There’s a lot of fun, some visually striking scenes and the occasional gentle bit of audience participation in Leah Shelton’s light entertaining tour of the “crazy” misuse of supposed medical diagnosis to stigmatise and abuse women.
The show draws on the personal family history of Leah’s grandmother, who was at one time consigned to a hospital for psychiatric care, along with a more general survey of the gruesome, oppressive use of psychiatry to keep women in their subservient place as it casually dismissed expressions of discontent.
The show opens in the semi-darkness to the sound of a slowed-down version of "Amazing Grace" as a strange female figure in a sparkly green dress wanders onto the stage carrying a huge axe menacingly in an elongated arm.
We later hear that her gran Gwen used an axe to smash up a television. We don’t know why, but we can think of a thousand reasons for taking such an action.
Interspersed amongst the excerpts from Gran’s case notes, that include regular medication and ECT applied without the patient's consent, are clips from television programmes from the early 1960s, a period when the establishment still needed a good slapping from Second Wave Feminism.
Since among the supposed illnesses suffered by women caught up in the medical nonsense used to control women was the condition known as hysteria, we also see Leah ask people on the streets if men can suffer from hysteria.
Another condition dreamed up to control women was the “wandering womb syndrome”, illustrated by Leah in a loose-fitting garment in which an object rushes madly around her stomach area. However, the show reassures us with the information that in the 1980s, “wandering womb syndrome” was removed from the international manual on mental illness.
A concluding section lists the women who have suffered the stigmatising label of mental illness. Among them are the fictional Lady Macbeth and the important political activist Francis Farmer. The list finishes with the name of Leah’s grandmother, Gwen.
The show is often amusing, always engaging, imaginative and politically important. However, it also felt far too gentle as it danced on the surface of the horror suffered by so many without explaining the cause of that horror.