THEATRE: Robert Greig
HYSTERIA is an impudent, sprawling, funny and splendidly perverse farce about the fantasies of Sigmund Freud. It turns the person whom WH Auden described as “a climate of opinion” into a bumbler floundering in the nets of his own theories.
As with Tom and Viv, one may learn little about Freud or his teachings, but Hysteria (directed by Clare Stopford at the Market Theatre) is a considerable contribution to Freud folklore, filtered through voguish preoccupations of our times.
It is impossible not to enjoy this effervescent, provocative production, while simultaneously being infuriated by Terry Johnson’s relentlessly cheery over- writing. (The play could and should be heavily cut.) In a way, Hysteria is a most un-English piece of work, with little restraint or irony: it speaks at the top of its voice.
The premise of Hysteria is Freud’s notion that, in a dream, all figures are aspects of a single personality. (Freud had much to say about dreams, but this is the mainspring of the play.) The play is set at the end of Freud’s life in London, after his flight from Austria, when he was dying from cancer. He is shown as being about to publish Moses and Monotheism, what was seen as his attack on religion, though, in fact, it had been published by the time he left Austria.
The characters of his dream are his doctor — Johnson conflates him with a leading Jewish historian, Abraham Yehuda; Jessica, the daughter of a patient; and Salvador Dali, who did visit him once with Stefan Zweig and compared Freud’s cranium to a snail. Each character could be said to approximate to conscious, subconscious and unconscious respectively.
The energy of Hysteria comes from its incisive linking of the arbitrary world of farce with the universe of dreams. The devices in both are identical: figures hidden in closets, guilty secrets imperfectly repressed, inexplicable entrances and exits, compressions of time, figures from the past invading the present.
The atmosphere is identical: a mixing of the sacred and profane, a sense of the significant and trivial being indistinguishable, momentum building up to an uncomfortable pitch. And, most important, the nightmarish sense of inescapability — farce is a treadmill form.
Johnson’s play — and Robert Whitehead’s performance — never settles for a single view of Freud. Perspectives shift the whole time. There is nothing as obvious or easy as poignancy in his view of Freud overwhelmed by his past and his past mistakes; rather the play shows the corrosive, comic indignity of self-doubt.
Much of this has to do with Freud’s theory of hysteria. Not that he had a single theory, though Johnson finds it useful to downplay the fact that Freud revised his view of hysteria invariably being the effect of sexual abuse in childhood. The play suggests that Freud, by his own logic, was also sexually abused by his father – – Freud himself had the intellectual rigour to wonder about this. But on stage this is a little flip.
The comedy of Hysteria is that all the characters are driven by their own single, fixed idea. They have the ridiculousness and malevolence of fanatics. The characters do not meet: they collide and spin off. They make enormous demands on one another, and mainly on
Whitehead plays Freud with a sideways snarl resulting from his cancer of the jaw, as a highly proper figure utterly bewildered and slightly ashamed of his vivid fantasies, like a gent caught in a compromising position. It’s a finely detailed performance, with subtle shifts, and directed with a clear sense of Johnson’s hard-heartedness.
It’s Dawid Minnaar’s sculpted, elegant performance as Dali that seized my attention. Dali is, of course, a buffoon — he’s mad, a Spanish Spike Milligan, one of those “characters” more interesting as an idea than a reality. Minnaar plays Dali as a sinuous clown, a character with no internal life, and an immense need for the recognition which Freud denies him. (The denial says much about Freud.)
Jessica (Leila Henriques) announces herself as Freud’s anima, a Jungian term guaranteed to outrage Freud. Her demand is for Freud to admit he is wrong and his therapy ineffective: in the outrageousness of the demand lies the comedy.
Yahuda (Dale Cutts), like all doctors, wants Freud to relax and to see that a Jewish denial of religion during the Nazi terror is divisive. That’s a rational argument, but Freud is no rationalist.