... 73 3.2.1 Questioning Madness and Gender Politics ............................................ 76 3.2.2 Epic Theatre as Othering-Machine: Harper and Performance ........... 79 3.3 Chapter Conclusion ............................................................................................... 87 4 On the Battlefields of the Mind: Exploring Mental Distress in the Institution ...................................................................................................................... 89 4.1 “You see, I’m lost”: The Therapist on the Edge in Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973) ........................................................................................................... 93 4.1.1 Ambiguity as Truth: The Psychiatrist as Unreliable Narrator ............. 94 4.1.2 Implications of Fashioning Mental Distress as a Spectacle ................. 98 4.2 The Mental Hospital as Battlefield in Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000)..... 106 4.2.1 “I am the Authority”: System Failure in the Mental Hospital .......... 109 4.2.2 The Earth is Blue Like an Orange: Seeing as Truth ........................... 115 10 Table of Contents 4.3 Dissecting the Biomedical Model: Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) ........... 120 4.3.1 Dramatising the Science of Mental Illness ........................................... 121 4.3.2 Psychiatry as the “Cinderella” of Medicine .......................................... 125 4.3.3 Trial and Error: Staging Uncertain Knowledge ................................... 128 4.4 Chapter Conclusion ............................................................................................ 131 5 What It’s Like to Live with Mental Disorder: Theatrical Solutions to the “Hard Problem” of Consciousness ......................................................................... 133 5.1 Mental Disorder Between Textual Lyricism and “Explosive Theatricality” in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000) ....................................... 136 5.1.1 The Fragmented Mind as “Alternative Space” .................................... 138 5.1.2 “Inscrutable doctors, sensible doctors, way-out doctors”: Kane’s Attack on Psychiatry’s Authority .............................................. 143 5.2 “It’s like the Sirens”: Mania Versus Medication in Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) ............................................................... 150 5.2.1 Implications of Form Mirroring Content ............................................. 152 5.2.2 Why Dissocia is a Mental Health Play ..................................................... 156 5.3 Chapter Conclusion ............................................................................................ 157 6 Democratising Madness: Socially Engaged Mental Health Plays ....................... 159 6.1 Theatre as Open Dialogue in Ridiculusmus’ The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland (2014) ............................................................. 163 6.1.1 Performing Open Dialogue .................................................................... 165 6.1.2 Hearing Voices as Polyphonic Dialogue .............................................. 172 6.2 Sharing is Caring: Audience Participation in Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2015) .................................................................................. 178 6.2.1 Care in the Community of the Theatre ................................................. 179 6.2.2 Sharing the “Werther Effect” in Performance .................................... 184 6.3 Chapter Conclusion