Sound and fury

The invited guest author of this post is Christopher Shinn, the head of playwriting at the New School for Drama. His 2008 play "Now or Later" (shortlisted for the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play) will receive its American premiere at the Huntington Theatre this autumn, and his new play "Teddy Ferrara" will premiere at the Goodman Theatre in early 2013.

THIS is a famous story, which also happens to be true: one night when Daniel Day-Lewis played Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989, he went onstage and instead of seeing the ghost of Hamlet's father, he saw the ghost of his own late father. He walked off in the middle of the performance and not only did not return to the stage that night—he never performed in a play again.

It is this kind of experience—which might be described as a “midway” point between accessing mad feelings in the service of art and becoming mad—that the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has explored in his work. He has argued that the madness we see represented in the theatre is not the same thing as the madness we see on the street or in the mental hospital. What the theatre requires is a madness that does not go too far, and yet goes far enough to be felt convincing. While the boundary between a “sane” madness and a “mad” madness may be fuzzy, it is essential for the effectiveness of art to remain on the side of sanity.

My experience as a playwright makes me sympathetic to Mr Phillips's ideas. When I write a play, I try to access something in me that feels beyond my control, a traumatic inner space where painful feelings and images of loss, longing and rage lie in wait. When this process becomes unbearable—that is, when I begin to feel “mad”—I haul myself to the computer and begin to write until I'm depleted.

It is the difficulty of this process—the reluctance of that inner space to open up and, once it does, the reluctance I feel to experience and translate it—which makes me agree with Mr Phillips's claim that, “the more disturbing something is, the more we defend against it.” If the writing is easy, I know it's not very deep; if it's hard I know I'm getting somewhere.

Is my process an example of the artistic ideal for representing difficult and frightening aspects of human experience? According to Mr Phillips, yes. My process approaches something mad, but doesn't get lost in it. I am taking my time, gingerly moving towards terrifying territory. I get there eventually, then leave before I become too overwhelmed. By keeping this safe distance, I not only protect myself but give the audience the ideal distance from which to explore this disturbing landscape. Even if it is exploring insane aspects of experience, my work itself remains sane, and therefore comprehensible, unlike the mental patient's utterings.

But I can't help but wonder if Mr Phillips is playing it a little safe in his central idea about the ideal distance for art to take from madness. Is it possible that his point of view is a defence designed to protect us from more fully confronting the things that disturb us?

In support of Mr Phillips's sense that artists and audiences alike require this distance, I remember a writing teacher, when I was an undergraduate, who tried to explain to me why fight choreography onstage often looks fake. “If you were to think that someone onstage had actually slapped their fellow actor, you'd stop thinking about the character and begin thinking about the poor actor.” The fakery, in other words, was intentional. This is a more concrete version of Mr Phillips's point that once madness crosses the line from the representational to the actual, we can no longer enjoy the performance.

But where is that line when we are in the realm not of physical violence but of psychic pain? Does conveying madness on stage require the sanitised distance and control that physical violence does? My experience with my play "Dying City" deepened the complexity of this question for me—and ultimately, I believe, suggests a more ambiguous answer than Mr Phillips's ideas about not getting too close to true madness.

I began writing the play in the summer of 2005, having thought about it for a year or so. Shaken by the scandal of Abu Ghraib, I felt that I needed to explore sexuality, trauma and violence in myself. I believed this personal approach might resonate widely in a culture that was confronting (or failing to confront) what those horrible photographs suggested about us and our society.

In the course of writing the play, which deals with sexuality as an inherently destructive force, I became highly anxious. The anxiety sprang from rage-fuelled fantasies—imagining myself as a soldier, killing people and feeling powerful in my violence towards both enemies and women. At a certain point in the writing, my heart-rate became elevated and didn't go down. Whether I was lying in bed, rewriting my play, teaching my playwriting class or having coffee with a friend, my heart pounded away. I thought about going to the emergency room. I was terrified that I might be about to die at any moment. But I waited it out, convinced that the problem wasn't physiological but psychological.

Some weeks later, after my heart-rate did indeed settle and as I was heading into school to teach, a group of students complimented the blonde streak in my otherwise dark-brown hair. I had noticed a little lightening, which I had chalked up to some time in the sun. But when I went to check myself in a mirror I saw a shock of hair that had gone completely blonde. It was so neat and delimited that the sun could have had nothing to do with it. In the days that followed, people kept asking me if I was “dyeing” my hair. After I heard this word a few dozen times, its connection to the word “dying” in my play's title and to my death anxieties while writing finally hit home.

When I finished the play, my symptoms receded and I was fine, until the Royal Court premiered "Dying City" in the spring of 2006 and I was plunged back into myself during the rehearsal process. While I could make it through daytime rehearsals, it is hard to overstate the agony I felt each night at my flat. I passed the hours curled up in a foetal position. My whole body throbbed with a pain that I could feel physically, but which seemed to exist in a wholly psychic realm. It was as if I was about to peer into something so intolerable that my entire being was attacking itself, as if by hurting me it could protect and distract me from facing something more unbearable than the overwhelming pain.

I made it through this experience and maintained my ability to function and interact with others and the world at large. The play was among my best-reviewed, doing well in separate productions in both London and New York—and later all over the world. Yet now that some years have passed, I can look back and see that while the play moves towards deep trauma, it simultaneously moves away from it: a possible-suicide in the play happens offstage; the worst betrayals and most intense sufferings the characters undergo are referred to rather than seen directly; scenes end abruptly at the moment of maximum trauma rather than exploring that agony at greater length. The play is by no means a denial of pain, but something about it is parallel to the suffering I underwent when writing it: things are not always dealt with directly, but tangentially—the heart-rate and the hair colour a kind of displacement to the body from the psyche, the way the pain in the play is mostly kept offstage rather than brought onstage. When we were in rehearsal, I was able to feel the suffering in more psychological than physical terms, but when I had written the play a year before, I was unable to feel these things so directly.

Despite the play's success, I look at it today as a mixed effort. Although in many ways it confronts pain, it also turns away from it—not unlike Mr Day-Lewis encountering his father's ghost onstage and in one moment both facing and fleeing it. (Luckily for writers, we can take breaks when we feel madness approaching. There is no such luxury for an actor mid-performance.)

Where Mr Phillips is right is that if we become truly mad, we are no longer capable of creating art that communicates effectively. Had I “slipped” into psychosis, I wouldn't have been able to write; Mr Day-Lewis clearly felt himself to be on the verge of a madness that would have made it impossible for him to continue performing coherently.

Yet I don't think the goal is to find the right balance between our sanity and our madness, so much as it is to be able to go deeper into our madness with each artistic endeavour. I don't think it's an accident that some of our most valued works put madness front and centre in the most naked and aggressive way: think of Lear's complete psychic collapse as he loses his kingdom, or Quentin Compson's near-incoherence on the day of his suicide in "The Sound and the Fury". These are just two examples of writers who were able to build a psychic strength that allowed them to travel to the weakest, most vulnerable, most terrified and shattered parts of their psyches. One can't find this kind of depth or truth in their early works. These achievements are the result of a lifetime of brave and fearless work—not just the achievement of balance, but of the capacity for relentless pursuit.

Great art isn't just about finding the balance between madness and sanity; it's about pursuing the most powerful madness, but having the strength to not succumb to it.