Wrecks Emotional and Unemotional

Abstract

In August 2018, Bridget Escolme watched approximately 25 performances with mental health themes at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Framed by Sara Ahmed's theorisation of cultural histories of taste, and with a focus on scenographies of wreckage, Escolme's paper describes three performances in the Traverse Theatre's festival programme, all of which exhibited elements of theatrical restraint in their depictions of lives 'wrecked' by the emotional effects/affects of class division, violent crime and mental ill health. She then moves to autobiographical works by emerging performers about their own mental health histories; by a performer who was raped by her own partner and who filmed male strangers talking to her in their home environments; and a performance by health service users and workers enacting and recounting past encounters with the NHS. These were, in a range of ways, deliberately messy performances about social and emotional wreckage, which placed audiences in precarious positions of witnessing. They inhabited live theatrical and filmed space in a range of deliberately untidy ways and, to cite a reviewer of one of the performances, 'subvert[ed] the model of what we often think of as good theatre'. Escolme's paper explores the cultural stereotype of the 'emotional wreck' as it was staged and interrogated in these performances and examines the challenges to her own notions of artistic taste and ethical audiencing which they posed.