25 – 27 March
A low, persistent tapping. A dim, clinical gloom. A figure already slightly unmoored. From the outset, The City for Incurable Women places us somewhere between institution and performance space, where the boundaries between treatment and theatre begin to dissolve.
Devised by fish in a dress, written by Helena McBurney and tightly directed by Christina Deinsberger, the piece traces the history of hysteria from ancient theories of the “wandering womb” through to the 19th-century demonstrations at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where women were made to perform their illness for medical audiences. What emerges is not just a history lesson, but a careful unpicking of how authority constructs, displays and controls the female body.
Charlotte McBurney’s solo performance is the engine of the piece. Calm, precise and quietly magnetic, she moves between narrator, patient and physician with impressive control. The stage never feels empty. Bella Kear’s sound design surrounds her with voices, instructions and interruptions, creating a dense, shifting texture that feels at times collaborative, at times invasive. The effect is disorientating in exactly the right way.
The production is frequently very funny. A thread of pop culture references, most unexpectedly Mean Girls, cuts through the material with a wry, knowing edge. These moments are not throwaway gags but carefully placed tonal pivots, allowing the piece to move between satire and something far more unsettling without losing its grip on the audience.
There is a strong sense of research underpinning the work, but it never feels heavy. Instead, historical detail is woven into a fluid, almost associative structure, moving from Hildegard of Bingen to Charcot, from magnets to early vibrators, from diagnosis to rebranding. The timeline accumulates rather than instructs, building a picture of how medical misogyny adapts rather than disappears.
At its most effective, the piece captures the destabilising experience of being defined by someone else’s language. Moments where voices overlap, fracture and compete give a convincing sense of slipping control, of a reality that is constantly being reframed from the outside. It is here that the work lands hardest.
What lingers is the anger beneath the wit. Hysteria may have been renamed, reclassified and supposedly retired, but its logic persists. The show makes that argument without labouring it, trusting the audience to draw the line from past to present.
Inventive, unsettling and sharply executed, The City for Incurable Women is a reminder that diagnosis is never neutral, and that performance, whether medical or theatrical, always serves someone.
★★★★★. Tilly Marshall, 26 March 2026
Photography Credit – Ellis Buckley
