A Genteel Lady Lunatic

‘Ah,’ said the director. ‘You’re the unfortunates.’
I didn’t feel particularly unfortunate at that point. True, I was wearing the most hideous costume possible, but I’d had a lovely lunch, passed most of the afternoon in entertaining banter with good-natured people, and the hardest thing I’d had to do was stand up.
Dressed in my awful outfit – a stained, shapeless cotton frock the colour of dishwater, and a hideous brown cardigan - I was playing the resident of a mental institution in the 1930s for the BBC’s forthcoming, Andrew Davies-penned adaptation of Winifred Holtby’s1930s novel South Riding. ‘Ooh you do look poorly,’ said the head of wardrobe – before I had been attended to by hair and makeup. When it’s screened, I will be, if visible at all, glimpsed on the edge of a shot, sitting in a basket chair overlooking the beautiful grounds of a stately home, clutching my blanket and yes, rocking backwards and forwards, as instructed.
South Riding is a novel about local government and a Yorkshire community struggling with the depression of the 1930s. One of its strands is a social-realist version of Jane Eyre: Sarah Burton, the heroine, is the bright, feisty schoolteacher deeply attracted to Robert Carne, a brooding, devastating landowner who made an unsuitable marriage to a highly-strung aristocrat who has gone insane. There having been significant advances in psychiatric care between the 1860s and the 1930s, unlike Bertha Rochester, the madwoman incarcerated in the attic, Muriel Carne is the resident of a genteel nursing home in Harrogate.
Winifred Holtby’s novel insists on the care devoted to her, and having been written before 1938, when electro-convulsive therapy was first used on human subjects, it is entirely possible that the kind of care Muriel would have experienced, in her expensive nursing home, would have been more enlightened and humane than the treatment received by Bertha, locked away out of sight. I’m not saying that conditions for the mentally ill poor would have been better then, or that there weren’t terrible instances of women being incarcerated on slim pretexts, or that the 1930s were a golden age for the treatment of psychiatric illness. But South Riding, for all its rich understanding of human flaws, is a novel written with a certain idealistic hopefulness about the potential for human goodness. The way my character was treated in make-up reflected this: ‘the nurses would have done it for her,’ they said, as my hair was pinned into a bun.
The attention to detail on a production like this is astounding. Two pairs of shoes for me, which would never be seen, were rejected: one for being too nice, the other because their buckles were too shiny. I was asked to remove my very tiny earrings, which were not even visible beneath my hair. A great deal of care is taken over everything, even on an ‘unfortunate.’ And although the word could evidently be intended disparagingly as well as meant kindly, there is something about the term ‘unfortunates,’ which suggests compassion, of a kind.