From Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf, from Nina Simone to Amy Winehouse, the tortured-artist archetype looms large: private torment fuelling public brilliance.
But across opera, theatre, film and television, a growing movement is pushing back against what many now insist is a corrosive myth – the romanticised necessity of creative martyrdom.
“Artists don’t need help because they’re weak; they need it because they’re strong,” said Annilese Miskimmon, the artistic director at English National Opera. “They’re strong enough to rehearse deeply traumatic parts multiple times a day and then perform those roles to order in front of thousands of people.”
Miskimmon recently directed Dead Man Walking, a true story that opens with the rape and murder of two teenagers – and closes with the state-sanctioned killing of the murderer, scrutinised by the grieving parents and the teenagers’ ghosts.
Before rehearsals began, Miskimmon called in Artist Wellbeing, a company that has provided mental health and wellbeing support for cultural centres including the Royal Opera House, the Royal Court and Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.
“The deal was that I wouldn’t know which of our artists had spoken to them, and the support they gave would be available up to a fortnight after the show had finished,” said Miskimmon.
Miskimmon said it was the first time she or ENO had employed the organisation. “With Dead Man Walking, it would not only have been irresponsible not to provide support for everyone involved but it would have risked the final production not being as emotionally powerful as it was,” she said.
“Society’s obsession with the tortured artists is misguided. We don’t think twice about athletes having psychological support, so why should artists have to feel mentally tortured to give their best performances?” she asked.
Therapeutic support is fast becoming widespread: the Actors’ Trust, in partnership with the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine, now offers mental health support for artists suffering stress and burnout linked to emotionally challenging material.
Wellbeing in the Arts, which works to improve the mental health of the arts and creative sector, has welcomed the change. But research underlines how urgent such support has become: the Film and TV Charity’s most recent wellbeing survey found that 84% of respondents suffered work-related stress or anxiety, with one in four considering leaving the industry as a result. In theatre, similar studies point to persistently high levels of depression, financial instability and emotional overload.
“Too many artists still labour under the belief that suffering is essential for creative excellence and artistic authenticity,” said Lou Platt, the founder of Artist Wellbeing. “Suffering is often part of the creative process, but you don’t have to be tortured to make great art.”
Since the #MeToo movement, directors have increasingly stepped back from the once celebrated practice of pushing artists to breaking point – a method openly embraced in the eras of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola.
Liz Counsell, the executive director of Dan Daw Creative Projects, which recently produced Outlier at the Bristol Old Vic and the Battersea Arts Centre, celebrated that shift.
“As well as being wrong, the ‘tortured artist’ isn’t a safe or reliably productive way to create art,” said Counsell.
“If an artist is still processing trauma, then it’s quite likely they’ll get to a certain point with a work and then shut down,” she said. “But if they’ve had time with a specialist therapist, they’re far more likely to be able to push further and explore more deeply than they otherwise would.”
Yet many artists are still made to endure suffering as if it were simply part of the job, said Platt.
“When actors are asked to act out sexual violence, domestic abuse, war and systemic injustice night after night for weeks on end, the trauma can bury itself deeply,” she said.
“We frequently talk to artists who are so disturbed by either the subject they’re tackling or the conditions they’re working in that they have to take medication just to cope,” she added.
But if you remove the suffering, do you destroy the art? For playwright Sophia Griffin, the opposite is true. Far from being the kernel of genius from which creativity springs, she argued, trauma can throttle it.
“I’ve used wellbeing practitioners for the past four years, and had I not, I can honestly say that my work would not have been as strong or as emotionally true as it has been,” she said.
Griffin recently suffered writer’s block when writing a play for the Bush Theatre in London. “It was only by working with an expert that I realised I was subconsciously resisting tapping into painful things I’d buried or not confronted in myself,” she said. “Realising that freed me up to write the work.”
Stories such as that, said Platt, are evidence that artists don’t need to be tortured to be brilliant. “With therapeutic help, artists can still access those emotional pathways they draw their creativity from,” she said. “They simply find they’re able to use their lived experience in service of the art, rather than letting the art use them.”
