Hearing Voices

What really goes on behind the locked doors of a psychiatric hospital?
After a suicide attempt Clare Summerskill spent two months in such a place...

Throughout this brand new play we hear the stories of six real-life people who recently met as patients on an acute secure psychiatric ward in a London hospital, the writer of this piece being one of them. The entire script is taken from interviews conducted by the writer with each of these patients and combined with extracts from the writer’s own diary about her time on the ward. The result is a unique and powerful piece of verbatim theatre, which explores the experiences of Mental Health Service Users behind locked doors.

The stories that are told in this piece represent the "voices" of the patients that were never heard by the consultants or the nurses on the ward. This ground-breaking piece of theatre reveals the views and personal histories of a group of people who are often hidden and excluded from mainstream society and allows their voices to finally be heard.

HEARING VOICES will be touring nationally to theatres for five weeks from the end of April to the end of May 2010. This tour has been funded by THE ARTS COUNCIL.

Clare Summerskill will be appearing in the show alongside members of her theatre company, ARTEMIS. The play will be directed by Lorae Parry. The Set and Costume Designer is Sophia Lovell Smith and the Lighting Designer is Crin Claxton.

The play “HEARING VOICES” by Clare Summerskill has been published by Tollington Press (2010). The cost is £8.99 plus postage.
To order your copy of the play please visit our Online Store.

Photos from the Production

From Autumn 2010 onwards there will be a shortened DVD version of HEARING VOICES which will be posted on YouTube in three ten minute extracts. In this way, service users who are not able to attend the theatre shows will have the opportunity to see this play. A longer DVD version of the play will be shown over the next few months as part of a talk that Clare Summerskill will be giving about the writing and research of HEARING VOICES. For further details please visit the DVD page on this site.