One or two things they know about her

In 1999 Book Works published A Case of Hysteria, in which Sharon Kivland followed Sigmund Freud’s analysis of a young woman, ‘Dora’ (Ida Bauer). The book merges many voices and confusions of identity arise. Indeed, it turns on a matter of voice. There is a long chapter that appears to be a play, with many characters. They are those who have written about the case (a ‘fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’), their words extracted as dialogue when they assert something – a speculation – about ‘Dora’ for which there is no textual evidence in Freud’s account or ‘fragment’. To this impossible dramatisation the author added the stage directions of a twentieth-century play, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. It has never been performed, though its performance has been imagined. Originally for seventy voices, including those of Jacques Lacan and Octave Mannoni, it is adapted for twenty-two voices for Pressure Chamber 0.5 : Nematodes as a read-through or table work, with the author as dramaturge. Readers: Jake Arnott, Emma Bolland, Marianne Chase, Simon Crump, Richard Dodwell, Steve Dutton, Bryan Eccleshall, Gavin Edmonds, Michael Hampton, Francis Haselden, Matthew King, Rosanna McNamara, Megan Nolan, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Maggie Pettigrew, Lucy Pook, Holly Sandford, Isabella Streffen, Linda Stupart, Sam Talbot, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, Frank Wasser