Beside herself
By: Sarah Daniels
Contributors: Daniels, Sarah, 1957-
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2013
Place of publication: London]
Language: eng
Description: St. Dymphna's is a halfway house for people with mental illness. On the board of management there sits Evelyn, an MP's wife, who is struggling desperately to make people like her; helping her father round the house, acceding to colleagues' requests and absorbing the stress she is quite obviously feeling, her innermost thoughts voiced to the audience by the otherwise unseen Eve. For it seems that Evelyn is also not well, the spectre of mental illness dogging her as she puts on a timid, polite manner and faces the world as though nothing is the matter. Named after the patron saint of the mentally ill - a girl whose father tried to seduce her then murdered her when she refused - St. Dymphna's Community Group Home becomes not just a place of work for Evelyn, but a safer space in which she can work out the problems afflicting her, and cut right to the source that caused them. 'Beside Herself' was first performed at the Royal Court, London, in March 1990.
Notes: Previously issued in print: in Plays two. London: Methuen Drama, 1997.