Sarah Kanes Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering

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The first book to focus exclusively on playwright Sarah Kanes approach to mind and mental health; it brings together archival material, healthcare contexts and contemporary performances. As such, it offers an important re-evaluation of Kanes oeuvre, revealing the relationship between theatre and mind, which lies at the heart of her theatrical project. Drawing on performance theory, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, this book argues that Kanes innovations generated a dramaturgy of psychic life, which re-shape the encounter between stage and audience. It uses previously unseen archival material and contemporary productions to uncover the mechanics of this innovative theatre practice. Through a radically open-ended approach to dramaturgy, Kanes works offer urgent insights into mental suffering that take us beyond traditional discourses of empathy and mental health and into a profound rethinking of theatre as a mode of thought. It makes a case for the relevance of Kanes work to understandings of contemporary diagnostic categories and places it in urgent debates about mental health in the medical humanities.

Author Bio

Leah Sidi is Lecturer in Health Humanities at University College London, UK. Her research focus is on contemporary theatre and mental health, with a special focus on feminist theatre and psychoanalysis. She has been the recipient of the Feminist Review Archive Award and a Wellcome/ISSF postdoctoral award at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She has published in Performance Research and is a regular contributor to the Institute for Medical Humanities The Polyphony.