THE CITY FOR INCURABLE WOMEN
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★
“an informative and affecting devised piece”
The City for Incurable Women by Fish in a Dress Theatre is a trailblazing dissection of the history of hysteria. This careful solo piece explores and uncovers the murky depths of how women’s mental illness has been and is being exploited.
Solo actor, Charlotte McBurney pulls the audience in by a thread and leads them through centuries of pain and performance of women’s psychological conditions. From the moment she tumbles onto the stage, to her emotional confessional climaxes, McBurney has everyone on side. McBurney takes us on a personal journey of women trying to reckon with the abhorrent nature of lifetimes fraught with medical mistreatment and performs with a sincerity that simply could not be bottled. A particular highlight of her performance is her engaging and (somehow) hilarious Horrible-Histories-esque delivery of different civilisations theories surrounding hysteria. Perfectly balancing the light-hearted and the solemn, McBurney is a performer who can achieve it all by the click of her fingers.
The power of her performance is only amplified by Helena McBurney’s watertight script. The playwright explores the dark history of the Salpêtrière hospital, and its theatrical torment of its patients, with careful delicacy. She precisely weaves the domestic horror and peculiar beauty of small mercies in the life of women kept in the hospital for years, along with the out-of-body surrealism of their dreams, psychosis, and treatments. The poetic doubling back of lines and images, and the metaphorical hinges which the show’s fibre depends on, make for raw and direct tension.
The City for Incurable Women delivers it’s most gut-punching moments through outstanding sound design, by Bella Kear. The creative panning, layering, and disintegrating of rhythmic pop loops and voices as McBurney evokes the very personal memories and “photographs” of women plagued by mistreatment and misunderstanding, hits the target every time. Not a note or voice is out of place, disorienting the audience and the speaker in a beautifully chilling way.
Without giving too much away, one of the few criticisms for the show is its culmination of the language and sound design in its final moments, which become slightly drawn out and almost too melodic for the tone the rest of the performance had set. Generally, the show hits the mark where pauses and beats of tension should rest, but a few moments do drag before snapping back into focus.
The large and expansive pain and emotions bubbling over the pot of the play could be directed more subtly, so as not to cheapen the fantastic pressure of sound and movement earlier explored in the places like the chalk-line yoga sequence. A sequence, it is importance to note, raw enough to bring about tears, and enhanced gorgeously by Christina Deinsberger’s dynamic costume design.
Overall, The City for Incurable Women is an informative and affecting devised piece, pulling together a haunting collage of the past to lament the issues of current treatment and sentiment around mental health and gender.
THE CITY FOR INCURABLE WOMEN
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 25th August 2025 at Upstairs at Pleasance Courtyard
by Molly Knox
Photography by Ellis Buckley
