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Theatre Intime Puts Sigmund Freud on the Couch in "Hysteria," British Drama Combining Farce and Intellectual Explorations
Donald Gilpin
It is 1938. Sigmund Freud has fled to a quiet London suburb, where he lives with his daughter Anna, following the German annexation of Austria. The father of psychoanalysis is dying of cancer of the jaw. The morphine he has taken to relieve the pain has also released demons from his repressed unconscious.
In his book-filled study he receives a series of nocturnal visits: first from a young woman seeking answers to mysteries surrounding the treatment of her mother, a patient Freud diagnosed with hysteria some thirty years before; then Dr. Yahuda, his physician and friend, who is outraged that Freud's most recent manuscript attacks Biblical myths of Judaism; then an eccentric, self-absorbed Salvador Dali, who comes to pay homage to the master whose theories of the unconscious have supported his own surrealistic artistic philosophy.
Very loosely based on an actual encounter between Freud and Dali, British playwright Terry Johnson's Hysteria (1993), currently playing at Theatre Intime on the Princeton University campus, charts a curious course between farce and serious drama. It leaps abruptly back and forth between British sex comedy and serious psychological, theological and political analysis – with a bizarre dream sequence near the end. The play is funny at times – especially in the first act, at times intellectually engaging, and at times frustrating in its over-abundance of interweaving subjects and shifting tones.
Director Rosemary Rodriguez, Princeton University senior, and her undergraduate cast of just four principals have taken on a challenging work, and have achieved much success here. The evening, two acts spanning almost two and one-half hours, is a long one, but it offers significant rewards.
Winner of the prestigious 1994 Olivier Award for Best Comedy, Hysteria sets out with an emphasis on the comical elements, as Jessica (Emma Worth) bursts in from the garden to disrupt the great psychoanalyst (Greg Taubman) with a mystery and unsettling demands to revisit a long-forgotten case study. Dr.Yahuda (Adam Brenner) arrives to insist that Freud not publish a manuscript he has recently completed in which he claims that Moses was an upper class Egyptian. Then, in the midst of the confusion, appears a highly caricatured Salvador Dali (Paulo Quiros).
More farcical than intellectual, the first act features slamming doors, rapid entrances and exits, disrobings, hiding in closets and shocking discoveries of apparent improprieties. Beneath the slapstick tone, however, the embittered Jessica, daughter of a woman whose case helped provide the foundation for Freud's early theories, which he later revised, on hysteria and child abuse, pursues her concerns to expose the destructive results of Freud's opportunistic change in thinking.
The ailing Freud is understandably reluctant to confront the miscalculations of his dredged up past, and he is equally unhappy at Dr. Yahuda's attempts, even on the eve of the Holocaust and World War II, to suppress the publication of Freud's potentially damaging repudiation of Moses' Jewish-ness. Dali meanwhile keeps at least one foot of the play in the realm of farce as he cavorts around wantonly manifesting his extreme emotions and uncontrollable armpit fetish.
Ms. Rodriguez has directed with intelligence and skill. The play's difficulties in reconciling its rapidly shifting tones and blending the farce with the many serious issues raised here seem to be a problem of the text rather than of the Intime production.
Mr. Taubman's Freud is focused and effective, always interesting, if not always entirely credible in making the sixty-year character stretch to portray the dying psychoanalyst. Ms. Worth is consistently convincing as the young woman, especially engaging and intriguing in her interactions with Freud. Mr. Brenner's portrayal of Freud's friend and physician provides a strong moral focus to the production, while Mr. Quiros plays this wildly caricatured version of the young Salvador Dali with energy and a deft touch for physical comedy.
For Freud's study, John Vennema has designed a detailed, realistic set (The two modern-looking doors we can forgive.), filled with hundreds of old tomes on the shelves, along with a collection of urns, busts and vases, an old filing cabinet, and Persian carpets covering floors and furniture. Lighting by David Bengali and costumes by Jeny Schanbacher aptly complement the other production elements.
Mr. Johnson has not achieved the magic touch of Tom Stoppard, who, in Arcadia and other serious comedies, confronts actual historical figures with his original characters for comic romps and a serious examinations of history and other matters intellectual. Hysteria does, however, provide much food for thought for Freudian scholars – both supporters and detractors – along with a tasty dose of wit and farce, in this challenging and ambitious Intime production.
Hysteria plays at the Hamilton Murray Theater, University campus, September 25-27 at 8 p.m. and a matinee at 2 p.m. Saturday. Call (609) 258-1742 or visit www.theatreintime.org.
