‘The past goes deeper than cancer’, Sigmund Freud
When the consequences of Freud’s past turn up in the form of a manic young woman in his very own Hampstead home in 1938, he is forced to question the integrity of his work and the darkness from his past.
It is a stormy night when Jessica barges in, adamant to be ‘analysed’ by Freud even threatening to cut her own wrists if she is removed.
Miranda Daughtry’s strong performance, an emotional rollercoaster of desperation, mania and later rage, represents a frustrated daughter’s search for answers and justice around her mother’s perhaps avoidable death.
We eventually learn that Jessica’s mother was a patient of Freud, receiving treatment for ill mental health with symptoms including anorexia, physical tics and debilitating phobias. Through a private diary, it emerges that Jessica’s mother was repeatedly sexually abused by her father.
She had told Freud. He had diagnosed it, attributing it to a hysteria and a feminine Oedipus attitude; the Electra Complex.
Shifting between a “realistic history play and surrealist fiction”, the tool of English face enables ‘the exploration of complex and uncomfortable content’ (Wald, 2007).
The Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s performance cleverly uses film and projection to capture the blurring of lines between truth and the imagined, the conscious and the subconscious, the present and our past experience. True to farce, events within Freud’s Hampstead office become increasingly absurd and outrageous, equally as strange as the projection content.
Jo Turner’s skilful physical performance as Freud captures the frailty of a cancer-ridden old man, haunted by his past whilst desperately searching for peace. With conflicted ethical and professional agendas, Freud’s integrity as a physician is compromised by his apparent complicity when treating sexually abused patients. How does one respond to epidemic proportions of familial sexual abuse amongst the upper classes? Bring the perpetrators to justice through public confrontation or blame it on the victim?
With the recent and ongoing Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Susanna Dowling’s direction of HYSTERIA is a timely performance, reminding audiences that familial sexual abuse is equally prevalent and catastrophic. The audience learns of the long-lasting devastation of abuse and trauma, particularly when disregarded or improperly treated.
The production is lightened by the entertaining and narcissistic interjections of Salvador Dalí, played by the exuberant Michael McStay.
HYSTERIA played the Eternity Playhouse Theatre between March 31 and April 30.