Jon Venn Madness in Contemporary British Theatre: Resistances and Representations Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 222 p. £47.99. ISBN: 978-3-030-79782-9.

Abstract

Madness, or ‘mental illness’, is a prominent theme in British cultural and political discourses today. Since the UK government declared a mental health ‘crisis’ in the early 2010s, we have seen a steady increase in reporting, commentary, and literature on madness and mental health. Beyond mainstream reporting, madness is also increasingly claimed as a political identity category by some service-user and psychiatric-survivor groups. In British theatre, the past decade has seen a renewed interest in performance explicitly thematizing pathologized mental distress and offering commentary on the adequacy ofmental health services. Venn’s book offers a welcome survey of some of the most interesting representations of mental distress on the British stage in the last thirty years as it ‘asks in what manner . . . theatre [can] act as a site of resistance against hegemonic understandings of madness’. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of madness on the twenty-first-century stage, Venn chooses examples that offer particular critiques of ‘hegemonic understandings’ of madness. The works are varied, and include such well-known plays as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, and Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker. Alongside these are successful but perhaps less widely known performance works from individual artists Bryony Kimmings and James Leadbetter aka the vacuum cleaner, and companies such as Analogue and Ridiculusmus. Dividing the book intofive chapters, Vennpositions these works as resistances to ‘hegemonic understandings’ of psychiatric institutions, suicide, hallucination, and autobiography. Of particular interest is Venn’s reconsideration of psychiatric power in the context of decentralized, community care service delivery in Chapter 2. Theatre has a long-standing relationship with psychiatry. Nineteenth-century naturalism was shaped by the conceptualization of hysteria as an observable, performative malady located either in an asylum or a bourgeois home. The legacies of naturalism and the psychiatric asylum persist in theatrical representations of madness today. Introducing the idea of a ‘contemporary asylum’ that exists beyond a single building, Venn demonstrates how theatre can reveal the power structures which remain inherent to psychiatry in the community care era. The ‘contemporary asylum’ exerts ‘capillaries of power’which shape and limit the experiences of mental health service users. Theatre offers a practical critique of psychiatric power by revealing its structures from within, ‘situating . . . the mad body as the object of competing power structures’. The dynamics of decentralized mental health service provision have received little attention within theatre studies and the medical humanities. Venn’s analysis of the contemporary asylum is an important step in addressing this lack. The other chapters offer thoughtful readings of plays and performance works which engage in themes of hallucination, suicide, depression, and breakdown. These chapters are more explicitly concerned with the ethics of representing madness. Pluralistic and fragmented forms of representation are favoured over attempts to fully represent an experience ofmadness. The book consistentlywarns of the dangers of essentialismanduniversalism, and concludes that the most ethical approach to staging madness is through an encounter with alterity which can be achieved through an ethics of nonrepresentation. Due to its commitment to pluralism, the book lacks a sustained theory of representation throughout. At times, it suggests that direct representation of mental distress is inherently problematic without fully articulating what the problem with representation is. Venn asserts, for example, that debbie tucker green’s nut exoticizes hallucination simply because the play makes clear which figures on stage are real, and which are figment. This is a bold claim, which would be better justified in the context of a rigorous theory of representation. This book encompasses a wide range of performances, which will be useful to any reader approaching the themes of madness in contemporary theatre for the first time, and the readings are generous with scholarly attention to performance history and contexts. The inclusion of plays from the 1990s raises the question of when ‘the contemporary’ begins, and Venn helpfully locates the current mental health culture in a continuity with reforms introduced at the start of the community care era. There is more to be said about how these plays have influenced each other over the past thirty years, with the older plays providing a performance context for more recent performances.