Content Warning: this review includes references to medical diagnoses and historical treatments
The City for Incurable Women is a one-person play, examining how the medical profession treats women who are, for any one of a number of reasons, viewed as ‘difficult’.
Brig saw a Relaxed Performance of this production. That means that the house lights were never fully dimmed, and we suspect that we therefore did not get the full benefit of all of the lighting changes, and possibly that some of the sound effects or volume may also have been softened.
The story in this play focuses on women who were in-patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the late Victorian era. In reality, they were permanent residents, there for any number of reasons. Some of them were sex workers, some had become pregnant whilst unmarried. Some were just perceived as too great a burden on their families and left there. Most were labelled ‘hysterical’, and Dr Jean-Martin Charcot was attempting to, if not cure them, at least record their conditions.
Charlotte McBurney, who performs the show, begins by talking about the overlap between medicine and performance. The word ‘theatre’ is common to both, and since the time of the Ancient Greeks, medical examinations and treatments have been used as a form of entertainment, as well as education.
Exploring the themes of hysteria and women’s health
It was within this tradition that Charcot operated. He worked at the hospital for over three decades, and held weekly lunchtime lectures where he displayed the female patients to a paying audience. The women, temporarily removed from their appallingly squalid living conditions, engaged in the performance of ‘hysteria’.
As Charcot was working in the late 19th century, there was also a medical fascination with the idea of ‘the wandering womb’, and this concept is also discussed in some depth in the play. It becomes apparent that the men examining, displaying and recording these women have no idea of any actual underlying medical knowledge about women’s anatomy.
Indeed, it becomes apparent that all of the men who have intervened into women’s lives over millenia have little to no idea, and are often just trying to get rid of women who they find problematic. The script references the idea that the labels applied to women have shifted: ‘shrew’; ‘witch’; ‘hysterical’, but the intention remains the same – to silence women, and remove them from public view.
This is a difficult play to watch, with a number of moments of discomfort. Medical procedures are discussed, and the specifics of the methods used on the women set out. These amount to being ignored at best, and being actively tortured at the other extreme.
McBurney does well with a complex role in which she plays a number of the incarcerated women, Charcot, and even a version of herself / a narrator.
An interesting and important production, which points out how quickly people can be condemned for daring to exist outside the deemed norms of any society.
The City for Incurable Women continues at 13:35, at Upstairs in the Pleasance Courtyard, daily until August 25 (not 12).
Featured Image courtesy of Chloe Nelkin Consulting
