ABSTRACT
In a moment when a national ‘mental health crisis’ was making headlines across the UK, 2016/17 saw a trio of high-profile and critically acclaimed plays thematising psychiatry on the London stage: Anatomy of a Suicide, People, Places, Things and Blue/Orange. These plays share a cluster of images and assumptions about psychiatric encounters in contemporary society. Each play was staged around a spatial binary which contrasted the medical/psychiatric institution with the bourgeois family home. Through a repetition of this psychiatric–domestic binary, they draw on a historical relationship between psychiatry and dramatic theatre, in which theatre is understood as inherently psychological and psychiatry as spectatorial. An entangled reading of these productions reveals the ways in which our capacity to envisage care is curtailed and restricted by the repetition of this binary, through the conditions of cultural production and the psychosocial legacies of our ‘mental health’ history.
