review

Eczema! by Maria Fusco

First published by Art Monthly, September 2018

NHS70: Eczema!, National Theatre Wales , July 2018

For the novelist Andre Gide, the human experience of pain possessed a social gravity that the itch did not. Pain had a noble quality capable of garnering empathy; the itch, despite its agonising frustrations, was comic. ‘One can pity someone who is suffering,’ Gide wrote, whereas ‘someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh’. This honest, if admittedly crushing observation formed part of a cultural archeology of atopic dermatitis performed by a group of writers, artists and dermatologists thoughtfully rallied to introduce Maria Fusco’s performance Eczema!, 2018.

Commissioned by National Theatre Wales to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the NHS, this peculiar work sought to read eczema as an inscriptive malady that could be scrutinised and made legible, interpreted as a distracting epidermal script through anecdote and analogy to the act of writing itself. Its complicated, cohabited stories teased and unpicked as one might loosen an old scab with a persistent fingernail.

If you have ever suffered eczema you will be aware of its insane paradoxes and polarities. The bizarre intimacy that a fear of social ostracisation might share with the heavenly gratification of scratching. A disquieting realisation that the body’s container, the largest human organ, is in fact attacking itself. The pre-performance readings helped to extrapolate something of this weirdness, and illustrate the writerly enclave that had given rise to the work. While academic Naomi Segal mapped the psychoanalytical matrices of the ‘skin-ego’ through which eczema sufferers might experience their condition as both epidermally and socially embodied, an erudite and joyful oral history of the ailment’s treatment was performed by Hywel Williams, a professor of dermatology whose generous and sensitively spoken words ventriloquised a living history of research and care.

Eczema is an aggressively visual ailment – its flare-ups mark the skin with a distinctive mottling, forming encrustations of flaking matter – yet its social visibility is partially occluded, ghettoised to an assumed period of infancy. According to consultant dermatologist Sinéad Langan of Guy’s Hospital, that eczema is far less common amongst adults results in social invisibility, a broad lack of consideration that surely led to the hyperbolic exclamation mark following Fusco’s title; a typographic clarion call for renewed awareness.

Such professional considerations were punctuated by the recital of literary works including Job’s Skin Game by the grand bard of dermatitis, Alaisdar Gray. This autobiographical tale exhausted comedic analogies of flakes and platelets with homely evocations of ‘cakes’ and ‘crumbs’, suggesting that effective control of the condition might be as dependent on lyrical ‘defences’ that rewrite the body as congenial habitat as any emollient or ointment.

Eczema! shared a similar faith in its own language and preoccupations. Working alongside sound designer Yann Seznec, Fusco had developed a hand-worn peripheral that encoded the motion, speed and intensity of her own scratching into a graphical score that could be run through a pipe organ, essentially pushing the instrument ‘through the shape of a scratch’. This sonic irritant, a kind of incessant percolation of warbling airs performed by composer and organist John Harris, sustained an evocation of eczema’s etymological root, the Greek ekzema: to boil over, seethe, foam, bubble or break out. The extrapolation of musical scales from cellular scales also resonated throughout the piece’s script which repeatedly chimed the sonorous qualities of sensation. A ‘song’ of flaking skin or the ‘hum’ of a healing scab might have a ‘persistent pitch’. An ache might ‘sing’.

Fusco’s libretto was commandingly performed by Rhodri Meilir, whose distinctive Welsh accent rattled, snagged and tore at its strange bricolage of medical histories and personal anecdotes. ‘The messages I SCRATCH into my skin can’t be translated: they are simply themselves,’ he stressed, figuring abrasion as a form of physical communiqué extending beyond reason into gestures of frenzied alleviation, a dermatological choreography whose meaning lay beyond language in a subcutaneous register. Fusco has an admirable knack for writing with and through place as previous works Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, 2017, and Master Rock, 2015, have shown. Eczema! charted a similar topography of entropic architectural metaphors engaging the body through a form of site writing. Scabs resembled ‘drawbridges’ spanning ‘port ravines’, crusts became the ‘slubbed monuments’ of a crumbling epidermis.

Being at once a personable account of the author’s own sufferings and an exercise in the fascination of the innately alien quality of the condition, Eczema!’s conclusive litany of analogies – ‘a poisoned tunic’, ‘starving rats’, ‘cascading motes’, ‘flaking spires’ – enunciated feverishly by Meilir, betrayed a hope at the heart of the writing that one might lyrically exorcise eczema, or at least find a vocal register appropriate to its relief. These were utterances that appeared to be sounding a timbral cipher for the ‘hateful heiroglyphs’ with which one lives in constant dialogue.