There is something theatrical about medicine. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that “the medical profession always conceived its practice as a spectacle in itself, drawing from the resources of spectacularity to showcase the therapeutic power in a more efficient way”[1]. And there is something medical about theater, whether it is because medicine “has always been a favorite subject in the […] repertoire”[2], or because “theater theoreticians, playwrights and stage practitioners alike have long appropriated the medical discourse, and exploited [the glossary of] pathologies and symptoms as a way to […] conceive the performing arts”[3] (the most famous example of that being the Aristotelian catharsis).
It should come as no surprise, then, to observe in the French theatrical landscape a very strong trend, that consists in linking playwrights with medical institutions through what is called immersions programs (often supplemented by interviews with patients and/or caregivers). After all, “the act of caring has something to do with the act of writing”: according to playwright Gwendoline Soublin, both involve “observing others, taking care of their words and lives, trying to restore [something] and give shape [to it]”[4]. But this trend is too significant not to question it.
In this article, I will outline the issues that such a tendency seems to raise. I will be basing my reflections on a corpus of five plays that all fit this model, yet are completely different from one another. Summaries of these plays can be found at the end of the article. I will also draw on interviews I conducted with some of their writers.
I – INVOLVEMENT
How does a playwright come into contact with the medical world? It may happen that they are familiar with this milieu through another side of their professional life (play D). But more often, it is through the commission from a theater (play C) or a theater company (play B). And it is indeed not surprising that “medical” plays are being commissioned in the post-Covid context, after a long-term crisis which affected the performing arts very violently[5], raising the question of their “usefulness” to society, while the usefulness of caregivers was, conversely, reassessed in a spectacular (but ephemeral) fashion. But this extreme topicality should not, however, lead us to believe that playwrights are merely attuning to a zeitgeist: Many of them have a deep-rooted connection with illness and care, which they formulate only when asked explicitly about it. For instance, Julie Rossello-Rochet (play B) confides that she “has lived among caregivers since childhood”[6], while Gwendoline Soublin (play C) evokes her “mother, who was a personal care assistant, [her] aunt, who was a nurse, [and her] grandmother, who worked as a cleaner in a hospital”[7]. In other cases, playwrights have frequented this environment themselves, either as caregivers (play D), as patients (play E), or as parents of a hospitalized child (play A). Thus, we mustn’t overlook the fact that what appears as (and, in fact, is) a trend also stems from personal, intimate experiences that took flesh in the playwright themselves, or in people they cared for, or who cared for them.
II – VIEWPOINT
The theme of care is vast. And depending on the medical institutions in which the playwrights immerse, the duration of this immersion and the interlocutors with whom they were brought into contact, the resulting plays will offer completely different points of view on the subject. For example, playwright Daniela Labbé-Cabrera (play A) spent six days and nights at her son’s bedside in a cardiac intensive care unit, forging powerful bonds with caregivers in a context of emotional distress. Thus, the focus of her text is put on the characters of anxious parents, and the atmosphere of mutual support – which would seem almost unrealistic to someone who hasn’t experienced it – can be felt throughout. She later came back to the hospital in question, asking to interview staff members and collecting 18 testimonies during a year-long investigation; those testimonies are scattered through the play, in the form of rewritten discussions between the mother’s character and several caregivers. As for Vincent Écrepont (play E), he interviewed a substantial number of patients (between one and three patients per session, 120 sessions in all over a two-year period) treated in the oncology departments of two different hospitals. It is hardly surprising, then, that his play focuses on the experience of hospitalization. But the context of the immersion is not the only thing that influences the play’s viewpoint; to think so would diminish the importance of the writer’s work. Take, for instance, two drastically different texts (plays B and C). Play B is practically a documentary, laying out various medical professions in a particularly technical fashion, and highlighting their precariousness due to lack of financial and human resources. This political perspective might be explained by the fact that, prior to writing her play, Julie Rossello-Rochet was already sensitive to caregivers’ working conditions: she had participated in the “Nuit Debout” movement (2016) and followed their protests in autumn 2019. In contrast, play C is resolutely poem-like: the text offers a highly sensitive approach, focusing on intimate sensations and ephemeral memories, and providing fragmentary thoughts on life and loss. The reason for this is surely that Gwendoline Soublin favored a more metaphysical approach in her writing, considering the subject of care as a means of “asking unanswerable questions”[8].
III – LANGUAGE
The vocabulary of care is not that of everyday life. And not everyone is familiar with peritoneal carcinosis, BTT shunt, dyspnea or cisplatin. These plays have the benefit of vulgarizing a world that is often little-known to the regular audience. And depending on the author’s approach, the care vocabulary can be conveyed in a more or less pedagogical way. In some cases (play B), the overflowing technical terms are not defined as the play goes[9]. This opacity may well mirror the playwright’s own immersion in medical institutions, when caretakers didn’t always have time to explain what they were doing, and she had to transcribe what she heard phonetically before checking it at home[10]. Thus, the reader/spectator experiences a very powerful real-life effect, but may also be deterred by such hermeticism. However, the interest of such an opacity could be to echo the very experience of a patient in the hospital environment: indeed, this technical and efficient language is well known by the caregivers, but not often to sick persons, which can be the cause for a violent objectification of their self:
“[…] what really pisses me off is when these doctors tell you that the hypoechoic tissue nodule within your left parenchyma requires a second orchiectomy. […] Too many things at once, too much information, too many questions […] …”[11] (Play E)
At the other end of the spectrum (play C and D), a highly poetic language, free of any technicalities, can also be found. And it obviously corresponds to plays that reject a documentary (or even realistic) perspective on care, preferring to evoke it in a fragmentary and sensitive way – such as David Léon’s:
“I hold out my hand, he sprays it, I smell it, brings back a memory, arms, torso, neck, the sensation of a desire, a reminiscence. I smell again and I tell him that yes, his perfume smells good.”[12] (Play D)
IV – AUTHORSHIP
When you are immersed in a powerful real-life context such as the hospital, you hear words that sound so surreal that they already belong in fiction. Those words seem to call out to be transcribed in extenso. Plays that spring from immersions in medical institutions therefore question their status. Will they be transcribed (play D and, to some extent, play B)? Reformulated (plays A, B and E)? Completely rewritten (play C)? And is this complex question a private matter between the playwright and their interlocutors – as any steps prior to artistic creation do not necessarily have to be shared with the public? Or is it the playwrights’ prerogative – freeing themselves from these considerations in the name of the all-powerful literary creation? Furthermore, could it be considered a theft or a gift to draw lines from someone’s words in order to put them into a work of art? Vincent Écrepont’s method is exemplary in this regard: fearing that he would “betray the patients after the gift of their words”[13], he first had them read their testimony for validation. Then, he clearly announced (and made sure it was agreed upon) that he would be “twisting” whatever had “resonated in him” in order to “create his five characters based on the stages of life and illness”[14] (and not primarily on their words). More broadly, these plays raise the question of the place of medicine and care – with all their rawness and realness – in art. This issue fascinates David Léon (play D), whose play presents itself as a patchwork of reported words from his patients, intertwined with such an aesthetic reflection:
“I always thought that, one day, I’d have to write about this gap. Between the work I do as an educator, which is absolutely rooted in real, everyday life, and the work of literature, which is trapped in the filter of culture. And I’ve always thought: you’ll never make it.”[15]
On the one hand, it may seem indecent to freeze the fragile matter of reality in an institutional form whose audience is globally privileged (and mainly not constituted by the people who are the subject of those plays). On the other hand, it seems meaningful to attribute concrete voices and faces (even if it is an actor’s face and a playwright’s text) to a subject that had not been sufficiently represented on stage until now.
Ultimately, isn’t the question raised by this trend that of the playwright’s mission in our society? Must they bear witness to reality, with all its complexity and wounds? And is it their responsibility to mend it?
[1] Florence Filippi and Julie de Faramond, “Introduction”, in Florence Filippi and Julie de Faramond (dir.), Théâtre et médecine : de l’exhibition spectaculaire de la médecine à l’analyse clinique du théâtre [Theater and Medicine: From the Spectacular Exhibition of Medicine to the Clinical Analysis of Theater], Épistémocritique, collection « Actes de colloque », 2016, p. 9.
[2] Florence Filippi, “Foreword”, in Florence Filippi and Julie de Faramond (dir.), Théâtre et médecine : de l’exhibition spectaculaire de la médecine à l’analyse clinique du théâtre, op. cit., p. 6.
[3] Florence Filippi and Julie de Faramond, “Introduction”, in Florence Filippi and Julie de Faramond (dir.), Théâtre et médecine : de l’exhibition spectaculaire de la médecine à l’analyse clinique du théâtre, op. cit., p. 9.
[4] Interview with playwright Gwendoline Soublin, conducted on February 29th, 2024.
[5] Study carried out in July 2020 by the French Ministry of Culture on the disastrous impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the cultural sector, and on the performing arts in particular.
[6] Interview with playwright Julie Rossello-Rochet, conducted on March 6th, 2024.
[7] Interview with playwright Gwendoline Soublin, conducted on February 29th, 2024.
[8] Id.
[9] A glossary is included at the end of the book, but it is not very practical to consult it while reading.
[10] Interview with playwright Julie Rossello-Rochet.
[11] Vincent Écrepont, La chambre 100, ALNA Éditeur, 2006, pp. 40-41.
[12] David Léon, Toutes ces voix, Espace 34, 2020, p. 9.
[13] Interview with playwright Vincent Écrepont, conducted on March 6th, 2024.
[14] Id.
[15] David Léon, Toutes ces voix, op. cit., p. 9.
Cover Picture by Pauline Picot
Play A – Daniela Labbé Cabrera, Cœur Poumon [Heart Lung], 2023, as yet unpublished. After setting the scene in a peaceful present time, Coeur Poumon goes back to following the harrowing journey of two parents as they go through the hospitalization of their newborn baby in an intensive care unit. The play interweaves these very distressing moments from the past (albeit full of human warmth between the caregivers and the families) with the mother’s return to the scene, as she interviews various members of the hospital’s staff in order to get other perspectives on what they all experienced.
Play B – Julie Rossello Rochet, Entre ses mains [In Their Hands], Éditions Théâtrales, 2023. Entre ses mains is a well-documented look at the French public hospital system, deprived of financial and human resources by successive governments. Teeming with highly technical vocabulary (equipment, substances, care gestures, etc.), the play features a vast gallery of briefly sketched out characters (nurses, stretcher-bearers, human resources managers, medical interns, etc.), all caught up in the whirlwind of permanent urgency.
Play C – Gwendoline Soublin, Depuis mon corps chaud [From My Warm Body], Espaces 34, 2022. Depuis mon corps chaud begins as the poetic monologue of someone announcing their departure (why? where?). Elliptical and mysterious, the first half of the text is filled with simple and evocative images of this person’s life, summoning through language all that will disappear with them, and all that will remain. The second part of the text clarifies the situation: the monologue of a very young care assistant reveals, with crudity and tenderness, that the first character – her patient – died of throat cancer, as she shares her own thoughts on care, life and death.
Play D – David Léon, Toutes ces voix [All Those Voices], Espace 34, 2020. Toutes ces voix offers a glimpse of the psychiatric hospital, where the author seems to have long worked as an educator. In the form of a patchwork of reflections and words spoken by his patients, the play pinpoints the hypocritical distinction between the delusional imagination of the schizophrenic (who would “hear voices”) and the sanctified imagination of the playwright (who also, in another way, draws voices from nothingness). It allows the playwright to question his own ambiguous place (as a writer and educator) as well, while reflecting on the powerlessness of literature to fully convey the rawness and vulnerability of reality.
Play E – Vincent Écrepont, La chambre 100 [Room 100], ALNA Éditeur, 2006. La chambre 100 features five figures (e.g. “the old man” or “the young girl”) who have been or are still affected by an illness, and who share their experiences of hospitalization at different stages of their lives and illnesses: diagnosis, treatment, remission, etc. This polyphony reveals the dehumanization from which these patients suffer through the dispossession of their (monitored and measured) bodies.
