Abstract
Prevention and Management of Violence: Guidance for Mental Healthcare Professionals Edited by Masum Khwaja, & Dominic Beer RCPsych Publications, 2013, £20.00 (pb), 144 pp. ISBN: 9781908020956 Violence is always a consideration for anyone working in the field of mental health. The remit of this
Highlights
Professor Oyebode’s study of madness in the theatre moves on a ‘trajectory’ from Classical tragedy and comedy through Shakespeare to instances of illness presented in Ibsen and contemporary West African and British drama: from the self-blinding of Oedipus to the actual suicide of the dramatist Sarah Kane
The studies are incisive and wield the diagnostic tools of contemporary psychiatry to reveal what is systemic in behaviour that once might have been viewed as particular or anecdotal
Psychiatry brings insights, and a lexicon that was unavailable to playwrights of old, who, for their own purposes, were drawn to human experiences of collapse and dissociation
Summary
Professor Oyebode’s study of madness in the theatre moves on a ‘trajectory’ from Classical tragedy and comedy through Shakespeare to instances of illness presented in Ibsen and contemporary West African and British drama: from the self-blinding of Oedipus to the actual suicide of the dramatist Sarah Kane. Oyebode uses the notion of ‘madness’, necessarily a blunt instrument, to suggest the depths which the dramatist probes in search of the forms which integrate life forces into the elements of being and personality. The relationship of drama to the particular instances Oyebode discusses is sometimes questionable.
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