Melbourne Reviews

The documented horrors of early psychiatric units are often recounted for melodramatic effect in popular culture. Think American Horror Story: Asylum or Girl Interrupted, and images of patients strapped to beds or made pliable and sedated with medication come to mind. What is curious about these examples is that while dramatised, they are based (in part) in truth. Asylum features a fictionalised Nellie Bly, the reporter responsible for exposing the inhumane conditions at the asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York, and Girl Interrupted is the film adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's memoir.

It seems that as an audience, we are drawn to these stories of human suffering with a perverse interest. We love a celebrity breakdown and will recount the Britney Spears head-shaving incident with a grotesque glee and consume information on the fall of Amanda Bynes with raptured interest and feigned concern.

Leah Shelton knows this all too well. Her 2022 one-woman show, BATSHIT, is an ode to her grandmother Gwen and to all women who have been defined as “crazy” over the course of history.

Directed by Oliver Award-winning Ursula Martinez, Shelton uses an eclectic mix of multimedia to tell her grandmother’s story. Blending physicality, music, historical news reports, and hospital transcripts displayed on a huge screen, past and present merge into a compelling story of female disempowerment and societal failures to protect the most vulnerable.

Shelton gives an engaging performance, putting herself, body and soul into the rapid-fire show that pulls no punches. It’s baffling (but not unbelievable) to think that in 1960s Australia, young women in their 40s were being admitted to psychiatric wards for being “withdrawn” or not “performing marital duties.”

That these same women couldn’t have a credit card or obtain a loan without a male guarantor until the 1970s and that the mostly male medical professionals had no idea about female health was irrelevant. As the vintage news footage in BATSHIT proclaimed, housewives shouldn’t be bored but grateful.

It’s hard to watch with 2025 vision; it’s harder still to be reminded that women are still overwhelmingly not believed when it comes to acts of abuse and that their pain is misdiagnosed or undervalued. Shelton brings up the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp legal battle and how differently they were each evaluated both on trial and by the media.

As Shelton explores the more personal aspects of the show, her performance moves from caricature contortionist to real-life. She reads her grandmother’s hospital records and recounts stories from her childhood of the woman who insisted she be called Gwen instead of Grandma. Gwen was released from the Heathcote mental institution in 1962 into the care of her husband. Shelton doesn’t explain how, but Gwen also left the institution of marriage to reclaim herself, not as a wife, a mother, or a grandmother, but as herself. As Gwen.

Shelton’s use of music is exceptional in this production; the opening number of Judy Garland’s Get Happy perfectly captures the tone of the show—it is funny, quirky, sad, and moving. An homage to her grandmother and all the women who have been labelled a “crazy bitch,” often for simply existing.