Theatre

This exploration of nineteenth-century female madness, produced by the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, is slight, pretty and appealing. In the aptly baroque great hall of St Bart’s, four fetchingly disarranged Ophelia types mingle with the women of the audience (segregated from the men, in a good idea that goes nowhere). One is a mother, another a youthful Jesus freak. The third is a ‘rebel’ (ie. a soft-focus lesbian), and the fourth is a nymphomaniac (whose main symptom, bafflingly, is tender affection for the furniture).  There’s also a fifth: a stern older woman who may be their matron.

‘Hysteria’ is apparently based on the ‘complex social lives’ of Brazilian women. Unfortunately the sentimental fragments of personal testimony communicated by the actresses (all floating hair and frothily pale skirts, all very lovely) convey hardly any cultural or historical context. The echoing acoustics, the heavily beautiful accents, and the lack of relationships between the women make the production melodiously indistinct.

The main drama comes from audience interaction: sometimes gently whimsical; sometimes hectoring and unilluminating. The confiding girls elicit sympathy, and some remarkable responses: on the night I went, a feminist from the audience called Michelle was by far the most impressive part of the evening. But, as a conversation between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries this is unsatisfying: asking a Victorian woman if she is ‘an onanist’ might have been subversive; asking a modern one is a characteristic example of this production asking far more of its audience than it asks of itself.