Batshit review – grandma’s moving story highlights pathologisation of women’s mental health

Mrs Gwen Couper is having “delusions” about leaving her marital home. Her medical records show that she lost a baby only a few days after birth and now “she has become more difficult to live with”. For that, she’s incarcerated in Heathcote, a psychiatric hospital in Western Australia.

Gwen was Leah Shelton’s grandma, and the inspiration for Batshit, a one-woman show about “the pathologisation of women’s mental health”. Directed by Ursula Martinez, legend of provocative cross-genre shows, Batshit debuted in Australia in 2022.

We open with Shelton as Gwen in a Stepford Wives get-up: ball gown, gloves, heels, perfect hair and makeup. And a gag. She sings Judy Garland’s Get Happy. She dances around a mid-century TV and chaise longue that sit on institutional white tiles, one comically extended arm gripping an axe.

The play fuses Shelton’s magnetic performance with serious research, through clownish physical sequences, audio recordings of Shelton’s mum’s memories, patient case notes and educational videos. The TV regularly flickers into life. It shows historic vox pops of Australians debating the life of housewives, a court official reading out Amber Heard’s histrionic personality disorder diagnosis, Shelton challenging people to name “crazy” celebrities or find a male equivalent to “crazy bitch”. Sometimes it’s a tool of surveillance.

Shelton teases out threads that connect 1960s Gwen to us today. She becomes doctor and we become patients in an effective segment on the shiftiness of diagnostic criteria. She reads out moving letters to her grandma and pays fierce tribute to famous women who met similar fates. Two years out from the show’s premiere, the celebrity focus and the fact these topics have now been discussed widely in the context of Heard and Britney Spears, slightly dilute the emotional heft.

Gwen’s story is the heart and the most compelling strand. The plain facts are shocking. In Heathcote, she’s medicated and electro-convulsed until she’s “well enough to return to married life”. Shelton’s central question still stands: what if being crazy is a sane response to the world around you?

• In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978

• Batshit is at Traverse theatre , Edinburgh, until 25 August
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews