BATSHIT

NOW TOURING

UK PREMIERE SEASON
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
1-25 August 2024
https://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on/event/batshit-festival-24

‘She’s off her trolley. Nuttier than a fruitcake. A couple of kangaroos loose in the top paddock.’
Women have long been locked up, pathologised and silenced by a simple label – crazy.

BATSHIT is a wildly theatrical and deeply intimate story of female madness. Created by psycho-siren Leah Shelton (AU) and directed by Olivier award-winning Ursula Martinez (UK), this is a requiem for Leah’s grandmother Gwen, who was incarcerated for seeking independence in 1960s Australia.

BATSHIT draws on personal stories, pop psychology and Prozac-laden humour to explore the myths that keep us compliant and the systems that let us down.

TOURING ENQUIRIES
Linda Catalano
linda@quietriot.com.au
au: +61 (0) 418 173 867
uk: +44 (0) 7931 848 083

ARTIST NOTES 

BATSHIT was inspired by my the story of my grandmother Gwen. She was incarcerated at Heathcote Hospital in Perth in 1963, and given a cocktail of drugs and ECT treatment without her consent.

Throughout the process of researching for this show, I uncovered many pages of psychiatric reports from my grandmother's time at Heathcote. The reports were worse than I might have imagined - full of judgemental, condescending, and gendered language from Doctors and Nurses. They consistently imply that she was detained because she wanted to leave her husband - and then deemed “cured” when she returned compliantly back to her husband after treatment.

Things haven’t really changed that much for women since the 1960s. Many women are still labelled with personality disorders, pathologised and medicated, for being angry about oppression and abuse. Women and girls are routinely duped into believing we are mentally ill for having normal and natural reactions to our experiences. We are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, eating disorders and PTSD; and seven times more likely to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. So it’s fair to say it’s a long-standing systemic problem.

This work asks whether we, as a society, are being let down by the medical and psychiatric systems. I hope BATSHIT will resonate with people who have similar stories to tell, and will open up conversations on how we might do things better.