In 19th-century France, the Salpêtrière hospital was an institution for mentally ill women. Safe to say the definition of mental illness was not the same as it is today. Inmates could end up being committed for anything from promiscuity to poverty.
It was here that Dr Jean-Martin Charcot developed his theory of hysteria, a word whose etymology goes back to the Greek word for uterus. Breaking with a long tradition of doctors who attributed erratic behaviour in women to a wandering womb, Charcot treated hysteria as a neurological disorder. He insisted men could be susceptible too.
In that and other areas, Charcot was a medical pioneer, even if his use of hypnosis, photography and showmanship strike us as eccentric today. We no longer ask patients to perform their illness for a curious audience nor do we recognise his four stages of hysteria.
That conditions in Victorian asylums were less than ideal and that women have had a raw deal due to the slow evolution of psychiatry hardly needs saying. What makes Helena McBurney’s script so riveting is the way it blends misogyny and mental illness into fluid theatrical poetry, blurring the line between medic and patient in a play that is half lecture, half nightmare.
Dressed in silky off-white trousers and a top buttoned up the back like a designer straitjacket, actor Charlotte McBurney gives a high-precision performance that crackles with vulnerability, confusion and intelligence. Haunted by voices coming at her from all directions in Bella Kear’s swirling sound design, she morphs from sober narrator to pompous doctor to psychotic Salpêtrière resident in a troubling collage.
In Christina Deinsberger’s production for Fish in a Dress, the actor is crisp, physical and speedy as she draws us from lucidity to feverishness and makes connections to the treatment of women across the centuries.
• At the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
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