« A country called Dissocia »: Anthony Neilson’s Heterotopian Exploration of Madness

Resumen

Anthony Neilson’s Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) is a striking illustration of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s contention that « writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come ». The play literalizes its heroine’s descent into madness by transporting her as well as the audience to an imaginary underground country, thus exploring and exploiting the links between theatricality and spatiality. Neilson combines, and starkly contrasts an exuberant space explored in Act One with the extremely austere space of a mental hospital in Act Two, moving from dystopia to « heterotopia » (Michel Foucault). This paper aims to study Neilson’s heterotopian strategies in his innovative approach to insanity as well as to theatre-making. Staging madness challenges the representational potential of theatre itself, and demands that the page and the stage be turned into a space for re-presentation and innovation.