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8 - Theatres of Mental Health

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

By
Jon Venn
Edited by
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 8: This chapter analyzes the legacy and influence of the diagnostic gaze in contemporary British theatre, examining how theatre can offer a site to negotiate the complex dynamic between psychiatric institutions and the experiences of patients. Contemporary psychiatry has overseen a vast expansion in the categorization of mental illness. Mental disorders can be identified and ascribed to individual patients in an act of diagnosis that signals mental illness as a ‘performative malady’. Alongside reflecting shifts in the etiology of mental disorder (increasingly focused upon a biomedical model), the speech-act of diagnosis has implications for the legal status and care of the patient. Analyzing works such as Joe Penhall’s Some Voices and Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, this chapter suggests how theatre can offer a reimagination of diagnosis by situating and troubling the role of the psychiatric user.

Keywords

diagnosishysteriamadnessmental healthpsychiatrytheatre
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science , pp. 116 - 130
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Suggested Reading

Angelaki, Vicky. Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis. London, 2019.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford, 1962.Google Scholar
Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. London, 1997.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke, 2003.Google Scholar
Furse, Anna. ‘Augustine (Big Hysteria): Writing the Body’, Theatre Review 2, no. 1 (1994): 25–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furse, Anna. Augustine (Big Hysteria). London, 1997.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harpin, Anna. ‘Revisiting the Puzzle Factory: Cultural Representations of Psychiatric Asylums’. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 38, no. 4 (2013): 335–50.Google Scholar
Harpin, Anna. Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness. London, 2019.Google Scholar
Millard, Chris. ‘Concepts, Diagnosis and the History of Medicine: Historicising Ian Hacking and Munchausen’s Syndrome’. Social History of Medicine 30, no. 3 (2016): 567–89.Google Scholar
Penhall, Joe. Blue/Orange. London, 2000.Google Scholar
Prebble, Lucy. The Effect. London, 2012.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wald, Christina. Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. London, 2007.Google Scholar
Watson, Ariel. ‘Cries of Fire: Psychotherapy in Contemporary British and Irish Drama’. Modern Drama 51, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 188–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitbeck, Caroline. ‘What Is Diagnosis? Some Critical Reflections’. Metamedicine 2, no. 3 (1981): 319–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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