We sat down for an exclusive interview with Ariel De la Garza Davidoff. Co-developed by Ariel with Michal Vojtech and Pierre Albert Ollivier, L’Indiscipline is a collaborative response to archival material on Charcot’s lectures and case studies. Their work blends historical research with theatrical experimentation, using satire to interrogate power and performance in medical history.
L’Indiscipline is at Theatro Technis as part of Voila Theatre Festival on 14th and 15th November. Tickets available HERE.
Ariel, L’Indiscipline explores a fascinating and unsettling slice of history. What first drew you to this subject matter and made you want to bring it to the stage?
In 2024 we took a play to the Edinburgh Fringe and we became obsessed with the idea of taking one to the Avignon Off Festival in France, so very soon after we returned home we began looking for ideas. Pierre, our co-writer for this project, was reading a series of arcane medical texts and came across the epidemic of fugues in nineteenth century France. We originally wanted to write something about the anti-semitic tale of the Wondering Jew and how it became a medical topic but we were more and more drawn by the doctors involved and discovered Dr. Charcot and Dr. Tourette. It is difficult to overstate how famous and important Jean Martin Charcot was at the time. He discovered the physical causes of Parkinson’s disease, ALS, MS, and a host of other conditions, to many he is the father of modern neurology. He was also a larger than life figure, he knew everyone that was anyone in France, he had a pet monkey and he was so well known that people would simply address letters to ‘J M Charcot, France’, in full confidence they would reach him.
Every Tuesday Charcot would have a public lesson where he would hypnotise his hysterical patients in front of the luminaries of Paris. His patients, ‘Blanche’ Marie Wittman for instance, became tabloid celebrities, and the experiments were highly theatrical.. We became convinced theatre was the perfect medium for this story. We wanted to put the audience in the same position as Dr Charcot’s audience in the 19th century, with all the absurdity and discomfort that entailed.
The play blends grotesque humour with real historical events. How do you navigate the balance between satire and respect for the suffering of the women at the Salpêtrière asylum?
During the writing process it was imperative to us that we didn’t make fun of the patient’s condition. To us the comedy lays in the absurdity of the situation, our patients are the most lucid characters in the piece. But it was also important to us to show a little bit of the complexity of the issue. It would be a mistake to cast the patients at the Salpêtrière solely as victims of a medical institution seeking to control them, and to cast the doctors merely as sadists with no concern for their patients. Many of the patients were happy to be in the Salpêtrière, they had a debilitating illness with no apparent physical cause, then called hysteria, and although they were dismissed by most people Charcot took their symptoms seriously. Moreover the Salpêtrière was in some ways a very progressive institution, and many of the doctors there campaigned for the humane treatment of patients of mental illness more broadly. Before the Salpêtrière and its doctor’s advocacy the mentally ill were sent to jails or insane asylums like St Anne which were abject places. All the same the hysterics in the Salpêtrière were subject to strange, humiliating experiments. Our approach is to present as much of this strange reality as we can to the public and hopefully allow them a glimpse into the birth of modern psychiatry and the many conflicts that are still, oddly current.
You co-wrote L’Indiscipline with Michal Vojtech and Pierre Albert Ollivier. What was that collaborative writing process like? How did the three of you shape the tone and vision of the piece together?
It was a very exciting process. As I said earlier Pierre had the first idea and then we began bouncing ideas back and forth between the three of us until any kind of individual authorship dissolved into a rolling boil. The three of us stayed in Pierre’s tiny Parisian apartment and over about two weeks wrote and re-wrote the play until we felt like it was working. We were nearly done with the play when we went down to Avignon to visit the theatre who had taken a big chance with us since we had never performed the play before. We were sitting in a cafe eagerly awaiting dinner at Pierre’s family home when we realised something was off. The ending wasn’t quite landing so we re-wrote most of the play in the next few days to clarify Charcot’s motivations. The process was very collaborative, ideas were pouring out and it madefor a very exciting period.
The play had its world premiere at the Avignon OFF Festival earlier this year. What was that experience like, and how did audiences there respond to the piece?
Putting on a play in another country is a mad endeavour. We packed a van in London and over the next two days drove down to Avignon. The closer we got the hotter and dryer it became. The festival was wonderful, Avignon comes to life during that month, even more than in Edinburgh every available space becomes a theatre. We had previewed in the wonderful Czech Center in Paris a week earlier but when we arrived to La Luna, our gracious theatre-home for the month, the space was completely different and it took a performance or two to get into the swing of things.
As with any festival the performance is just a tiny part, the biggest activity is getting people to come see that performance. So we joined in on the tradition of performing in the street. Our troupe would stage hypnotisms, once or twice even getting a policeman called over to check it was act, a badge our actors wore proudly.
Audiences reacted very differently, some found the show incredibly compelling and came multiple times. Others were almost offended by the portrayal of Charcot who is very well known in France and is quite revered in some circles. It was very interesting to see what landed and what didn’t, what was clear is that the play might be divisive to some but it is never boring, and every night we would leave the theatre feeling a jolt of energy.
Finally, on a personal note – what has working on L’Indiscipline taught you?
Too many things to list here! How to rig scaffolding, how to work with live music, how a septic tank functions (this last one was a bitter lesson to learn) but the most important thing is almost esoteric. In theatre during a long run like this one (we played 25 times) the most important things are the energy and connection of the cast. It is not something you can control, but you can remain vigilant and help channel it towards a great performance.