Jon Venn Madness in Contemporary British Theatre

Annotation

This book considers the representation of madness in contemporary Britishtheatre, examining the rich relationship between performance and mental health,and questioning how theatre can potentially challenge dominant understandingsof mental health. Carefully, it suggests what it means to represent madness intheatre, and the avenues through which such representations can becomeradical, whereby theatre can act as a site of resistance. Engaging with the heterogeneity of madness, each chapter covers differentattributes and logics, including: the constitution and institutional structures ofthe contemporary asylum; the cultural idioms behind hallucination; the means bywhich suicide is apprehended and approached; how testimony of the mad personis interpreted and encountered. As a study that interrogates a wide range of British theatre across the past 30years, and includes a theoretical interrogation of the politics of madness, this isa crucial work for any student or researcher, across disciplines, considering thepolitics of madness and its relationship to performance.