L’Indiscipline – Voila! Theatre Festival / Theatro Technis, London

Threepenny Collective mine a dark story from history in L’Indiscipline, making its English-language debut as part of Voila! Theatre Festival.

Content warning: discusses historic treatment of mental illness, including outdated practices and terms.

L’Indiscipline

Sometimes you don’t have to depart too far from reality to conjure up a story that seems stranger than fiction. That’s what Threepenny Collective have done with L’Indiscipline, an hour-long theatrical work that centres on psychologist Jean-Marie Charcot and his Tuesday Lectures.

Like this work which we saw recently, L’Indiscipline takes the form of one of these lectures. A neat device that immediately puts us in a different relationship to the material as an audience. Charcot’s Tuesday Lectures took place at the Salpêtrière Hospital, which is sort of like Paris’s version of Bethlem Hospital. Charcot had established a pioneering neurology department there, and regularly demonstrated psychiatric conditions to audiences which included people like Sigmund Freud and Edgar Degas. Or Truby King, for my fellow New Zealanders. The patients most associated with these demonstrations are Louise Augustine Glaizes and Marie “Blanche” Wittman, both ‘hysterics’. You can see a contemporary painting of a demonstration involving Wittman here.

The lecture we witness, however, is not quite like the others. Writers Ariel de la Garza Davidoff, Pierre Albert Ollivier, and Michal Vojtech have melded historic research with ‘theatrical experimentation’. In doing so, they’ve come up with somethinga bit like a Whodunnit. After a confident opening by Charcot (Raphael Ruiz), we learn, from his assistant Georges Gilles de la Tourette (yes, the one who described Tourette’s Syndrome, played by Fabio Goutet) that Louise is missing. Charcot and de la Tourette improvise with other patients – Wittman (Daniela Hirsch), Rose Kemper (Sacha Augeard) and Men (Clément Jarrige) – demonstrating the power of hypnosis through a protracted and exploitative scenario. We sort of solve the mystery by the end, before learning about the real fates of the characters in a slide show using a historic projector.

We’re All Mad Here

The authors and Threepenny Collective seem to be going for something avant-garde, perhaps Brechtian, with L’Indiscipline. Emotions are certainly heightened and not just amongst the patients. It’s actually Charcot who most often ends up jumping up and down in a rage. This is successful in blurring the boundaries between sanity and illness. But is a lot to sustain over the course of an hour. The frenetic energy, thrust stage and sometimes strong accents also mean some lines are lost. These two factors together impacted, for me, the effectiveness of the satirical humour.

What I do think is successful is setting the play up in a way that we are complicit in a performative type of illness and diagnosis that feels very uncomfortable today. It’s not too far away from the visitors who paid to see the inmates at Bethlem Hospital as a form of entertainment, just with a veneer of scientific enquiry. And if we were to forget our role as voyeurs, Kemper’s eerie prescience brings us straight back to it. The lack of care for the patients, physical manhandling, and use of supposedly therapeutic techniques to entertain rather than heal both remind us that the treatment of mental illness has come a long way, and that it is rooted in a system of control and repression.

I would have been interested to see L’Indiscipline in its original French. I think there’s something quite Gallic about the theatrical style here that didn’t quite translate in English. But it’s a very effective format for bringing to life this buried story from medical history, and experimenting with theatrical forms and storytelling. Exposure to international work like this is a great reason to check out the Voila! Theatre Festival listings. You never quite know what you will find!

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3/5

L’Indiscipline was on as part of Voila! Theatre Festival on 14 and 15 November 2025 only. The festival continues until 23 November: find out more here.