Though Terry Johnson’s Hysteria was named Best Comedy in the 1994 Olivier Awards, the play is not exactly, well, hysterical. Unlike Johnson’s next success Dead Funny, which supplies what the title appears to promise, Hysteria — skilfully revived under the direction of its author — is only fitfully amusing. I laughed about as often as its protagonist Sigmund Freud tells us he did on a visit to Ben Travers’s Rookery Nook: four times, he says, with characteristic precision.

The classic Whitehall farce gets its name-check, one supposes, to reinforce what is really only a tenuous leak between Hysteria and a theatrical style it purports to celebrate. Though there is a certain amount of slamming of doors (behind one of which hides — but of course! — a naked young lady) and a splendid comic tableau featuring a snail-encrusted bike presented (as pictured right) to the wondering gaze of Salvador Dali, of all people, the play’s humour is really verbal rather than visual.

One of my scarce laughs came when the founder of psychoanalysis tells the aforementioned stripper (the daughter of famous former patient, it turns out) that half of his face is now Bakelite and she asks whether he can get the Home Service.

Even as one chuckles, however, one remembers the old man’s distressing last months, exiled to London following the rise of the Nazis and suffering from jaw cancer that was soon to kill him. The wonder was he could remain so stoic in the circumstances. Cheerful even — as when he rejects the advice of his daughter and disciple Anna (heard but not seen in this play) to take shelter from an air raid on the basis that he will shortly be spending quite long enough under the ground. That his attitude was a matter of intellectual rigour is brilliantly caught in the tour de force performance by Antony Sher. Rarely do we see Freud ruffled, despite the challenges made by his patient’s daughter Jessica (Indira Varma). These concern, inter alia, his sudden rejection — on the grounds, she thinks, of financial expediency — of some of what he once held to be incontrovertible truths of his science.

Sher admirably sustains throughout Freud’s guttural Viennese accent without ever sacrificing intelligibility. This is not always the case with Will Keen as the monomaniac Salvador Dali, who is introduced to Freud’s study (impeccably presented by designer Lez Brotherston) in order to permit discourse between two iconic figures much preoccupied with dreams. While Dali is amusingly dismissed as a man by Freud (“I don’t think I have met a more classic example of a Spaniard”), his art is written off as “the conscious rendition of conscious thought”. Says Freud: “You murder dreams.”

Murder more palpable is the subject of conversations between Freud and his doctor, Yahuda (David Horovitch), also a Jew. These remind us that this is a play as much to do with the Holocaust as with psychoanalysis and art.

No laughing matter, then.

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