The Female Malady 236 one thing to dangerous exhilaration of his mountain-climbing relive the experiences in Scotfand, and to be the manly physician-priest leading another explorer to the heart of darkness, or the top of Everest, days in and five days out changing diapers, giving It was bottles, five quite another to spend three years and generally wiping up after a noisy, woman The image of the schizophrenic Laing had created drew upon his own heroic fantasies; it jealous, smelly, middle-aged voyage that was a male adventure of exploration and conquest of Mary The Mary Barnes wright David Edgar, to have lost enthusiasm for however, appealed strongly story, it to the play- who saw Laing as a representative figure of 1960s as a way to engage audiences on the side of and the case antipsychiatry Edgar's play, ham Rep ized scarcely the reality Barnes's experience Faced with the obligation to play mother on the psychic journey, Laing seems culture, — Mary Barnes, was produced at the Birming- 1977 and then transferred to the Royal Court in and stylized version of the Barnes-Berke narrative, it A fictional- makes the Mary Barnes the story of antipsychiatry Mary's madness becomes the myth of Kingsley Hall; she is its heroine and its symbolic story of ideal On theories the opening night of the play, however, the impact of Laing's was significantly from the image to the a lisping, in a undermined, for those reality, who bouncing, and giggling fifty-five-year-old "beguiling child-like way," and The Guardian that she was away Mary Barnes, woman, who acted by the presence of the still who could look real admitted to a reporter from wrestling with acute attacks of depres- sion and withdrawal 38 An even more important dramatist of Laingian theory was David Mercer Laing acted as Two Minds official consultant for Mercer's television play In (1967), a drab, documentarylike demonstration of Laing's theory of schizophrenia and the schizophrenogenic family Although Mercer denied that he oine, Kate Winter, Madness, and had seems a particular Laingian case in mind, his herto be a composite of several cases the Family, especially Maya and June Two Minds for collaboration with Laing, adapted In in Sanity, In 1972, Mercer, in the screen in a film called Family Life {Wednesday's Child in the United States) The film was naturalistic in style; the action and dialogue were improvised within the framework provided by the script Some hospital scenes were shot unrehearsed with the Philadelphia Association's North London com- munity of sixteen people; and amateurs played several of the leading roles