After 400 years a female playwright will have a work performed at the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. Bedlam, Nell Leyshon’s fictional portrait of the London hospital, Bethlem, for the insane, set during the mid-18th century gin epidemic.
Leyshon said it is a “great privilege” to be the first woman to have a play staged at the Globe. “It’s a challenge and I’m quite aware of the fact,” she said. “I have to be honest, it fed my writing; I thought I can’t write a flabby play. I wanted to prove that women can do conflict, that they can write big structures, big stories because I’ve heard it too many times that women aren’t as good at that.”
Bedlam is expected to be a rowdy affair portraying a period when the poor were almost permanently drunk. Workers accustomed to drinking 12 pints of beer or cider a day were now drinking pints of gin, flavoured to make it more palatable.
The hospital was a horrible place run by people who had no understanding of mental illness. When the inmates were not shackled or being forced to vomit or being bled with leeches, they were being goaded by members of the public who paid for Sunday entry. “It became the really smart thing to do,” said Leyshon, “to look at the mad. And they sold you sticks that you could poke them with.”
Leyshon is the first known woman to have her work performed at the Globe but, to be fair to the theatre, it was closed for many years. It opened in 1599 and presented many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, but it was closed by the Puritans in 1642 and demolished two years later. The actor Sam Wanamaker established the Globe Trust in 1970, and in 1997 performances began once more at the reconstructed theatre.
