Performing Nerves: Four Plays, Four Essays, on Hysteria

243 Pages·2019·4.04 MB·English

by  Anna Furse, Elaine Showalter

Performing Nerves
Academic interest in hysteria has burgeoned in recent decades.
The topic has been probed by feminist theorists, cultural studies
specialists, literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, psy-
chologists, medical and art historians, as well as novelists. The
hysteric is construed as a powerless, voiceless subject, marginal-
ised by the forces of the patriarchy that have been the root cause
of their distress, dissembling, and disablement.
In Performing Nerves, Anna Furse interweaves her artistic and
academic practice, drawing on her own performance texts to ex-
plore four different versions of debilitating hysteric suffering.
Each text is extensively annotated, revealing the dramaturgical
logic and, in turn, the historical, medical, and cultural contexts
behind their protagonists’ illnesses, which are argued as environ-
mentally caused in each case. This unique, reflective insight into a
playwright and director’s craft offers not only an account of how
mental suffering can manifest in different contexts and times,
from the 19th century to today, but also a breadth of access to
the ideas that can motivate creative research.
This book is an invaluable resource for scholars of theatre
studies, performance studies, dramaturgy, 20th-century history,
gender studies, and medical humanities.
Anna Furse is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Gold-
smiths, University of London, where she is Co-Director of the
Centre of the Body and Director of the MA in Performance
Making. A veteran award-winning theatre artist, she writes and
produces her own works internationally, through commissions
and co-productions. She is a published author of plays and the-
oretical writing; a frequent speaker at international conferences;
and Artistic Director of her own production company, Athletes
of the Heart: www.athletesoftheheart.org.
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Performing Nerves
Four Plays
Four Essays
On Hysteria
Anna Furse
with a foreword by Elaine Showalter
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2020 Anna Furse
The right of Anna Furse to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Furse, Anna, author.
Title: Performing nerves : four plays, four essays, on hysteria /
Anna Furse; with a foreword by Elaine Showlater.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers:
LCCN 2019052769 (print) | LCCN 2019052770 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138389359 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138389366
(paperback) | ISBN 9780429423956 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hysteria—Drama. | Hysteria in literature. |
Psychoanalysis and literature. | Drama—Technique.
Classification: LCC PR6056.U75 A6 2020 (print) |
LCC PR6056.U75 (ebook) | DDC 822/.9208—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052769
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052770
ISBN: 978-1-138-38935-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-38936-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42395-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
List of figures vi
Foreword by Elaine Showalter viii
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xxi
1 Making a drama out of a crisis: Augustine
(Big Hysteria) 1
2 What she wants: Sea/Woman 78
3 The duty to run mad: Shocks 111
4 Shapeshifting: Gorgeous 163
Conclusion 207
Index 211
List of figures
0.1 Jean Béraud, Dans les Coulisses, 1889. Musée
Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris xiii
0.2 Jean Béraud, La Proposition, 1885–1890. Musée
des Arts Décoratifs, Paris xiv
0.3 Augustine, Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture
(Hystero-Epilepsy: Contracture). IPS Vol. 2,
1878. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of
Physicians of Edinburgh xvii
1.1 Augustine, Hystéro-Épilepsie: État Normal
(Hystero-Epilepsy: Normal Condition). IPS Vol.
2, 1878. Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of
Physicians of Edinburgh 2
1.2 Shona Morris as Augustine, Wolfe Morris
as Charcot, and James Dreyfus as Freud in
Augustine (Big Hysteria) by Furse. Hypnosis.
Photo: Hugo Glendinning, 1990 6
1.3 Shona Morris as Augustine (Attitudes
Passionelles), in Augustine (Big Hysteria) by
Furse. Photo: Sheila Burnett, 1990 7
1.4 Augustine, Léthargie: Hyperexcitabilité
Musculaire (Lethargy: Muscular
Hyperexcitability). IPS Vol. 3, 1879–1880.
Photo: Paul Régnard. Royal College of
Physicians of Edinburgh 12
1.5 Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, Une Leçon
Clinique à La Salpêtrière, 1887 20
1.6 Augustine, Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture
(Hystero-Epilepsy: Contracture). Photo: Paul
Régnard. IPS Vol. 2, 1878. Royal College of
Physicians of Edinburgh 23
2.1 Maja Mitić in SeaWoman by Furse,
2011. Photo: Djordje Tomić, Fotokratija 103
2.2 Maja Mitić in SeaWoman by Furse,
2011. Photo: Djordje Tomić, Fotokratija 110
3.1 Diogo André in Shocks by Furse. Photo:
Nina Klaff, 2018 112
List of figures vii
3.2 Diogo André in Shocks by Furse. Photo:
Nina Klaff, 2018 116
3.3 Mathew Wernham and Diogo André in Shocks
by Furse. Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018 121
3.4 Mathew Wernham, Diogo André, and Chorus in
Shocks by Furse. Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018 138
4.1 Vissey Safavi in Gorgeous by Furse, directed by
Rosamunde Hutt. Photo: Timothy Nunn, 1999 188
Foreword
Hysteria and the theatre have been linked since the age of Greek
tragedy, and metaphors of the histrionic have long influenced
clinical discussion of patients, especially women, who were seen
by male doctors as actresses seeking attention through imagi-
nary physical symptoms. In the 19th century, Paris became the
capital of hysterical theatre, with Dr Jean-Martin Charcot act-
ing as the producer and director of a grand clinical theatre at
his hospital La Salpêtrière. There, young female patients were
brought to perform every Friday for an audience of fashionable
Parisians, including writers, actresses, cabaret performers, and
dancers, to demonstrate their symptoms of grande hystérie and
to respond on cue to the doctor’s commands. In Vienna, Freud’s
office became the set for “the talking cure,” an intimate dialogue
between doctor and patient, a theatrical two-hander. By 1977, in
their book Hysterical Personality, psychiatrists Kay H. Lacher
and Joe P. Tupin suggested that acting would be the ideal ca-
reer choice for the hysterical woman, who might find a life in the
theatre to be a way to satisfy “her exhibitionistic needs.” While
the notion of an “acting cure” reflects hostility towards hysterics,
women, and actresses, the history and representation of hysteria
have been the subjects of numerous plays and performances in
the theatre, cinema, television, and dance.
In Performing Nerves, Anna Furse presents four of her theat-
rical works based on hysteria and its cultural history. She con-
textualises these dramatic pieces in a rich, erudite, and complex
analysis of the relationship between gender, mental illness, hys-
terical body language, and social pressures. In her view, subjects
of these traumas are people communicating extreme strain and
distress through a “coded monodrama, expressed in their trans-
formative bodies.”
Chapter 1, “Making a drama out of a crisis: Augustine (Big
Hysteria),” is centred on her play Augustine (Big Hysteria),
first produced in April 1991 at the Plymouth Theater Royal and
then at theatres in the UK, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Denmark,
Canada, and the USA. Augustine was a pioneering work in the
new feminist theatre of hysteria in the 1990s. Furse imagines that
Foreword ix
the young Sigmund Freud, who had studied with Charcot in
1886, was the analyst of Augustine, the star of Charcot’s hyster-
ical theatre. Her performances in the stylised body poses which
Charcot titled as her “Attitudes Passionelles” were recorded in
drawings by his assistant, the artist Paul Richer, and multiple
photographs taken at the photographic atelier of the hospital by
Albert Londe. Responding to these pictures reproduced in the
Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, the Surrealists
celebrated Augustine as the “perfect archetype” of their imagi-
nary erotic hysterical muse. By bringing Charcot into the play,
as the ringmaster of a fantastic circus, Furse dramatises the tri-
angular private theatre of the unconscious, staged by the “hys-
terical” woman patient, the male doctor/director, and the male
observer or recorder.
Chapter 2, “What she wants: Sea/Woman,” reexamines and
reimagines Ibsen’s late play Lady from the Sea (1888) as a “ther-
apeutic journey” comparable to the cases of female hysteria in
Freud and Joseph Breuer’s classic Studies in Hysteria. In Sea/
Woman Furse compares Ibsen’s heroine Ellida to Bertha Pappen-
heim, whom Breuer called “Anna O” in the most controversial
case study of a 19th-century “hysterical” woman. She also brings
the contemporary problems of ecological crisis to the perfor-
mance piece, which was conceived in collaboration with the Ser-
bian actress Maja Mitić.
Chapter 3, “The duty to run mad: Shocks,” contains Furse’s
most recent and most ambitious play, Shocks: A Theatrical Req-
uiem, a disturbing and moving recreation of the painful saga of
shellshock in the First World War; its initial demonisation as
malingering or cowardice; and its ultimate understanding as a
language of protest, grief, and despair. In the early years of the
war, treatment was epitomised by doctors like Arthur Hurst at
the Netley Military Hospital in Devon, who employed a range
of electric shocks and physical punishments to force soldiers to
give up their symptoms. Near the end of the war, the patients
and medical staff were filmed as Netley War Neuroses (1917),
a propaganda film choreographed by Hurst to show the success
of his methods, although it is now seen as evidence of another
ritual theatre.
The play is based on the work of the great British neurolo-
gist, psychiatrist, and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, who
was assigned during the war to serve as medical supervisor at
Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland, a disused “hydro,” or asy-
lum for wealthy neurotics treated with water cures of various
sorts, which was re-purposed as a hospital for shellshocked of-
ficers. There Rivers worked out a Freudian theory of shellshock,
coming to understand it as a form of male hysteria, a specifically
gendered response to an impossible set of conflicts and com-
mands. He was able to experiment with a compassionate version