She’s off her trolley. Nuttier than a fruitcake. A couple of kangaroos loose in the top paddock. She’s ‘crazy’. 

For years women have been locked up, medicated, pathologized and silenced with the label ‘crazy’. Challenging these preconceptions, acclaimed Australian performer Leah Shelton makes her Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut with her solo show BATSHIT, directed by Ursula Martinez. Bianca Mastrominico was there for Total Theatre Magazine.  

Crossing the stage area of Traverse 2 to reach my seat for BATSHIT, I am treading softly on the set, taking in the imposing, tile-patterned white screen which flows from the back wall of the stage onto the floor area, neatly delimiting the performance space.

The feeling is of entering a gigantic bathroom, in which sit a purpose-built, old-fashioned television, and a chaise longue with boxes underneath. On the right side of this installation, discretely placed against a black wall, is a mic on a stand, which will be brought onstage at various times in order to engage with the audience through forced jokes and raw storytelling.

As I sit and observe, the set design (by Leah Shelton with Freddy Komp) appears slightly off-centre, exaggerated, clinical yet weirdly familiar, surreal but with a vintage and reassuring vibe to it. Then, when darkness engulfs my eyes and a very dim glow follows, I perceive a figure crawling on the floor in front of the television and something in this bodily form doesn’t really add up. An other-than-human shape, wrapped in a fluffy and floating fabric, with appendages which are just too long. There is an unidentifiable object attached to one part of this alien creature’s limbs, which keeps swishing around with each movement they make.

While my brain is trying to make sense of what my retina can grasp, I am experiencing the vision as an unsettling ‘mistake’, similar to an AI hallucination, the kind of algorithm-driven body dysmorphia which makes you question your own perceptions and the subtle feeling of abjection that comes with them. When a loud sharp sound strikes and the lights brighten, we are confronted with the full reveal of a figure standing tall in front of us. They are awkwardly looking and smiling in stillness, and could be equally identified as a woman, a drag queen, or perhaps even a non-human, robotic entity with a feminine allure.

The figure wears a knee-length ballroom-style gown in tones of green and sparkling gold with pristine matching green and shiny dance shoes. They exhibit blonde curly hair and heavy doll-like make-up. Their arms are enveloped in long green gloves and one arm is definitely longer than the other, ending with a hand holding a toy axe.

This is the opening scene of BATSHIT which, without preamble, starts toying with our perception of ‘otherness’, our interpretation and judgment of bodies and identities, filtered by our own perspective, shaped by our personal associations and affected by our own biases and background.

Devised by acclaimed Australian performer Leah Shelton and directed by Olivier award-winning performance artist Ursula Martinez, the show is the culmination of a decade-long collaboration between the two artists. Shelton’s accomplished performance and Martinez’s uncompromising directorial vision conjure a dystopian storytelling centred around the performer’s family history which, as the programme states, ‘explores the stigmatisation of women’s mental health – the myths, fantasies and fears that keep women compliant and the systems that let us down’.

The dramaturgy revolves around the story of Shelton’s grandmother, Gwen, who was incarcerated at Heathcote hospital in Perth, Australia, in 1963, and given a cocktail of medication and ECT treatment without her consent.

Eventually we come to understand that the weird image of a heavily made-up blonde with a long arm and a plastic axe is a theatrical rendition of Gwen’s psychological states through which the performer/granddaughter, both symbolically and symbiotically, re-enact her grandmother’s most difficult moments in life. We learn from Shelton that these followed a major nervous breakdown, when in a spurt of rage Gwen – a Methodist and a housewife – destroyed the family television with an axe. 

There is something profoundly strange in the appearance and behaviour of Shelton as Gwen – for example, in the showing off of big and clumsy dance steps executed as if the blonde figure were a puppet instructed from within to move ‘without their consent’ – a behaviour akin to the grandmother’s experience of mental health issues and subsequent hospitalisation.

This link is reinforced by the white harness that the performer holds in the mouth, which impedes her speech when she tries to communicate with us, telling childish jokes at the mic to warm us up; recorded audience laughs layered upon Shelton’s own forced laughing. Ten minutes into the show and this image alone raises the bar of what could be a fairly conventional comedic routine into a contrived – and painful to watch – spectacle of intellectual oppression and emotional suppression, which are core themes in the performance.

Structurally, the first part of the work is about Shelton embodying her grandmother’s story. The fluffy ballroom dress is eventually discarded for a white coat which the performer – still in the curly blonde wig and make-up though now with bare feet – wears back-to-front to become both a male doctor figure and a female patient, alternating between the two personas.

At some point Shelton’s own narrating voice disassociates from her actions. While her recorded voice continues to deliver factual information about Gwen’s medical reports, her physicality shows us the effects of medication and ETC treatment.

This is how BATSHIT boldly plunges into a multilayered examination of intergenerational trauma, from a feminist perspective. Shelton/Martinez’s performance text also threads in the vox populi through street interviews from the black-and-white era of television in which a male interviewer asks women and men of various ages if Australian housewives are happy. Ironically, in the context of the performance montage the answers we hear end up bringing to the forefront women’s internalised patriarchy and normalised delusional mechanisms of coping with systemic oppression and gender inequality.

The use of projected captions – as seen previously in other shows directed by Martinez – is not only an inclusive technical mechanism but becomes a dramaturgical tool which amplifies the voiceover and visualises the text for the audience. Memorable and surprising is also when Shelton, lip-syncing the male doctor’s voice, moves around the auditorium interviewing individual audience members with the mic and asking open-ended questions – some banal, some mildly intrusive – which nevertheless require honest and personal answers. This scene is juxtaposed with the TV broadcast of an old programme in which a middle-aged white man (allegedly an expert) mansplains how to recognise the signs of hysteria in women. When the audience’s answers to Shelton’s questions are typed in real time on the screen wall and we can read them as captions, they not only become part of the dramaturgy but most importantly they end up demonstrating that so-called hysterical attributes of women are actually common emotional states belonging to anyone regardless and beyond gender. We laugh (bitterly) at this recognition as the man on the TV continues with what now clearly appears as an absurdist indoctrination.

As an elaboration of grief – visually and viscerally – the work questions hysteria as a psychological disorder connected with the suppression of healthy emotions. In BATSHIT we are skilfully drawn into a performance which dissects and dismantles body politics and patriarchal structures through exposing their impact on women’s wellbeing. Unmasking hysteria as a controversial and contested medical term, as well as a social fabrication and a stigma imposed on women to exercise control over their body/minds is a strong theme which is developed throughout the performance.

After interviewing the audience, Shelton takes the wig off and sits quietly on the floor to watch a black-and-white live feed of herself on TV, as if re-watching a scene from the past. When the performer gets up and exits the stage there is some respite for the audience to reflect and breathe, while we are left to watch the broadcasting of Shelton/Gwen in white coat doing street interviews in search of more contemporary and updated definitions of hysteria. Although this section could perhaps be shorter, it gives us the chance to witness and ponder upon contemporary problematic and unresolved discussions surrounding gender politics and their affect on women.

When Shelton returns on stage dressed in her own clothes and without the heavy make-up, a vulnerable storytelling at the mic begins to unfold, which brings back the story of the axe. Eventually, a real one is brought on stage and leant against the mic stand.

If Gwen was crazy, then a lot of other women were too, which gives Shelton and Martinez the hook to aptly end the show with the declamation of a long list of names of women who shook conventions and rebelled against patriarchal supremacy, facing the stigmatisation of being labelled as mad in order to break free and be who they are/were in the world. Recapping on the grotesque beginning of the show, in an act of tribute to her grandmother and all women deemed crazy, Shelton’s simulates smashing the TV with the axe, embodying one more time the violence, despair, deep need for love, value and self-recognition which led Gwen to destroy the TV – an object which in the 1960s brought news of wars, boosted consumerism with its adverts, influenced opinions, and became a powerful political tool in the Debordian society of spectacle.

While Shelton’s actions echo the gravity of Gwen’s rage, on stage the granddaughter’s gesture is controlled, contained and decided. It symbolically closes the circle, becoming a cathartic statement of emancipation and an assertive feminist requiem to her female ancestors.

At the end of the show, in an enthusiastic blurring of art and life, Shelton asks us to feature with her in a selfie for her Mum’s 80th birthday and we all shout: ‘Happy 80th Birthday, Mum!’ 

At the heart of the Fringe, the personal continues to be unapologetically political.

Featured image (top) Leah Shelton: BATSHIT. Photo Pia Johnson

QuietRiot / Leah Shelton: BATSHIT played at Traverse Theatre, 1-25 August 2024, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe www.edfringe.com  

For full details of Traverse Theatre’s year-round programme, see www.traverse.co.uk