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When Freud wrote that hysterical symptoms and crises constitute a pantomime of sexual pleasure, he was identifying the way in which an initially psychical affect would pass into bodily expression instead of being verbally spoken about - but he could have been describing Terry Johnson's play Hysteria. The play shifts between serious dialogue and farcical sexual pantomime as Freud's last thoughts, recent memories and suppressed anxieties dictate the action.
Johnson builds on a factually correct meeting between Salvador Dali and Sigmund Freud that took place in July 1938 at Freud's lodgings in Elsworthy Road, and an apparently true incident in which the bewildered surrealist found a bike with a hotwater bottle attached to the saddle in Freud's backyard. The dramatic action is transferred to a brilliant reproduction of Freud's consulting room and today's Freud museum in Maresfield Gardens. The Dali/Freud encounter becomes elaborated through the intervention of a living case history, Jessica, who, as a victim in her own right and the avenging daughter of an abused mother, confronts Freud with his abandonment of the seduction theory.
The play abounds with historical inaccuracies including the implication that Freud is under the effects of the morphine administered by his physician only in September 1939 two days before his death. For, following the injections, the harassed, deathfixated Freud experiences what is hinted to be by the end of the play a recurring guiltridden nightmare. This includes last thoughts about his death and the fate of his sisters left behind in Austria; recent memories on the publication of ‘Moses and Monotheism’, and his own visit to an English theatre farce; and suppressed anxieties about events in 1897 and his shift away from fact in the seduction theory to fantasy and the discovery of infantile sexuality.
The character of Dali (Tim Potter) acts as a foil to the intensity between Jessica and Freud (played by Phoebe Nicholls and Henry Goodman). Dali