The Starving Saint and the Stage: Why We Fear the Visible Wound

On a stage in Basel, a woman named Janine Rickenbach stands under the spotlight. She is wearing a camisole that leaves nothing to the imagination regarding the state of her arms and neck. She has lived with anorexia for decades. She looks out at the audience—at us—and asks the question that hangs heavy in the air, suffocating the room like stage fog: “Are you thinking, ‘Oh my God…?’ Is it because I look the way I look?”

This moment, from the controversial play Jeanne Dark, has triggered a predictable ethical reflex across the Western cultural landscape. Therapists are appalled. Parents are concerned. The media is scandalized. The verdict is swift and seemingly unimpeachable: recruiting people with eating disorders to play characters in a narrative about Joan of Arc is exploitative, dangerous, and ethically reprehensible. It is, they argue, a glamorization of a deadly illness.

But if we pause the knee-jerk moral panic for a second, we might find that what unsettles us isn’t the alleged exploitation of the performers. What truly terrifies us is the disruption of the “medical gaze.”

In our modern sanitarium of a society, we have a specific place for illness: the clinic. There, the suffering body is a problem to be solved, a deviation to be corrected, a statistic to be managed. The patient is passive; the doctor is the active agent of truth. When a person with anorexia enters a theater not as a patient to be cured, but as an actor with agency, articulating her own existence, she shatters this hierarchy. She reclaims the right to display her body not as a medical failure, but as a vessel of human experience.

Critics argue that this jeopardizes the performers’ health. Yet, Rickenbach herself offers a piercing counter-narrative: “I wanted to show I’m not an illness, I have an illness.” She describes the stage as a place of liberation, a space where she can “be who I really am,” as opposed to her daily life where the compulsion for control and perfection is a silent, crushing cage.

The brilliance of director Lies Pauwels lies in the intuitive, uncomfortable bridge she builds between the modern anorexic and the medieval saint. Joan of Arc, the teenager who led armies and burned for her voices, and the person starving themselves in a quest for absolute bodily control, share a terrifying commonality: the exertion of a will so powerful it negates the flesh. Historians have long debated “holy anorexia,” where medieval mystics starved themselves not for thinness, but to feast on God. The context changes, but the mechanism—using the body as the final battleground for control in an uncontrollable world—remains hauntingly similar.

By placing these two archetypes side by side, the play suggests that anorexia is not just a pathology; it is a language. It is a desperate, destructive, yet profoundly human attempt to speak when words fail. To dismiss this artistic exploration as mere “romanticization” is to deny the complexity of the disorder itself.

The outrage also betrays a deep hypocrisy in how we consume suffering. We demand “authenticity” in our art, yet we recoil when that authenticity comes with real stakes. We applaud actors who starve themselves for an Oscar (think Christian Bale or Joaquin Phoenix) as “committed,” but when a person who actually lives that reality steps onto the stage, we call it “unethical.” Why? Because the Hollywood star can take off the costume. The person with anorexia cannot. And that permanence forces us to confront a reality we’d rather leave in the therapist’s office.

The ethical question shouldn’t be whether Rickenbach should be allowed on stage. She is an adult; to say she cannot consent to this performance is to strip her of her agency yet again, infantilizing her in the name of protection. The real question is for the audience: Can we bear to look at her? Can we listen to her monologue without immediately categorizing her as a victim needing rescue?

Perhaps the theater is exactly where this pain belongs. Not because it cures the illness—art is not medicine—but because it validates the human struggling beneath it. When Rickenbach stands there, unfazed, she is not asking for our pity or our diagnosis. She is demanding, for two hours, to be seen on her own terms. And in a world that wants to hide her away until she is “fixed,” that act of visibility is not exploitation. It is a radical, terrifying triumph.