Fintan Walsh provides a stimulating introduction to a complex subject. The first of four sections focuses on Sigmund Freud and his successors who drew on Sophocles’ and Shakespeare's plays and performances to develop their theories. In turn, Emile Zola and August Strindberg, influenced by Freudian and Darwinian ideas, espoused naturalism and the exploration of characters’ motives.
The new notion of shifting layers of consciousness led the Surrealists, and significantly Antonin Artaud, to reject what he viewed as repressive rationalism in favour of shocking audiences out of their complacency. More recently, playwrights such as Hélène Cixous put Freud, Melaine Klein and therapy onstage, some would say on trial, while Sarah Kane laid bare her personal experience of depression and ineffectual treatment.
The short section on actor training concentrates on Stanislavsky and his American disciple Lee Strasberg's Method approach. In ‘Drama and Theatre in Therapy’, the third section, Walsh offers some fascinating tidbits: participation in and attendance at theatrical performances was recommended as long ago as the second century CE as a treatment for mental illness. Regrettably, the techniques of psychodrama, drama therapy and Augusto Boal's practice are allotted a scant seven and a half pages.
In the final section, ‘Therapeutic Dramaturgies and Relations to Contemporary Theatre’, several examples of playwright Conor McPherson's use of the confessional monologue are given. The performances of solo artists including Bobby Baker (who wrote the very personal preface), comedians such as Ruby Wax and David Granirer, and the encounters staged by Adrian Howell and David Hoyle are described relatively extensively.
Inevitably in such a brief study, there are omissions. Most puzzling is the failure to mention Anton Chekhov, a practising physician who was in no doubt that his medical knowledge had influenced his extraordinary ability to observe the human condition. Surely a seminal work such as The Seagull, with its depiction of writers and actors driven to madness and suicide, should have been cited. No Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller or John Arden, and no Edward Bond, whose searing indictment of aggressive societies breeding aggressive citizens in powerful plays such as Saved is arguably relevant here.
Teya Sepinuck's beautiful Theatre of Witness productions at Derry Playhouse are the only examples of community-based work with the capacity to heal. Attention could have been paid to the solid contribution of organizations such as Them Wifies in Newcastle upon Tyne. For thirty-four years they have developed imaginative ways of using theatre and other arts to prevent and help treat women's mental health problems. What about Sonja Linden's work with torture victims, and Cardboard Citizens and their version of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, which challenged the stigma of mental illness?
Of course choices must be made. It does seem as though in making them Walsh has favoured individual artists over writers and companies committed to exploring the connections among politics, social justice and therapy. Perhaps that would have required another book.
