Theatrical bodies and madness: a case study of a theatre playground in a South African forensic psychiatric hospital

Abstract

This study analyses, over a three-year period, a theatre programme with forensic psychiatric patients and staff at Fort England psychiatric hospital in Grahamstown/Makhanda, South Africa. Framed as a ‘theatrical playground', programme sessions were structured around theatre games, improvisation and devised theatre processes that culminated in playmaking at the end of each session. Participation in the group was voluntary and constructed to allow involvement in theatrical play on its own terms, set apart from the therapeutic and rehabilitation agendas that govern the institution. By means of a conceptually-driven critical analysis of the empirical practice, the study explores the ethical tensions and possibilities of locating all participants as political actors with agency to develop the stories, characters, and images they choose for themselves. It juxtaposes the democratic principles of the theatre space with the oppression and control of psychiatry when viewed as a Total Institution. I draw on the work of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman in order to conceptualise a history and critique of psychiatry, and to contextualise how colonial psychiatry developed in South Africa. I compare manifestations of power and control that are part of forensic psychiatric practices with the political possibilities of different resistant theatre spaces, such as the work of the Olimpias artist collective and the Madness Hotel (Vitor Pordeus). I show how these examples, and the theatre project researched here, approach all participants as authors and makers of and on the world. I deploy a Vygotskian lens to discern how participants collectively create a Zone of Proximal Development, which explains the profound shifts in learning and skills observed in participants considered as low functioning or beyond treatment or rehabilitation. The study analyses three aspects of the practice: video documentation of selected workshops and performances; interviews with patient and staff participants; and my reflective practitioner field notes - in order to build the case for the radically humanising effect of the theatre playground. My analysis of key moments in the theatre practice highlights the ways in which patient-participants perform ‘a head taller' than clinical staff's expectations, when offered opportunities to experiment with relationships by means of embodied practices in a creative process set apart from the therapeutic gaze. Reflective and critical analysis of the practice reveals three types of experience in particular: first, hope as an overall affect that aligns with a recovery approach to mental health; secondly, how participation is experienced as humanising by disrupting and playing with institutionalised roles and bodies; and finally, how permission to play with the roles, narratives, and the power structures of psychiatry as an institution, reoriented participants as political actors in relation to the forensic hospital and the wider world. These experiences challenge the stigma and positioning of forensic psychiatric patients as incapable, outside of culture and humanity, and reposition them as legitimate knowers and creators.