Batsh*t at the Traverse Theatre – Edinburgh Fringe review

Leah Shelton is furious. You can tell from the moment the Australian performer, wielding a fake axe attached to an elongated arm, enters onto the intimate stage in the Traverse Theatre studio – some gripping figure of psychological disturbance and pathological terror.

The reason why? Decades upon decades of female mental ill-health being misdiagnosed, mistreated or simply maligned. Shelton tells the story of her own grandmother, Gwen, medicated and locked up due to her unruly behaviour and the (naturally male-led) institutions responsible for her experiences. There’s a brutal, unquenchable sense of injustice coursing throughout Shelton’s tale – the way that an individual is let down at almost every single turn – by family, friends and the medical profession. One harrowing transcription comes where it falls to the husband to describe the patient as ‘much improved’ after incessant courses of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). The implications are stark: men were electrocuting their wives into submission.

Casting her net further, Shelton highlights how culture and language perpetuate these ‘mad woman’ stereotypes – the misconception around the location of the uterus or the ‘craziness’ of female figures that have become swaddled in infamy – even right the way up to Brittany Spears or Amber Heard. Words matter when medical opinion is based on misogynistic assumption. A passage of audience interaction throws the fallibility of diagnoses into the spotlight.

Ursula Martinez’s tech-heavy production, presented on a sterile white-tiled set, almost feels too clinical, going through the motions of demonstrating this intensely catastrophic misdiagnoses without foregrounding the true emotional weight of this individual tragedy. It also felt fractionally too short – perhaps an extra ten or twenty minutes would really finesse the harrowing tale’s bite.