Hysteria

Synopsis

London, 1939. Sigmund Freud, one of the greatest names of the 20th century and the father of psychoanalysis, spends his dying days in Hampstead - in exile from Hitler's Europe. An unexpected visitor in the night throws the certainties of a life's work into doubt and blurs the borders between dreams and reality. When things cannot get any stranger, they do. Why has his Doctor found women's undergarments on the lawn? Is there a naked woman in the house? Was Salvador Dali chasing a swan round the garden? Is he barking mad? Or has everything just degenerated into farce? Contains scenes of an adult nature.

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 3 September 2012

We do like to see people with a rock-solid faith in their own infallibility come a cropper. That’s farce. Of course, it can equally be tragedy. Terry Johnson’s new production of his 1993 play Hysteria about the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud towards the end of his life treads the tightrope between the two genres with nerve-racking skill.

Freud is a sick man, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, living in north-west London as the Second World War belches over the European horizon. Into the consulting-room which he has re-created from those books and artefacts he has managed to salvage from Vienna erupt the surreal painter Salvador Dali, himself persona non grata in Franco’s Spain, and Jessica, a girl with a problem. To be accurate, a whole shelf-full of problems.

All three have their own, highly individual agendas to pursue. So in his own way does Freud’s doctor, the devout Jew Yahuda. From the moment the curtain rises on [Lez ...

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