"A bear in the distance, perhaps" : Uncertainty and the Dramatisation of Mental Illness in Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears (2010)

• Main Author: Ayache, Solange
• Other Authors: Voix Anglophones : Littérature et Esthétique (VALE), Sorbonne Université (SU), Institut national supérieur du professorat et de l'éducation - Académie de Paris (INSPÉ Paris), Kasia Zaremba-Byrne (St Mary’s University), Dr. Michelle Paull (St Mary’s University)
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2018
• Subjects: psychiatric realism; In-yer-face theatre; In-yer-head theatre; mental health; mad woman; uncertainty; contemporary British theatre; Mark Haddon; mind; mental space; mindscapes; bipolar personality disorder; theatre studies; drama studies; psychopoetics; stage realism; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; [SHS.LITT]Humanities and Social Sciences/Literature; Haddon; Kay; Arctic
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-04288077

International audience The British stage has been delving into the minds of women suffering from psychological disorders in a number of plays over the past twenty years. If Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (1999) and Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) are among the most well-known - marking a shift, as we could argue, from a theatre ‘in-yer-face’ to a theatre ‘in-yer-head’ - Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears also deserves attention as an instance of what can be called a ‘Theatre of Uncertainty’, along with other plays - such as Simon Stephens’s Heisenberg, for example. In Haddon’s play, Kay, an artist, is bipolar; as she explains that ‘We think there’s only one world. […] But there are so many worlds, aren’t there, one laid over the other’, the chaotic structure of the play becomes a metaphor for her subjective, pathological perceptions and delusions, highlighting our sense of reality as a construct through poetic devices which break with the traditional dramatic linearity of the conventional play. Indeed, instead of providing a chronological, rather deterministic succession of scenes, the drama emerges from a broken alternation of possible scenarios. Exploring ‘the difficulty of coping, on a domestic level, with mental illness’, the contradictory, mixed up scenes that make up Polar Bears invite the reader-spectator to imagine the parallel worlds of an undecidable story, instead of merely registering a given narrative. In providing a structural image of the female character's pathological states as she alternately goes through manic and depressive phases, the play also reflects on the tentative process of its own writing, while encouraging us to put in question our perception of reality as a defined, single object, questioning our freedom of choice and self-determination. Haddon’s piece thus opens a dramatic space which allows for a form of ‘psychopathological realism’ to develop, to use Christina Wald’s expression, and results in a dramaturgy of possibility based on the representation of the ...