In 19th-century France, the Salpêtrière hospital housed women diagnosed with mental illness—though the definition of “mental illness” back then was far broader than today. Women could be institutionalized for anything from promiscuity to poverty.
It was here that Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot developed his theory of hysteria, a term rooted in the Greek word for uterus. Unlike earlier doctors who blamed women’s erratic behavior on a “wandering womb,” Charcot treated hysteria as a neurological disorder and argued that men could suffer from it too.
Charcot was a medical pioneer, though some of his methods—like hypnosis, photography, and theatrical demonstrations—seem eccentric today. We no longer stage public performances of illness or recognize his four stages of hysteria.
Of course, conditions in Victorian asylums were harsh, and women bore the brunt of psychiatry’s slow progress. What makes Helena McBurney’s script so compelling is how it weaves misogyny and mental illness into a fluid, poetic drama, blurring the lines between doctor and patient in a play that’s part lecture, part nightmare.
Dressed in sleek off-white trousers and a top buttoned at the back like a designer straitjacket, actor Charlotte McBurney delivers a razor-sharp performance, flickering between vulnerability, confusion, and intelligence. Haunted by voices swirling around her in Bella Kear’s immersive sound design, she shifts seamlessly from composed narrator to arrogant doctor to tormented asylum patient.
In Christina Deinsberger’s production for Fish in a Dress, McBurney is dynamic and precise, guiding the audience from clarity to delirium while drawing parallels to the treatment of women throughout history. Playing at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August.
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