Dislocated: Metaphors of Madness in British Theatre

Abstract

To be mad is, according to common idiom, to be out-of-place. One has lost the plot, gone out of one’s mind, taken leave of one’s senses; you are out to lunch, round the bend, away with the fairies, round the twist, in a dark place. A person descends into madness or is driven there. Two things are apparent here. Firstly, there is the recurrent sense of journeying that attends on madness. Secondly, the dominant notion of place renders ‘mad’ experience an inherently geographical encounter. Madness, then, is figured as a location, as site. Or, perhaps more accurately, as simultaneously site and non-site. To be mad is to be both somewhere and yet nowhere, or at least not here, that is to say ‘reality’. It is, then, to be displaced, dislocated, gone. Indeed, as Peter Barham and Robert Hayward have noted, this language of absence and disappearance ‘is recapitulated in the traditional psychiatric account of schizophrenia as a narrative of loss in which the pre-illness person goes missing, seemingly abandoned by the force of the disorder’.¹ Moreover, if, following Erving Goffman, institutional spaces encode socio-behav- ioural scripts that are ineluctably performed, then one wonders what this collision between institutional places of madness and cultural notions of madness as space might mean for our understanding of the complex relations between experience and environment.