Hauntological dramaturgy: affects, archives, ethics / 9781000547344, 9780367808891, 9780367407568

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Hauntological Dramaturgy

This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: ‘Remember me’—the command King Hamlet’s ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate and sometimes seek justice for the dead. It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida’s hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher’s and Simon Reynolds’ development of Derrida’s ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie. This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies. Glenn D’Cruz is Associate Professor of Art and Performance and teaches drama and cultural studies at Deakin University, Australia.

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Hauntological Dramaturgy Affects, Archives, Ethics Glenn D’Cruz

First published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Glenn D’Cruz The right of Glenn D’Cruz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40756-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-21741-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80889-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsvi

Introduction: hauntological Dramaturgy

1

1 Memorialisation, Memory and Practices of Archival Care

21

2 Re-member Me: Ian Charleson

47

3 The Anarchival Reactivation of Rumstick Road (1977/2014)

66

4 Re-membering Anto D’Cruz: intergenerational Trauma and Object-Oriented Dramaturgy

89

5 Re-membering David McComb: sonic Hauntology and Uncanny Australia

112

6 Can’t Help Thinking About ‘Me’: the Hauntological Dimensions of David Bowie’s ‘Auto-eulogy’

139

Index159

Acknowledgements

This book addresses topics and themes that developed while I participated in archival research connected to AusStage, an online record of live performance events in Australia. I am extremely grateful to the AusStage team, especially Jenny Fewster, who kept my projects on track with tact and patience. Thanks to my AusStage research assistants, Görkem Acaroğlu, David Tredinnick and Linda Wells, for editorial assistance. I wrote most of Chapter 3 while I was a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center at City University New York in 2018. Thanks to Peter Eckersall and Frank Hentschker for their hospitality and practical assistance with this project. Clay Hapaz and Ken Kobland of the Wooster Group were extremely generous with their time and expertise. Thanks to Clay and Ken for patiently answering my questions about their respective roles as documentarians and archivists. Thanks to Kate Hunter, Miles O’Neil, Misha Myers and Patrick Pound, my colleagues at Deakin University, for their generous responses to my work, Vanitas (which is the focus of Chapter 4). I am indebted to Carol D’Cruz for stimulating conversations about life, love, theory and practice over many years. Thanks to Leonard D’Cruz for his eminently sensible editorial suggestions and unstinting encouragement. Thanks to my partner in crime, Sonia Sankovich, for putting up with me during this book’s overly long gestation. A shorter version of Chapter 2, ‘The politics of (in)decision: a hauntological reading of Dickie Beau’s Re-member Me,’ appeared in Performance Research (2019), Vol. 24: 44–52. Thanks to Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall for their editorial feedback on this publication. Sections of Chapter 1 first appeared as ‘Letter to a dead playwright: Daily Grind, Vicki Reynolds, and Archive Fever in New Theatre Quarterly (2012) 28: 122–132. Thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers of these articles for their comments and suggestions

Introduction Hauntological Dramaturgy

Hauntological Dramaturgy is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: ‘Remember Me’—the command King Hamlet’s ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy to engage with a series of performances, drawn from different genres, that commemorate, celebrate, investigate and sometimes seek justice for the dead. Hauntological dramaturgy, as we shall see, requires us to listen to and talk to ghosts—these acts, at least in the context of this study, do not have a supernatural dimension. I  use the figure of the ghost to unsettle verities concerning questions of legacy, inheritance and justice. As Colin Dickey points out, ‘even if you don’t believe in the paranormal, ghost stories and legends of haunted places are a vital, dynamic means of confronting the past and those who have gone before us’ (2016, xiii). Jacques Derrida’s neologism, hauntology functions as a major guiding thread for this work, but I use this, and associated terms, as an ironist—that is, as someone who recognises the impossibility of constructing a universal theory that accounts for every performative act of commemoration or remembrance. Our understanding of things—people, events, performances— can always be otherwise. This does not mean that I am not committed to the critical vocabulary I use in this work. Rather, I think it important to recognise what it owes to a confluence of various cultural, institutional and political factors that could have been very different had I been writing in a different place and time. Richard Rorty notes that an ironist is the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires—someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. (1989, xv) As we shall see, temporal dislocation is a major theme of this book, which should come as no surprise since contemporary culture is saturated with technologies that disturb the boundaries between past, present and future. The DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-1

2  Introduction

Internet and so-called Web 2.0 technologies—that is, those platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram that facilitate user-generated content— ensure that today, more than ever, disembodied images and voices from different eras rub up against each other in ways that unsettle our experience of linear time, so it becomes increasingly difficult to identify cultural artefacts that convey a sense of the ‘now.’ As Simon Reynolds puts it, [w]e’ve become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data. Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously. (2011, 5) As we shall see, fractured time plays a central role in the concept of hauntological dramaturgy that informs and connects each of the chapters in this volume. So what is hauntological dramaturgy? Let us unpack each term of this conjunction.

Hauntology Derrida developed the neologism, hauntology, within the context of addressing the question Whiter Marxism? This was a crucial political question in the wake of end of the cold war and death of communism. If we had arrived at the ‘end of history’ with the demise of communism, as Francis Fukuyama (1992) then argued, what happens to this discredited social formation and the legacy of its dead architect, Karl Marx? Derrida argues that Marxism is not dead because it is not a singular entity: Marx and Marxism he points out are more than one, for this ‘old materialism’ is haunted by spectral figures: ghosts, phantoms, spirits, which continue to pose questions about responsibility and justice. Niall Lucy puts it more elegantly when he observes that it is only possible to accept the ‘end of history’ thesis in a world devoid of ghosts because [f]irst of all, to suppose that communism, like Marx, is dead, that its time is over, would be to deny something like the revolutionary spirit or promise within communism (or Marxism) which can’t be separated from it. And this would be to suppose, secondly, that today’s present time supersedes a past present when time was out of joint because of communism’s ever-present threat to global stability or world order, which of course as everyone knows depends on the unhindered operations of the ‘free market.’ (2004, 115) The key point is that time remains out of joint in the wake of communism’s apparent demise, as we shall see in the following pages. The neologism, hauntology, a pun on ontology, is similar to other terms coined by Derrida in his account of the function of presence in western

Introduction 3

metaphysics. For Derrida, ontology, the study of being, or what ‘is,’ is no simple matter. The logic of différance and the concept of the trace unsettle the possibility of approaching things in themselves as stand-alone entities, self-sufficient and stable—for, as Hägglund puts it, ‘the now can appear only by disappearing—that it passes away as soon as it comes to be—it must be inscribed as a trace in order to be at all’ (2008, 18). But it is the principle of responsibility and the search for justice that distinguish hauntology from its cousins within Derrida’s vocabulary. It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognise in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (1994, xviii) So hauntology concerns responsibility and respect for justice for those that have gone before and those who are yet to come (Derrida 1994, xviii). It bears repeating that in Specters of Marx, Derrida pursues this theme of justice and responsibility to the heritage of Marx after the triumphant declaration of the death of Marxism demonstrating that Marxism was not a monolithic entity and there was more than one Marx. Nonetheless, if we are to comprehend the significance of hauntological dramaturgy, we need attend to the neologism’s context, which requires us to work with broad strokes. As we know, Karl Marx was (is) caricatured as the chief patriarch of the old materialism, which is most often characterised as a philosophy that inverts Hegel’s dialectic and accounts for historical change through class conflict generated by material forces and relations of commodity production set in train by the industrial revolution. Where Hegel posits spirit, thought and ideas as the motor of history, Marx is concerned with bodies, labour, factories and furnaces and the way commodities become vessels that contain human labour power. In other words, the old materialism concerns a material world where machines combined with human toil (blood, sweat, tears) to create a stratified social, political and economic order. Derrida’s controversial intervention concerns his observation that Marx’s writings are haunted by immaterial spectres and not only at the level of rhetoric. He writes: When Marx evokes spectres at the moment he analyses, for example, the mystical character or the becoming-fetish of the commodity, we should therefore not see in that only effects of rhetoric, turns of phrase that are contingent or merely apt to convince by striking the imagination. If that were the case, moreover, one would still have to explain their effectiveness in this respect. One would still have to reckon with the invincible force and the original power of the ‘ghost’ effect. One would have to say why

4  Introduction

it frightens or strikes the imagination, and what fear, imagination, their subject, the life of their subject, and so forth, are. (1994, 185–186) On one level, we should not be surprised by Marx’s rhetoric since he was writing in a period marked by widespread interest in the supernatural. The Spiritualist movement, for example, was founded in 1848, the same year Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto (Marx’s famous ‘dancing table’ metaphor is, in part, a reference to Spiritualism’s claim to levitate tables during séances). And let us not forget that 19th-century Romanticism, a movement that dared to question the supremacy of the Enlightenment’s valorisation of reason, ‘is full of ghosts, ruins and portents’ (Wang 2007, 207). Derrida, however, is drawing attention to the affective power of what he calls the ‘ghost’ effect in Marx’s analysis of the commodity, which is terrifying because it animates the inanimate. Marx uses the example of a table to help explain the crucial distinction between use value and exchange value in his analysis of the commodity. Before his analysis, the table is an ordinary thing, but when Marx sees it as a commodity ‘it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will’ (Marx 1977, 163f). For Derrida, the table takes on a spectral quality—the table becomes the thing ‘which is no longer altogether a thing’ (1994, 190) and is terrifying in its indeterminacy, for it is both inert (as a material object that has use value) and active (as a commodity that has abstract agency in the marketplace). In short, Marx provides us with the analytical tools to see the hidden immateriality that inheres in the sensible table (its exchange value). This insight concerning the inseparability of the material from the immaterial is certainly relevant to the concerns of this book, but if this commentary on dancing tables and commodities seems overly abstract, Marx’s use of theatrical language in his analysis of the table underscores a not insignificant connection between hauntology and dramaturgy. Derrida notes that Marx must describe the apparition of the commodity as a stage entrance (auftritt). And he must describe the table become commodity as a table that turns, to be sure, during a spiritualist séance, but also as a ghostly silhouette, the figuration of an actor or a dancer. (1994, 189) Haunting, then, is a performative act, so it is not surprising that Derrida uses theatrical terms and metaphors throughout Specters of Marx.

The Spectral Turn in Theatre and Performance Studies Many scholars have addressed the connections between hauntology and performance. Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin wrote about the ‘spectral turn’ in

Introduction 5

theatre and performance studies in their book, Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, observing that scholars of theatre and performance took their time getting on board Derrida’s ghost train. Ghosts may be everywhere, but the spectral turn has focused overwhelmingly on fiction and film. This is curious since the obsession with representing ghosts on stage dates back at least to Euripides and Seneca, and the fascination with theatrical ghosts and the supernatural in the Early Modern period is well documented. (2014, 2) As they observe, Peggy Phelan (1997), Marvin Carlson (2003), Alice Rayner (2006) and Andrew Sorfer (2013) among others have hastened the delayed encounter with spectrality, and an ever-increasing number of academics are attuned to spectrality as a key feature of theatre and performance (although not everyone engages with the concept of hauntology). This was probably inevitable since, as Luckhurst and Morin point out, ‘Derrida’s central metaphor in Specters of Marx is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Derrida’s exploration of hauntology has a distinctive theatrical dimension’ (2014, 2). Perhaps Hélène Cixous puts the relationship between spectrality and theatre best when she observes that the theatre is a place where the living meet and confront the dead, the forgotten and the forgetters, the buried and the ghosts, the present, the passing. . . . The dead are not always as dead as we think nor the living as living as they think. (1999, 303) So let us return to hauntology in order to better understand why Derrida’s neologism is so central to the conceptual logic of this book. Like other items in Derrida’s vocabulary (différance, trace, arche-writing and so on) hauntology functions to unsettle the concept of presence by showing how ‘time is out of joint’ insofar as no entity can be fully self-sufficient or present to itself in a discrete, singular instance of time. For Derrida, the very terms ‘past,’ ‘present’ and ‘future’ provide a misleading conception of temporality since ‘time,’ as Martin Hägglund points out, ‘is différance’ (2008, 16). That is to say, these temporal categories contaminate each other. Yet, and this is a crucial point, everyday language reinforces the idea of indivisible presence. And, as we shall see, temporal confusion generates a plethora of uncanny phenomena. Let’s be clear at the outset, hauntology does not require a belief in supernatural phenomena. Rather, it is a term that underscores the necessity of being with the figure of the ghost. The term also functions as an injunction or a summons to talk with and listen to ghosts. Hauntology also gives ghosts their due by helping them seek justice, which is why Derrida refers to Shakespeare’s Hamlet throughout his book, for the play concerns a restless spirit’s search for justice through the medium of his son, the titular prince. As we have already noted, ‘[i]n the name of justice. . . . it is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the

6  Introduction

ghost and with it’ (1994, xiv). Niall Lucy puts it succinctly when he writes, ‘Derrida takes to writing about ghosts, because the ghost puts into question what it means to exist, what it means to be—or not to be’ (2004, 112). So Derrida deploys the figure of the ghost to challenge the coincidence of being with presence and disturb those binaries that separate the living from the dead, the body from the spirit, the material from the immaterial.

Memory Machines, Repetitions and Revenants Of course, Derrida is not the only touchstone for the concept of hauntological dramaturgy, and his neologism need not be central to understanding the ways theatre and performance works are haunted. In many ways this book owes as much to the pioneering work of Marvin Carlson and Alice Rayner amongst other theatre and performance studies scholars as it does to Derrida. In fact, this book builds on and attempts to extend, through detailed case studies, the ideas about spectrality and performance that Carlson develops in his seminal book, The Haunted Stage (2003). Theatre repeats itself incessantly. In fact, scholars of theatre and performance reiterate this observation with subtle (and not so subtle) differences regularly. Marvin Carlson, whose seminal work, The Haunted Stage (2003), functions as a guiding thread for much of this book, argues that the repetition of past acts appears to be a fundamental characteristic of all drama. He supports this claim, in the first instance, by citing other scholars who have made similar remarks. Herbert Blau (1987, 173), Richard Schechner (1985, 36–37) and Joseph Roach (1996, 3) all develop the idea that theatrical representations are repetitions that audiences have seen before. Schechner famously extended this idea to all forms of performance. His concept of restored behaviour contends that all actions are assembled and shaped by prior actions, or, put differently, all actions are composed by a pre-existing repertoire of movements, thoughts, images, ideas, words and so on—so the bodies of actors are haunted by their previous roles and by the performances of other actors who have embodied the characters they play. For example, every actor who plays, say, Hamlet, must reckon with the ghosts of other notable performances of the same role. In a similar vein, each production of a play is haunted by prior performances of the same text, or, if it is a new work, it is haunted by the genre conventions, themes and staging options of older performances. Carlson also points out that spaces are haunted by past activities. Theatre buildings often house ghosts, but sitespecific performances explicitly exploit the past for dramatic purposes (Carlson 2003, 134–138). Margherita Laera stresses that the theatre obsessively and compulsively reiterates and re-enacts its past (2014, 1). That said, it is important to underscore that there is no repetition without difference, as Carlson points out ‘performance, however highly controlled and codified, is never exactly repeatable’ (2003, 4). Carlson enlists Derrida to substantiate this declaration since the esteemed philosopher famously argued that acts of reiteration and repetition

Introduction 7

are never stable (Derrida, 315). So, if theatre traffics in repetitions, these repetitions are mutable. We might also say, following Gilles Deleuze, that there is no repetition without difference (1995). Repetition is the key to Carlson’s concept of ‘ghosting,’ which is primarily concerned with questions of audience reception and the role intertextuality plays in the spectator’s interpretation of any given performance. Following Roland Barthes (1977), Carlson reminds us that ‘every new work may also be seen as a new assemblage of material from old works’ (2003, 4)—a point that is reinforced throughout this work. Carlson’s key point is that the stage is haunted by stories, characters, structures, costumes, props, performances and performers from the past, and his concept of ghosting helps us unpack the significance of repetition in performance. He also observes that we use the memory of past events and occurrences to interpret new phenomena with similar features in everyday life since memory plays an important role in human cognition generally. Further, all artforms, he contends, activate past memories of similar forms. For example, our experience of reading a particular novel or seeing a specific film will inform subsequent encounters with other novels and films and establish horizons of expectation, to use Hans Robert Jauss’ phrase (1982). That said, Carlson makes the bold claim that theatre activates a different aspect of memory, ghosting, ‘which presents the identical thing they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context’ (2003, 6–7). The identical thing? Presumably, Carlson is referring to the dramatic text, which functions as a kind of blueprint for theatrical performance. Of course, many performances do not require such a text, and those that are based on dramatic writing are often edited and presented in a way that makes the use of the term ‘identical’ problematic. For example, there are many different folio versions of Hamlet and a plethora of different published editions of the text. I, for one, am never sure about what edition of Shakespeare’s classic work the actors of any given production are mouthing (at least without recourse to programme notes). Carlson’s salient point seems to be that ‘the practice of theatre has been in all periods and cultures particularly obsessed with memory and ghosting’ (2003, 7). I am not convinced that theatre is more concerned with memory than any other artistic medium. Ghosting, as I demonstrate in Chapters 5 and 6, is certainly prevalent in other artistic forms such as popular music and film. There is also a sense in which a medium like film is at least as equally concerned with memory and memorialisation as the theatre. Paul Grainge writes that cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. While, in representational terms, the past has been figured in variations of the history film, the costume drama and the heritage picture from early cinema to the present, rituals of remembrance have come to surround the culture of film. Whether in the form of commercial reruns, generic recycling, critical retrospectives or popular reminiscence, the memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has

8  Introduction

become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. (2018, 1) And Alice Rayner, a theatre studies scholar, concedes, If candlelight and curtains were among the earliest means of conjuring ghosts in theatre, surely the most contemporary means are in film, where it is all the more evident there is nothing behind the veil and that ghosts are products of veiling. (2006, 156) My scepticism about ghosting being an essential and distinctive aspect of theatre does not negate my belief that Carlson’s concept enables us to unpack the ways theatre functions as a memory machine, and I fully accept his argument that theatre productions weave ‘ghostly tapestries’ that play with an audience’s ‘collective and individual memories of previous experiences with this play, this director, these actors, this story, this theatrical space, even, on occasion, with this scenery, these costumes, these properties’ (2003, 165). My focus, in the subsequent chapters of this book, will be on the dramaturgical strategies that artists use to reckon with specific ghosts, but in this introduction, I will use Carlson’s influential study as a point of departure for elaborating what makes the concept of dramaturgical hauntology distinctive. First, unlike Carlson, I make no claims about whether theatre is better placed than other artforms to conjure and reckon with ghosts, and my concept of hauntological dramaturgy focuses on performance as a memorialisation machine. Indeed, the final chapter of this volume engages with the work of Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds whose writings explore the hauntological qualities of contemporary culture with a focus on popular music—hauntology is the name of a relatively obscure genre of electronic music, primarily associated with the Ghost Box label and artists such as Philip Jeck, Burial, and the Caretaker (Fisher 2012). Fisher argued that these artists confront a cultural impasse—namely the failure of the future: ‘[B]y 2005, electronica was no longer capable of evoking a future that felt strange or dissonant. If electronic music was “futuristic,” it was in the same sense that fonts are ‘‘gothic’’—the futuristic now connoted a settled set of concepts, affects, and associations’ (2012, 15). As I have already intimated, Reynolds describes the various ways contemporary music, and contemporary culture in general, is obsessed with the recent past. His concept of ‘Retromania’ is especially useful in helping us identify the various ways that our phenomenological experience of linear time is disturbed by cultural trends that have intensified the temporal dislocation described by commentators on postmodernism such as Andreas Huyssen (1986) and Frederic Jameson (1991). Having provided an account of how various theories of spectrality frame the investigations into the performance of memorialisation in this study, we now need to turn our attention to the concept of dramaturgy.

Introduction 9

Dramaturgy At its simplest, dramaturgy, in the context of this book, refers to the selection and combination of texts, people, things and technologies for the purpose of composing a work for performance. This elementary definition resonates with Eugenio Barba’s metaphorical description of dramaturgy as an act of weaving together the various strands that make a performance (1985). However, even a cursory glance at the critical literature on the topic reveals that the word is more elusive than it first appears since it can refer to a wide range of practices. Marianne Van Kerkhoven poses a series of questions that capture the term’s exhaustive application in the theory and practice of contemporary performance in the following passage: Is it only possible to think of dramaturgy in terms of spoken theatre, or is there a dramaturgy for movement, sound, light and so on, as well? Is dramaturgy the thing that connects all the various elements of a play together? Or is it, rather, the ceaseless dialogue between people who are working on a play together? Or is it about the soul, the internal structure, of a production? Or does dramaturgy determine the way space and time are handled in a performance, and so the context and the audience too? And so on. We can probably answer all these questions with ‘Yes, but. . . .’ (1994, 8–10) As we can see, there is a dramaturgy relevant to every aspect of the creative process (which is why I sometimes use the plural form of the word in this book), but the composition of a creative work is always enmeshed within conceptual, political and social contexts, so today scholars write about queer Dramaturgies (Campbell and Farrier 2016) or new media dramaturgy (Eckersall, Grehan and Scheer 2017) or ecodramaturgies (Woynarski 2020) and so on. In Chapter  2, I  analyse Dickie Beau’s Re-member Me, a work that could easily be approached with reference to its queer content of its use of new media, or a range of other dramaturgical considerations, which is why I  agree with Turner and Behrndt when they claim that ‘Van Kerhoven’s questions also imply that dramaturgy is something to be sought out: therefore we see its necessary relationship to processes of analysis. Indeed, the term “dramaturgy” is often used as shorthand for dramaturgical analysis’ (2008, 18). In the chapters that follow, I argue that acts of assembling dramaturgical elements—concepts, sound, light, music, space, bodies, spectators and so on—conjure ghosts that generate affects and raise ethical problems, which I will address shortly. Most of the chapters in this book also pay close attention to the way archival objects facilitate spectral encounters. So, to speak of hauntological dramaturgy is to speak of a kind of object-oriented dramaturgy. The subtitle of this work is ‘Affects, Archives and Ethics.’ Let us examine how each of these terms relates to the concept of hauntological dramaturgy I have elaborated so far.

10  Introduction

Affects The term ‘Affect’ is a much used and abused term in academic discourse. In its everyday usage, the word refers to the ability of something (a person, a poem, a play) to act upon another body. Within the context of human interactions, the word often connotes an emotional response to some kind of phenomena. Brian Massumi (1995) makes an important distinction between affect and emotion. For him, an affect is a corporeal intensity that resists narrativisation. Put simply, affects cannot be put into words because they are involuntary physiological (autonomic) responses to occurrences. We can, we often assume, name and locate emotions, on the other hand, for emotions break into consciousness. In the following pages, I  refer to both uses of the word ‘affect’. That said, the work’s frequent references to Freudian psychanalysis indicate that I view hauntological affects as psychosomatic sensations that resist comprehension (at least without analysis). Put another way, hauntology has an affective dimension. Further, each of the dead souls I pay homage to in this book have affected me, in very different, but equally profound ways. This makes Hauntological Dramaturgy an explicitly personal book, suffused, as it is, with anecdotal references to performances that have profoundly affected me (usually by memorialising the dead). In some ways, this book attempts to unpack my obsession with mystery. That is, with the way ghost stories have shaped my aesthetic prejudices. I am less interested in the physiological mechanisms that generate affects than I am in the phenomena of being moved by a story or a performance. The following anecdotes provide a personal context for my early interest in the supernatural (which, I suspect, is a significant condition of possibility for this book). I grew up in a superstitious family. My mother believed that the colour green was a harbinger of bad luck, so we weren’t allowed to wear green clothes or purchase any household item tinged with the portentous hue. My maternal grandmother and great-grandmother believed in malevolent ghosts and spirits. As mixed-race Anglo-Indians, Catholicism as well as Hindu mythology informed their belief in the supernatural entities. My great-grandmother told terrifying tales of possessions, exorcisms, doppelgangers and poltergeists with conviction. The most horrifying tale concerned me. Apparently, I was stricken with a life-threatening bout of whooping cough not long after my birth. The matriarchs of my mother’s family believed that the spirit of a woman, a former occupant of the family home in Madras, was seeking retribution for having lost her own child in infancy. She was a kind of hungry ghost, a Preta, or bhoot, in the Hindu tradition—that is, a restless spirit whose restlessness and malevolence were formed by having suffered a terrible trauma in life. Apparently, I avoided being devoured by this ravenous ghoul by leaving India (my parents migrated to the UK when I was 6 months old). A decade later, one of my aunts lost a child in early infancy. The hungry ghost, my great-grandmother believed, was finally sated. The most notable thing about this story was the way it made me feel. I shook and shuddered as I heard the story. This was a formative embodied experience, and the recounting of the tale continues to affect me in a visceral way. My maternal grandmother was a tiny wizened woman. She had

Introduction 11

nut-brown skin and a deeply lined face framed by long plaits of shocking white hair—to my young eyes she looked like a ghost, which heightened the visceral impact of her storytelling. She did not have the opportunity to regale me with her stories until my family migrated to Australia in the 1970s, so my first experience with the corporeal affects of the supernatural occurred in London when I was 8 or 9 years old. The source of my terror was a television documentary about the mystery of the Mary Celeste, a cargo ship apparently abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872. In many ways the details of the story are irrelevant to the present context. What is notable is the fact that I was home alone for the first time in my life. The documentary facilitated my first direct experience of the uncanny—that is, the experience of feeling something familiar turn into something strange. In this case, the story of the missing ship was enough to make me feel the presence of unseen forces lurking in my lounge room. I found this formative experience unsettling; it generated affects that were simultaneously frightening and thrilling. As we shall see, I use the word ‘unsettling’ frequently in this book since hauntological dramaturgy seeks to disturb verities between apparently insuperable spatial and temporal thresholds to engage with often-disturbed, hungry ghosts who cry out for somebody to care for their legacies. I will further unpack the concept of the uncanny with reference to Freud’s famous essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (2003), in some of the following chapters (most fully in Chapter 5, which is partly concerned with gothic aesthetics). For now, I want to flag that hauntological dramaturgy involves the practice of developing techniques to disturb the spectator. These techniques, which may be conceptual, thematic and technical, seek to elicit some kind of corporeal and emotional response from spectators that can turn the intimate shelter of home into something unnerving and ominous. I saw Jeremy Dyson and Andy Hyman’s play, Ghost Stories, in 2015. I fully expected to be entertained, but certainly not spooked. Unlike my matriarchal forebears, I am not superstitious or religious, yet a belief in supernatural entities is not a prerequisite for feeling fear. Dyson and Hyman’s highly successful show is a veritable catalogue of dramaturgical devices for generating screams, shrieks and other expressions of terror. They manipulate light, sound, colour and voice in a manner that genuinely unsettles viewers. It is not, as the work’s publicity declares, for the ‘the faint of heart or those with nerve conditions’ (Dyson and Nyman 2021). The works I engage with in this book as exemplars of hauntological dramaturgy are not ghost stories in the traditional sense—they certainly do not elicit the kinds of affects facilitated by Dyson and Hyman’s work (they are much closer to eulogies). This is not to denigrate Ghost Stories or damn it with faint praise. It is an outstanding achievement, but it not really concerned with the questions that animate this book: questions, as I have already noted, about legacy, inheritance and justice. That said, hauntological dramaturgy does possess a technical dimension. In other words, to be unsettled by a work is to experience a range of corporeal sensations. While appreciating the cool, detached dramaturgy of a director like, say, Thomas Ostermeier, whose work

12  Introduction

I  have written about elsewhere (D’Cruz 2018, 181–201), this book is concerned with works that elicit affects more associated with acts of mourning and remembrance. That said, the book makes several references to technologies that enable us to raid the archives of dead performers to create new works from old material or simply re-package and re-present their work for new audiences. For example, the David Bowie estate has released live recordings and various rarities and other archival ephemera since his death. This is not unusual in the field of popular music. As Greil Marcus reminds us in his book Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1999), death can sometimes be a rather smart career move. New digital technologies enable the departed to manifest as holograms, and deepfake technology makes the return of ghosts, at least on screens, more convincing than ever. Indeed, technological innovation in the areas of artificial intelligence and robots provides a rich area for further research into hauntological dramaturgy, an area that I have obviously neglected in this volume. Today, technology can make the dead utter words and speeches they never articulated as living human beings. For example, a forthcoming documentary on Anthony Bourdain—Roadrunner: A  Film about Anthony Bourdain (Neville 2021)—uses AI technology to create the impression that the deceased celebrity chef is actually narrating the film. That AI can convincingly mimic the grain of Bourdain’s voice does not bode well for those concerned about the importance of being able to distinguish authentic documentary material from manipulated simulacra. In its most benign form, deepfake technology is entertaining. It also has the potential to spread disinformation and ruin reputations. While I do not directly engage with these new technologies, I hope the concept of hauntological dramaturgy will prove useful to scholars and artists who venture into this nascent area of study.

Archives This book is substantially concerned with how artists use institutional and personal archives to create performances. It is especially interested in what Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy (2014) call ‘theatrical things.’ This focus on archival objects stems from my association with AusStage, a database that documents live performance events in Australia. While connected with AusStage, I inherited the Melbourne Workers Theatre (MWT) archive, which, as we shall see in the first chapter of this book, put me in contact with the material traces of the company’s performances: posters, programmes, reviews, costumes, props, photographs, videotapes, contracts and so on. These objects are significant in a number of ways. First, as Schwietzer and Zerdy point out, ‘objects open doors to the past; they help us to reclaim “forgotten” performance practices and to reimagine historical narratives’ (2014, 1). Second, scholars such as Schwietzer and Zerdy argue that objects possess an autonomy and agency that make them more like collaborators than inert, passive things waiting to be activated by humans (the new materialist sensibility of these writers resonates with Marx’s

Introduction 13

old materialist ‘dancing table’ metaphor mentioned earlier). Today, it is almost impossible to write about the function of objects in theatre without referencing new materialism or one of its variants (object-oriented ontology or speculative realism). William Connelly provides a concise account of the concerns of new materialism when he writes: The ‘new materialism’ is the most common name given to a series of movements in several fields that criticize anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics. [The new materialism] casts light on the dissonant relations between the drives of neoliberal capitalism and boomerang effects from nonhuman forces. (2013, 399) This summation also marks some of the general contours of object-oriented ontology (OOO). As I  understand it, OOO is an enterprise that attempts to think the existence of objects outside their connection with human consciousness. In doing so, philosophers such as Graham Harman (2018) and Levi R. Bryant (2011), amongst others, make the case against human exceptionalism—that is, the idea that the human beings are somehow unique and categorically different from all other beings, animals and objects. While I do not directly engage with this body of thought in Hauntological Dramaturgy, I adopt a flat ontology in the way I deal with ‘theatre things.’ In other words, I make no distinction between the significance of material and immaterial objects, so thoughts, daydreams and concepts exist on the same ontological plane as so-called material things: tables, chairs, buildings, curtains, animals and so on (which is not to say that there are differences between things, but objects cannot be reduced to other entities). While the prospect of developing an objectoriented dramaturgy is tantalising, this is not one of the goals of this book. Rather, I  am more concerned with the politics of the archive and the way archivists and artists care for the remains of performance and use archival objects to facilitate creative practice. That said, this book is informed by the distinction Diane Taylor made between the archive and the repertoire. She astutely pointed out that the difference signified by these two terms ‘does not lie between written and spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)’ (2003, 16). Moreover, the repertoire ‘enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge’ (2003, 20). Taylor also identifies the temporal dislocation that characterises the archive when she points out that

14  Introduction

archival memory ‘succeeds in separating the source of “knowledge” from the knower—in time and/or space’ (2003, 19). While I am sympathetic to Taylor’s general argument, I find Brian Massumi’s concept of the anarchive more useful for identifying the way hauntological dramaturgy works as a creative practice. For Massumi, the anarchive is a ‘a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation’ (2016, 7). I will engage with this concept more thoroughly in Chapter 2. For now, it is sufficient to note that the creative potential of objects is a consistent theme of this book and one that generates ethical questions concerning how we respect the remnants of things past (people and performances).

Ethics With specific reference to the remains of performance art, Heike Roms makes an important distinction between the archive as a monolithic entity that manifests relations of power and archival practices (which are performative and can be creative). That is ‘the plurality of actions (selecting, sorting, classifying, preserving, tending, handling) that are undertaken in order to maintain collections of documentary material’ (2013, 38). She goes on to identify the way different stakeholders, scholars, artists and archivists care for the legacies of the performers and productions that are housed in various kinds of collecting institutions (galleries, libraries archives, museums and so on). As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, families also care for the legacies of the deceased, and there is, of course, an ethical dimension to these disparate but connected archival practices, especially those that repurpose the contents of these repositories for new works. As Nicholas Ridout observes, the question ‘How to Act?’ provides a succinct account of ethics (2009, 5–6). What actions, in other words, do we perform to care for someone’s legacy? Whatever our response might be, to care for the legacy of another is to engage with ethical questions concerning duty and responsibility. In practical terms, we need to consider the following questions: To what extent are we compelled to respect the wishes of the dead? And how to proceed if they have left no instructions about how they want to distribute their possessions—the traces of their lives? How might our obligations to care for the dead shift with over time or with changing political and social contexts? Do we have license to repurpose the legacies of the dead for our own purposes, artistic or otherwise? Do we concede that Oscar Wilde had a point when he declared that ‘no artist has ethical sympathies’ (2003), or do we take a more philosophical approach to ethical issues by following the lead of Emmanuel Levinas in acknowledging that to exist means that we have no choice but to respond to the call of the other, to be responsible for the other, to listen and hear the voice of the other even as it disturbs the order of our own subjectivity—as he states in Totality and Infinity ‘to be for the Other is to be Good’ (1969, 261). On the face of things, Derrida’s concept of hauntology has much in common with Levinasian ethics since both are concerned with metaphysics and questions of justice. Moreover, Derrida explicitly engaged with Levinas’ philosophy,

Introduction 15

most famously in his essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (1980). However, Martin Hägglund points out those scholars, such as Simon Critchley (1999), who perceive an ethical turn in Derrida’s thought with the publication of Spectres of Marx ignore the way the logic of deconstruction challenges ‘the notion of an ideal justice, without renouncing the struggle for justice’ (2008, 78). Put simply, there is always a form of violence that inheres in all ethical actions: forms of exclusion, neglect and erasure occur with every ethical decision we make. So, in Derrida’s reckoning, violence is a condition of possibility for any kind of struggle for justice. Clearly, the realm of ethics demands an engagement with philosophical questions like the ones I have just posed. Rest assured, though, that while this book invokes philosophical concepts to unpack dramaturgical problems, its major focus is on the mechanics of assembling performance works that engage with spirits and spectres. I  fully acknowledge that such a focus precludes an expansive account of the relationship between performance and ethics. For those readers interested in exploring this topic further, I  recommend Helen Grehan’s excellent book, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (2009). This book is divided into six chapters. Each concerns the ways scholars, artists and sometimes archivists remember the dead by conversing, metaphorically, with their ghosts. These conversations, as I have indicated earlier, are usually mediated through objects. Chapter 1 is primarily concerned with archive theory with a particular focus on Derrida’s account of the archive in his book, Archive Fever: Freudian Impression (1996). It is divided into two parts. The first reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the MWT to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. This section of the chapter juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics and hauntological character of the archive. The second part unpacks the fraught relationship between human memory and video recordings of performance events, arguing that scholars and archivists have a responsibility to care for the spirit of the legacies they curate and preserve for posterity. In other words, an entity’s way of being, its character and its often-idiosyncratic approach to making work should be reflected in archival practices of care. I use my misremembering of a formative theatre production, the Sydney Front’s, John Laws/ Sade (1987), as a case study that identifies some of the major arguments used for and against the value of video and film recordings in preserving the legacy of performers and performance events. Chapter 2 provides a hauntological reading of Dickie Beau’s Re-member Me (2018). Dickie Beau is a ‘lip-sync fabulist’ who, in Re-member Me, celebrates the life of Ian Charleson and his critically acclaimed performance of Hamlet, a performance that was never recorded. Its traces exist only in a few reviews and the memories of those people who either saw or participated in this landmark production. Beau fills the archival gap by creating a performance that channels the spirit of Charleson, a classical trained stage actor best remembered today for his

16  Introduction

role in the film Chariots of Fire (Hudson 1981) by lip-synching to famous archival recordings of Hamlet as well as new recordings with those who witnessed Charleson’s tour de force as the Prince of Denmark. While Beau provides a compelling example of Marvin Carlson’s concept of ghosting, Re-member Me also has a political dimension, especially in the way it uses queer dramaturgy to unsettle assumptions about the place of Hamlet in the western canon. The chapter also examines the performance as an archival act of care. Ian Charleson died of AIDS 8 weeks after performing the role of Hamlet in a production directed by Richard Eyre in 1990, so Beau’s queering of the role generates a series of ethical questions about privacy, celebrity and politics, which speaks to the importance of Derrida’s concept of justice to hauntological dramaturgy. Chapter  3 introduces the concept of the anarchive with reference to the Wooster Group’s seminal work, Rumstick Road (1977). In short, the anarchive is a cross-platform reiteration of an artist’s archival traces. It is an archival practice of care that foregrounds creativity and innovation, thereby generating a different set of ethical considerations for artists. Rumstick Road inaugurated a new genre of autobiographical performance and also generated a welter of critical commentary. Produced as a response to the death of Spalding Gray’s mother, the performance, devised by Gray and Elizabeth LaCompte, provides rich material for considering how the Wooster Group used a variety of objects—Gray’s personal recorded conversations, family letters, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 35 mm slides, music—to summon the spirit of Gray’s mother. Dissatisfied with the official archival record of the production held in the New York Public Library, the Wooster group used contemporary digital technology to resurrect and repurpose the performance as a video, which constitutes a new work of art that produces an ‘anarchival’ artefact that unleashes the creative potential of archival material—production stills, video recordings, audio recordings, super-8 film footage and a variety of objects used in 1977—while remaining faithful to the spirit of experimentation that marked the original production. Chapter 4 is also concerned with family archives and objects but focuses on the aesthetic and ethical challenges posed by devising my own multiplatform work, Vanitas (2017–2021). Partially inspired by Rumstick Road, Vanitas is an ongoing theatre/installation/video performance work that examines my oftencombative and testy relationship with my father, AJ D’Cruz, an Anglo-Indian man whose modest aspirations were thwarted by unfortunate circumstances, racism and what Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’—that is, the investment in dreams and life goals that generate anxiety, dissatisfaction and despair. In my artistic work, I use objects owned by my father of ideas and activities I associate with his life to tell his story and converse with his ghost. On one level, the chapter explores how family archives might be repurposed in the anarchival spirit articulated in the previous chapter, thereby providing a different perspective on hauntological dramaturgy, one that emerges from my own artistic practice. This autoethnographic approach to making creative work is not without its own ethical challenges related to questions of representing the dead and their legacies. I continue to be haunted by my father’s ghost, especially since I have

Introduction 17

created a work that may or may not represent his spirit in the manner he might have approved. As mentioned earlier, critics like Simon Reynolds (2011) and Mark Fisher (2012, 2014) developed the concept of hauntology with reference to music and popular culture, and the final two chapters of this book explore hauntological dramaturgy in this context with specific reference to two dead rock musicians: the relatively obscure David McComb, lead singer and songwriter of the criminally neglected Australian band, the Triffids, and David Bowie, a critically acclaimed superstar whose death was mourned all over the world by his plethora of fans. McComb died young, but his former bandmates, friends and fans have found ways to keep his legacy alive and conjure a lost future where his star shines brightly—his band were touted as the next big thing by the influential New Musical Express (NME) in 1985, but they never realised their potential in their heyday. Their return as a ‘legacy’ act, sans McComb, generates a series of intriguing questions about hauntology and ‘Retromania.’ A small caveat concerning this chapter: I have been haunted by McComb’s music for most of my adult life—he was a contemporary of mine, and we even attended the same university in the 1980s. If I sound like an overenthusiastic fanboy in this chapter it is because I  continue to find McComb’s music dazzling, but while Chapter 5 explores what it means to be haunted by an artist’s oeuvre it also frames its argument concerning the hauntological features of McComb’s music, which creates a sense of fractured time that is not wholly dependent on pop culture referents. His hauntological sensibility, I  argue, has more to do with being attuned to uncanny currents in literary history and culture. Further, the chapter explores the relationship between McComb’s compositional techniques and the role sound plays in hauntological dramaturgy. McComb’s sonic palette has much in common with gothic aesthetics, and the first part of the chapter deals with what makes his work resonate with the role atmospherics play in hauntological dramaturgy. The second part of the chapter is concerned, again, with the archival practice of care by identifying the ways McComb’s legacy has grown in recent years due to the efforts of his friends who have written or edited books, produced concerts and even a new album or unrecorded songs that function as a eulogy for an underappreciated artist. The final chapter of this book examines some of the key works David Bowie produced in the last five years of his life as a practice of ‘auto-eulogy’—this is yet another practice of archival care but one that is conducted by the artist who anticipates their death. ‘Auto-eulogy’ involves conversing with one’s own ghost (or ghosts) in order to help shape one’s own legacy. Bowie’s work consistently challenged the commonly held idea that identity is static, so it is no surprise that we need to acknowledge that his ghost, like all ghosts, is more than one. Chapter 6 identifies the ways some of his late songs and video clips not only resonate with but also complicate Mark Fisher’s account of the relationship between nostalgia and hauntology by looking at ‘auto-eulogy’ as a practice of self-care. For Bowie, auto-eulogy is a multiplatform activity that has much in common with the anarchival approach to questions of inheritance and legacy

18  Introduction

addressed in Chapters 2 and 3. Bowie famously created a range of personas that underscored his interest in theatricality, but in the final years of his life he actually co-wrote an experimental off-Broadway musical with the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, Lazarus (2016). In the final part of this chapter, I enumerate the ways in which this play functions as an ‘auto-eulogy’ and facilitates an encounter between Bowie and his own ghosts before his actual death. Finally, it is important to underscore that my articulation of hauntological dramaturgy is not a prescriptive methodology for reading or making creative work. The concept is not defined by a set of specific dramaturgical practices, nor is it a genre. As Carlson (2003) points out, there is a sense in which every kind of text is haunted. To take the example of theatre, a dramatic text may contain ghosts as characters, and, if not, it will certainly be haunted by intertexts, ideas and concepts from other times and locations. Further, the restaging of a dramatic work will be haunted by its previous productions or at least by the memories of those productions. Actors will be possessed by characters and haunted perhaps by the performances of other thespians who played the same role. Similarly, theatre spaces are haunted by everything that occurred in those spaces. The past always bleeds into the present. While I  have certainly spent some time engaging this general concept of haunting, I  am more interested in formulating a concept of hauntological dramaturgy that is best thought of as a disposition or attunement to the dead—an attunement that has an ethical dimension. To summarise, this book draws on three broad and interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida’s hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to the ghosts; Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher’s and Simon Reynolds’ development of Derrida’s ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, have helped me consider the ways that ghosts put us in touch with ethical problems generated by remembering the dead, mourning the dead and seeking justice on behalf of hungry ghosts, those restless souls who have unfinished business on the earth. With the exception of perhaps David Bowie, each chapter of this book commemorates at least one disturbed spirit. I attempt to set things right for Vicki Reynolds; Ian Charleson; Bette and Spalding Gray; my father, AJ D’Cruz; and David McComb (Bowie’s ghosts do not need my help; they do a pretty good job of remembering themselves). As we shall see, good ethical intentions can result in unforeseen violent outcomes. So, while I attempt to acknowledge the singularity of the lives I address in this volume, I apologise in advance for the inevitable ethical transgressions that I commit in my attempt to seek justice on behalf of these restless souls. Enough preamble. Enter the ghosts.

References Barba, Eugenio. 1985. “The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work.” New Theatre Quarterly 1, no. 1: 75–78. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.

Introduction 19 Blau, Herbert. 1987. The Eye of Prey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bryant, Levi. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Campbell, Alyson, and Stephen Farrier, eds. 2016. Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1999. “Enter the Theatre (in between).” Modern Drama 42, no. 3: 301–14. Connelly, William. 2013. “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41, no. 3: 399–412. Critchley, Simon. 1999. Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2018. Teaching Postdramatic Theatre: Anxieties, Aporias and Disclosures. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Dickey, Colin. 2016. Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. New York: Penguin. Dyson, Jeremy, and Andy Nyman. 2021. “Ghost Stories.” Accessed July 26, 2021. www. timeout.com/melbourne/theatre/ghost-stories. Eckersall, Peter, Helena Grehan, and Edward Scheer. 2017. New Media Dramaturgy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, Mark. 2012. “What Is Hauntology.” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1: 16–24. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Classics. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press. Grainge, Paul. 2018. “Introduction: Memory and Popular Film.” In Memory and Popular Film, edited by Paul Grainge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grehan, Helena. 2009. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hägglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A  New Theory of Everything. London: Penguin. Hudson, Hugh, dir. 1981. Chariots of Fire. Enigma Productions/Twentieth Century Fox Films. Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. John Laws/Sade, 80-minute theatre work, Sydney, 1987. Laera, Margherita. 2014. “ ‘Introduction.” In Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat. London and New York: Methuen.

20  Introduction LeCompte, Elizabeth, dir. 1977. Rumstick Road. Performing Garage, New York, March 25–April 17. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Luckhurst, Mary, and Emilie Morin, eds. 2014. Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lucy, Niall. 2004. A Derrida Dictionary. London: Blackwell. Marcus, Greil. 1999. Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession. Boston: Harvard University Press. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage. Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31: 83–109. Massumi, Brian. 2016. “Working Principles.” In The Go-To How to Book of Anarchiving, edited by Andrew Murphie. Montréal: The Senselab. Neville, Morgan, dir. 2021. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. CNN Films/HBO Max, USA. Phelan, Peggy. 1997. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London and New York: Routledge. Rayner, Alice. 2006. Ghosts, Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Re-member Me, written and performed by Dickie Beau, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia, October 21, 2018. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Ridout, Nicholas. 2009. Theatre and Ethics. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Roms, Heike. 2013. “Archiving Legacies: Who Cares for Performance Remains.” In Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, edited by Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schweitzer, Marlis, and Joanne Zerdy, eds. 2014. Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sorfer, Andrew. 2013. Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Turner, Cathy, and Synne Behrndt. 2008. Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. 1994. “Theaterschrift 5 & 6.” On Dramaturgy. Accessed November 6, 2019. http://sarma.be/docs/3108. Wang, Orrin N. C. 2007. “Ghost Theory.” Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 2: 203–25. Wilde, Oscar. 2003. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Classics. Woynarski, Lisa. 2020. Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

1 Memorialisation, Memory and Practices of Archival Care

Ghosts can manifest in a variety of places, but archives, institutional and personal, provide an especially conducive environment for spectres since they contain ephemera associated with dead people, past events and bygone eras. These remnants mediate our encounters with ghosts. Archives, then, are haunted places. And the institutional archive is an especially foreboding place. In the words of Elin Diamond, it ‘reeks of legality and ceremony. It’s where you curtsy even when you don’t intend to. It’s where you mark the difference between this place and every other place’ (2008, 24). This type of official repository is often difficult to access without the appropriate academic or professional credentials, and, as we shall see, it functions as stern arbiter of truth and a source of historical authority. That said, archives have never been so prominent in scholarly discourse. David Carlin believes that archives, in recent times, have lost their dowdy reputation and have become ‘enticing’ (2020, 32). No doubt, this transformation is partly a consequence of the digital revolution, and many scholars, including Carlin, have pointed out that we need to rethink the ontology of the archive in the light of digital technology since, today, archival objects, or digital representations of such objects, are, theoretically, available to everybody. The Internet may be the biggest archive ever built, but material collecting institutions—galleries, libraries, archives and museums—still exist, and access to their materials continues to be restricted. Gunhild Borggren and Rune Gade make a similar point to Carlin when they note that the idea of the archive has expanded in recent years from the idea of a physical storage space that preserves objects and documents to virtual archives of data collections accessed through computer screens, collective memory engaged in reinterpretations of history, or political dimensions of archives invested with issues of accessibility and power. (2013, 9) It is no coincidence that various digital technologies—digital audio and non-linear video editing software along with digital storage and retrieval

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-2

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mechanisms—provide a condition of possibility for the appearance of ghosts that I write about in this book. Inevitably, archives house incomplete records, and these omissions generate debate and rancour amongst all scholars concerned with questions of history, legacy and inheritance, but archives also pose a particular set of practical and philosophical problems for those interested in preserving the legacies of performances and performers. A welter of critical commentary on these difficulties testifies to the way the archive troubles the ontology of performance. Paul Clarke and Julian Warren point out that from the 1960s, ‘performance’s origins have been ontologically founded on disappearance and ephemerality as vanishing’ (2009, 47). Peggy Phelan’s claim that performance only exists in the present is the most famous articulation of this position. ‘Performance,’ she writes, ‘cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’ (1993, 146). While Phelan was referring to performance art in this passage, I think her observation also applies to theatre since it is difficult to maintain the distinction between different genres of live performance in absolute terms—the theatre production I discuss in the second part of this chapter is, as we shall see, a case in point. Rebecca Schneider adds a deconstructive twist to Phelan’s oft-cited ontological declaration when she argues that the scandal of performance relative to the archive is not that it disappears (this is what the archive expects) but that it both ‘becomes itself through disappearance’ (as Phelan writes) and that it remains—though its remains resist ‘house arrest’ and Derrida’s noted domiciliation. (2001, 105) I will unpack Derrida’s commentary on the archive shortly. For now, it is sufficient to acknowledge that Schneider disturbs archival orthodoxy by asking whether ‘in privileging an understanding of performance as a refusal to remain, do we ignore other ways of knowing, other modes of remembering, that might be situated precisely in the ways in which performance remains, but remains differently?’ (2001, 101). This chapter is about some of these other ways of remembering, which more often than not manifest as embodied practices of care, to use Heike Rom’s phrase (2013, 38). Erdmut Wizisla points out that we remember Walter Benjamin, the celebrated literary and cultural critic, because of the strategic calculation with which he deposited his manuscripts, notebooks, and printed papers in the custody of friends and acquaintances in various countries. His archives landed in the hands of others, so that their documents might be delivered to posterity. (2007, 1)

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Benjamin’s friends cared for his archive as a body of work and eventually found ways to disseminate his rich scholarship to the world. But what about those writers who never had the foresight or opportunity to care for their legacies? And what becomes of the legacies of those artists whose work cannot be preserved on the page or is distorted by recording mediums? This chapter engages with these questions but in so doing it will unpack the politics of the archive by paying particular attention to its spectral character. These tasks necessarily require a conversation with ghosts and an explication of the archival theory that underpins the concept of hauntological dramaturgy. This chapter tells two ghost stories. The first concerns the memorialisation of Vicki Reynolds, an emerging playwright who died before her first fulllength play, Daily Grind, was performed. I  first encountered Vicki’s spectre when I  was compiling a history of MWT in 2006. Sorting through a collection of dusty boxes containing the production ephemera of the company, I found a mysterious untitled VHS videotape, which, as we shall see, facilitated my interest in Vicki’s life and its memorialisation. The second section of this chapter is about the relationship between human memory and the archive. It analyses this connection by contrasting my memory of seeing what was, for me, an especially formative theatre production (John Laws/Sade by the Sydney Front) with viewing the archival video record of the same work 30 years after my original viewing. The Sydney Front, a dynamic, experimental Australian theatre company, has haunted me since I saw them perform John Laws/Sade in 1986. My encounter with the video record of this production was a singularly unsettling experience since it exposed the unreliability of my memory but also raised questions about how the unreliability of human memory can function as an archival practice of care if it remains true to the spirit of a person or an event—a topic that haunts most of the subsequent chapters in this book. Having outlined the broad structure of this chapter, we can now converse with our first hungry ghost, Vicki Reynolds.

Letter to a Dead Playwright Dear Vicki, You didn’t know me, so let me introduce myself. My name is Glenn D’Cruz, and I’m a theatre studies academic at Deakin University. Through a convoluted chain of events I won’t bore you with, I find myself faced with the daunting task of organising the Melbourne Workers Theatre archive. I  guess I’m one of the guardians of the company’s history. Since you were an important part of that history, I  feel obliged to tell you, for reasons I’ll reveal later, a little bit about what I intend to do with the remnants of the company’s past—the photographs, videotapes, scripts and other bits of production ephemera. Soon I  will sort, catalogue, classify, describe, analyse and eventually deposit these items in the Deakin University library, and they’ll be accessible to anyone who has a scholarly interest in MWT, or perhaps the history of Melbourne, or maybe some other purpose I can’t possibly foresee. As you might have gathered

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from this awkward prelude, I’m troubled by the fact that I can’t anticipate who will examine this material—I can’t predict how future scholars might use and interpret the contents of the MWT archive, and I’m not sure how to proceed. I thought you might be able to assist me. What do you reckon, Vicki? Before I  go any further, I  should say something about my motivations, just in case you’re wondering about why I’ve summoned you here today. First, let me assure you that I’m not some disinterested academic without any direct involvement with MWT. I was the chair of the company’s committee of management from 2002 to 2006 and a member of its artistic advisory committee from 2002 to 2008. I’ve seen almost every MWT performance for the last 10 years, although I must confess missing most of its early productions. I’m sorry to say I never actually saw any of your work. I also edited a book celebrating MWT’s 20th anniversary (D’Cruz 2007), but more importantly, I’m someone who admired the company’s radically egalitarian ethos and its political commitment. So there you have it—my credentials, my justifications. I have to confess my motives aren’t completely altruistic—as an academic, I stand to benefit from sifting through the miscellaneous debris of MWT’s past. This task that I find a little disquieting won’t hurt my career. Anyway, enough preamble—let’s get to the point. In short, I’m writing to you because during the course of digitising the company’s video archive I  found a videotape, which I  subsequently identified as belonging to the first production of your play, Daily Grind. You might be pleased to know that it was a great success—MWT staged in 1992, and it was remounted by the Street Arts Company in Brisbane in 1994 and Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, in 2001. So belated congratulations. Anyway, unlike most of the archived MWT video material, which consists of edited production highlights, or full-length performances, the tape in question, while obviously connected to your play, was difficult to classify without researching its context. Why is this a big deal? Well, I can’t just deposit this artefact without some contextualisation and commentary—I’m an academic, after all, and we’re compelled to inspect, classify and analyse any artefact we consider significant (don’t ask me about the stuff we toss out—I might come to that later). Some of my colleagues call this process of selection and commentary ‘dramaturgical analysis’ (Burvill and Seton 2010, 316). Can I put a reference in a letter? Sorry, you probably don’t give a shit, but there are no hard-and-fast protocols for what I’m doing in addressing you like this, Vicki. You’ve probably sensed my nervous disposition—this is a bit weird, especially since this letter is not a private bit of correspondence. I want to respect your privacy, but since your work and name are scattered through several archives for all to see it’s probably a bit late to be overly sensitive about these things. Anyway, the grainy VHS tape contains three sections. In the first, an actor, who I subsequently identified as Belinda McClory, performs a choreographed striptease for the camera. She bumps, grinds, gyrates and strips to Prince’s song, ‘Cream.’ Her performance is obviously sexual, although hardly provocative given the proliferation of soft pornography in popular culture in the

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early nineties (her ‘striptease’ is positively tame by today’s standards—how do I know? Well, let’s not go there). Belinda’s character is clearly performing for the camera, and my first impression is that the tape does not represent any sort of record of a ‘live’ theatrical performance. The second part of the tape contains footage of a man leaning on the bonnet of a parked car at night. He rolls and lights a cigarette, looks up the sky and shakes his head with a look of disdain before walking away from the car and disappearing into the distance before the image fades to black. Someone has obviously composed the scene to look like it’s part of a film or television drama. The final section is also filmic and portrays the stripper in the first scene walking down a street with a large blue bag strapped to her left shoulder. She walks right up to the camera until her head is fully in frame and produces a look somewhere between trepidation and anxiety. It didn’t take me long to solve this mystery. Of course, I’d heard bits and pieces about you and your play while assembling the MWT book, and I remembered your friend and collaborator Patricia Cornelius insisting that the book include some acknowledgement of your singular contribution to company. I  republished a short article that Patricia had written about you for the April 1995 edition of Australasian Drama Studies. Included in that volume, which I dutifully located in the Deakin University Library, were several other pieces you might find interesting. First, the journal contained the revised version of your script with an account of the ‘making’ of Daily Grind by Carol Stevenson, who was the play’s assistant director. Apologies for this, but I need to quote a bit of Carol’s article. The original production of Daily Grind began with video footage of Roxy performing a strip and the live actor coming on to complete the routine. The juxtaposition of live and recorded images of the same woman— the one passive, viewed, the other confrontational, speaking—helped to highlight the way in which the female nude is generally positioned in an X-rated cinema compared to the way in which Roxy is positioned within Daily Grind. (Stevenson 1995, 110) Carol sounds like an academic (she did teach theatre history at Victoria University in New Zealand according to her biographical statement in the journal, which explains the tone of her article, which sounds as though it’s informed by aspects of 1970s feminist film theory). Anyway, there’s no direct reference to the video in the published script, and I couldn’t locate earlier drafts of the work when I was editing the MWT book. Perhaps I should trawl through the formidable pile of MWT papers and documents again. Did you ever consider using video to make the point about the disparity between passive and active performances, Vicki? Convinced that I have a duty to undertake more than a perfunctory dramaturgical analysis of the video, I searched for more information about you and Daily Grind. Possessed by a desire to locate as much information about you, your play and your play’s multiple contexts, I punched your

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name into my web browser and discovered, unsurprisingly, that it’s scattered all over the Internet. I discovered several reviews of your play on the Theatre Works website (the venue for the MWT production of Daily Grind). In addition to the reviews, the company’s online archive contains a poster, an excerpt from a MWT newsletter and a short biographical sketch of you, which mentions your illness and untimely death. Your name also crops up in relation to other works such as The Bridge, which you produced with Donna Jackson in 1990. There are several other references to you in cyber space; your name frequently appears in the AusStage database—the archive I’m helping to develop. I  could go on. Every reference leads to another reference and another, and so it goes on. Anyway, I think you will probably be most interested in a work that appears in a recent edition of the journal, Double Dialogues. It’s written by your sister, the playwright and academic, Jodi Gallagher. Jodi’s article is titled ‘Blood Is Thicker than Water: Family Drama, Self-representation and the Construction of Authenticity.’ It’s a fascinating piece, which, amongst other things, examines the relationship between the private and public and the place of autobiographical disclosure in art. To get right to the point, Jodi writes very eloquently about how your death inspired both her play Elegy and your daughter Bindy Cole’s installation and photographic exhibition, Bindi’s Boxes and Unpacking Bindi 1–3. Like me, your sister, for perhaps different reasons from mine, wanted to summon your spirit and return you from the ranks of the dead. Jodi was also looking for traces of you in your play. She writes: I searched for traces of my sister in the characters on the stage while knowing that they were never intended as portraiture. I listened to the rhythm of the words and heard her speech patterns that echoed mine. I relived the times when Vicki would read me drafts of scenes on the phone and we would laugh about what we thought would be the response from the audience—the audience that I was now part of, responding, listening, watching, all the time knowing her absence. (Gallagher 2010) I’m searching for different kinds of traces, Vicki. We never met, as you know, so I don’t know what you were like or how close your play was to your own experiences. All I have are the scattered and contradictory references to your work, your name and your life. I’m looking for traces that will allow me to properly contextualise your work for a future that I cannot possibly anticipate. I don’t have time to outline all the issues that Jodi’s article raises, or the anxieties it creates for me, your archival guardian, so I’ll focus on just one aspect of this rich and suggestive work—authenticity. We’re all looking for authenticity, aren’t we? Archivists and academics perhaps even more than most people want the ‘real’ thing, the most authentic artefact that is as close to the absent event or the deceased person as possible. Archivists, academics and collectors generally think about authenticity in terms of an item’s proximity to some absent origin

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or generative principle. We can’t help doing this and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nonetheless, Jodi takes issue with another sense of the word ‘authenticity.’ She notes that Alan Filewod and David Watt impute that you are a working-class woman in their account of MWT’s history, which I republished in Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Filewod and Watt 2007, 52). Your friend Patricia Cornelius also attests to your ‘working-class background.’ Patricia writes that you ‘saw the work of strippers in industrial terms and the play is refreshing for it. The play is strong in its authenticity—from one who knows that world and does not romanticise it’ (Cornelius 1995, 103). She also records: From the outset, Vicki was very interested in the politics of the company and in the telling of stories about working class experience. Her own writing reflected her own working-class background and an interest in telling the stories which are largely left untold. (ibid., 103) Jodi points out that your alleged status as a working-class woman lends a certain credibility to Daily Grind and the Theatre Company’s image as a collective dedicated to making work ‘for, with and about working class people’ (Stevenson, 104). The description of Daily Grind in the AusStage database reinforces this sense of authenticity—‘Daily Grind was written by an ex-stripper which accounts for the almost palpable aura of honesty,’ according to one of the play’s reviewers. Jodi contests this official picture of you as an authentic working-class artist, while accepting that you were probably partly responsible for propagating a bogus working-class image. She writes, ‘Was she working class—under any definition? I can quite clearly state that she wasn’t—by any definition. Her life experience, however, is in this instance being used as a marker of authenticity and authority for the company’s practice’ (Gallagher 2010). Under any definition? How do you define class, anyway? It used to be about the position you occupied in the production chain, as all good Marxists know. If you didn’t have the ability to purchase the labour power of others and if all you had was the ability to sell your own labour then you were working class. Simple, eh? Not any longer, but let’s not go there right now. At the very least, you, like MWT itself, clearly identified with a certain working-class image. Early archival photographs of the company at the Jolimont rail yards testify to this affinity with workers. The picture on the front cover of the MWT book shows several members of the company dressed in overalls and boots—they look like factory workers. I know you spent a considerable amount of time in the rail yards. What was that like? What did the workers make of the likes of you? Did they see you and your mates as a bunch of arty wankers engaged in cosplay, or did they appreciate your desire to contribute to the struggle against capital? The rail yards don’t exist anymore, and MWT stopped performing in workplace venues a long time ago. In fact, your play was the first MWT production performed in a regular theatre venue. What do you think about that, Vicki? And what do you make of your sister’s claim that you weren’t working class by any definition?

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How do I phrase this next question? Who were you, Vicki Reynolds? Who are you, Vicki Reynolds? Who or what will you be, Vicki Reynolds? I can’t possibly settle the matter of your working-class identity here or anytime in the future no matter how many traces I follow to find the ‘truth’ about you and your play, but I do know that I will partially determine the answers to these questions, which is why I’m writing to you, hastily, hesitantly, under the heady disorienting grip of archive fever. I’m not mad enough to expect a reply from you anytime soon but chasing your name across various archives has given me pause for thought about my responsibility to you as a singular identity, Vicki Reynolds, working class or not. I hope I haven’t bored or annoyed you with this missive, Vicki. In closing, I’d like to give you the last word, but I know this is impossible. Anyway, while trawling through the various MWT videos on my computer I found a fuzzy, hazy electronic representation of you. It’s from an SBS TV documentary. You’re sitting in front of an old Macintosh computer, which is framed by sundry bits of paper pinned to some kind of notice board. You look thin, a little gaunt, and your face is framed by curly poodle locks— your hairstyle is so very 1980s. You gaze confidently at the interviewer and explain the MWT modus operandi: We do all the research for the shows amongst the working class. Making contacts through the union movement, and through here where we work at Jolimont railway maintenance yard. There a big percentage of migrant workers here. Obviously for Taxi, we interviewed lots and lots of them. Through the trade union movement, we talk to people from the RSI support group, which is mainly made up of Italian and Greek women who worked in factories on machines and who’ve been injured at work. I think whatever show we do is always to some extent about migrant experience, and we try to use actors from different migrant backgrounds and their languages. I mean that’s a priority in this company to use those people, so, you know, their stories are told. (no reference available) Forgive me for trying to tell some of your story, and thanks for indulging me (I know you had no choice). Yours sincerely, Glenn D’Cruz

*** Archive Fever I am still disturbed by the fact that I could not track down a definitive reference for Vicki’s television appearance. The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) logo on the videotape told me where to look, but the station’s archives contain no record of this broadcast—the recording was probably wiped. No doubt my sense of deflation is symptomatic of a bad dose of ‘archive fever’—a sickness

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that is, more or less, occupational hazard for academics, archivists, collectors and those who feel compelled to reckon with ghosts. Jacques Derrida coined this term in his eponymous book, which argues that to be stricken with archive fever ‘is to have compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’ (Derrida 1996, 91). If we follow the logic of deconstruction, there can be no ‘place of absolute commencement’ and no absolute point of origin for any event, life or discourse since no document is self-sufficient—there is always the trace of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in every archival inscription. Before unpacking Derrida’s commentary on the archive in more detail, it is important to say something about the context in which I encountered the ghost of Vicki Reynolds. Until recently, I  have been a member of the AusStage project. AusStage is a web-based archive that contains information about ‘live’ performance events in Australia. The facility is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and a consortium of 18 universities and industry partner institutions like the Australia Council for the Arts. Established in 1999, AusStage ‘records information on live performance in Australia, as a wealth-producing creative industry, a generator of social capital and an indicator of the nation’s cultural vitality’(AusStage). It functions as a valuable resource for a wide range of stakeholders including academics, students, artists and anyone else who has an interest in Australian live performance. The archive will, if it hasn’t already, transform the ways that scholars conduct research into Australia’s performing arts culture. My first contribution to the AusStage project involved digitising the MWT archive. Having catalogued and deposited a wide range of visual material in the Deakin University digital repository (which is linked to the AusStage database), I completed the digitisation of the company’s video archive in 2008. However, access to this resource is restricted because of Deakin University’s reluctance to publicly display material that may contravene copyright laws (I could not assign authorship to a significant number of the photographs in the archive, for example). For the most part, I was too distracted by technical problems concerning cataloguing protocols and preservation strategies to consider the project’s philosophical and ethical dimensions—see Burvill and Seton (2010) for a detailed account of the technical problems associated with the AusStage archive. These practical problems are not insignificant, but they do seem to have dominated my engagement with the process of archiving MWT’s rich legacy. This situation changed when I discovered the unmarked videotape mentioned earlier. This bit of ephemera raised various ethical problems about the archive, which I alluded to in my letter to Vicki, but which I will now unpack by explicating some of Derrida’s key ideas in Archive Fever. The subtitle of Derrida’s book, A Freudian Impression, requires a little bit of explication. Carolyn Steedman points out that Derrida had long seen in Freudian psychoanalysis the desire to recover moments of inception, beginnings and origins, which—in a deluded way—we think might be the moment of truth. For Derrida, Freud’s work

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is particularly marked by the foundationalism, or fever for origins, that he has spent nearly half a century writing against. (2001, 1160) Derrida reminds us that within the word ‘archive’ shelters the Greek word ‘arkhe,’ which refers to what he calls commencement and commandment. Thus, the term ‘archive’ contains traces of two forgotten, and potentially antagonistic, principles. If we pay heed to these silenced principles, we find that the archive is a place where things apparently commence and a place where certain privileged people command and exercise power according to the principle of the law. In other words, the first principle speaks of origins and beginnings, while the second carries a nomological force. The ‘arkhe’ is, in short, one of Derrida’s ‘undecidables’ since the term ‘archive’ is fractured and split between that which is originary and that which commands and orders the event after the event. Moving on to the word’s Latin root, ‘archivum,’ Derrida notes that this term derives from the Greek arkheion, which refers to the domicile of the superior magistrates (that is, those citizens charged with the publicly recognised authority to make the law). The ancient Greeks called these figures Archons and deposited official documents in their homes. Derrida writes that the Archons were guardians responsible for the physical security of documents who had ‘the power to interpret the archives’ (Derrida 1996, 2). This brief summary of Derrida’s account of the archive underscores the connection between archives and authority. In the introduction to this chapter, I alluded to Rebecca Schneider’s argument concerning how performance functions as an embodied archive, which unsettles this despotic conception of the archive. She points out that not everybody accepts the authority of archival documents noting that such deference is arguably foreign to practices in popular culture, such as the practices of American Civil War re-enactors who, often motivated by a distrust of documents, consider performance as precisely a way of keeping memory alive—making sure it does not disappear. (2001, 102) Jonathan W. Marshall makes a similar point when he draws attention to the body as a repository for historical trauma in his hauntological reading of Japanese Butoh, noting that ‘The spectacle of the revenant, deceased, or spectral presence that has returned to deform and inhabit the body of the dancer is a central organizing trope of butoh’ (2013, 66). Derrida does not ignore the archival function of the human body. Indeed, he addresses the relationship between human memory and the archive with reference to Freud’s famous ‘Note on the Mystic Writing Pad’ (1951). For Freud, the unconscious is a vast archive, an inexhaustible storage mechanism that records all sensory impressions. However, these impressions are not easily recalled once they’ve been deposited in the interior of the unconscious

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(after making the journey from the outside world through the medium of the sense organs). Freud describes this psychic archive by way of an analogy with a simple child’s toy, the mystic writing pad. This device consists of a thin plastic sheet placed on top of a wax slate. It is possible to produce markings on the surface of this toy with a pen or stylus. The impressions ‘magically’ disappear when the user lifts the plastic from the slate. The wax slate, however, retains the impressions made by the stylus after they have vanished from the plastic sheet. While acknowledging the imperfect nature of the comparison, Freud, nevertheless, argues that this device comes closest to approximating the workings of human memory. Indeed, all other mechanical supplements to memory, in Freud’s time, fail to display the ability to both contain an unlimited amount of impressions and remain open to new information. For example, a piece of paper can permanently record a limited number of impressions before running out of space. A blackboard, on the other hand, can receive an infinite number of impressions but cannot retain them without destroying its ability to keep receiving new imprints. In many ways, traditional archives operated in a similar fashion to this Freudian account of embodied human memory. Archives sort, classify and store information. Scholars retrieve information with varying degrees of difficulty (some items get lost or misplaced and require investigative work). For Freud, human memory involves similar processes. The psyche is a mechanism that also sorts, classifies and sometimes represses memories. It is an imperfect apparatus prone to forgetting things and distorting facts. I will return to this argument in the second part of this chapter with specific reference to the debates generated by the prevalence of video archives in the digital age. For now, it is enough to note that as the de facto MWT archivist I behaved as a contemporary Archon by making decisions about what archival items are significant enough to be rescued from oblivion and by exercising hermeneutic authority. In short, my clumsy attempt to correspond with Vicki Reynolds is one manifestation of my own archive fever: that is, my desire to solve the enigma of Vicki’s traces in the MWT archive, to follow the traces of Vicki’s life to some point of origin that might tell the truth about the authenticity of her play and her contested ‘working class’ identity. If I have a responsibility to future scholars interested in MWT how do I proceed? How far do I let my archive fever drive my search for the truth about Vicki Reynolds? My letter to Vicki attempts to reference some of Derrida’s insights concerning the politics of the archive and identify the dramaturgical dimensions of archival practices of care. While recognising the necessity of ordering, interpreting and consigning archival documents, my letter implicitly marks the tensions that exist around transforming personal information into public knowledge by identifying the inherent violence involved in the process of selecting documents of significance and interpreting those documents under the sign of official, institutional authority—various people express a view about Vicki’s class identity in my letter except, of course, Vicki herself (whose own testimony may have more to do with embracing the romance of the margins through self-fashioning than telling the truth about her class identity).

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Derrida observes that the archive, like news media, ‘produces as much as it records the event’ (Derrida, 17). The same might be said of archival practices of memorialisation (like my letter). I summon the ghost, I address the ghost, but I also cannot help but produce a version of the ghost that serves my purposes no matter how hard I might try to act ethically. To what extent does my ‘letter to Vicki’ actually resurrect her spirit, I wonder? What kinds of violence do I commit by invoking her name and inviting her ghost to speak to a community of scholars? There are no simple answers to these ethical questions. The best I can do is to agree with Martin Hägglund when he claims the Derrida’s thesis in Specters of Marx ‘is that violence and discrimination are not opposed to justice: they are inextricable from its very possibility’ (2008, 78). In other words, acting ethically, in any capacity, involves a founding violence—we can never discriminate and distort, but we must act, nonetheless if we are to seek justice for the ghost. I will have cause to revisit these ethical issues in subsequent chapters, but for now I want to say more about the spectral structure of the archive since the archive, its various forms, is the memory machine that facilitates our encounters with ghosts.

The Spectral Structure of the Archive In Archive Fever (1996), Derrida argues that Freud’s ‘death drive’ provides the condition of possibility for the archive. Freud formulated this in his monograph, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2003). In basic terms he argues that all organic matter emerges from inorganic matter and has an internal drive mechanism that seeks to return to its prior state (these are scientifically erroneous claims). Put simply, for Freud, everything that is alive seeks its own destruction. Derrida claims that this innate drive towards oblivion makes the archive possible because the unconditional mortality of life motivates a desire to preserve the remains of what once lived and what may be forgotten. So mortality and finitude create the desire for the archive, but the tension between destruction and preservation, between remembering and forgetting, gives the archive its spectral character, which is, I contend, inherently dramaturgical since the combination and selection of archival objects is a creative act, and to enter the archive is to reckon with ghosts and their ephemeral traces—photographs, letters, videotapes and so on. Neither history nor culture is possible without close encounters of the spectral kind. In Derrida’s words, the ‘structure of the archive is spectral—neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” visible or invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met’ (1996, 84). It is important to underscore that the temporal disjunction is also an integral part of the archive’s spectral character. The archive does not merely preserve traces of the past by remembering and memorialising the dead—it is also necessarily about the future. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come,

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later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. (1996, 36) The grammatical complexities and contortions, characteristic of the future perfect tense, in this passage perform the kinds of temporal dislocations that are a feature of hauntological dramaturgy—the Derridean promise depends on space, a gap, a crack for the light of the future to shine through. The archive can never be fully present, nor can its aporias ever be resolved. Maybe sometime in the future we might know what it will have been to be, or not to be Vicki Reynolds, a working-class woman, a forgotten playwright, a mother, a sister, a lover, a friend, a ghost. Not tomorrow, but in time to come. Perhaps. Having explicated the Derridean concept of the archive, which underpins the concept of hauntological dramaturgy, we can now focus our attention on other ways of remembering the dead by examining the role human memory plays in archival acts of care for the legacies of performers and performances.

‘The Man Who Mistook Marat for Sade: ‘Living’ Memory and the Video Archive’ As noted in the introduction to this book, Marvin Carlson famously described the theatre as a memory machine, noting that ‘the practice of theatre has been in all periods and cultures particularly obsessed with memory and ghosting’ (2003, 7). To recap, for Carlson, ‘ghosting’ is the defining feature of theatre since theatrical performances are suffused with the memories and spectres of previous performances in a way that Carlson believes is central to the art form (2001, 6–7). And while the dramatic text is especially ‘haunted by its predecessors’ (2003, 8) all material used in or generated by performances (props, costumes, programme notes, posters, reviews, sound recordings, video documentation and so on) can be recycled, redeployed or, as we shall see in a moment, re-discovered in other places and times. So spectral intertextuality can take many forms and be found in all performances made for the stage and screen: all venues, production ephemera and performers are haunted by a past time that they document to greater or lesser extents through ephemeral remnants. Following Carlson’s lead again, we can see how the actor’s body is haunted. All actors carry their previous roles with them, but stars often have difficulty exorcising the ghosts of their most famous characters. So, when an audience sees, say, Andrew Scott playing Hamlet, they also see his previous characters: Jim Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes reboot, the ‘hot’ priest from Fleabag and so on. The actor’s performing body is, as Carlson notes, a haunted body as a consequence of celebrity but also as an effect of the theatre’s penchant for replaying specific character types with an accompanying set of codified vocal and corporeal gestures (2003, 58–59). The actor’s body, then, is an archive of sorts, but we should also be mindful

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of the fact that all bodies possess an archival character since bodies are marked and shaped by daily practices such as diet, frequency of movement, trauma, environment and so on. As mentioned earlier, Jonathan Marshall’s account of the hauntological character of Butoh makes a similar point (2013). In short, our bodies record our lives. Further, our bodies also store genetic information, which we may or may not pass on to future generations. Schneider points out that figures such as Freud, Nietzsche and Foucault acknowledge the body’s archival character (2001, 103). That said, archival memory in all its forms is a condition of possibility for the appearance of ghosts and for the concept of hauntological dramaturgy. The archive, as I have already indicated, is a haunted space but one that has been radically transformed by various technological innovations—in the 1970s and 1980s the ubiquity of cheap videotape made it possible to document entire performances, and the digitisation of these tapes makes it possible for ghosts to return in new contexts (as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3). In the second part of this chapter, I will unpack the consequences of this technological innovation for the ways we remember performances, especially those singular productions that haunt spectators over a large span of time and constitute a form of archival practice not predicated on what Schneider calls ‘identicality’ (2001, 103)—that is, a form of memorialisation that is not tied to archival visibility but to the human body as a kind of memory machine.

Video Traces/Embodied Memory Digital video archives, which are growing at an exponential rate, will become increasingly important to theatre history and performance studies, and questions of how scholars negotiate the relationships between memory, technology and performance events in theoretical and practical terms will shape the way we understand aesthetic and academic heritage. Indeed, there is already a considerable body of scholarly material on this topic. I am especially interested in those that focus on the relative merits of video recordings and human memory as archival mechanisms since they raise questions about the authority of the archive and the ways archival technologies, in the words of Maaike Bleeker, ‘transform how we remember, how our and others’ memories are entangled in the here-and-now, and, in the end, even how we think and imagine’(2012, 2). Today, various digital data storage systems—from humble computer hard drives to complex online storage technologies—enable researchers to access a welter of knowledge about performance events that leave traces in the form of moving image documentation, and these archival objects function as authoritative documents for those interested in preserving and analysing performance events. Denise Varney and Rachel Fensham claim that ‘video is a necessary and unnecessarily maligned aid to research; without it, performance disappears and we lose our history and our capacity to think through performance’ (2000, 88). I sympathise with Varney and Fensham’s broadly deconstructive approach to theorising the relationships between videotaped recordings and the ‘live’

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event—since I agree that neither medium is purely self-sufficient, self-identical and uncontaminated by the other. However, I want to make a case for rethinking what the ‘ephemerality of individual memory’ and perhaps the fallibility and unreliability of personal memory might offer to scholars in the way of providing an alternative source of knowledge, which draws on the archival qualities of the human body and human memory I sketched earlier. The ubiquity of digital technologies that enable us to preserve vast amounts of data about our every aspect of our private and professional lives has profound implications for how we understand the relationship between memory, forgetting and our very sense of self. ‘For millennia,’ Bleeker (2012, 2) and others have noted, ‘forgetting remained easier and cheaper than remembering. With the digital revolution, however, the situation has turned around: it has become easier to keep than to discard’ (Bleeker 2012, 2). Today, we are all hoarders courtesy of those multinational enablers—Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, to name the most obvious facilitators of our digital lives—who make it increasingly difficult to forget or misremember. Diana Taylor (2003) has made a convincing argument for being sensitive to the political implications of the archive in relation to what she calls the repertoire of ‘embodied’ knowledge. She writes: A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire). Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it. But that does not mean that the performance—as ritualized, formalized, or reiterative behavior—disappears. . . . Multiple forms of embodied acts are always present, though in a constant state of againness. They reconstitute themselves, transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next. Embodied and performed acts generate, record and transmit knowledge. (21–22) But what happens when the video record exposes these ‘embodied and performed’ acts as apparently faulty, unstable and misleading? In 2013, I had the opportunity to compare my memories of a singular theatrical event, a performance of the Sydney Front’s John Laws/Sade, with a video recording of the performance, which I witnessed more than a quarter of a century earlier. The following account of the differences between my memory of the work and the information contained in the archival record of the work provides a starting point for thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of the video archive as a memory machine (and a repository for phantoms). My memory of the Sydney Front performance has been a consistent and singularly important part of my pedagogical practice where, I will argue, it demonstrates its value as an alternative to the official archival record. Until recently, my memory was my only significant link to this landmark performance. My most vivid recollection of the performance concerns a scene where one actor violently drags another from a bathtub by his scrotum. I recall

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the visceral impression this made on me at the time—I winced in sympathy and recall a disturbing quality of energy rushing through my body that I have never forgotten. This Sydney Front production impressed me both physically and intellectually. I was so sure the actor in the bathtub was the Marquis de Sade, and I was convinced that somebody violently dragged him from the relative comfort of his watery sanctuary by his genitals. How could it be otherwise? I remember crossing my legs as this act of abject cruelty unfolded before my eyes. As it turned out, I mistook Marat for Sade and, to add insult to my faulty memory, nobody dragged poor old Marat across the stage by his scrotum or not at least in the way I remembered. Why is this unreliable memory, a moment plucked from a performance that occurred a quarter of a century ago, worth writing about? Let me back up a little. The Sydney Front was a critically acclaimed Australian ensemble that transgressed the boundaries between art, pornography and politics in a series of intellectually ambitious performance works between 1986 and 1993. Clare Grant (2012), one of the founding members of the company, produced a comprehensive archival DVD, Staging the Audience: The Sydney Front, which presents highlights from the group’s provocative canon of work. Marked by profanity, nudity and a confrontational interrogation of the relationship between performers and spectators, the Sydney Front were arguably the most daring performance group to come out of Australia. I first witnessed their challenging style of theatre in 1987 at the Performance Space in Sydney. For reasons I could not articulate back then, I found John Laws/Sade utterly compelling, and I’ve never forgotten key aspects of the show, which was unlike anything I had ever seen before—the work, indelibly etched into my memory, generated a lifelong interest in avant-garde performance, and I  have described my experience of witnessing it to my students over the last 30 years or so. More than any other performance, this exemplary work had a major impact on my conception of what theatre could be, and, in some ways, it is responsible for my career as a performance studies academic. I walked out of the Performance Space on what I recall as a typically sticky, humid summer’s night in Sydney feeling enthralled, energised and intellectually engaged. I also felt that I had discovered something incredibly rare: a theatre performance that did not exude the rank, musty odour of the museum. I had just witnessed something lively and energetic, something for today! On reflection, I think I made a decision that night to commit myself to what I had previously considered an archaic medium. I was feeling unenthusiastic about my recently completed degree in theatre and drama studies and was considering withdrawing my application for a higher degree in the same field. John Laws/Sade gave me a renewed enthusiasm for my work and inspired me to pursue my current vocation. The first chapter of my book, Teaching Postdramatic Theatre (2018), begins with an account of John Laws/Sade, since it sparked my interest in and enthusiasm for experimental performance or what we now call postdramatic theatre (Lehmann 2006). I describe this performance to every new generation of undergraduate students for a variety of reasons, but, more than anything else,

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I want to impart some of my enthusiasm for my chosen field, and John Laws/ Sade was the first show that really messed with my brain in the best possible way. I also find that the work allows me to talk about dramaturgy—the ways artists manipulate the fundamental building blocks of theatre—space, time, physical presence, bodily energy—to give the audience a visceral experience they are unlikely to forget. The performance has haunted me for decades in the sense that I continue to repeat and relive my experience of witnessing the work at least once a year. While researching my book on postdramatic pedagogy (D’Cruz 2018), I thought it prudent to make sure my account of John Laws/ Sade was as accurate as possible since I was committing my memories to print. I logged on to the AusStage database to find out whether there were any archival records of the performance and soon discovered the existence of a video recording. I had been proselyting about the Sydney Front for more than three decades, so the prospect of comparing the accuracy of my memory with the archival records held at the University of Sydney became impossible to resist. Whether we agree with Phelan’s statement that performance is ‘that which disappears’ (Phelan 1993, 146) there is little doubt that scholars must deal with the traces of performance events in order to produce critical and analytical commentaries. Digital archives of ‘ephemeral’ performance events—acts presented in a specific time and place—provide scholars with access to an unprecedented wealth of research material: production photographs, posters, reviews, video recordings and so on. Moreover, many companies regularly record their works in high-definition video formats and remediate them through Internet sites such as Digital Theatre (www.digitaltheatre.com/) and Artfilms (www. artfilms.com.au/). Others routinely document and preserve rehearsals in some kind of digital medium. It bears repeating that these material traces of live performance have never been so readily available, and digital archives have exponentially expanded the historical record of performance works. But what is the status of anecdotal recollection and human memory in the age of digital reproduction? By comparing my memories of the Sydney Front’s John Laws/Sade (1987) with its archival video record, in some ways I am revisiting and interrogating the proposition, articulated by Peter Brook and Eugenio Barba amongst others, that human memory is the most appropriate archive for live performance. Barba claims that the ‘essential dimension of the theatrical performance resists time not by being frozen in a recording but by transforming itself in living memory’ (Barba 1990, 96). To put it differently, a ‘live’ transient performance event requires a ‘live’ repository that is capable of transforming the event itself. Thus, the unreliability of human memory is not a liability since it transforms the performance through the spectator’s unique perception and interpretation of the event itself—the spectator is possessed by the spirit of the performance. Lynn Gardner claims that ‘there is something about somebody telling you about a performance—or sometimes even about just a moment—in their own voice that brings it uniquely alive’ (2011). My enthusiastic account of the Sydney Front performance certainly seemed to capture the attention of my students year after year. I think Stephen Scott-Bottoms puts it best when

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he observes, in his reappraisal of Phelan’s landmark book, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), that past performances ‘live on in the contested and deeply subjective space of personal memory, in the unmarked realms of affect, as partially glimpsed ghosts haunting future potentiality’ (2020, 210). But how did the digitised video record of John Laws/Sade tally with my memory of the performance, and how does Gardner’s provocative declaration contribute to debates about the ‘truth value’ of performance archives? I wrote the following account of my memory of John Laws/Sade on the plane to Sydney (in 2013) in order to document my anecdotal account of the performance before I viewed the video recording of the play. What follows is a slightly more formal version of the talk I have presented to students so many times (it also includes a brief explanation of why I thought the production was so important).

Remembering John Laws/Sade, 1987 The performance space, as I  remember it, resembled a church hall. It certainly did not look like a purpose-built theatre. I also vaguely remember milling around in some sort of courtyard before the performance. The fact that the play’s programme contained a bibliography (which contained references to various French philosophers, Foucault, Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, perhaps) showed the intellectual ambition of the group, which I found impressive (most probably due to my status as an overly enthusiastic undergraduate neophyte). I  think the audience were ushered into a foyer of sorts. Here, we found a number of large black cylinders. Each cylinder was about six feet high and contained a series of holes. Stagehands invited members of the audience to put their hands through the holes. I remember the sense of shock and surprise when I  felt naked human flesh. The holes were positioned throughout the entire length of the cylinders, so it was possible to touch a variety of different body parts. The physical contact between audience and performers felt strange; it subverted the convention that separates performers from spectators. I cannot recall whether the stagehands removed the cylinders. I think we were ushered into another area, which had a stage and a seating bank. Before entering this area, we had to file past an actor dressed like a policeman. He looked menacing, scanning members of the audience as they moved past him. I  remember seeing a naked actor submerged in a bathtub filled with water. I think he had long, unkempt hair. I assumed he was playing the Marquis de Sade, although, on reflection, he was perhaps playing Jean-Paul Marat. I think I  recognised this tableau as belonging to Peter Weiss’ play, The Marat/Sade (1963), but I can’t be sure. The following scenes made a particular impression on me, but I cannot remember whether I recalled them in any particular order. An actor, naked from the waist down, but clad in some kind of tutu, appears upstage. He sings ‘You Make Me Feel like a Natural Woman.’ There is obviously nothing ‘natural’ about his performance. I recall that something was also happening downstage during the performance of the song.

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I remember an actor delivering a monologue about a subject I cannot recall while opening and then eating a can of dog food. He consumed the contents of the can in a very matter-of-fact manner, displaying no sense of disgust at eating the gelatinised pet food. I wondered whether there was some trick to this performance. Did the actor merely put a dog food wrapper on a can of something more palatable to humans? The performance constantly made me question the ‘reality’ of what I was seeing before me. A group of actors appeared in formation and began to stomp hard on the floor. They gazed intently at the audience. I remember one female actor laughing semi-hysterically as she locked eyes with me. I found this attention a little uncomfortable and disconcerting. Excerpts from John Laws’ talkback radio played at different points during the performance, but my most intense memory, as previously stated, is of the naked actor in the bathtub being dragged across the stage by his genitals. Once again, I found myself trying to figure out how it might be possible to forcefully drag a man across a stage by the balls without inflicting severe pain. Two figures, the ones who entered the space on a motorcycle, were responsible for this act, which culminated in them stuffing what appeared to be cream buns up the fundament of the hapless fellow, who had spent most of the performance submerged in the bath. I think all three figures exited the space on the motorbike. I had no idea what this performance was about, but I felt thrilled and invigorated by it. I  had never witnessed a theatre that even remotely resembled John Laws/Sade. I  could not stop thinking about. It made all the dramatic work I had seen previously seem lame and tedious. What was the connection between the Sydney radio shock jock, renowned for his narrow-minded racist tirades, and the Marquis de Sade? And what of the references to the Peter Weiss play, most famously staged, after Artaud and Brecht, by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) under the direction of Peter Brook in 1964? Was the performance Artaudian? What was it trying to say about these canonical modernists? Perhaps the play was about the increasing prevalence of surveillance technologies, cruelty, the body and biopower (hence the references to Foucault in the programme notes). These memories are vague. I realised that I could not recall much specific detail. I  remember the nudity, bits of the costuming. As far as documentation of this performance is concerned, I think I may have seen a photograph or two published in a long defunct journal, Spectator/ Burns, but apart from this, I did not set eyes on any other material record of the performance. I  suspect the play’s affinities and resonances with the then novel discourse of postmodernism also played a role in making this production memorable, and perhaps its postmodern characteristics contributed the way I remembered the production. If critics can reduce what we used to call postmodernist performance to a series of stylistic and thematic tropes, then John Laws/Sade employs many of the motifs and techniques that have become staples of experimental performance (and postdramatic theatre) over the last 30 years or so. The use of multimedia,

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the parody of popular culture, the use of pastiche and the refusal to present any kind of cogent ‘story’ or embody ‘psychological’ characters with deep subjectivity are now commonplace. In short, John Laws/Sade made it difficult for me to categorise what I was seeing as a recognisable genre of theatre. It certainly had a lot in common with the few performance art or live art events I  had witnessed in the 1980s. The performance also made me appreciate the energetic exchange between spectators and performers that is always in play during a performance by challenging my belief that theatre had to tell a compelling story. I recall, perhaps more than anything else, the palpable transfer for energy between performers and spectators. Witnessing John Laws/Sade made it impossible for me to see theatre in the same way again.

John Laws/Sade in the Video Archive, 2013 The archival video recording of the performance was a revelation. I  was astounded by just how little of the performance I had actually committed to memory. I had forgotten so much: like the fact that the work was subtitled ‘a confession,’ that the black cylinders resembled punching bags, that they were suspended from the ceiling, that all the elements of the performance appeared to take place in one large area, that a recorded voice-over gave the audience instructions to mill about the space and insert their hands into the cylinders. I had no recollection that cocktail music played as the audience entered the space. I had also forgotten so many key images and scenes: the upside-down actor that swings from a rope suspended above the stage area, Marat’s bath dance, Clare Grant’s hilarious telephone conversations (with a phone sex service and automated telecom recordings), the violent water dunking scenes, the remote-controlled toy and so much more. I also recognised that a significant proportion of the spoken text comprised of quotations from a variety of works by or about the Marquis de Sade—Weiss’ Marat/Sade, Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine, Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. I was vaguely familiar with Weiss’ play at the time but missed the other references. Most of the scenes described in the preceding section of the chapter appeared in the video but in a form that did not quite correspond with my memory of the event. For example, an actor recited, rather than sang, the song, ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.’ The actor did not wear a tutu—he was clad in what appears to be a green smock or cape over a baggy white shirt. His genitals are visible, but his performance is aggressively masculine—there was no attempt to represent an ambiguous sexuality. Sound bites from the John Laws radio show did not play throughout the performance. The dog food can was obviously fake, and the actor recited the famous ‘pleasure in killing’ speech from Peter Weiss’ play, The Marat/Sade. And, much to my amazement, poor old Marat was not dragged out of the bathtub by ‘the short and curlies,’ nor did he exit the arena on a motorcycle, although a motorcycle did appear in an earlier scene; I was somewhat heartened by the fact that the actor playing Marat did have his genitals groped, and some kind of cake was actually shoved up his

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fundament—I can only speculate on why I thought the ‘crotch grab’ occurred in the bathtub. My memory of John Laws/Sade is partial. It distorts and rearranges the performance recorded on the grainy archival videotape. My memory of the performance also displayed many of the formal characteristics of Freud’s account of dreams: I could see examples of condensation, displacement, and symbolisation in my anecdotal retelling of the play (Freud 1965). My mind had transformed scenes by condensing elements of many scenes into a single event—for example, I’d combined the bathtub, motorcycle and ‘crotch grab’ into a single memory whose veracity was, in my mind, beyond doubt. There is a sense, then, in which, if we follow Freud that my memory of the performance says more about my unconscious drives, desires and anxieties than it does about the play. If a dream is, as Freud suggests, a form of wish fulfilment, what was I wishing for? I am not sure I want to answer that question in the present context. Suffice it to say that human memory most certainly transforms the theatrical event in the manner described by Barba. I think it is also true to say that I more accurately recollected the affective force or the performance more than its substantive content. While it is not possible to comprehensively account for my faulty memories in the present context, it is worth acknowledging that the phenomenon of misremembering is common and the subject of investigation in a number of scientific and social scientific fields (which I will leave aside for another occasion). As already noted, my recollection of the performance is distorted in ways that are akin to the distortion of information in dreams, yet psychoanalysis has little to say about the misrepresentation of information in the preconscious mind. For Freud the term ‘preconscious’ refers to memories that are not present to consciousness but can be recalled at will (Freud 1915, 159–204). The preconscious area of the mind will not however admit traumatic memories, which must remain repressed in the unconscious. My inaccurate recollections may indeed have some relation to my unconscious desires or may relate to traumatic memories I have repressed. It is difficult to say one way or another. On one level, psychoanalysis does not really proffer a scientific theory of memory as such, although questions of remembering, misremembering and forgetting are central to its account of subjectivity and its analytical practice. Moreover, the Lacanian concept of méconnaissance, which refers to the subject’s misrecognition of itself during the mirror stage—the gap between physical reality and the subject’s ‘recognition’ of its self in the mirror—may provide a useful framework for interrogating the implications of my return to the ‘thing’ (Lacan 1988, 14). In the current context the return to the ‘thing’ is a return to the video archive with a bad case of archive fever, a malady, as stated earlier in this chapter that is characterised by a compulsive desire to locate origins (Derrida 1996, 91). My return to the ‘thing’ exposed a gap between my memory of the performance and the ‘thing’ which is not quite the ‘thing’ (the video archive). Nonetheless, my memory is not something I want to give up, having made it mine through repeating it in narrative form as part of my pedagogical practice for so many years. Obviously, I transformed my embodied experience of the witnessing the

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performance into a verbal narrative, which can never fully express the affective aspects of my phenomenological experience of the event. Does this mean my memories of the performance have no value because the archival record of the performance cannot verify them? Perhaps there is something about the postdramatic structure of the play that made it so difficult to remember? Perhaps a more conventional linear narrative might have been easier to recall? The key questions in the present context are these: To what extent is the video record a more reliable witness to John Laws/Sade than my fallible memory? Where does the spirit of the performance reside? It is certainly true that certain kind of academic work cannot proceed without archival video recordings. For instance, it is almost impossible to conduct a semiotic analysis of the performance based on memory (as opposed to some kind of mechanical or notational recording of the theatrical event). I realised that I had remembered very little visual and aural information—details of costume, colours, sounds and other sensual perceptions. So what was I actually remembering? On reflection, leaving aside the work’s affective impression, I think I had memorised a speech about the work—a speech that I recited with a high degree of regularity over the years but a speech, nonetheless. By looking at the tape, I could, if I was so inclined, produce a detailed analysis of Marat’s bath dance scene—a 7-minute sequence in which Marat, breathing heavily through a mask, emerges from the tub, naked. His movements are laboured, and awkward, yet they are obviously choreographed to the electronic harpsichord music that plays throughout the scene. The videotape reveals so many little details—the callouses on the actor’s bare feet, the shape of his body, the size and shape of the bath, the way his laboured breathing inflates and deflates the Harlequin mask, his body movements in relation to the recoded music, and so on. No doubt, these almost overwhelming details provide a rich source of information for the scholar interested in semiotics, but to what extent can the video record convey the affective qualities of the performance? Would a contemporary viewer of this archival recording be moved by the performance? Despite the limitations of 1980s video technology, the archival tape preserves the cadences of the actors’ speech, their gait and patterns of movements— features almost totally absent in my memory. The tape also acted as a catalyst for activating forgotten memories associated with the performance—I remembered why I  was in Sydney and who accompanied me to the performance (details that could, no doubt, assist me in a fuller psychoanalytical account of why I  remembered certain details of the performance and not others). The video record is, as Varney and Fensham convincingly argue, a valuable and perhaps indispensable resource for the scholar. Yet there is a sense in which it also masks certain features of the work. Most obviously, the video is compromised by being a recording of a single performance and by being shot and edited a particular way. Might Marat have been dragged out of the bathtub by the balls in another performance that was not preserved on videotape? I was so perplexed by the absence of this scene in the archival record that I made contact with Clare Grant, the member of the Sydney Front who

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published the group’s archive on DVD. She assured me that my memory was playing tricks on me. Nonetheless, scholars need to be careful about treating archival records as infallible testaments of the ‘truth’ of a performance. As Mathew Reason points out, the ‘ideal’ authoritative archive must fail to deliver on any count of completeness, neutrality, and accuracy. Academic documentations can also take on an arrogant egotism—theatre history constructed as that which is studied and written about—that surely transcends any elitism that can be levelled at memory. (2003, 87) This is not to say that we need to throw the video of Marat’s dance out with the bathwater. Rather, it might be prudent to acknowledge the value of alternative conceptions of the archive, especially in a performance studies context. Helen Cole’s intriguing installation, We See Fireworks (which has been seen in various venues in Europe), constitutes one possible alternative, or supplement, to the scholarly archive. The installation is a performance archive of audience voices—‘a curated programme of memories of past performances or performative moments whispered softly into the darkness. Articulated by 250 recordings of strangers, these words are viral, searing into the consciousness until our deepest memories become yours’ (Cole 2011). In subsequent chapters, we shall see how artists use archival material, the apparent remnants of performance to make new works that employ forms of hauntological dramaturgy that are more attuned to spirit than facticity. So, finally, what is the value of human memory and audience testimony to a theory of hauntological dramaturgy? I think there might be more than a kernel of truth in Lyn Gardner’s observation that recounting a performance in one’s own voice can imbue it with a lively quality since the spirit of the performance speaks through the spectator’s personal recollection (Gardner 2011). I think my flawed and distorted retelling of John Laws/Sade is most definitely mine, and I believe it captures the spirit of the performance even as it transforms and distorts it. More importantly, my memory stores traces of the affective qualities of the performance, the feelings and impressions it left on my body, my (perhaps misguided) sense of being in a specific place and time. Some recent scholars in the fields of performance and theatre studies proffer the cognitive and affective turn in these fields as evidence that the theories of language, cognition and subjectivity that underpin so much of the scholarship in these disciplines have lost their authority. Howard Mancing (2006), for example, argues that outmoded theories of language and cognition derived from structuralism and post-structuralism account for why so many scholars tend to talk about ‘reading’ performance and privilege the sorts of information one can glean from the study of video archives: Virtually no one in linguistics today conceives of language as a closed self-referential system of differences, believes that the terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ are particularly meaningful or useful, places processed of coding

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and decoding at the heart of communication, or conceives of the listener (or reader) as a passive receiver of the (speaker) or (writer’s) message. Yet all these concepts are cornerstones of Saussurean and post-Saussurean linguistics, and all are crucial to semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, poststructuralism and much more. (ibid. 2006, 189) This is not to say I completely reject the value of reading the video record of a performance in terms of its sign systems—clearly, it is possible to conduct valuable research by analysing video archives carefully and critically. The danger inherent in contracting an excessive bout of ‘archive fever’ is that it relegates the embodied experience of witnessing a performance to a form of discounted or subjugated knowledge. I would also like to think that my ‘distorted’ recollection of John Laws/Sade has conveyed something of the production’s energy and vitality to my students over the years, something that is perhaps as valuable as a factually correct analysis of its archival traces. I hope they forgive me for mistaking Marat for Sade. To care for the legacy of a dead person, say, the playwright Vicki Reynolds, or a defunct theatre company, say, the Sydney Front, involves various practices of archival care that remain true to the spirit of the departed entity, so, under certain conditions, like the pedagogical situation described in the previous paragraph, misremembering can be true to the spirit of the lost object, event or person if it conveys something of their affective value. In the case of the Sydney Front, I have always imbued what I now realise is my factually incorrect narrative with an enthusiasm and rhetorical energy that summons the ethos of that performance. Roms, at the end of her article cited earlier in this chapter, notes that Derrida wrote a short sequel to Archive Fever, titled Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (2006). In this work Derrida reflects on how best to care for legacy of friend, Hélène Cixous, a figure whose work contested patriarchal and state authority but whose archive is under control of the state she consistently criticised. The Cixous archive, Derrida writes, ‘should be at the heart of an active research centre, of a new kind, open to scholars from all parts of the world’ (2006, 83). Roms makes the following observation about Cixous’ legacy, which is a distributed presence across multiple genres, authorial voices, and additions, which challenges and archives system of classification. An artist’s legacy thus presents a particular kind of ‘gift’ it brings archives into being and at the same time unsettles them. The archive keeps literature’s forces secret by stacking it away, but by doing so it also keeps it secret potentially working (even if inadvertently). (2013, 52) In this passage Roms underscores Derrida’s desire to find an archive that will resonate with the spirit of Cixous who was as much an artist as a writer. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next two chapters, archives seldom achieve this

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aim and it is often left to artists to care for the legacies of their peers and friends, especially when the official records distort or exclude their work and achievements. In other words, where scholars tend to interrogate ghosts, artists tend to listen, converse and, above all, play with the phantoms whose memories they seek to honour.

References AusStage. Accessed July 4, 2011. www.ausstage.edu.au/ausstage. Barba, Eugenio. 1990. “Four Spectators.” Translated by Richard Fowler. The Drama Review XXXIV, no. 1 (Spring): 96. Bleeker, Maaike. 2012. “Introduction: On Technology  & Memory.” Performance Research 17, no. 3: 2. Borggreen, Gunhild, and Rune Gade. 2013. “Introduction: The Archive in Performance Studies.” In Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, edited by Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Burvill, Tom, and Mark Seton. 2010. “Access to Digitized Performance Documentation and the AusStage Database.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 30, no. 3: 316. Carlin, David, and Laurene Vaughn. 2020. Performing Digital: Multiple Perspectives on a Living Archive. London and New York: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Clarke, Paul and Julian Warren. 2009. “Ephemera: Between Archival Objects and Events.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 30, no. 1: 45–66. Cole, Helen. 2011. “We See Fireworks.” Accessed August 12, 2021. http://weseefireworks. blogspot.com.au/2011/08/three-weeks-magazine-review-of- we-see.html. Cornelius, Patricia. 1995. “Other Cultures, Other Classes: Patricia Cornelius on Writing for the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre.” Australasian Drama Studies no. 26 (April): 141–52. D’Cruz, Glenn, ed. 2007. Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007. Melbourne: Vulgar Press. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2018. Teaching Postdramatic Theatre: Anxieties, Aporias and Disclosures. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Diamond, Elin. 2008. “Performance in the Archives.” Theatre History Studies 28: 20–26. Filewod, A., and D. Watt (2007) “The Meat in the Sandwich: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–1994.” In Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007, edited by Glenn D’Cruz, 30–58. Melbourne: The Vulgar Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1915. “The Unconscious.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: [Early Psycho-Analytic Publications]. Volume 14. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vintage. 2001, translated by James Strachey, 159–204. London: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 1951. “A  Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’.” In  Organization and Pathology of Thought: Selected Sources,  edited by David Rapaport, 329–37. New York: Columbia University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1965. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Avon Books.

46  Memorialisation, Memory and Practices Freud, Sigmund. 2003. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. Translated by John Reddick. London: Penguin Books. Gallagher, Jodi. 2010. “Blood Is Thicker than Water: Family Drama, Self-Representation, and The Construction of Authenticity.” Double Dialogues, Issue 13. Accessed August 10, 2021. www.doubledialogues.com/article/blood-is-thicker-than-water-family-drama- selfrepresentation-and-the-construction-of-authenticity/. Gardner, Lynn. 2011. “What’s Past Is Prologue: Share Your Theatre Memories.” www.guard ian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/apr/20/theatre-memory-past- performance-plays. Grant, Clare. 2012. Staging the Audience: The Sydney Front, 1986–1993. Melbourne: Contemporary Arts Media. Hägglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. John Laws/Sade, 80-minute theatre work, Sydney, 1987. Lacan, Jacques. 1988. Freud’s Papers on Technique. Translated by John Forrester. New York: Norton. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. New York: Routledge. Mancing, Howard. 2006. “See the Play, Read the Book.” In Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, 185–206. London: Routledge. Marshall, Jonathan, W. 2013. “Hauntology and European Modernism mal tourné in Butoh.” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4: 60–85. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Reason, Matthew. 2003. “Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance.” New Theatre Quarterly XIX, no. 1 (February): 82–89. Roms, Heike. 2013. “Archiving Legacies: Who Cares for Performance Remains.” In Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, edited by Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. “Performance Remains.” Performance Research 6, no. 2: 100–8. Scott-Bottoms, Stephen. 2020. “Double Take: Unmarked: The Politics of Performance.” Theatre Research International 45, no. 2: 209–24. Steedman, Carolyn. 2001. “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida and Dust.” The American Historical Review 106, no. 4: 1159–80. Stevenson, Carol. 1995. “The Worksite the Body: An Oral History of the Making of Daily Grind.” Australasian Drama Studies 26: 104–10. Taylor, Diane. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Varney, Denise, and Rachel Fensham. 2000. “More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance.” New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 1 (February): 88. Wizisla, Erdmut. 2007. “Preface.” In Walter Benjamin’s Archive, edited by Ursula Marx, Gundrun Schwartz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla, translated by Esther Leslie. London and New York: Verso.

2 Re-member Me Ian Charleson

Introduction In the previous chapter I raised the issue of whether archive fever for apparently enduring objects, the material remnants of productions, occlude other strategies for remembering performances and performers. I also suggested that audiovisual recordings fail to capture the spirit of a performance and that human memory, for all its frailties, might have something to offer scholars concerned with caring for the legacies of the dead. In what follows, I will unpack Dickie Beau’s dramaturgical strategies for dealing with the archival absence of an audiovisual recording of Ian Charleson’s critically acclaimed performance of Hamlet. In short, I will argue that Beau develops a hauntological dramaturgy that memorialises Charleson’s ‘lost’ performance by recording and then replaying the memories of some of those people who witnessed the late actor’s virtuosity in what turned out to be his final role. The chapter will also identify the political and ethical issues generated by this intriguing work, titled Re-member Me (2018). Let us begin, though, with another performance—one that recalls the fact that Hamlet is one of the most haunted texts in the European tradition of theatre. Carlson, amongst others, points out that Hamlet ‘is not only the central dramatic piece in western cultural consciousness, but it is a play that is particularly concerned with ghosts and with haunting’ (2003, 78). Moreover, the role of the doomed Danish prince, he suggests, is doubly haunted, on the one hand, by the memories of the famous Hamlets for the past (some within the living memory of the audience members, others known only through historical reputation) and, on the other hand, by memories of the new interpreter, who comes with his own particular style and technique, in most cases also familiar to the audiences. The successful new Hamlet will add his unique voice to the tradition and join the ghosts with whom Hamlets off the future must deal. (2003, 79) So let us begin with a skit that involves some of the most famous ‘living’ ghosts of Hamlet. Most of the actors in the comedic sketch I am about to describe and DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-3

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analyse have played Hamlet in recent times, so their performances can plausibly reside in the memories of audiences. I think the skit provides a useful way of addressing the politics of playing Hamlet, a politics that Beau’s Re-member Me underscores in the ways it memorialises Charleson. As part of the Bard’s 400th birthday celebrations in 2016, a few months before the Brexit vote, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) staged a skit starring some of Britain’s most eminent actors, most of whom have played Hamlet on stage. The piece begins with Paapa Essiedu, reciting the play’s bestknown line: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ A  British-Ghanaian, Essiedu is the first black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC. The Australian Comedian, Tim Minchin, interrupts Essiedu’s speech and suggests an alternative line reading: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ Minchin demonstrates his interpretation of the line, with characteristic ‘Aussie’ irreverence, holding Yorick’s skull aloft as he speaks. Essiedu points out that the skull is not part of the soliloquy and then asks whether Minchin has ever actually played Hamlet. Minchin confesses that he has not yet played the Dane, implying that he might take on the role in the future. Minchin did, in fact, play Hamlet in 2004, but he is obviously not letting this fact get in the way of a good joke. An argument ensues. Benedict Cumberbatch enters stage right and provides his reading of the iconic line. He is followed in turn by Harriet Walter (who suggests that she, too, will one day play Hamlet), David Tennant (who speaks in his native Scottish brogue), Rory Kinnear (son of Roy Kinnear, the British character actor), a regal Sir Ian McKellen (an iconic actor who performed the role in his youth and who receives a rousing welcome from the audience) and Dame Judy Dench (who enters the stage emphatically declaring that ‘it is I, Hamlet the Dame). The assembled throng continue to argue amongst themselves until Prince Charles strides onto the stage and recites what he takes to be the definitive reading of the line—he is, after all, a Prince who, like Hamlet, is not afraid of giving directions to actors. The skit is hilarious. The actors are charming, and Prince Charles demonstrates a keen sense of humour and irony. Indeed, there’s no shortage of mirth in this riff on Hamlet. What’s not to like? At the risk of being a crusty killjoy, I want to draw attention to the ideological work performed by the scene. To play Hamlet is to inherit a certain tradition and execute a role which will both alter and conserve this tradition. Until relatively recently, the role has been played mostly by white men with stentorian voices and clipped British accents. The RSC skit, on one level, suggests that perhaps the Hamlet club is, now more than ever, open to new members. After all, gathered together on a single stage, we have a black man, two women, a Scotsman, a gay man, a wild colonial boy and the Prince of Wales! The skit implicitly suggests that actors from a diverse range of backgrounds can play the role of Hamlet. There is, however, something unsettling about this apparently magnanimous gesture given the elite status of these high-profile players—it feels as though their perfunctory nod towards inclusivity does little to unsettle the upper-crust orthodoxy that marks the RSC as an establishment of cultural institution. Questions of

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diversity aside, the sketch consolidates the idea, perhaps most overtly expressed by Steven Berkoff in his account of playing Hamlet, titled I Am Hamlet (1989), that the performance of Hamlet is tied to the actor’s identity: ‘Whoever plays Hamlet is Hamlet,’ Berkoff contends (1989, x). The skit also suggests, through its apparently inclusive roll call of those actors who have played or may play Hamlet, that the tragedy is, perhaps, a play for its time, a political play about an impending decision. On the one hand, this diverse collection of Hamlets represents an inclusive Britain, but the appearance of this assembly of disparate ‘Danes’ cannot mask the fact that something is pretty rotten in the UK. The time of the skit, and the play itself, is, as we shall see, out of joint. Simon During draws attention to the temporal disjunction at the heart of the tragedy when he writes that ‘the play mirrors needs and discourses that belong to a time which is not its own’ (1992, 218). He also cautions that it is misleading to suggest that each historical time finds its own image in Shakespeare since ‘that would be to take the self-identity and authority both of the texts and the present for granted’ (1992, 221). With these caveats in mind, I think the RSC’s inclusive skit gestures towards the hegemony of contemporary identity politics, for politics has always been about identity (in the sense that land rights, voting rights and various forms of political affiliation have historically excluded racial, class and gender identities). The skit, then, was staged at an especially conflicted time in the history of the UK. A few months after this performance the UK voted to leave the European Union, and the battle between populist politics and identity politics divided people throughout the land. Like Denmark in Shakespeare’s play, the UK, at the time of writing, is in political turmoil. Following Hans Sluger (2014), I have argued elsewhere that ‘politics is best approached through Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances. In other words, there is no single characteristic that defines politics, but rather a set of resemblances that enable us to recognise manifestations of the political’ (D’Cruz 2019, 173). Thus, like politics in general, there is no single feature that defines political theatre. The same might be said for the concept of hauntological dramaturgy, which is a term used to designate a general engagement with how the figure of the ghost might help us unpack the relationships between performance, politics and ethics. I  will now develop this concept through a reading of Dickie Beau’s Hamlet ‘mash-up.’ To this end, I will read the performance through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994a) and focus on how it helps us unpack the way it addresses identity politics through its dramaturgical strategies.

Memories and Mourning Hamlet’s iconic status also means that it is effectively, in the words of Marvin Carlson, the dream and ultimate test of every aspiring young serious actor in the English-speaking theatre [and the] very thing that makes Hamlet so

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attractive to a young actor, the density of its ghosting, culturally, theatrically, and academically, also, of course, makes it a formidable, even daunting challenge. (2003, 79) Richard O’Brien argues that ‘references to the play and to its overdetermined central character can be uniquely evocative of missed opportunity, never to be recovered. Hamlet can haunt the performer who finds himself past the point of conceivably succeeding in the role’ (2018, 2). The titular character from the cult film, Withnail and I (Robinson 1987), was famously confronted with this phenomenon: MONTY: It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, I will never play The Dane. When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.  .  .  . Don’t you agree? WITHNAIL: It’s a part I intend to play, Uncle. MONTY: And you’ll be marvelous. (Robinson 1995, 34) Chris Lawson unpacks the significance of Monty’s observation when he argues that playing Hamlet is not only the pinnacle of a man’s acting ambition; it also becomes the culmination of youth, the realization of a dream that is, in itself, life-affirming. To miss this opportunity is to be haunted by a certain ‘lack,’ to remain unfulfilled and perpetually at the boundaries of ‘otherness.’ (1997, 34) When Dickie Beau, the award-winning lip-synch artist, realised that he might never play the Dane, he devised a performance that channelled the voices of the most celebrated theatrical luminaries associated with the part (he also mischievously includes Uncle Monty’s declaration in the mix). So he both plays and doesn’t play the coveted part of the tragic prince. At its most basic level, Re-member Me is a performance that summons the ghosts of Hamlet or at least some of its most notable recorded performances. In short, it is a play of absence and presence, a performance that, as we shall see, takes a hauntological approach to its dramaturgy. Beau credits drag performer, Dusty Limits, with the idea of constructing a lip-synch performance comprised of the greatest Hamlets since the advent of sound recording (2018a). Re-member Me includes excerpts from celebrated performances by luminaries such as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton, but it is more than a mere homage to the ghosts of Hamlets past. It is, to invoke a Derridean theme, an act of mourning, perhaps even a work of mourning, or a performance that stages the work of mourning. Let us back up a little and gloss Beau’s account

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of the production’s genesis. During the course of writing the work, Beau discovered what turned out to be an apocryphal story about Daniel Day Lewis’ aborted turn as the Prince of Denmark, directed by Richard Eyre at the Olivier Theatre, London, in 1989. Lewis apparently saw the ghost of his own father, the poet, Cecil Day Lewis, as he was waiting to take the stage. The experience proved to be sufficiently traumatic for him to flee the theatre and never return to the production. Lewis has since claimed he did not literally see his father’s ghost but felt overwhelmed by the play’s requirement that the actor playing Hamlet must encounter his father’s ghost night after night (Beau 2018a). Lewis was replaced by Ian Charleson for the remainder of the production’s run. Charleson is best remembered today for his role as Eric Liddell, the athlete (and missionary), in the film Chariots of Fire (Hudson 1981). Praised by those who saw it, Charleson’s Hamlet was never recorded. No archival sound, film or video recordings of this landmark performance exist. Eight weeks after the curtain came down on this legendary National Theatre production, Ian Charleson died of AIDS-related septicaemia in January 1990. He was 40 years old. Beau writes: In the midst of the many press cuttings in the National Theatre archive relating to the 1989 production, and the drama around Day Lewis quitting it, I came across a stunning review by the then chief critic of the Sunday Times, John Peter. But this standout review did not celebrate Day Lewis’s performance, and instead showered praise on the ‘masterful’ performance of the actor who went on to replace him. I searched for a recording of this performance, but no recording exists. (2018b) Beau goes on to say that it was this discovery that radically transformed his approach to making a work about the great Hamlets. After playing with the original conceit by lip-synching to the voices of Olivier and company, the final half an hour of Re-member Me homes in on Charleson’s Hamlet, which lives only in Peter’s review and the memories of those people who either saw Charleson’s performance or were part of the production. Here are some extracts from John Peter’s review: His delivery is steely but delicate; the words move with sinuous elegance and crackle with fire. This is a princely Hamlet, every inch the king he should have been. Charleson makes no concessions to dreamy, distraught romanticism. . . . He oozes intelligence from every pore: a restless inquisitive rationalist. . . . He has a natural alertness, which helps him to hear the silent sub-text of people’s conversation: an essential intuition which cracks the coded language of the court. (1989, 9) Peter was not alone in his praise for Charleson’s performance. Richard A. Davison recalls Charleson’s performance in an article that collates several other

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recollections of what has become a mythical incarnation of Shakespeare’s Prince: Under his inspired direction, Richard Eyre’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet led to the truest Hamlet in my memory, in the short-lived performance by Ian Charleson. I remember more laughter than at many comedies, more tears than at most tragedies. We laughed with Hamlet and at the end even the men in three-piece suits wept openly for him. (2008, 325) Davison’s article contains reminiscences from Eyre and actors involved in the performance as well as Charleson’s friends and family who witnessed his landmark performance. The article functions as an archival repository for the memories of these people and precedes Beau’s research, which involved him recording the voices of many of those most familiar with Charleson’s performance. We can find other recollections about this landmark performance in a book published as a tribute to Charleson shortly after his death, For Ian Charleson: A Tribute (1990). The contributors to this publication, those friends and family members closet to the late actor, generate a vivid picture of his personality. Some of these tributes refer to his towering performance as the Prince of Denmark. We learn that Charleson played Hamlet in his youth but was never satisfied with this first attempt at this iconic role (in a sense, he was haunted by this perceived failure). We also learn that not only did he think long and hard about how he would produce the greatest Hamlet ever to occupy a stage but that he had to overcome colossal physical and psychological barriers just to appear on stage. Suffering from AIDS, Charleson’s face was disfigured by the disease. He had to overcome the side effects of his medications and the psychological impact of knowing that his death was imminent. Joanna Kirby recalled that she didn’t recognise Charleson when he first appeared: ‘His face was swollen and I couldn’t see his eyes. Those sitting behind me kept saying, “is it him? Is it really him?” ’ (For Ian Charleson: A Tribute 1990, 77). Peter Eyre suggests that Charleson used his illness as an advantage, so that an audience which would have at an earlier time looked at Hamlet the Prince, the handsome and noble Ian Charleson, were now encouraged to look into Hamlet the Prince, another Ian Charleson, transformed by suffering, forced to contemplate the end of his life. (For Ian Charleson: A Tribute 1990, 83) The production’s director, Richard Eyre, provides a more intimate account of Charleson’s approach to the role: We talked a great deal about Hamlet’s accommodation with death, always as a philosophical proposition, his own state lurking just below the surface, hidden subtext. Ian was very fastidious about the ‘Let be.’ It wasn’t, for

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him, a chiding of Horatio, or a shrug of stoic indifference; it was an assertion, a proposed epitaph perhaps: don’t fuss, don’t panic, don’t be afraid. (1990, 124) But perhaps it is Ian McKellen who provides the most evocative account of Charleson’s Hamlet when he writes: The revelation of the Charleson Hamlet was to show what he would have been like had he never met the ghost. We knew what he had been like at university, brightly and outrageously witty. It was obvious what a marvellously sympathetic friend he could have been and how easily Ophelia must have fallen for him. We believed her mourning ‘that most noble and most sovereign reason’, because we had seen it. (1990, 129) While unmistakably a work of mourning, the book celebrates Charleson’s determination and virtuosity under the gravest of circumstances. No doubt his impending death added gravitas to his Hamlet, but this fact does not fully account for the superlative performance. I do not have the space in this chapter to cite all the recollections of Charleson’s Hamlet. Suffice it to say that various witnesses recount specific gestures and speeches that generated powerful affects. How to do justice, then, to such a performance? Any response, as I shall argue, must surmount significant dramaturgical and political problems.

Dickie Beau’s Re-member Me Before addressing the politics of the work directly, I will briefly describe my memory of the Beau’s performance in order to convey a general sense of the tone of Re-member Me. These are the basic ingredients, as I remember them: plastic body parts, chairs, screens, video projections, sound recordings and a performer, Dickie Beau. Beau, the accomplished lip-synch artist, is dressed for a workout: resplendent in a singlet and blue shorts, sporting sweatbands on his head and wrists and trainers on his feet. As he dances and prances to a variety of sound recordings, it becomes apparent that he will be playing a queer Hamlet. The significance of his attire is not immediately apparent to me. However, the various athletic accruements are hard to miss. Before Beau appears, the audience beholds a series of dismembered mannequins: some are mere torsos; others lack arms or legs, all of them are decapitated. Together they constitute a downstage tangle of pink plastic objects. There is a video screen which will accommodate a variety of projected images throughout the performance. A thin curtain immediately under the screen divides a backstage area containing an operating table, chairs and the heads of mannequins, some of which will be reassembled and clothed. The screen will be drawn at various points during the performance, and backlights will throw shadows onto the curtain, which functions as another screen.

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I found the following sounds and images especially memorable. Adopting a clichéd, histrionic pose, standing side-on to the spectators, legs planted firmly apart, one arm raised as if holding Yorick’s skull, eyes directed at the invisible object held aloft, Beau lip-synchs the phrase, ‘It is I, Hamlet, the Dane,’ which is presumably uttered by one of the celebrated actors whose performance of Hamlet Beau’s work celebrates and satirises. Loud, thumping club music follows this declaration of identity, and Beau moves to the beat, comically contorting his body as he dances to the music. He’s camping it up. This cabaret aesthetic, which is enhanced by the lights, raises the question of whether the performer is ‘taking the piss.’ ‘Where is this going,’ I ask myself? Beau performs a series of routines as shadow plays. The projection of his shadow is sharp; it accentuates the movement of his lips. Even in shadow I am aware of the disparity between Beau’s corporeality, his physiognomy, and the exaggerated contortions of his face. The sense of the words that appear to emanate from Beau’s lips as the recordings of Hamlets past play on the theatre’s PA system also strikes me as comic, but there is something unnerving about the way he keeps rearranging the mannequin body parts on stage. At one point, he constructs a whole body from the dis-membered pile and, taking it behind the curtain, addresses it as though it is another actor. What is he trying to reconstruct? And why the tropes of illness? I find the hospital paraphernalia, especially the hospital bed, in this backstage space unsettling. The show’s comic cabaret routines contrast sharply with these sombre acts, but it is not until the second half of the play that I become aware of what’s happening. For the first 30 minutes of the work I feel confused yet absolutely engaged by the spectacle. I find myself laughing at the way Beau’s physiognomy exaggerates the fruity stentorian quality of the actorly Hamlet recordings. This, of course, is quite a deliberate strategy. Beau recalls: I listened to lots of recordings and began a sort of obsessive research process. I loved listening to John Gielgud’s Hamlets—and there are various recordings. They’re totally histrionic and quite sing-song-y but strangely enough I think they’re possibly the most affective, if affected, renditions I’ve listened to. And Jonathan Pryce’s Hamlet spoke to me because he played the part as if he was possessed by the spirit of his Father’s Ghost— my playback performances are often referred to as being like a medium ‘channelling’ spirits. (2018b) Beau’s body vibrates as he is possessed by the dis-embodied voices of the historical Hamlets. His lip-synching is faultless, which intensifies the uncanny affects generated by his performance. I become aware of just how very Englishsounding the voices of Hamlet sound (and later ponder the work involved in producing the ‘Shakespearean voice’ and consider what it takes for actors, especially those with regional or ‘foreign’ accents, to find the appropriate tone and grain). To sum up, the celebrated performers of Hamlet are not here, at

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the Melbourne Arts Centre on Saturday, 20 October 2018, but they are also not-not here. Indeed, Beau describes the show as a work about the presence of absence (2018a). Writing in another context, Mark Fisher, whose work on hauntology we will encounter in Chapter 5, observes that the work trip hop artist, Tricky, unsettles ‘the idea of the voice as a rock-solid guarantor of presence and identity’ (2014, 44). We can say the same thing about Beau’s work. The recorded voices of the famous actors are separated from their iconic identities by Beau’s audacious and irreverent remix. When Re-member Me focuses on Charleson’s story I begin to apprehend the spectral connections and flows between the performer’s body and the objects it interacts with, especially the tele-technologies (sound recordings and video images) that carry the vocal traces of the absent, mostly dead, actors. I  feel especially moved when the iconic slow-motion sequence from the film Chariots of Fire appears on the screen (sans its equally iconic score). Charleson looks so young and beautiful. The spectral image of his body, which we now know was ravaged by AIDS as he played Hamlet, is lithe, lean, almost incandescent. The slow-motion cinematography heightens the grace of Charleson’s body in motion. The sound recordings which carry the memory of Charleson, the words that describe his triumph as Hamlet, and the stage actions which rehearse his illness clash and collide. Beau summons the spirit of Charleson to celebrate the late actor’s singularity. Beau’s performance does more than merely remix archival voices or memorialise Charleson. We might say, with a nod to Derrida, that the play mobilises cathected archival objects, newspaper clippings, sound recordings and the dismembered mannequins through Beau’s body to achieve justice for Charleson whose ghost is the only mute phantom amongst those summoned by Dickie Beau. In what follows, I will unpack some of the political questions generated by Re-member Me with a focus on how the performance can be, on the one hand, an act of responsibility to the inheritance and heritage of Hamlet and, on the other, an act that fails to recognise that memorialisation does not necessarily enable the spectre to return as himself. In other words, there is always the possibility that the act of mourning can be a gesture that does violence to the dead. In his essay, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’ Derrida writes: I was searching like him, as him, for in the situation in which I have been writing since his death, a certain mimeticism is at once a duty (to take him into oneself, to identify with him in order to let him speak within oneself, to make him present and faithfully to represent him) and the worst of temptations, the most indecent and most murderous. The gift and the revocation of the gift, just try to choose. Like him, I was looking for the freshness of a reading in relation to detail. (2001, 38) In more prosaic terms, Derrida, in this passage, is pointing out the difficulty in choosing between a mode of mourning (and remembering) that attempts

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to faithfully represent the deceased and one that attempts to find something fresh in relation to some detail of the dead person’s life—Derrida is, of course, referring to Barthes’ use of the term ‘punctum’ in his last work Camera Lucida (1981). I  will return to this ethical conundrum, this frustrating aporia with reference to Re-member Me at the end of this chapter. For now, it is necessary to say something more about Derrida’s use of Hamlet in Specters of Marx, since it will have a bearing why Dickie Beau’s dramaturgy resonates with hauntology.

Derrida’s Hamlet: Time and Identity In the wake of the fall of communism and the apparent triumphalism of neoconservatism, Derrida decided that it was time to play the Dane. While he probably didn’t don a cloak of solemn black as he delivered his response to the question ‘Whither Marxism’ at the University of California at Riverside in April 1993, he most certainly and deliberately channelled Shakespeare’s Hamlet as he spoke. Why Hamlet? Leaving aside the obvious trope of haunting in The Communist Manifesto, Hamlet is a play suffused with questions concerning inheritance, mourning, heritage spectrality and decisionism—questions that manifest repetitively in Derrida’s later, so-called ethical works. Of course, the scholarly literature on Hamlet (both play and character) is voluminous and impossible to survey and analyse in the present context. Suffice it to say, in Derrida’s idiom, that the tragedy and its titular character are more than one, which makes it impossible to reckon with all the spectres of Hamlet. But for our present purpose, which is concerned with the politics of Re-member Me, we could do worse than start with Hamlet’s injunction to Horatio at the end of the first act: ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome’ (Hamlet, 1.5.184). As Heather Hirschfeld points out, Hamlet’s instruction to Horatio is complicated: ‘Hamlet’s hospitality, with its echoes of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, gives way to hesitation; his tenderness towards the ghostly stranger, to suspicion’ (2019, 1). Of course, Hamlet’s status as a paragon of hesitation has a long history. For example, Hirschfeld cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s observation that Hamlet is confounded by the fact of his father’s death: What is the effect upon the son? Instant action and pursuit of revenge? No: endless reasoning and hesitating—constant urgings and solicitations of the mind to act, and as constant an escape from action; ceaseless reproaches of himself for sloth and negligence, while the whole energy of his resolution evaporates in these reproaches. (cited in Hirschfeld 2019, 21) Laurence Olivier risked ridicule in his famous film version of the play when his narrated prelude informed the cinema audience that ‘Hamlet is a play about a man who could not make up his mind’ (1948). Either way and banalities aside, Hamlet’s hesitation resonates with what we might call, with Derrida, the trial of undecidability. It is no wonder then that Derrida so readily takes on the role

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of Hamlet. Aijaz Ahmad argues that Derrida, the prince of deconstruction, believed he had ‘the rectitude to set right a time that is out of joint’ (1999, 93). In short, he had hoped that the collapse of historical Marxism would coincide with at least the philosophical and academic triumph of deconstruction. He is in mourning, in other words, not so much because of the death of the father per se but because of the kind of death it had been and for the fact that the kingdom has been inherited not by the prince of deconstruction but by right-wing usurpers (Ahmad 1999, 93). It would not be stretching things to say Francis Fukuyama plays Claudius to Derrida’s Hamlet. In his sometimes-withering critique of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Derrida appeals to the logic of the ghost, a logic that exceeds the opposition between materiality and ideality to unsettle Fukuyama’s argument. In addition to pointing out his failure to ‘re-elaborate a thinking of the event’ (1994a, 79), Derrida also questions the empirical veracity of Fukuyama’s claim that we have arrived at the end of history by listing a litany of global calamities: the economic conflicts within the European community; the political clashes generated by the GATT treaty; economic inequality; widespread poverty in the so-called third world; and a host of other economic, social and political antagonisms that marked the state of the world in the early 1990s (1994a, 79). That was then, but what about now? Certainly, many of these forms of social, political and economic injustices are part of the present political scene. The world today, however, is probably more politically polarised than in the 1990s: populist politicians across the world continually exploit religious, class and racial divisions between people. In short, the politics of polarisation is coincident with identity politics—a politics, arguably, predicated on a desire for recognition and the thymotic part of the human soul to invoke Fukuyama’s recent appeal to Hegel and Plato (Fukuyama, 2018). As previously stated, the logic of the ghost unsettles binaries and definitive declarations about what it means ‘to be or not to be.’ The ghost is a figure of uncertainty that reminds us that time, at least in Derrida’s reckoning, is always out of joint. It cannot be otherwise. This statement requires some explication if we are to fully appreciate the role fractured temporality plays in the concept of hauntological dramaturgy. Within the context of Hamlet, the phrase ‘time is out of joint’ is usually understood as a reference to the fact that things are not as they should be. King Hamlet should still be alive. He should still be married to Gertrude, and Prince Hamlet should succeed his father as king. Alas, the scheming Claudius has upset the order of things and Hamlet is compelled, by his father’s ghost, to set things right. Put differently, the murder of King Hamlet has diverted the course of history. Further, this act of treachery diverts the ‘natural’ order of kingly succession, which requires correction. The question of time and time’s relation to identity is crucial component of Derrida’s philosophy, which draws attention to the metaphysics of presence in western philosophy—that is, the persistent tendency to associate presence with Being. An entity is because it is present in the now. And the now is often thought of as a discrete instant of time. Drawing of Heidegger’s critique of the Aristotelian conception of time as a succession of

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indivisible moments, Derrida develops a set of concepts (arche-writing, trace, différance, hauntology and so on) that demonstrate the idea that this conception of time is incoherent. In the words of Martin Hägglund the ‘temporal can never be in itself but is always divided between being no longer and being not yet’ (2008, 15). Crucially, he reminds us that Derrida uses this insight to deconstruct the logic of identity, which, as I have pointed out already, associates Being with presence. If presence is fractured by containing a trace of the no longer and a trace of the not yet, then no entity is self-sufficient. Identity, then, can never be pure. It is always contaminated by the past and the future. So hauntology is another manifestation of fractured time. To be is to be haunted by what has passed and what may or may not come. I will unpack this temporal aspect of hauntology further in Chapter 5 with reference to Mark Fisher’s use of the term. For what follows, it is important to recognise that Derrida’s invocation of Hamlet enables him to riff on some of his favourite themes: undecidability, temporality and identity—themes that also rattle around, like ghosts, in Beau’s performance.

(In)Decisions I started writing this chapter because I could not stop thinking about Derrida’s concept of hauntology as I watched Dickie Beau’s performance, Re-member Me, a performance suffused with spirits, spectres and hauntings. And in the aftermath of this experience, I suspected that the concept of hauntology might help unpack the politics of Beau’s compelling riff on Hamlet. But it is also important to note that Beau’s performance belongs to the genre of AIDS memorials and is an exemplary form of queer dramaturgy that also raises questions about heritage, inheritance, justice and the politics of the archive. Haunting, Ross Chambers points out, is a recurring feature of testimonial writing (2004, 34). Indeed, the concept of hauntological dramaturgy is not a pure concept. I cannot be defined by a set of constitutive features or practices. Rather, it is best understood as an orientation, in criticism and creative practice, towards the spectral, the temporal and the political. As a term, it is not meant to displace other dramaturgical principles but underscore their capacity to engage with ghosts. Before concluding this chapter with a discussion about how we might unpack Beau’s performance through a Derridean lens, it is important to note, as I have already implied, that this is not the only approach that we might want to take towards the performance’s overtly political themes. Beau’s queering of Hamlet demands some reckoning. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier argue that queer dramaturgies do not merely represent queer stories but ‘seek forms that do not ‘ “fix” character, time and place in the way that most realist, or mimetic, theatre does’ (2016, 15). They also argue that queer dramaturgies ‘are also intricately bound up with the identity of the maker/s (self-identifying as queer)’ and acknowledge that what might represent politically radical performances and forms of queer dramaturgy will vary from context to context, so ‘that which is radically queer

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in one context can be less so in another’(2016, 8). There are obviously resonances (and differences) between this conception of queer dramaturgy and the hauntological themes I have invoked in this chapter—Beau’s queering of Hamlet is certainly one of the most compelling aspects of Re-member Me. However, I want to focus on what Derrida brings to the wake. Where does his neologism, hauntology, lead us? How might it unsettle our understanding of Re-member Me as a testimonial that both resonates with and unsettles persistent conceptions of self-identity and, perhaps more ambitiously, contemporary identity politics? These are the questions I will address in the final section of this chapter. So let us return to the performance of Re-member Me. King Hamlet declares, ‘Remember me,’ which functions as an injunction for his son to remember his legacy and the manner of his death and to seek justice. Dickie Beau’s play is also a work that seeks to memorialise a legacy and the specific manner of an eminent figure’s death. Beau’s use of the word ‘re-member’ also suggests an act of restoration. The OED defines the term, ‘re-member,’ as a transitive verb which means ‘To put together again, reverse the dismembering of ’ (OED, online). The title of the performance, then, suggests that Beau seeks to put Charleson, or his neglected legacy, back together again. And in a way, Beau does reconstruct Charleson, not by restoring the corporeal integrity of the deceased actor’s body, which was ravaged by AIDS, but by compensating for the late actor’s absence from the audiovisual Hamlet archive by voicing the memories of witnesses to his greatest triumph, his unrecorded performance of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Yet there is something unsettling about this form of re-membering given Beau’s cut-and-paste dramaturgy. Yes, Beau reckons with a ghost, known by a singular proper name: Ian Charleson. Now, Charleson, as we learn from the testimonials gathered by his family (which was published in a slim volume) was a complex, multifaceted man: actor, brother, lover, musician and many other things (Maclachlan 1990). For me, it is the revelation of those small Barthesian details of Charleson’s personality that constitute some of the most moving passages in the slim volume published as a tribute to the actor after his death: the fact that he loved the music of Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner—the sound of, as he apparently put it, ‘black women screaming’ (For Ian Charleson: A Tribute 1990, 23). However, Charleson was a celebrity, and because he left instructions to announce the cause of his death as an AIDS-related illness, his death was a public event. He was apparently the first public figure to make such a claim in the UK. So he was a martyr of sorts, though certainly not a gay rights activist. Yes, Beau’s play is a memorial to Charleson’s extraordinary performance of Hamlet and an acknowledgement of the political significance of Charleson’s death. Like the tribute book, the performance is both an act of mourning and celebration, not an unusual coupling in the aftermath of someone’s death. I repeat, because this fact bears repeating, Charleson’s death was a public death by virtue of his celebrity and perhaps a political death by virtue of his manner of death (he declared, albeit posthumously, that he died of an illness that was, at the time, cloaked in shame).

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So, finally, the question for me in attempting to reckon with Beau’s performance through the lens of hauntological is this: To what extent did he follow the ghost, listen to the ghost, seek justice for the ghost? We would be foolish to look for any kind of programmatic politics in Derrida’s work. He is not that kind of thinker. This is not to say that he has little to offer those of us who are concerned with pragmatic activist strategies in the party-political sense: the logic of the ghost compels us to think the political through the trial of undecidability, which is perhaps why Derrida finds Hamlet, the Prince of contemplative hesitation, such an exemplary figure. Derrida states: However careful one is in the theoretical preparation of a decision, the instant of the decision, if there is to be a decision, must be heterogeneous to the accumulation of knowledge. Otherwise, there is no responsibility. In this sense not only must the person taking the decision not know everything . . . the decision, if there is to be one, must advance towards a future which is not known, which cannot be anticipated. (1994b, 37) Decisions: Should Hamlet kill Claudius while he is praying and risk the usurper’s soul ascending to heaven? And what of Queen Gertrude’s guilt? Should Hamlet confront her directly? Should he follow the ghost’s injunction to seek justice? Should he be and bear responsibility for all that he inherits as the Prince of Denmark? Or should he not be and exempt himself for such a burdensome responsibility? Hamlet hesitates and defers so many decisions through the course of the play, but he does, finally, act shortly after Queen Gertrude is poisoned. Hamlet, patently, does not know everything, and he cannot anticipate the outcome of the several courses of action open to him. This is enough to drive him mad. As Derrida, citing Kierkegarrd, observes: ‘the moment of decision is madness’ (1992, 26). Niall Lucy argues that Hamlet, the character, is never political in the standard sense. The political reckoning of his actions, and inactions, proceeds not from a direct or conscious choice to oppose power, but from the fact that while he never quite recoils from a sense of responsibility, he knows that, in itself, responsibility is unprogrammable and inexhaustible. (2004, 114) Lucy is, of course, writing about Derrida’s Hamlet (for Hamlet, as we know, is more than one—fear not, I will come to Beau’s Hamlets soon enough). In other words, the work of justice can neither be calculated nor completed for, if we follow the logic of deconstruction, there is no such thing as ideal justice. Hägglund argues that Derrida ‘undermines the notion of an ideal justice, without renouncing the struggle for justice’ (2008, 78). This is the challenge of politics and ethics: we must make decisions, in the name of justice, if we want to create a better world, but we make political and ethical decisions knowing

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that they will generate unforeseen consequences, which will entail forms of violence—unpredictable forms of exclusion and discrimination. So how does this account of the political help us unpack Beau’s politics? Indeed, how does this account of the political, which resonates with a certain spirit of Marxism, for Derrida, speak to the myriad of political problems—climate change, populism, racism, LGBTQ rights, terrorism, economic inequality, immigration and so on and so forth—that demand that we act now. On the face of this calamitous state of affairs, Derrida does not seem to offer much. Messianism? ‘Democracy to Come’ (1994a, 81)? The trial of undecidability? Richard Rorty points out that the problem with trying to pin justice down, or develop prescriptive political principles, is that ‘every institution or principle will produce new, unexpected, injustices of its own. Every imaginable utopia will need a social protest movement. Justice is a ghost that can never be laid’ (1999, 213). Terry Eagleton provides a less charitable reading of Derrida’s engagement with the spectres of Marx when he bluntly states that Derrida is deluded if he really thinks ‘there can be any effective socialism without organization, apparatuses and reasonably well-formulated doctrines and programmes’ (1999, 86). Eagleton has a point, but I think the political force of Derrida’s hauntological reading of Marx through Hamlet becomes more apparent when we read him alongside Carl Schmitt, political theorist, jurist, Shakespearean aficionado, Nazi and perhaps the most influential theorist of political decisionism. On one level, Schmitt’s enthusiasm for Hamlet seems anti-intuitive. He is, after all, the champion of decisionism and famously defined the political in terms of the friend/enemy distinction: ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy’ (2007, 26). Thus, politics involves a nation identifying its enemies and making a decision to absolutely separate or disassociate from them. Moreover, the political, for Schmitt, is a unique concept that does not draw on other binary distinctions. He writes that the political exists ‘without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic or other distinctions’ (2007, 27). Consequently, binary oppositions between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, profitable and unprofitable cannot define an enemy, for the enemy is ‘in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible’ (2007, 27). Of course, a wide range of religious, economic and moral forces may provide the impetus for the friend/enemy distinction (2007, 38). So a religious grouping can become a political grouping if it is in conflict with other factions that threaten its existence. But which individual or entity has the authority to make the friend/ enemy distinction? Who decides? In very broad terms, Schmitt, a staunch critic of liberal democracy, argued that political power resides in the figure who can call a state of exception and suspend the law in order to exterminate enemies with extreme prejudice: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on exception’ (2005, 5); ‘[t]he Political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity’ (2007, 43). Obviously, Schmitt was not one for equivocating or hesitating, so why was he so enamoured by Hamlet? Victoria

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Khan (2003) suggests that Schmitt was less interested in the titular character than in the way the play dramatises a specific political situation that requires a decision and that in Schmitt’s view it is Shakespeare who decides. Khan writes, ‘Hamlet may not be decisive, we might say, but Shakespeare is—not least of all in representing the state of emergency of early-seventeenth-century England and the historical necessity of a decision between Catholicism and Protestantism’ (2003, 83). I do not have the space to summarise Khan’s account of Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet here. Suffice it to say, Schmitt stands for a form of binary thinking that perhaps makes Derrida’s account of the political worth revisiting in a time where polarised, binary thinking seems to point to something rotten in the state of contemporary politics. This is not to say that are no commonalities between Derrida and Schmitt. Both thinkers reject normative decisionism. For Derrida, all decisions, as I have argued already, must go through the trial of undecidability; justice is not a matter of mechanically applying the law. For Schmitt, the friend/enemy distinction ‘can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgement of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party’ (2007, 27). Both also acknowledge that we make decisions with reference to singular circumstances and that decisions are violent in their effects. The crucial distinction is that Derrida calculates with the incalculable and accepts that all positions, political or otherwise, will be contaminated by their apparent opposites (democracy is always contaminated by sovereignty, for example, and subject to the law of autoimmunity; it is ghostly, never fully present). So we can only apprehend ‘democracy to come’ in the space: Between an infinite promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise. (1994a, 81) This is not the same thing as the sort of immanent critique presented by the likes of Fukuyama, since it is the contradictions within the concept of democracy (articulated in the quotation mentioned earlier) that constitute the condition of possibility for any kind of democratic future. Crucially, this opening towards the future does not guarantee better or more fully realised forms of democracy. Schmitt, conversely, is committed to a form of authoritarian purity that maintains an absolute distinction between friend and enemy with no regard for justice, equality or freedom. Schmitt closes the circle, if you will—there are no gaps or fissures that let the light in. The Hamlet skit I  referred to at the beginning of this chapter, you will remember, suggested that the role of Hamlet can accommodate difference— almost anybody can, theoretically, play the Dane within the apparently inclusive RSC, a venerated British institution that appears to represent a modern,

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‘politically correct’ Britain. As we all know, this expansive conception of national identity was challenged by a democratic vote that summoned some of the most shouty and unpalatable spectres from the UK’s recent past. The anti-immigrant, racist invective that marked the Brexit debates demonstrates that it is not possible to exorcise ghosts. They are also a part of the present (and future). Democracy facilitated Britain’s exit from the European Union. And let us not forget that the Nazis came to power through democratic means. Democracy must admit forces that can result in its own destruction, which is why it is such a fragile concept and which is why all decisions, political, ethical and aesthetic, involve risk, as Derrida argues in Rogues (2005). We must make calculations in the face of incalculable variables. We also face these political impasses and contradictions when we make creative work. As I have already argued, dramaturgy is a practice that demands decisions: what to include, what to leave out, how to assemble, where and what to stage and so on. The conditions that enable dramaturgical success are the same conditions that make failure a distinct possibility. Dramaturgy is a haunted practice, especially when it explicitly engages with politics and ethics. Life, politics and art involve risk. This truism is evident in Dickie Beau’s memorialisation of Ian Charleson. So, let us return, one more time, to Re-member Me, a performance whose dramaturgy we might describe as hauntological, built as it is around spectral voices, corporeal absences, uncanny objects and archival texts. Beau claims to re-member Ian Charleson, and his spectre is conjured by the voices of others: people who knew him; people, famous and unknown, who witnessed his greatest triumph and trial; and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Beau made certain dramaturgical decisions that underscore a certain spectre of Ian Charleson: the gay martyr whose illness marked and ravaged his body during the pinnacle of his achievement as an actor. But this, as we know, is only an aspect of Charleson the man, the singular being that Beau memorialises. We know that this is not the only way we remember Charleson. His film performances provide a place for his spectral presence, and the Ian Charleson Award, established in 1991 for the best classical performance by an actor under 30, ensures that his proper name is not forgotten. Incidentally, four of the actors in the sketch I described at the beginning of this book have won the award: Paapa Essiedu, David Tennant, Benedict Cumberbatch and Roy Kinnear. Did Beau endure a trial of undecidability in developing his dramaturgy? I suspect he did since all dramaturgy involves hesitation in the selection and combination of dramaturgical elements. Did he follow the ghost, or did he summon the ghost? More to the point, did he find justice for Ian Charleson? If we follow the logic of hauntology we must accept that in proffering Re-member Me, Beau commits an inevitable violence to the memory of Charleson, for there are many Charlesons and, for that matter, many forgotten Hamlets whose voices are absent from the archive. In celebrating a few, Beau does violence to the memory of many, yet how can it be otherwise? However, there is also something surprising in the manner of Beau’s act of memorialisation, something unsettling in his act of mourning and celebration, something irreverent, something unexpected,

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something haunting. But, perhaps most importantly, there is an ethical commitment in Beau’s queering of Hamlet and his mourning of Charleson. Rather than attempting to play his own Hamlet, rather than attempting to be remembered for playing a distinctive, singular Hamlet, in the manner of a Gielgud, a Richardson, or even a Paapa Essiedu, Beau makes a decision, perhaps a mad decision, to be responsible for an ‘other’ Hamlet, Ian Charleson’s Hamlet, a Hamlet whose voice is occluded by archival violence—for, as I have stressed, the archive does not contain Charleson’s Hamlet in any recorded form. Perhaps Beau’s remembrance of Charleson is what Derrida means by justice; perhaps this is why we might call Beau’s dramaturgy hauntological. In this world of apparently definitive friends and enemies, a world that, on one level, appears, from many points on the political spectrum, to give credence to Schmitt’s concept of the political, Beau’s queering of Hamlet teaches us something about the political value of paradox, hesitation and the importance of reckoning with the ghosts of others in these disjointed times.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1999. “Reconciling Derrida: ‘Specters of Marx’ and Deconstructive Politics.” In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, edited by Michale Sprinkler. London and New York: Verso. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Beau, Dickie. 2018a. “Creator’s Note.” In Re-member Me Program. Melbourne: Arts Centre. Beau, Dickie. 2018b. “Interview: Dickie Beau on the Many Unexplored Faces of Hamlet.” StageBuddy. Accessed November  9, 2018. https://stagebuddy.com/theater/ theater- feature/interview-dickie-beau-many-unexplored-faces-hamlet. Berkoff, Steven. 1989. I Am Hamlet. London: Faber and Faber. Campbell, Alyson, and Stephen Farrier, eds. 2016. Queer Dramaturgies International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Chambers, Ross. 2004. Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1999. “Enter the Theatre (in between).” Modern Drama 42, no. 3: 301–14. Davison, Richard A. 2008. “The Readiness Was All: Ian Charleson and Richard Eyre’s Hamlet.” European Legacy-Toward New Paradigms 13, no. 3: 325–35. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2019. “The Politics of Teaching Theatre.” In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, edited by Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan London, 173–75. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority’.” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Carlson, 3–67. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1994a. Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1994b. “Nietzsche and the Machine: Interview with Jacques Derrida by Richard Beardsworth.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (Spring): 7–66. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Re-member Me 65 Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. During, Simon. 1992. Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London and New York: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. 1999. “Marxism Without Marxism.” In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, edited by Michale Sprinkler. London and New York: Verso. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books. Fukuyama, Francis. 2018. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. London: Profile Books. Hägglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschfeld, Heather. 2019. “Introduction.” In Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, edited by William Shakespeare. The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, Hugh, dir. 1981. Chariots of Fire. Enigma Productions/Twentieth Century Fox Films. Kahn, Victoria. 2003. “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision.” Representations 83, no. 1: 67–96. Lawson, Chris. 1997. “ ‘Melancholy Clowns’: The Cult of ‘Hamlet’ in Withnail and I and In the Bleak Midwinter.” Shakespeare Bulletin 15, no. 4: 33–34. Lucy, Niall. 2004. A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Maclachlan, Ewen, Alan Bates, David Puttnam, Hilton McRae, Di Trevis, Hugh Hudson, Elizabeth Charleson, David Rintoul, Ruby Wax, Sharman Macdonald, Richard Warwick, Johanna Kirby, Peter Eyre, John Whitworth, Sean Mathias, Catriona Craig, Suzanne Bertish, Kenneth Charleson, Richard Eyre, and Ian McKellen. 1990. For Ian Charleson: A Tribute. London: Constable. O’Brien, Richard. 2018. “ ‘I Will Never Play the Dane’: Shakespeare and the Performer’s Failure.” Literature Compass 15, no. 8: e12470. Olivier, Laurence, dir. 1948. Hamlet. Denham Studios. Peter, John. 1989. “A Hamlet Who Would Be King at Elsinore.” Sunday Times 12 (November): 9. Re-member Me, written and performed by Dickie Beau, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia, October 21, 2018. Robinson, Bruce, dir. 1987. Withnail and I. Handmade Films. Robinson, Bruce. 1995. Withnail and I: The Screenplay (10th Anniversary ed.). London: Bloomsbury. Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sluger, Hans. 2014. Politics and the Search for the Common Good. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 The Anarchival Reactivation of Rumstick Road (1977/2014)

Introduction Let’s begin with a common truism: we will all become ghosts sooner or later. We will die, and the traces of our mortal lives will, to greater and lesser extents, circulate in the form of documentary traces—audiovisual recordings, photographs and other sundry relics. Some of these items might be recycled in forms we cannot anticipate. Our friends and family might use these remnants to construct memorials that celebrate our lives in cyberspace or some other unforeseeable arena. Rest assured, most of us will return as ghosts. This is especially true if those we leave behind, those who care for our legacies, mine our electronic devices for our digital traces. The Black Mirror episode, ‘Be Right Back’ (Brooker, 2013), provides an unsettling vision of how nascent technologies might use digital traces to re-member and reanimate the dead. In this chapter, I want to further develop the concept of hauntological dramaturgy through unpacking the critical commentary on the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road (1977), a seminal performance that continues to inspire artists and critics more than 40 years after its premiere in New York City. This will enable me to substantiate two key points. First, and perhaps most importantly, I want to underscore the fact that the archive can be a creative space. It is becoming increasingly easy to recycle and recombine archival material in the service of art. Today, electronic archives, particularly those housed by Web 2.0 technologies such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and so on, have made information more accessible than ever. This is not to say that formal archives are irrelevant or that all knowledge is accessible to everyone. Clearly, traditional archives continue to exert authority through regulating access to information, but it is now possible to play with ghosts by diving into the archive and adopting what we might call an anarchival attitude. Second, ghosts do not always take a Derridean form. They do not always compel us to seek justice or retribution on their behalf. Sometimes spectres have more sinister motives. Let us briefly unpack this observation with reference to the Wooster Group’s seminal work, Rumstick Road. The performance deserves its reputation as a landmark avant-garde work, but it is also quite traditional in its thematic obsessions. It has more in common with Ibsen’s canonical play, Ghosts (2002) than the critical literature on DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-4

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the work suggests. Both deal with family trauma, questions of inheritance and practices of mourning—themes germane to this book and to psychoanalysis (a key influence on the concept of hauntological dramaturgy). In the preceding chapters, I  identified the archive as a haunted space, noting the close connections between ‘archive fever’ and psychoanalysis, a discourse suffused with ghostly figures. In the next two chapters I will develop my account of hauntological dramaturgy with the aid of a more recent psychoanalytic concept. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok formulated a theory of transgenerational haunting, which posits that individuals can inherit trauma—Derrida was interested in their work and wrote a long preface, ‘Fors’ to their book, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de L’Homme aux Loups (1976). He had less to say about their concept of ‘the phantom’ as a figure that facilitates the frightful transfer of trauma from one generation to the next. For Abraham and Torok, the ghost dwells within the haunted subject until it is exorcised by uncovering its repressed secret. Should the child have parents ‘with secrets,’ parents whose speech is not exactly complementary to their unstated repressions, he will receive from them a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge—a nescience—subjected to a form of ‘repression’ before the fact. The buried speech of the parent becomes a dead gap, without a burial place, in the child. This unknown phantom comes back from the unconscious to haunt and leads to phobias, madness and obsessions. Its effect can persist through generations and determine the fate of an entire family. (1984, 17) Unlike Derrida’s phantom that returns from the dead to ‘set things right,’ Abraham and Torok’s phantom is malevolent. Colin Davis suggests that the phantom in this alternate conception of hauntology ‘is a liar; its effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its secret remains shrouded in mystery’ (2013, 54). The task of the analyst is to effect a cure for intergenerational trauma by bringing the phantom’s secrets to light. This is a very different conception of the function of ghosts. Davis suggests this different conception of the ghost becomes a focus for competing epistemological and ethical positions. For Abraham and Torok, the phantom and its secrets should be uncovered so that it can be dispelled. For Derrida and those impressed by his work, the spectre’s ethical injunction consists on the contrary in not reducing it prematurely to an object of knowledge. (2013, 58) Put differently, Derrida seeks to remain open to the ghost as an Other who issues an ethical injunction. In contrast, Abraham and Torok seek to resolve trauma by exorcising the phantom. The first iteration of Rumstick Road, I will argue, attempts to exorcise its phantoms whereas the reconstructed video work

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seeks justice for the spirit of the performance itself and the ghost of the late Spalding Gray. As we shall see, scholars and critics have read Rumstick Road in a variety of ways over the years, consistently praising its dramaturgical innovations. Yet, for all its avant-garde trappings, the work is a sophisticated ghost story. Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte devised Rumstick Road with contributions from Libby Howes, Bruce Porter and Ron Vawter in 1977. Basically, the piece investigates the 1967 suicide of Spalding Gray’s mother, Elizabeth (Bette), at the age of 52, and it is the second part of the 3 Places in Rhode Island trilogy, which was based on significant aspects of Gray’s life. Of course, Spalding Gray must have been traumatised by the death of his mother, but he appeared to be equally traumatised by his family’s unwillingness to speak about his mother’s mental health. Obviously, Bette Gray is not an unknown ancestral phantom, in a literal sense, but it is the way the performance attempts to uncover family secrets, I will argue, that makes the event of her suicide resonate with Abraham and Torok’s concept of the phantom and, more generally, with the concept of hauntological dramaturgy. That said, the phantoms of Rumstick Road are never really exorcised since Bette’s death haunts Spalding Gray throughout his life, which also ended in suicide. Gray’s ghost, though, appears in a plethora of archival recordings that continue to inspire (and haunt) other artists. For the most part, this chapter will focus on how the Wooster Group activate the archival remains of Rumstick Road to generate a new anarchival memorial to Spalding Gray, but before explicating this term and identifying the group’s anarchival strategies, we need to familiarise ourselves with the first iteration of the performance. The Wooster Group developed the performance by using items taken from what we might call the Gray family archive as prompts for generating scenes. So photographs, family letters and tape recordings Gray made with his father, grandmother and his mother’s psychiatrist are integral to the work, which also uses other objects and props: a red tent, a make-shift operating table, a phone, chairs and so on. LeCompte recalls that the company worked with ‘things’ that were not directly related to the Gray family: ‘Ron brought the slide projector and put the slide over Libby’s face. Ron improvised his part about the doctor during a rehearsal. Libby brought in her costume and made her dance. (Elizabeth LeCompte quoted in Savran 1986, 7). This quotation confirms Andrew Quick’s observation that the Wooster Group’s earliest work ‘placed an emphasis on encountering material, rather than seamlessly representing or embodying character and/or the landscape in which the dramatic action takes place’ (2007, 9). Writing closer in time to the original performance, Leverett observed that documentation was an integral part of new theatre during the 1970s, but the subject matter comes generally from the personal (private) world of the artists instead of from the broader (public) sphere of world events. Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte’s Rumstick Road is probably the most important example of this movement to date. (Leverett 1979 cited in Martin 2013, 43)

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Contemporary interest in the work is due to some extent to Spalding Gray’s suicide in 2004. Gray, of course, is best remembered for his autobiographical monologues, and it is possible to see Rumstick Road as an early instance of him drawing on his personal life for artistic purposes. However, David Savran’s account of the performance gives us pause for thought since his interviews with Gray, LeCompte and other members of the creative team make it clear that Gray’s life was the starting point for what became a group-devised work that, in many ways, challenged verities about the relationships between art and life, representation and reality, person and persona. Bonnie Marranca, a critic well-acquainted with the group’s work, points out that their productions ‘reflect a collective intelligence, duplicated on the literary level by the anthology-like scripts that are staged. The most Pirandellian of performers, The Wooster Group is always in search of an author’ (2003, 2). This collective approach to making work inevitably leads to conflicting accounts of what their work is about. LeCompte recalls that I went through such a hard time with Rumstick. People would say, ‘Oh, that’s such a sad story about Spalding’s mother’s death.’ I felt at the time that they missed the point. Spalding was so central that they saw him, but not the piece. It’s not that he wasn’t the center of the piece, but that it was not about Spalding’s mother. And many people immediately felt sorry for this person who’s revealing what actually happened. Certainly his presence was at the heart of the piece’s power. But I felt that Rumstick was more confrontational, more ambiguous, less judgmental than many people thought it to be. (Cited in Savran 1986, 6) Gray took a different view when he recalled that it seems that I was trying to develop some meaningful structure into which I could place the meaningless act of this suicide. Perhaps it was the hope that this newly created structure would somehow redeem and put in order the chaos of my mother’s world. (King 1992, 77–78) This statement suggests that Gray was looking to resolve his experience of family trauma. The phantoms in the play, the malevolent ‘liars’ that possess Gray’s relatives, don’t give up their secrets. In other words, no matter what kind of formal aesthetic resolution the performance may reach, it does not yield a therapeutic solution for Gray. This may be why Rumstick Road is usually remembered for its innovative dramaturgy, which eschewed realist conventions in favour of a surreal, dream-like logic composed of fragments. Formally, the piece unfolds in a non-linear manner and does not represent psychological characters. With the exception of Spalding Gray himself, the actors do not play members of Gray’s family—Ron Vawter is credited in the published text of Rumstick Road as ‘the man’ and Libby Howes as ‘the woman’ (Rumstick Road 1978, 92–115). That said, Vawter lip-synchs to a recording of

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Gray’s father, and LeCompte projects an image of Bette Gray on Howes’ face. Both moments are especially eerie (and resonate with Dickie Beau’s dramaturgy described in the previous chapter). Second, the work does not directly explain Bette Gray’s death but rather confounds causal logic by reassembling ‘a broken chain of events’ (Savran 1986, 6). Finally, in Savran’s words, Rumstick Road apparently exposes the theatre as ‘the site of disjunction between face and mask, between being and playing a role. All that remain are the fragments: personae, interpretations and memories’ (1986, 7). Crucially, there is no resolution at the end of the work. The performance, then, constitutes an exemplary instance of the sort of experimental theatre that thrived as part of the so-called downtown scene in New York in the 1970s. Like John Laws/Sade, the work I unpacked in Chapter 1, Rumstick Road also displays several features academics would later describe as being constitutive of postmodern theatre. For example, in her book, The Theatre of the Real, Carol Martin described the work, long after its original run, as an attempt to ‘vanquish the realist epistemology of the 1960s with its problematic sincerity and mandatory political critique in favour of a formal, apolitical postmodern theatre’ (2012, 50). It is also possible to describe the work as postdramatic—Hans-Thies Lehmann cites the Wooster Group as exemplary practitioners of postdramatic dramaturgy with specific reference to its use of electronic media (2006, 168). Regardless of the critical vocabulary one chooses to describe the play, there is little doubt that it is a landmark performance that continues to attract critical attention. This chapter has three sections: the first briefly summarises the major reasons for why scholars rate the work so highly (remembering that critical writing is a form or archival care); the second introduces the concept of the anarchive in order to describe the dramaturgy involved in the anarchival reconstruction of Rumstick Road as a video in 2014; the chapter concludes with a short account of the Wooster Group’s anarchival reanimation of Nyatt School, the third part of The Wooster Group’s Rhode Island trilogy.

Rumstick Road (1977): Critical Perspectives Rumstick Road has garnered an enviable critical reception as a seminal work that established a dramaturgical vocabulary that continues to influence contemporary theatre makers. It has also been memorialised in other ways that resonate with hauntological dramaturgy, as we shall see shortly. I  have already noted that academics, such as David Savran, recognised the work’s historical importance early, but several others have drawn attention to the ways Rumstick Road emblematically represents the spirit of risk and experimentation that marked the New York City downtown scene in the 1970s and 1980s, so traces of the work continue to flicker in and out various accounts of this especially formative period in the history of experimental performance in the United States. Carol Martin points out that [the] conflation of the real with the fictional in Rumstick Road and the role that documentary material plays in constructing this work are instrumental

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in understanding the influence of performance practices of this period on theatre of the real today. (Martin 2013, 46) So the work continues to resonate with critics and artists and, therefore, could be said to haunt contemporary practice as a form of inheritance. Another strain of criticism suggests that Rumstick Road’s implicit suppositions about the nature of reality are consistent with the account of reality proffered by quantum physics. This is a big call that perhaps foils credibility. After all, it is not readily apparent how this seminal avant-garde performance from the 1970s connects with quantum theory. That said, hauntology, as we have seen, is a pun on the word ‘ontology,’ which refers to the nature of being. However, as we saw in the introduction to this book, it is a concept that unsettles all theories that make claims to be based on some form of realism. There is no doubting Martin’s claim about the influence of Rumstick Road on contemporary performance, but I think we need to be cautious about focusing narrowly on the work’s formal innovations, which is exactly what Natalie Crohn-Schmitt does in her account of the performance. Writing in 1990, she used Rumstick Road as a paradigmatic example of what was once called the New Theatre, which, she contends, presents a vision of reality that is consistent with the quantum theory’s implication that reality is marked by indeterminacy, purposelessness and chance. CrohnSchmitt also pointed out that the New Theatre eschewed the Aristotelian unities of action, time and place thereby resonating with the aesthetic ideas of John Cage. Today, as I have already suggested, we are more likely to categorise Rumstick Road as a postmodern or postdramatic work if we wish to employ a classificatory term that functions as a short-hand description of the play’s distinctive aesthetic qualities, but let’s not go down that path for now. Interested readers can find an account of the salient features of postmodern and postdramatic vocabularies in my book Teaching Postdramatic Theatre (D’Cruz 2018). For the moment let us note that Crohn-Schmitt argues that the composer, John Cage, developed an aesthetic practice that unsettled conventional aesthetic values of order, unity, causality and development by embracing chance, process, indeterminacy and the interpenetration of all things. Cage’s music, in Crohn-Schmitt’s account, also drew attention to the way spectator’s observation of an artistic event transformed the meaning of the event itself (1990, 7). In short, Crohn-Schmitt argues that Cage’s artistic practice is consistent with the ontological (hauntological) implications of quantum theory (or, to be more specific, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle). Crohn-Schmitt was not the first theatre studies scholar to explore the connections between quantum theatre and performance. David E. R. George also makes an analogy between experimental performance and a perhaps overly generalised quantum theory view of reality when he observed that the ‘stage of life’ implied by quantum theory, like the stage of experimental theatre, is plural, multiple, infinitely relativized. Any actual world is only one possible manifestation of a whole array of possible worlds and . . . it is not a

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given, but created as much by its inhabitants as by immutable (social or scientific) laws. (1989, 176) In other words, experimental theatre, as described by Crohn-Schmitt and George, is a theatre of the real, to use Carol Martin’s oft-quoted phrase. The implication is that the dramaturgy of the so-called new theatre is somehow more authentic and real because of its penchant for non-linear structures and its ability to incorporate random elements into its compositions. Crohn-Schmitt develops her thesis concerning the resonances between quantum theory and experimental art by comparing Rumstick Road to Eugene O’Neill’s canonical play, Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill 1941)—a play, incidentally, that Gray once acted in as a young man. On the surface, the two works share a number of similarities. Both are autobiographical works that draw on the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional family in Rhode Island. After a detailed reading of both works, Crohn-Schmitt concludes that Rumstick Road is [b]ased on a different set of assumptions about the nature of reality and our relationship to it than is traditional theatre, and those assumptions are Cagean. In their examination of the role of observation, of language, and of technology; in their structure; in their dedication to process, the field situation, indeterminacy, unimpedeness, and interpenetration. They reveal Cage’s aesthetic in theater practice. (1990, 76) In other words, the experimental work is characterised by indeterminacy and a rejection of causal logic, which has the effect of encouraging a variety of different observations about the meaning of the work. For example, CrohnSchmitt points out that the scene where the woman enters the tent is read differently by three different critics. Bierman sees the woman ‘bedding down for the night’ while Mel Gussow cannot make any sense of the scene whatsoever. Crohn-Schmitt herself reads the scene as symbolising the death of the woman (1990, 72). Further, she notes the complex temporalities represented in Rumstick Road make the audience aware ‘that the present time in the theater and those past times and places being recalled come together as one, as do performer and role’ (1990, 73). So temporal disjunction, a key feature of hauntology, plays an important role in Crohn-Schmitt’s account of the work. I am not convinced that the distinctions Crohn-Schmitt makes about the differences between so-called conventional drama and experimental theatre hold up under close scrutiny. There is a sense in which all forms of drama play with and represent different time periods: the time of the performance event, the times recalled by characters, the time of the play’s setting and so on. This is not to say there is no value in drawing an analogy between the Rumstick Road’s dramaturgy and quantum theory. Temporal disturbance is, after all, a persistent theme of this book.

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In an earlier draft of this chapter, I went further down the quantum theory rabbit hole. Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism (2007) tempted me down this perilous path for two reasons. First, Barad, as a trained physicist, does not traffic in mere analogies—she explicitly rejects analogical thinking (2007, 88). So, on the face of things, her work provides a more authoritative approach to assessing the plausibility of so-called quantum theatre. Second, Barad believes in Derridean ghosts: indeed, she makes the claim that there is empirical evidence for hauntology, as articulated by Derrida (2010, 260). Indeed, the idea that matter itself is spooky and unstable at the sub-atomic level is compelling, but fiendishly difficult to unpack for people, like me, who lack the requisite degree of scientific expertise. Personally, I find it difficult to assess the merits of Barad’s claims in the present context. This is not to say that her reading of Derrida is illegitimate or that her work has nothing to offer a theory of hauntological dramaturgy—indeed, other scholars of theatre and performance have made productive use of Barad’s key concepts (Norman 2012; Scott 2015; Donald 2016). I will have to let my reference to Barad’s work stand as a side bar, and encourage those readers, who are more informed about quantum theory than me, to form their own views about its possible connections to the concept of hauntological dramaturgy. I will follow a different path and unpack the significance of Rumstick Road for a theory of hauntological dramaturgy with reference to the concept of the anarchive.

Rumstick Road as Anarchival Practice Andrew Quick points out that documentation plays a crucial role in the Wooster Group’s creative process. He writes: Transcription, forensic reconstruction of documentary material (drawn from recordings of their own rehearsals, television, film, the performance work of others, interviews, telephone calls, meetings and so forth), the intricate construction of scores by performers, technicians, assistant directors, stage managers, all indicate the multiple ways in which documentation is not only a residue of their process but also a vital component of the Group’s creative practice. (Quick 2007, 8) Paul Rae adds that the ‘scope, scale, and contribution of nonhuman entities, objects, and agents in the production of events have conventionally not only been ignored but actively obscured in favor of self-conscious displays of human creativity and virtuosity’ (2015, 118). We will have cause to revisit objects in the next chapter, but, for now, I want to underscore the importance of documentary sources and tele-technologies to the Wooster Group’s creative practice. The word ‘documentation’ has an interesting etymology. The OED online notes that the word derives from old French and Latin and carries a variety of meanings: as a verb, it could be used to refer to teaching or showing. Further archaic usages refer to warning and admonishing (OED 2019). There is a sense

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in which the documents used in Rumstick Road resonate with all these associations. The performance certainly teaches the audience how difficult it is to find a specific cause for Bette Gray’s suicide. The documents (and tele-technologies) provide clues but no precise diagnosis for Bette’s malaise—they do not speak unequivocal truths about her life and death, yet they are crucial, as we shall see, to apprehending the hauntological dimension of the Wooster Group’s dramaturgy, for (Derridean) ghosts, as I argued in Chapter 1, reside in the machinery of archives. As intimated earlier, perhaps the group was looking for the wrong kind of ghosts in the wrong places since the malevolent phantom described by Abraham and Torok resides deep within the psyche of the traumatised subject and the work appears, at least superficially to eschew psychology. While working with various forms of archival documentation is a defining feature of the Wooster Group’s creative practice, it may be more correct to describe the group as being possessed by what we might call an anarchival spirit, a spirit concerned with releasing the creative potential of objects and documents. This is not to say that conventional archival practices lack a performative dimension. If I read her correctly, Elin Diamond draws attention to at least three commonalities between archival research practices, especially formal practices that occur in official archives, and performance. First, the archive is a site of performance that is activated when a researcher transforms archival objects, through touch and intellectual labour, into knowledge; second, the archive generates affects: in Diamond’s words, the archive ‘solicits and interacts, with a reader/spectator who, drawn by texts, objects, or perhaps something unlooked for, is seduced into desirous identification with, writers, figures, and events’ (2008, 22); third, archival research can go ‘off script’—unexpected findings might divert the researcher’s original line of investigation and lead to hitherto unexplored questions; fourth, and most importantly for this study, ‘the archive has secrets, “ghosts,” as Derrida puts it, that promise an untold story’ (2008, 22). So, while we can agree with Diamond that performance in the archives involves confronting regimes of truth, I want to suggest that what I am calling the anarchival spirit does so by disrupting the formality and authority of the archive. Anarchival practitioners are inclined towards illegality. They refuse to genuflect before the authority of the archive. So let me spell out a provisional thesis: whereas scholars tend to bend the knee before the altar of the ordered, organised official archive, artists tend to see the archive as a space to play. Brian Massumi’s account of the anarchive identifies several features that resonate with the way documents function in Rumstick Road. In short, he contends that the anarchive attempts to unsettle the authority of the archive by exploring its creative potential. Andrew Murphie puts it another way. He writes that ‘if the archive promises order and authority, and the ability to do many things, it does so at a sometimes-heavy price. The anarchive promises a way out of systems, often from within, to life’s living’ (2016, 5). For Brian Massumi, anarchival practices underscore the creative potential of things. So, while the anarchive draws on traditional archival items, it is ‘a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation’ (2016. 7). Moreover, he points

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out that the ‘anarchive as such is made of formative tendencies; compositional forces seeking a new taking-form; lures for further process. Archives are their waystations’ (2016, 7). The Gray family archive was a waystation for Rumstick Road. The work is not reducible to the objects in the archive, nor is it reducible to Gray’s psychology or his mother’s suicide. If we use the vocabulary of the anarchive, we might say that the Wooster Group’s creative endeavours release various potentials embodied in things and events, thoughts, feelings and various recording technologies. Gray took a significant personal risk when he decided to allow the group to work with his personal family documents. On one level, this decision unsettled the boundaries that separate the private sphere from the public sphere by turning over intimate objects and life experiences to other people for the purpose of creating a public performance. On another level, it disturbed the very borders of the sovereign self by showing (through archival documentation) the various relations that work to create the perception of a coherent self. Rumstick Road, then, is a play of (object) relations (familial and material). In other words, it works through Gray’s relations (his parents, grandparents, siblings and so on) and his relations with places, objects and the creative input of his collaborators. Elizabeth LeCompte remembers that Gray was right in front of the audience, with this set behind that I could animate, not necessarily illustrating anything he said, but animating certain things that I took from the monologue. Sometimes the images were directly from his past, because I knew his family pretty well. And sometimes they were my own, and sometimes they were [Wooster Group founding members] Ron Vawter’s or Libby Howe’s stuff. (2012, 218) In short, I am suggesting that the Wooster Group’s creative practice is anarchival in the way it undermines the authority of documents in favour of their dramatic possibilities. There is, of course, as I have already suggested, a sense in which most forms of creative practice release hitherto concealed potentials in various materials. What marks the anarchival practice of the Wooster Group as distinctive in the context of Rumstick Road is its disinterest in psychology as an explanatory framework for investigating Bette Gray’s suicide. As James Bierman points out, the events in Rumstick Road appear ‘to have grown more out of the spatial workings of the pieces than any compelling psychology. Their structure is architectural rather than linear’ (1979, 17). Indeed, the organisation of space is integral to LeCompte’s aesthetic design, and we will have cause to return to this topic shortly. However, we cannot ignore the ethical problems generated by what I am calling an anarchival practice. In the last chapter, we saw how Dickie Beau attempted to engage with questions of inheritance and justice by re-membering the late Ian Charleson. In many ways, Beau contested the authority of the archive, which threatens to extinguish the memory of those persons and items absent from its recording technologies, by creating

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a new work from archival recordings. As a public figure, it is possible to find traces of Charleson’s life in various public archival technologies (film, television and radio recordings, for example). Bette Gray, conversely, was not a celebrity. Most traces of her life are not on the public record. So how are we to reckon with questions of inheritance and justice in Rumstick Road? How might it unsettle the account of hauntological dramaturgy I have proffered so far? Let us return, for a moment, to the concept of the anarchive. Clearly, advocates of the anarchive are indebted to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, figures often cited by creative artists located within the university. In his preface to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi writes that Deleuze and Guattari open up new intellectual and creative possibilities by refusing to ask questions that have dominated Western philosophy: The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? (1987, xiv) Let us unpack this quotation with reference to Rumstick Road. Is the performance true? Does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible? These questions do not have definitive answers, yet they do provide a framework for discussing the aesthetics and ethics of the performance. The documents attest to certain facts: Bette Gray committed suicide; she received electric shock treatment; she was a Christian Scientist; she held strong spiritual beliefs, she lived on Rumstick Road; she suffered from mental illness; Spalding Gray was Bette’s son, and his presence on stage lends a sense of authenticity to the performance (he is not playing a dramatic character as such but presenting a heightened version of himself). These brute facts are true, and truth, as we shall see, still matters in the context of the play. The critical commentary on the play, written by theatre critics and academics, suggests that Rumstick Road not only works as a compelling performance, but it generates a series of provocative questions about Bette Gray’s death and her connections to forms of spirituality, madness, patriarchal authority, the practice of psychiatry and the nature of reality itself (Bette Gray’s religious beliefs add another spectral layer to the complex mix of elements in Rumstick Road since Christian Scientists believe that the material world is illusory and that spirituality constitutes reality). The performance works by working on documents from the Gray family’s archive. In other words, the act of assembling theatrical scenes or set pieces releases affective potentialities from the slides, 8  mm films and tape recordings that make the work resonate with commentators more than 40 years after its inception. But what new thoughts did Rumstick Road make possible? Perhaps the most germane thought we need to interrogate in the present context concerns the ethical obligations artists may or may not owe to the dead. The anarchive releases potentialities of all sorts, but the effects of these potentialities cannot be anticipated in advance. In undermining the authority of the archive,

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the anarchive necessarily promotes risk and courts unsavoury sensations that demand that we reckon with ghosts. Let us start with the ghosts of Rumstick Road: Bette Gray, the other members of the Gray family whose disembodied voices are heard in the theatre space and the nameless psychiatrist that prescribed Bette Gray’s shock therapy. David Savran notes that two scenes in Rumstick Road were especially confronting in the way they transgressed the boundary between the private and public realms. The first occurs when a tape recording of Gray’s grandmother is played during the performance. Gray makes it clear, apparently following LeCompte’s direction, that he did not have permission to use the tape in the production. In fact, his grandmother expressly requested that he not play the tape to anyone. The second controversial incident occurs when Gray plays a recording of a telephone conversation with his mother’s psychiatrist. Writing in the Village Voice, Michael Feinglod points out that I’d like to register a vehement protest about the morality of using private documents and tapes in this kind of public performance. Prefacing one tape with the announcement that his grandmother has specifically asked him not to use it in the performance, Gray obviously thinks he’s found a terrific way to rivet the audience’s attention. So, obviously he has. But I feel cheapened by having been made to participate in this violation of a stranger’s privacy. It’s all very well for Gray to want to create a work of art out of a traumatic event in his life, . . . but to make a point of including dishonorable transactions like this in it is to brutalise the audience, implicating them in the artist’s pain instead of offering them a share in its transcendence. (Cited in The Director’s Voice, Volume 2, 216) So the performance works, but at what cost? Is Rumstick Road a work of mourning or, as Feingold implies, an instance of opportunistic exploitation? Gray himself claimed that the work had therapeutic value for him: ‘At last I was able to put my fears of, and identification with, my mother’s madness into a theatrical structure. I was able to give it some therapeutic distance, . . . some perspective’ (cited in Savran 1986). Gray replied to Feingold’s critique in The Village Voice: At the time we made Rumstick, we saw theatre as a place to make the personal public. O’Neill quoted his family in Long Day’s Journey into Night. . . . We live in a brutal time that demands immediate expression. By using private words and documents, Rumstick employs the painful and ‘exploitative’ mode common to modern autobiography. (2011, Loc 789) We might speculate that, if Abraham and Torok are correct, the therapeutic value of the work, for Gray, might lie in the way it brings Bette Gray’s hitherto unspoken trauma into the open, thereby providing an opportunity for Gray to exorcise his mother’s ghost. This does not, however, help us untangle the ethical consequences involved in mining a personal family trauma for constructing

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a public performance. Savran provides an articulate, if not thoroughly compelling, defence of Gray when he suggests that any attempt to offer the audience closure through ‘transcendence’ would constitute a dishonest act since it is not possible to transcend ‘the chain of brutality’ that marked Bette Gray’s life: [O]ne can never rise above these relationships, or above metaphysics—they are ingrained in thought and language, and in the operation of theatre. As a result, they do not aim for an impossible transcendence but rather a deconstruction of the chain of brutality. (Savran 1986) In any event, Savran’s reading of the Wooster Group’s transgressions in Rumstick Road coveys a bleak account of the work’s fidelity to the life of Bette Gray but one that resonates with Derrida’s observation that the work of mourning always carries the possibility of doing an injustice to the dead, especially when one uses them in another work. In Circumfession (Derrida 1993, 6), he writes about feeling guilty about writing about his mother’s death: ‘exhibiting her last breaths and, still worse, for purposes that some might judge to be literary’. I will address these ethical questions in more detail in the next chapter, but it is now time to summon the ghost of Spalding Gray himself through two very different anarchival reactivations. ‘Ghosts are captured on camera,’ writes Ben Brantley in his review of the Wooster Group’s video reconstruction of Rumstick Road. The film, Brantley contends, is ‘by its very nature phantasmal’ (2014). Derrida once remarked that ‘[c]inema plus psychoanalysis equals the science of ghosts’ (1983). Leaving the first part of his equation aside for the moment, it is not hard to conceive of the cinema as a mechanism that multiplies ghosts since it makes absent bodies visible. The dead and the departed reappear every time we screen a movie. Derrida calls this phenomenon ‘intrinsic virtualisation’ (2015). Of course, all tele-technologies (photography, television, radio, telecommunications and the Internet) have a spectral quality, a feature regularly exploited by the Wooster Group over the last 40 years or so. In its reactivated form as a work of video art that has been screened in cinemas and distributed widely on DVD, Rumstick Road provides an exemplary instance of how hauntological dramaturgy connects with anarchival practice, but before exploring this relationship in detail it is important to describe the project’s rationale and the technical processes that made the work possible (the reconstruction could not have been possible prior to the advent of non-linear digital editing software, for example). It is also important to recognise at the outset that the video is an homage to Spalding Gray and other members of the Wooster Group who are no longer alive. Filmmaker and long-time associate of the group, Ken Kobland, describes the project as both an act of love and a memento mori (2018). It is easy to lose sight of the fact the original work owed as much to the affective impact it had on its audience as to its formal structure as a work of art, especially within the context of a scholarly work that is compelled to explicate various theoretical concepts

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that help us appreciate the dramaturgical complexity of Rumstick Road. Cindy Rosenthal recalls that Rumstick Road was the first piece of experimental, avantgarde theatre that really connected with her on an emotional level. There was something about Spalding Gray and his openness and feeling like you were in the room with somebody that was breaking apart or trying to pull himself together through stories and memories that just grabbed me. As a person who was an emerging theatre artist, I’ll never forget the pulsing tent that was literally like a beating heart. It felt like my heart. I’d never seen an experimental theatre work that hit me emotionally before. . . . It also seemed as if everybody in that room at that moment and that performance was having that same ‘oh, my God’ experience. I’m not exactly sure, but I feel like when it was done, I burst into tears. (2018) This is not surprising given the nature of the material and the sombre themes explored in the performance. I  mention the affective force of the work because it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the archive is never dispassionate. But what happens when archives fail to do justice to the people or events they purport to serve? In what follows, I will argue that the reactivation of the Rumstick Road archive seeks to disrupt or talk back to its official archival record. So, on one level, the video reconstruction seeks justice for the work itself. The Theatre on Film and Tape (TOFT) archive at the Lincoln Center houses an archival video recording of Rumstick Road. However, the Wooster Group was never happy with this archival recording, which failed to properly document the play’s triptych set which was integral to the aesthetic logic of the work. Indeed, Bierman notes that the design does ‘not simply contain the action, but rather acts as the forms that shape the action’ (1979, 17). According to Savran, renaissance illustrations of anatomical demonstrations inspired LeCompte’s spatial vision, which comprised of three main elements that were encompassed in a box-like structure. The set contains three distinct spaces: rooms are located stage right and stage left and are separated by an enclosed space which effectively functions as a bio-box—it is here that we find ‘the controller,’ the performer responsible for playing the music cues, tape recordings and speaking various directions through a microphone. The two rooms are connected by a passageway backstage, but the actors also move from one room to another by passing in front of the controller’s raised box. Gray begins his performance from this centre-stage position, and the man’s physical examination of the woman (which resonates with the renaissance image of the anatomical examination) also takes place in this centre-stage playing area immediately under the bio-box. Action often occurs in these spaces simultaneously, so the spectator must take in the entire performing space in order to get a sense of how the juxtaposition of these concurrent scenes creates meanings through irony or simple contrasts of sound, movement and action.

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Wooster Group archivist Clay Hapaz points out that the TOFT recording was a two-camera shoot that was probably edited on the fly by a vision mixer— this, he claims, was a common practice in the 1970s and 1980s (Hapaz 2018). The recording zooms in and out of various scenes and often uses a split-screen effect to capture simultaneous action. This technique fails to record the controller’s actions and consequently fails to respect the integrity of LeCompte’s design. The reconstructed video, then, attempts to correct this distortion in part by making the entire set visible. It does not, however, attempt to wholly duplicate the experience of watching the performance from a single perspective since the reconstruction provides details that could not have been visible from the perspective of the audience. This is most apparent in the way the video presents the Gray family slides (these images take up almost the entire screen). Ultimately the reconstruction is a work in its own right, a ghostly evocation of Rumstick Road. The work would not exist had it not been for Ken Kobland’s decision to make a flipbook out of the original production. He recalls: When the piece was made, I wanted to make a flipbook out of it. You know, it’s a book you can flip through the pages and the characters move around. That was the basic idea and that’s why I  photographed the set, I  photographed each individual scene as much as I  could to create the Flipbook. So, the set would be fixed, and the characters will move from here to here to here to there. They would interact, they would go to the center of the page, but I never did it. When the idea came to reconstruct Rumstick Road, I thought I’d be able to finally make the flipbook I always wanted to make. (2018) The production left other archival traces. Apart from the TOFT recording, LeCompte shot some super-8 footage, and fragments of the production were also captured on U-matic tape. Kobland also had access to the original slides, reel-to-reel voice-recordings and photographs. He recalls that Rumstick was made at a time when you could start to retrieve some stuff from the theatre piece through video recordings, photographs and so on, but the archival material was very fragmented. It was almost like putting together pieces of mummified cloths. The video reconstruction could never create the theatre piece again, but it is possible to convey what sort of event it was, so you could say, ‘yeah, I remember that.’ (2018) Kobland used Final Cut Pro 7 to resize the various visual elements of the archive and place them into the still image of the set he had originally shot for his never realised flipbook. In short, he re-sized and sometimes animated the digitised archival images and video recordings to create the effect of putting the

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play back in its box, as it were. This operation, which was enabled by the ability of digital editing technologies to make images malleable, restored the spatial integrity of the original production. Of course, the reactivated Rumstick Road is not coincident with the stage performance; it is a new work generated by the traces of the original, which, in turn, was composed from fragments and traces from other times and other lives. And much of the reconstructed video’s poignancy comes from our knowledge of Spalding Gray’s life and death. The work anticipates the manner of Gray’s death by suicide. If you are aware of Gray’s career and the facts of his biography, it is difficult to miss the dramatic irony of his investigations into his mother’s demise. There is a sense in which the passage of time adds another layer of meaning and complexity to Rumstick Road. Kobland makes the astute observation: He repeated it [the arc of the play] almost in every way. There’s a scene in which Ron and he lift the tent and move it through the window. It symbolised or played out the move that the mother makes to a new house from which she can’t recover. He repeated that. On the phone with the psychiatrist, this insane psychiatrist, who says just watch out because this is passed on. Spalding often spoke about what could possibly happen to him, what would put him in a place that his mother was. (2018) Perhaps the original production of Rumstick Road allowed Gray to successfully mourn the loss of his mother, but it seems that he never discovered the trauma that disturbed his mother and was perhaps responsible for his own struggle with mental illness. If we invoke Abraham and Torok’s concept of the phantom, we can speculate that Gray’s prolific autobiographical investigations failed to dislodge the phantom that dwelt within himself. Perhaps he never managed to fill the gaps in his family history or find a way of inciting his relatives to break their silence and give up their secrets. And perhaps, those occlusions prevented him from identifying the malevolent phantom that disturbed his well-being. Maybe he was seeing the wrong kind of shrink. We can only speculate. If we are to see the Wooster Group’s dramaturgy through the lens of hauntology we need to determine the extent to which Rumstick Road attempted to listen to the ghost of Bette Gray and seek justice on her behalf. The work and its subsequent anarchival reactivation certainly raise questions about inheritance, fidelity and justice. The theatrical version of the performance conjures a myriad of ghosts: disembodied voices and ethereal images abound, which speak directly to these Derridean themes. What will be Spalding Gray’s inheritance? What does he learn about his past and future by retrieving and co-creating the composite of images, voices and documents that comprise the play? Does his engagement with the ghost of his mother force him to set things right? And what do we, spectators and scholars, learn from all this anarchival activity? The answers to these questions will obviously vary from person to person, but, for me, the video reconstruction of Rumstick Road underscores the Wooster

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Group’s commitment to ghosts; the work speaks back to the archive by using its contents to transform the way we remember the landmark performance—the video reaffirms the importance and integrity of the spatial logic of the theatrical production. The Wooster Group’s (an)archive is not a static repository of objects stored away for the edification of scholars but a collection of items that are onsite in the performing Garage waiting to be reactivated and repurposed in new contexts and in new works, like the video reconstruction of Rumstick Road, a new work that is made from the traces of the past. In other words, it’s an anarchival work that reckons with the ghost of Spalding Gray by refocusing attention on a prescient performance that continues to echo through these especially disjointed times. The Rumstick Road video was made by people who knew and loved Spalding Gray, but Gray’s ghost haunts people who never knew him. His reputation as a distinctive and celebrated monologist is beyond dispute and endures long after his untimely death in 2004. Gray achieved a level of fame and celebrity that also transcended his membership of the Wooster Group, and his solo performance works for theatre and film have inspired countless artists. He may not have been the first figure to make art from personal neuroses, obsessions and familial traumas, but he is, quite rightly, remembered for making a significant contribution to the art of the personal monologue. Eddie Paterson writes that Gray’s legacy is essential to understanding the reassertion of monologue as a genre of contemporary American performance because of its characteristic combination of playful aesthetics and politics. Gray’s impact on the development of monologue leaves the genre uniquely positioned to be politically insightful for, in the tradition of the Jeremiad, he offers a rhetorical vision of the United States in the late twentieth century. (2015, 78) Since his death in 2004, several solo performers have paid tribute to Gray by making work that draws on his distinctive dramaturgy, aspects of which we can see, in a nascent form, in his early work with the Wooster Group. Gray is best known for his minimal performance style. He rarely needed more than a wooden desk, a microphone, a glass of water and a spiral notebook containing notes and prompts for whatever stories he chose to communicate. Gray’s dramaturgical techniques are deceptively simple. He basically told stories about his life that often revealed intimate personal details, which were usually based in fact—he once described himself as a poetic journalist who was attempting to give the chaos of life some kind of aesthetic structure in order to keep his demons at bay. However, he confessed to embellishing his tales and filtering reality through his imagination. Nell Casey points out that Gray’s monologues were a strenuous exercise in memory. From the start, Gray worked only from an outline for his shows. He tape-recorded his performances in order to play them back and edit the story in his mind; he would alter the

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piece to make it, as he explained in a 1999 interview, ‘more dramatic and funny by juxtaposing a little hyperbole here and playing with it a little bit there.’ As a result, he began an ongoing creative relationship with his audience—tweaking his stories based on their reaction, what he called a ‘dialogue’—that he would rely on for the rest of his career. ‘I start wide open and want it to come down to something set organically,’ Gray explained. ‘I never memorise my lines. I’m trying to corral them every time. It’s like bushwhacking—I hack my way up the hill each night until eventually I make a clear path for myself ’. (2011, Loc, 66) Steven Soderbergh’s filmic tribute to Gray, Everything Is Going to Be Fine (2010), contains excerpts from Gray’s most celebrated monologues alongside edited highlights from various interviews that Gray gave throughout his life. The film confirms that Gray frequently spoke about Bette Gray’s suicide and remained traumatised by his mother’s death and his family’s reluctance to speak about her illness and subsequent demise. At one point, he recalls that his father informed him about Bette’s death by saying, ‘[S]he’s gone.’ Gray cites this incident as another example of ‘avoidance.’ Clearly, he was haunted by his mother’s suicide throughout his life and was mindful of the consequences of the family’s silence in a way that resonates with Abraham and Torok’s account of intergenerational trauma I explicated at the beginning of this chapter. Bette Gray killed herself when she turned 52, and Spalding began to have suicidal fantasies when he reached the same age. As we know, Gray did finally commit suicide a decade later. He suffered from depression and possibly lived with bipolar disorder for much of his life. However, his mental health rapidly deteriorated as a consequence of serious injuries he sustained in car accident in 2001. Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and writer, treated Gray in the wake of his accident and recalls that Gray reluctantly sold his house because ‘ “witches, ghosts, and voodoo” had “commanded” him to do it’ (2015). Sacks provides a harrowing account of Gray’s last days, which do, indeed, suggest that the arc of his life had many similarities with that of Bette Gray, a poignant fact that now frames our reading of Rumstick Road as a prescient work. Taoists believe that people who meet violent or unhappy deaths return as malevolent spirits who must be placated with various offerings. Gray spirit certainly appears to haunt the North American Theatre or at least certain solo performers who have created work that explicitly keeps Gray’s legacy in play. Gray does not really return as a hungry ghost. And if he is a revenant it has more to do with Marvin Carlson’s concept of the haunted stage. As mentioned earlier, Carlson makes the case that we always hold the memories of past performances when we see a new work (2003). For example, if we see the production of the same dramatic text more than once, we are haunted by our memories of all the productions we have seen, which is another reason why Dickie Beau’s Remember Me encourages a hauntological reading. The work summons the ghosts of many of the most celebrated actors who have played Hamlet. If theatre as a

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genre of performance is hauntological, Carlson suggests that this is especially so for postmodern performance, which habitually recycles material and cites previous performances—as we have seen, the Wooster Group’s work is exemplary in this regard, which is why Carlson devotes so many pages to the company. In the final chapter of The Haunted Stage, Carlson observes: One particularly striking and contemporary sort of body ghosting is made possible by a combination of the group’s general recycling of material and its duplication of bodies within a single production by the use of video. Very often an actor his physical body is visible to the audience can also simultaneously be seen by them on video screen, sometimes synchronically with visible body and at other times, and more directly germane to his study, presented as a recording taped at some other time. (2003, 169)

The Anarchival Reanimation of Nyatt School At the time of writing, 2021, the Wooster Group are working on a kind of sequel to the Rumstick Road reanimation. However, this work uses archival video from the original production as part of a live performance event staged in the Performing Garage. The archival record of the final part of the Rhode Island trilogy, Nyatt School (1978), is not as extensive as its predecessor. While many of the props remain (the spine of the red tent, vinyl records and the pink chair, for example) the only video recording, shot on tour in Amsterdam, of the piece is fragmentary and fuzzy. The sound is almost unintelligible. One key sequence exists in much better quality on 16 mm film, but it is not enough to make up for the paucity of archival documentation necessary to create something akin to the Rumstick Road reconstruction. LeCompte and her collaborators overcome this apparent obstacle by creating a new theatrical work, Nyatt School Redux (Since I Can Remember), which was performed at the Performing Garage in New York in 2019. The original production is notable for the way it foreshadows the staging of Spalding Gray’s later autobiographical monologues—he addresses the audience in a more casual manner while seated on a stool behind a long table, occasionally drinking from a glass of water, for instance. While less explicitly about Gray’s mother, it is connected to the proceeding work in the way it explores the theme of a woman’s psychological breakdown through a partial staging of T.S. Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party (1950). LeCompte decided to remount the work with members of the current company along with a few people, most notably Kate Valk, who remembered the original production. LeCompte believed that this new performance would serve two purposes: it ‘could at least fill in the gaps for an archival record and, at the same time, demonstrate our process for devising our work’ (2019). The new work is essentially a palimpsest of the older work (Valk also believes that

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the Amsterdam video was recorded over a video of a performance of Rumstick Road, which, she says, is sometimes audible). Kate Valk mostly acts as a narrator, commenting on the archival footage of the original performance, which plays on a large television monitor at the back of the stage. At other times, her role is that of a translator. She ‘makes sense’ of the fragmentary images for the audience by filling in gaps and also telling stories about her memories of the original performance, which she witnessed as a member of the audience (she eventually took over Libby Howes’ role in a later, 1982, version of the work). She adopts some of Gray’s signature moves, at least in the conversational tone while commenting on the archival material. At other times, it is as though she is a medium for Gray’s ghost. She and other members of the cast repeat Gray’s speech and physical movements, but Valk also follows Gray’s autobiographical impulse and tells personal stories about her involvement with the company and memories of Gray. One such tale involves Libby Hawes’ struggle with mental illness, which, during rehearsals, generated a debate about the ethics of revealing details about another person’s personal trauma for aesthetic purposes. Ken Kobland objects to this segment of the performance. David Gordon, in his account of the work’s rehearsal process, writes that Kobland, who shot much of the old and new footage, interrupts. He is upset with Liz and argues that this is exploitative and not ‘her experience to use.’ Liz is adamant: It is Kate’s story too. She is merely relating her own personal experience. And it is important, because of the theme of women suffering breakdowns. Spalding connected deeply with the character of Celia; his own mother, a Christian Scientist, was also treated by psychiatrists before taking her life. (2020) The debate, as Gordon describes it, reveals a lot about the company’s dramaturgical process, which often progresses though heated arguments about the details of the performance. In the present context, though, it is important to underscore the integral role that video and sound recordings play in the new work. At times, the actors in the new work repeat the movements of their counterparts in the archival materials. They also lip-synch to some of the vinyl recordings and also speak lines fed to them through earphones (a technique often used in verbatim theatre) thereby producing a set of haunting affects similar to those I described in the previous chapter. Gordon points out that LeCompte prefers to use the words ‘channelling’ or ‘transmission’ instead of ‘lip-synching’ (2020). Of course, the Wooster Group’s work has exploited the hauntological potential of audio and video recordings throughout its long history. So much so that it is possible to see most of their work through the lens of hauntological dramaturgy. Indeed, any work that makes extensive use of tele-technologies, as I have already intimated, summons ghosts. However, it is also important to acknowledge that the reanimation of Nyatt

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School, which is still a work in progress, also brings the past into the present. LeCompte notes that we have discovered that when it is placed in a new time and context, new possibilities and resonances emerge. I recognise that we are not just making an archival record—we are in the process of making a new piece. (2019) In the work’s penultimate scene Ron Vawter pretends to shoot the children who were part of the original cast. They fall to the floor and pretend to be dead. Today, of course, this scene recalls the horror of school shooting in America, as Gordon notes. The new work also exposes the gap between the late 1970s and the present day by describing rather than representing the final scene of Nyatt School in which Gray bares his naked posterior to the audience, while Vawter uses his penis to move the needle on one of the record as Howes simulates masturbation (apparently, LeCompte instructed the child performers to close their eyes during this notorious sequence). That the group chose not to represent or recreate this scene speaks volumes about the radical shift in social and political mores since the 1970s. In many ways, this hybrid performance is an exemplar of a hauntological dramaturgy that is animated by an anarchival spirit. Obviously, it uses archival objects to facilitate an encounter with ghosts, but it also gives its audience an insight in the company’s heritage and dramaturgical process. It is more than a mere performance. It is a performing archive that plays with ghosts. Following Carlson’s lead, we can see that the Wooster Group’s dramaturgy involves repetition, citation, reiteration and recollection. As Carlson observes in the introduction to his book, The Haunted Stage, all plays could be called Ghosts since the theatre always deals with things we have seen before. The retelling of stories already told, the re-enactment of events already enacted, the reexperience of emotions already experienced, these have always been the central concerns of the theatre in all times and places, but closely allied to these concerns are the particular production dynamics of the theatre: the stories it chooses to tell, the bodies and other physical materials it utilizes to tell them, and the places in which they are told. (2003, 3) Of course, the stories we retell and the events we re-enact in the theatre can never be exactly the same, as Carlson notes, with a nod to Derrida. And it is this aspect of the haunted stage that makes it so compelling. In this chapter, we have seen how spectral dramaturgy operates as a mechanism of commemoration with respect to what I  have identified as an anarchival impulse. That is an approach to archival materials—objects, documents, images, audiovisual recordings—that reworks and repurposes them to generate novel works that are infused with the spirit of people, places and things that have come before. In the next chapter, I will take this anarchival aspect of hauntological dramaturgy

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(and its concomitant ethical dilemmas) further by focusing on a work, Vanitas (D’Cruz 2020), that re-members my deceased father, Antoine Joseph D’Cruz.

References Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1976. Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de L’Homme aux Loups. Paris: Flammarion. Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1984. “A  Poetics of Psychoanalysis: ‘The Lost Object—Me.” Translated by Nicholas Rand. SubStance 12, no. 1: 17. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/ continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3, no. 2: 240–68. Bierman, James. 1979. “Three Places in Rhode Island.” The Drama Review: TDR 23, no. 1: 13–30. Brantley, Ben. 2014. “A Suicide Stalks Young Spalding Gray.” New York Times, May 1, 2014, Section C, Page 4. www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/movies/spalding-gray-on-video-inwooster- groups-rumstick-road.html. Brooker, Charlie. 2013. “Be Right Back”. Black Mirror episode. Channel 4 Television Corporation/Netflix, UK. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Theatre as a Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Crohn Schmitt, Natalie. 1990. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Davis, Colin. 2013. “Etat Present: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeran. London and New York: Bloomsbury. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2018. Teaching Postdramatic Theatre: Anxieties, Aporias and Disclosures. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2020. Vanitas. Multiplatform work. https://vimeo.com/472469046 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1983. Quoted in Ghost Dance, directed by Ken McMullen. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. “Circumfession.” In Jacques Derrida, by Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2015. “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ Antoine de Baecque, Thierry Jousse, Jacques Derrida, Peggy Kamuf.” Discourse 37, no. 1–2: 37. Diamond, Elin. 2008. “Performance in the Archives.” Theatre History Studies 28: 20–26. “document, n.” OED Online. September 2019. Oxford University Press. Accessed October  31, 2019. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy-b.deakin.edu.au/view/Entry/56328?rske y=jwgKJ9&result=1. Donald, Minty. 2016. “The Performance Apparatus: Performance and Its Documentation as Ecological Practice.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 20, no. 3: 251–69. Eliot, T. S. 1950. The Cocktail Party. New York: Harcourt, Brace. George, David E. R. 1989. “Quantum Theatre—Potential Theatre: A  New Paradigm?” New Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 18: 171–79. Gordon, David. 2020. “The Forty Year Rehearsal.”Harpers Magazine. Accessed August 29, 2021. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/the-forty-year-rehearsal-wooster-group-elizabethlecompte/.

88  The Reactivation of Rumstick Road Gray, Spalding. 2011. The Journals of Spalding Gray. Edited by Nell Casey. New York: A. Knopf. Kindle Edition. Gray, Spalding, and Elizabeth LeCompte. 1978. “Play: Rumstick Road.” Performing Arts Journal 3, no. 2: 92–115. www.muse.jhu.edu/article/654873. Haptaz, Clay. 2018. Interviewed by Glenn D’Cruz. New York. Ibsen, Hendrik, 2002. Ghosts. Translated by Stephen Mulrine. London: Nick Hern Books. King, William Davis. 1992. “Dramaturgical Text and the Historical Record in the New Theatre: The Case of Rumstick Road.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7, no. 2 (Fall): 71–87. Kobland, Ken. 2018. Interviewed by Glenn D’Cruz. New York. LeCompte, Elizabeth, dir. 1977. Rumstick Road. Performing Garage, New York, March 25– April 17. LeCompte, Elizabeth, dir. 1978. Nayatt School. Performing Garage, New York. LeCompte, Elizabeth. 2012. The Director’s Voice, vol. 2. Edited by Jason Loewith. New York: Theatre Communications Group. LeCompte, Elizabeth. 2019. “Director’s Notes.” In Nyatt School Redux (Since I Can Remember). http://thewoostergroup.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Nayatt-SchoolRedux-streaming-program.pdf. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Leverett, James. 1979. “Other Voices, Other Ruins,” Soho Weekly News, 22 November: 47. Fales Library, Downtown Theatre Collection, New York University. Marranca, Bonnie. 2003. “The Wooster Group: A Dictionary of Ideas.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25, no. 2: 1–18. Martin, Carol. 2013. The Theatre of the Real. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Massumi, Brian. 1987. “Forward.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, translated by Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, Brian. 2016. “Working Principles.” In The Go-To How To Book of Anarchiving, edited by Andrew Murphie. Montréal: The Senselab. Norman, Sally Jane. 2012. “Theatre as an Art of Emergence and Individuation.” Architectural Theory Review 17, no. 1: 117–33. O’Neill, Eugene. 2002. Long Day’s Journey into Night. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene. Paterson, Eddie. 2015. The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics. London: Methuen Drama. Quick, Andrew. 2007. The Wooster Group Work Book. New York: Routledge. Rae, Paul. 2015. “Workshop of Filthy Creation, The Theatre Assembled.” TDR: The Drama Review, 59, no. 4: 117–32. Rosenthal, Cindy. 2018. Interview with Glenn D’Cruz. New York. Sacks, Oliver. 2015. “The Catastrophe: Spalding Gray’s Brain Injury.” The New Yorker. Accessed November 12, 2020. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-catastrophe-oliversacks. Savran, David. 1986. Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Soderbergh, Steven, dir. 2010. Everything Is Going to Be Fine. Washington Square Films, USA. Scott, Jo. 2015. “Matter Mattering: ‘Intra-activity’ in Live Media Performance.” Body Space Technology 14. http://doi.org/10.16995/bst.33.

4 Re-membering Anto D’Cruz Intergenerational Trauma and Object-Oriented Dramaturgy

Introduction I knew he was dead as I drove to my parents’ house. The doctor was cagey on the telephone: ‘Your father is very ill. Please come home immediately.’ I think I pressed him for details, but he just calmly repeated his request. When I arrived, I saw my maternal grandfather and one of my uncles pacing on the front veranda. Their blank expressions confirmed my intuitive deduction: my dad was dead. The scene inside the house was bleak. Antoine Joseph D’Cruz (Anto) lay on his favourite couch, his body almost wholly covered by a thin sheet, a big toe almost comically protruding from the covering. My mother was inconsolable. She was crying hysterically as my sister tried to comfort her. I think the three of us embraced. Soon thereafter, a medical team removed my father’s body, which left its faint impression on the couch. He was gone—dead at 53, as we later learnt, from a massive heart attack. That night, as I slept in my childhood bedroom, my recently deceased father appeared to me in a dream. He wore a suit and tie, his preferred mode of dress. It was a dark blue ensemble, I think. His white shirt was crisp, as were his dress trousers. He appeared at some distance from me—I don’t recall any actual barrier between us, but I can’t be sure. I am, after all, recalling a dream from over 35 years ago. In any event, he was mute. As tears streamed down his face, he waved and then receded from view, fading into the void. His spectre didn’t issue any posthumous instructions for me to ‘remember’ him, yet remember him I did—belatedly and somewhat publicly. This performative act of remembrance and memorialisation will be the focus of this chapter. At the time of his death, our relationship was poor. We seemed to fight a lot. He thought I was, in his parlance, a ‘waster’—that is, a scruffy, indolent profligate, obsessed with trivial amusements. I was actually a pretty ordinary university student who was attempting to fit into a new cultural setting. I grew my hair, wore blue jeans and consciously rejected my father’s moral and sartorial values, which were forged by Jesuit priests in British India in the 1940s. My father was a brown-skinned Anglo-Indian, a fact that will figure prominently in the story that will unfold. For now, though, it is sufficient to know that I did not mourn his death. In fact, I felt a palpable sense of freedom when he died. DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-5

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I did not cry at his funereal, and, if I’m being honest, I felt very little sadness at his passing. Indeed, I thrived in the wake of his demise, barely pausing to register my mother’s terrible grief. I was too self-absorbed in my own world, which was opening up all sorts of new possibilities and potentialities for me. There is, of course, nothing remarkable about the manner or significance of my father’s death or my cold response to it—antipathy between fathers and sons is a common, almost banal occurrence. Yet, when I did finally get around to work of mourning, I learnt so much about how his achievements and disappointments were connected to much wider historical and political currents. As Alice Rayner astutely observes, ‘personal losses and their constitution of the psyche are replicated in historical losses such that historiography is both a personal and a public matter’ (2006, 185). As an Anglo-Indian and the progeny of British colonialism, Anto believed that he experienced a series of social and professional exclusions because he was, in today’s terms, a person of colour (POC). I witnessed some of his public humiliations first-hand, but it was not until I started to explore his life through the things he left behind—objects, documents, photographs, films—that I got a better sense of the enormity of his struggles and the muted tragedy of his relatively short life. For reasons I  cannot comprehend, I  wrote my father a letter on the 30th anniversary of his death. I rarely marked this occasion, so the impulse to finally mourn his death took me by surprise. I adopted a conciliatory tone; I touched on a few of his foibles but concentrated on the many sacrifices he made for his children. His hard work provided the conditions of possibility for our privileged lives. It took me decades to acknowledge this fact. The letter provided the impetus to create a more public memorial, which took the form of a solo performance, which has much in common with Spalding Gray’s commemoration of his mother in Rumstick Road, especially with respect to the way I used documentary material from the family archive to construct the performance. Today, it seems almost everybody catches archive fever. Simon Reynolds believes that the archival mindset has seeped out of the museum ‘to infect every zone of culture and everyday life’ (2011, 23). This book demonstrates that I  am not immune to this affliction. Moreover, this chapter testifies to the degree I have been inspired by those artists, like The Wooster Group, who see the archive as a creative space. To be clear, I am under no delusion that my work, Vanitas, is in any way comparable to theirs in terms of its aesthetic and cultural value. It has found a receptive audience, amongst a small coterie of academics and members of the Anglo-Indian community, but its contribution to the world of performance is modest, to say the least. That said, there is only so much that one can learn through observation and analysis. This is especially true in the present context. I have already offered two accounts of how hauntological dramaturgy operates from the viewpoint of a spectator and scholar, and I will continue to expand the concept with reference to other relevant performances in subsequent chapters. For now, I want to focus on my own creative practice to provide an account of hauntological dramaturgy from the inside, as it were. In what follows, I will unpack the various strategies of memorialisation I used to reckon with my father’s ghost by focusing on the hauntological dimension of objects.

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Vanitas: Hauntology and Object-Oriented Dramaturgy In his book, The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster writes: There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. They are there and not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to. . . . In themselves, the things mean nothing, like the cooking utensils of some vanished civilisation. And yet they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself: whether to color his hair, whether to wear this shirt or that, whether to live, whether to die. And the futility of it all once there is death. (1988, 10) While I will soon take issue with some of Auster’s remarks about objects, he makes two observations that resonate with me: First, there is indeed a terror associated with confronting the objects of the dead; second, the possessions of the dead, with the passing of time, gradually cease to belong to the world even as they, paradoxically, ‘remain the same’ or at least appear to have an enduring materiality. In what follows I will unpack the hauntological dimension of objects with reference to a devised monodrama and an essay-film (based on the performance), Vanitas, which I wrote and performed as an act of mourning. The work is structured around my father’s possessions. During the course of the performance I am, in a sense, ‘possessed’ by his possessions, which enable me to construct a story about his life and our fraught relationship. Each object reveals an aspect of his life: his dress sense, his taste in music, his moral principles, his professional aspirations, his frustrations, his religious beliefs and so on. Moreover, these objects facilitate an encounter with my father’s spirit. In the next section of this chapter, I will unpack the dramaturgical significance of three exemplary objects (suit, signet ring, tape recorder) in order to expand my account of hauntological dramaturgy. I will also draw on Alice Rayner’s discussion of stage props (2006) and Graham Harman’s theory of OOO (2016a) to locate my work within contemporary discourses about the ontological and epistemological status of objects. But, first, let us get a more detailed picture of how Vanitas tells Anto’s story. The performance begins with a monologue about my father’s fondness for tailored suits and his insistence that I, too, wear suits to formal occasions. As I recite the following words, I project a series of slides showing me wearing suits as a young boy. I HATE suits and all they represent: authority, wealth, confidence, entitlement, superiority. Bosses wear suits! Normal, socially acceptable people wear suits. Yes, sir, I  am looking at you! Criminals wear suits. Politicians wear

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suits. The people responsible for destroying the environment wear suits. My father wore suits, So, I wore suits, reluctantly, unwillingly, grudgingly. From the age of seven, he paid a tailor somewhere in East London to turn me into a subcontinental version of Little Lord Fauntleroy. It wasn’t his fault. I blame the British and the Indians, too. Both groups despised us as much as they despised each other. Chee-Chees, blacky-whites, half castes, AngloIndians. Midnight’s orphans. The Brits hated as for giving human form to their rapacious colonial lust. Kipling (1993) called us borderline folk, the white manifesting in spurts of ‘fierce, childish pride.’ The black in ‘still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and strange, unaccountable impulses to crime’. The Indians saw us as British stooges Lackeys, hopelessly compromised by lax morals, alcoholism and music. We were party people. The men: ‘good for nothing’ wasters living for the day, slaves to their basest desires. The women: temptress whores, easy lays. Eve incarnated. Trouser Snake charmers with painted faces, blush, mascara, lipstick. The suit guarded against such slurs by encasing its wearer in a magical mantle of respectability. Pariah dogs of the world unite and embrace the suit! (D’Cruz Vanitas 2020) While I  detested wearing suits as a child, my attitude changed a little when I  grew older. I  used to borrow my father’s suit jackets as a young adult since vintage clothes became prized fashion items in the 1980s (I usually wore one of his jackets over a black T-shirt; blue jeans displaced the suit’s trousers). I left one of his most precious suit jackets at a party a few months before he died. He had worn this particular garment to his mother’s funereal and was incensed by my carelessness in losing this cherished possession. While the suit symbolised our troubled relationship, it also conveyed something about my father’s place in the (post/colonial) order of things. In order to better understand the significance of the suit in this context, I need to provide a short account of Anglo-Indian history. AJ D’Cruz was an Anglo-Indian—a member of the ‘mixed-race’ community produced by British colonialism. Today, Anglo-Indians are a miniscule ethnic minority, characterised by their European customs. They are, for the most part, Christian; they speak English as their mother tongue and wear western clothes. These features marked them as ‘outsiders’ in India. As the progeny of sexual intercourse between Europeans and Indians, Anglo-Indians are not part of the Hindu caste system and are, therefore, reviled as being ‘unclean’ outcastes. Having a male European ancestor somewhere in one’s family genealogy confers Anglo-Indian identity in legal terms. However, this legal identity did not mean the community was accepted as a legitimate part of the Raj. Anglo-Indians posed a threat to imperial prestige since they were material reminders that the local population could contaminate European colonialists and dilute their racial purity. So Anglo-Indians were mostly reviled by the European colonial powers that occupied India and became what we might call Midnight’s Orphans when India became an independent nation on 15 August 1947—for those who are interested, you can find a more expansive account of Anglo-Indian identity in my book, Midnight’s Orphans (2006).

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Rejected by the cultures of both their maternal and paternal progenitors, Anglo-Indians became a distinct ethnic minority, and while the British did not wish to socialise or live in close proximity to Anglo-Indians, they did put them to work on the railways. Indeed, by 1928 the Indian railways employed almost half of the Anglo-Indian population, either directly or indirectly through cognate occupations that served the railway system. With the imminent withdrawal of the British from India in the 1930s and 1940s, Anglo-Indian community leaders, most notably Sir Henry Gidney and Frank Anthony, managed to secure job reservations for Anglo-Indians. This meant that the Anglo-Indian connection with the Indian railway system was guaranteed for a period of 50 years after independence. However, a large number of Anglo-Indians chose to leave India, fearing they had no ‘proper’ place in the new nation. Today, Anglo-Indians are primarily a diasporic community with large populations in the UK, Canada and, of course, Australia. My father left India for what he hoped would be a better life in London in 1963, a few months after my birth. He got a job as a London transport bus conductor and soon saved enough money to pay for my mother and me to join him in the UK. Eventually, after 7 years on the buses, he secured a job as a postal clerk and got to wear a suit to work. As someone who grew up with the stigma of illegitimacy, the suit functioned as a sign of an elusive form of respectability. It confounded the stereotype of the Anglo-Indian as a morally lax outsider. The suit, then, bears witness to a historical trauma that manifests within the context of familial relations. In the previous chapter I  invoked Abraham and Torok’s concept of the phantom to frame the hauntological dramaturgy of Rumstick Road. I want to develop this strand of hauntological thinking with reference to my own family history. Apparently, Abraham died before he could fully elaborate this concept. Ironically, Torok edited and published his notes on the phantom after his death (underscoring the fact that writing is always a spectral activity since it endures beyond the life of its authors). Writing in 1975, a significant time before Derrida’s more celebrated commentary on ghosts, Abraham observed: It is a fact that the ‘phantom’, whatever its form, is nothing but an invention of the living. Yes, an invention in the sense that the phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life. The phantom is therefore also a metapsychological fact: what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. (1994, 171) The phantom, then, is an invention that creates a space within the traumatised subject for secrets that belong to one’s forebears. The spectre is the agent, then, that facilitates the intergenerational transmission of trauma. I can only speculate about the degree to which my parents transmitted their traumatic experiences as displaced Anglo-Indians to me. What is not in doubt is the fact that my father kept some secrets to himself (despite having a generally voluble disposition). You always knew where you stood with AJ D’Cruz. He often spoke

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about his childhood in India. This was usually in the context of admonishing his children for not appreciating the fact that they never went hungry. He was rather less forthcoming about the details of his family life. It seemed that, as the eldest child, he assumed the role of patriarch for his brothers and sisters for reasons I have never been able to establish. Nobody in the family spoke about the dysfunction that obviously marked his parents’ marriage. I may have heard a few remarks and occasional whispers about domestic violence, but the only thing I could know for certain was that my paternal grandparents lived separate lives (even when they lived under the same roof, they had separate bedrooms and rarely conversed; as an Anglo-Indian from the French colony of Pondicherry, my grandmother spoke French as her first language, which may have contributed to communication issues). Their separation was obviously a source of shame in the context of Anglo-Indian culture, which seemed to be obsessed with observing strict moral protocols. Abraham notes that the phantom, in his reckoning, is not associated with the loss of a love object. So, if I am haunted by my father, in the terms of this particular theoretical schema, it is not because I have failed to mourn his death successfully, thereby becoming a Freudian melancholic (2005). Abraham suggests that people who carry ‘encrypted’ secrets within themselves leave it up to their descendants to reckon with the ‘tombs’ buried within themselves (1994, 172). Thus, the concept of intergenerational haunting is about confronting the trauma of an Other, a trauma that takes the form of a phantom that must be exorcised to restore a sense of well-being in the haunted subject. Hence, the children of parents who experienced racial prejudice under colonialism, for example, will inherit this trauma. In effect they introject the unconscious of another being. Abraham speculates that [the] phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious—for good reason. It passes—in a way yet to be determined—from the parent’s unconscious into the child’s . . . it works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subjects own mental topography. (1994, 173) He goes on to say that in most cases his patients do not acknowledge the existence of this phantom within. The work of psychoanalysis exorcises the restless ghost. Perhaps making art, especially in collaborative situations like the one described in the previous chapter, is analogous to working with an analyst in the mould of Abraham (who develops his theory from his clinical experience as a psychoanalyst). That said, it would be ingenious of me to suggest that my creative work somehow confirms this theory. The work of Abraham and Torok certainly gives me pause for thought and provides a seductive theoretical framework for an ‘after the fact’ analysis of my dramaturgical processes. As an aside, it is worth noting that there is an interesting body of scientific research that makes this theory seem less implausible. The concept of epigenetics resonates with the theories of Abraham and Torok and provides a potentially illuminating path for future research into the connections between hauntological

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dramaturgy and intergenerational trauma. In simple terms, epigenetics refers to ‘converging evidence supporting the idea that offspring are affected by parental trauma exposures occurring before their birth, and possibly even prior to their conception’ (Yehuda and Lehrner 2018, 243). However, this research is in a nascent phase, which is why I do not pursue this line of inquiry in the present study. Yehuda and Lehrner point out that animal research has defined a molecular pathway through which transmission of trauma effects might occur, more precise language is warranted to distinguish between clinical observation and biological mechanism. At the current time, the idea that epigenetic mechanisms underlie clinical observations in offspring of trauma survivors represents a hypothesis to be tested. (2018, 243) Having sketched a non-Derridean theory of hauntology, we can now return to dramaturgical matters. While reading the following account of the function of objects in Vanitas, it is important to note that I was not consciously thinking about hauntology or theorising my dramaturgical practice as I was making the work, which is not to say that Abraham’s concept is not relevant to my dramaturgical practice (which certainly involved developing strategies to metaphorically engage with my father’s ghost). As we have seen already, less theoretical forms of research and analysis, as in the case of Dickie Beau’s Re-member Me and the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road, inform dramaturgical practice. Further, we should also acknowledge, with Gaston Bachelard, that knowing must be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. This is the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an exercise in freedom. (2014, 17) So, while I  was quite consciously exploring how my dead father’s possessions testified to what we might call the presence of loss, I  was also following an emotional thread that I hoped would help me unpack the long-repressed trauma I experienced in the aftermath of his untimely demise through exercising my imagination and creativity. The project, as you will recall, began with a letter, which attempted to communicate with Anto D’Cruz by recalling his spirit or, to put it differently, reckoning with his ways of being in the world. The next section of this chapter comprises of a series of retrospective reflections which identify the spectral dimensions of my creative practice with a particular focus on objects. In her book, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (2006), Alice Rayner identifies the ways that some of the most overlooked elements of theatrical production—such as blackouts, the curtain, and props—contain ‘fundamental issues of ghostly theatricality: repetition, the double, matter and memory’ (2006, xxix). In her chapter on objects, Rayner argues that theatre is

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distinctive in its use of three-dimensional objects, which ‘provide a good deal of the perceptual satisfaction of an audience’ (2006, 73). I’m not convinced that the presence of three-dimensional objects in theatre is necessarily more compelling than the representations of objects in other mediums, especially in the wake of those theories, such as Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 1996) and OOO (Harman 2016a), based on a flat ontology, which do not distinguish between real, represented or imaginary things in the realm of Being. In other words, a knife, a unicorn and the concept of ghosts exist on the same plane of Being. This is a point Rayner acknowledges when she claims: The greatest mystery of theatrical ghosting is not that the ghosts are disembodied spirits from some ineffable realm, heaven or hell, and hence imaginary. The mystery, rather, is that they are fully embodied and material but are unrecognized without a certain mode of attention, a certain line of sight that can perceive the mysterious thing that is distinct from, yet embodied by, the theatrical object. (2006, xvii) As she also observes, to make a distinction between ‘the material and imaginary is already to invest belief in a duality in which thinking and doing, mind and matter, past and present, are separable entities’ (2006, xvii). It should be apparent from the previous chapters that hauntological dramaturgy is predicated on the idea that time, space, materiality and immateriality are inexorably entangled. Rayner makes a number of astute observations about the way objects (primarily in the form of stage props) facilitate encounters with revenants and assist us in recovering the past. Indeed, my reference to suits in Vanitas attempts to recover, through representation and repetition, a lost life and a lost world. As previously mentioned, I used to borrow my father’s suits when vintage clothes became fashionable in the 1980s. I sometimes wear one of his suit jackets in Vanitas (his trousers and shirts are too small for my frame). I  also use photographs of the two of us dressed in suits as a form of testimony that speaks about the symbolic function of this garment in our lives—it is worth underscoring that we consistently argued about clothes and my ostensibly ‘scruffy’ appearance. Wearing suits mattered for my father, which is why suits perform an important dramaturgical function in Vanitas. On one level the suit functions as a sign of a deceased person and a lost time—it represents a once familiar item within an uncanny frame. For Freud (2003), the uncanny refers to an unsettling experience that uncovers repressed, often traumatic, aspects of the past. Put another way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the homely becomes unhomely, and ordinary places and things become ominous (I will have cause to return to this concept in a more expansive manner in the next chapter). As signs, the suits that appear in Vanitas, primarily in photographic form, combine a wide range of cultural and personal associations (wealth, power, respectability and so on), but, most importantly, they testify to the presence of loss in the performance and in my life. Put more directly, I always associated suits with my father because

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this particular ensemble of fabric conveyed so many of his aspirations: he craved recognition and respectability, in part, to distance himself from the disparaging stereotypes associated with Anglo-Indians but also to signal a certain style, a way of being in the world aligned with order and authority, or at least that’s the way I read his character—he often used phrases like ‘correct’ and ‘up to the mark.’ And this is why I cannot help becoming conscious of my father’s absence whenever I wear a suit. Moreover, suits remind me of the apparent gulf between Anto’s values and aspirations and my own. For me the suit is an ensemble of fabric that still generates a complex melange of feelings: dread, resentment, embarrassment, fear, affection, grief, pathos. As Rayner observes, [a]n object may thus become larger than itself as it expands toward multiple associations and meanings, or it may contract toward mute materiality that refutes and escapes the habits of making meaning. In other words, stage props clearly participate in the signifying, narrative, and stylistic fictions of the drama as well as the culture, and they also supply the material, aesthetic, and tangible reality of things in themselves. (2006, 74) Objects, then, can have a multitude of functions within a wide range of performative contexts, but there is something especially compelling about what we might call documentary objects—that is, objects that are intimately connected to a historical period or to a person represented or referred to in a performance. Rayner is primarily concerned with the spectral qualities of stage props as they function in dramatic theatre and identifies the ways that props move from an apparently inert state while sitting on the props table to a state of activity and motion that facilitates a recounting of history. In this regard she echoes Carlson’s account of theatre as a haunted memory machine (2003)—all objects can be recycled, re-represented, recalled and repurposed in all genres of performance. In Vanitas, most of the objects either belonged to AJ D’Cruz, the primary subject of the work, or had a direct connection to his life. This is true of most works that make use of documentary material—it is certainly the case in Rumstick Road, which, as we have seen in the last chapter, makes extensive use of family photographs and sound recordings connected with Spalding Gray’s relatives. These objects have a poignancy for the creators of the work that may or may not be conveyed to the audience. To a large extent an audience is indifferent to the authenticity of an object. For example, wearing my father’s clothes on stage certainly holds significance for me and generates affects that influence my performance. Unless I explicitly draw attention to the fact that I’m wearing a suit that once belonged to my father, the suit is just another theatrical sign, and even if spectators do become aware of my personal attachment to the suit they are unlikely to experience the fabric’s visceral impact on me. From the point of view of the performer, then, the personal object is a kind of fetish. It is imbued with what we might call magical properties that facilitate communion with the dead. Rayner provides an alternative approach to this theme in her discussion of

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the relationship between object and the human sense of touch. She points out it is through touch that we leave traces of our identity on the surface of objects and that the ‘endurance of the object carries the memory of the touch and holds on to the intimacy cut off by death, which is how objects become sacred relics and memorials of the dead. Objects hold time still in material presence’ (2006, 82). So the object, the suit in the context of the present discussion, is not just part of a theatrical memory machine—it is also an integral part of the dramaturgy’s hauntological dimension insofar as it functions as a material conduit for a spectral encounter. My father’s skin once touched the fabric I wear on stage, his hands once buttoned the jacket, his sweat once seeped out of his pores into the fibres of the jacket. Perhaps these material traces of his body in the garment are imperceptibly faint, but the knowledge that his body once left material traces on the aging cloth has a palpable impact on the way I perform. On one level, there is nothing novel about this observation—I have just described a way to access what Stanislavski calls emotional memory. The salient point here is that the material (suit) and my immaterial (emotions) combine to unsettle time. As a performer, my emotional connection with the suit makes past memories present, and the stage is haunted by my recollections and narrative repetitions. When I read the letter I wrote to my dead father in the final part of the performance I cry, involuntarily, tears of grief. This has dramatic impact, but it also testifies to a force that possesses me. Sometimes, during this part of the performance, I can, in my mind’s eye, see my father as he appeared to me in the dream I described earlier. I guess this makes me a bad actor, if we accept Diderot’s claim that great actors do not experience genuine emotion. Yet there is a sense in which I am both acting and not acting. Of course, I could offer a more sober explanation for why wearing my father’s suit jacket makes me cry, perhaps with reference to the biological or neuroscientific literature on human emotion and memory, but such a move would miss a crucial point—hauntological dramaturgy thrives on mystery. It is predicated on the impossibility to wholly explain objects in terms of function, material composition or their place in the order of things. As Rayner astutely observes, ‘practice takes conceptual dualities and transforms them into something other than what we can think, but it is nonetheless possible to act in the midst of the transformation’ (2006, 184). We can develop and expand on these themes by unpacking the significance of another object that once belonged to my father: an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. Here is the text that accompanies the images and sound recordings from this section of the play: You’d never know it from the way he screamed at her, but my dad loved my mum. And she loved him. She insisted he buy the tape recorder, so he could at least enjoy the soundtrack of the television programs he missed as a consequence of being a shift worker. ‘Be quiet! Your father’s sleeping’. My dad was a London Transport bus conductor for many years. He worked the 57 route which began at the West Ham garage and terminated in the West End. His was not a glamorous job. 4.00am start. Pitch black. Ice cold.

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Foggy, dusty, dirty, diesel stench. And sometimes, he might have heard the following phrases: ‘Go back to your own country, you fucking Paki, you fucking wog, you fucking coon, you fucking nigger, you fucking black cunt.’ Knock off at 10.00pm. Head home, Eat, Shit, Sleep, Start again. Shift work was lucrative. Time and a half. You could pay down the mortgage on the two-up, two-down terrace house in 30 years! On his days off, the tape recorder allowed him to relax to the soundtrack of the Des O’Conner Show. Or, if he was in the mood, he could listen to the smooth croon of Jim Reeves, or Engelbert Humperdinck, the Anglo-Indian Elvis. The tape recorder came with a microphone, and my dad recorded himself singing for fun. He was not quite tone deaf, but he was no singer. But what he lacked in ability he made up for in enthusiasm, and his passion was infectious. One day he recorded the neighbourhood kids. White, cockney boys and girls, our friends and playmates. It’s still possible to thread the reel-to-reel tapes through the heads of the ancient machine and hear sounds from the past. Distant, Distorted, High noise to signal. An archive born out of love. The Elizabethan Popular 200 tape recorder is almost 60 years old. It was made in Romford, Essex, and was, apparently, a popular item. It enabled ordinary people to replay and record sound in fairly high fidelity on a shoestring budget. As we know from previous chapters, all recording technologies (tele-technologies, to use Derrida’s phrase) are ghost machines insofar as they provide the technological means for the dead to return. My father’s disembodied voice resides on magnetic tape, which I can replay and manipulate with the aid of today’s more sophisticated audio technology. I  can access the unique grain of my father’s voice, which evokes a lost world and a lost time. More specifically, my father’s Indian accent carries rich melange of associations. Simon Reynolds writes: Accent is relevant because it is a ghostly trace of past generations. A person’s accent is intimate yet oddly impersonal: it’s an inheritance, something that precedes you, that places you and that gives you away. Beyond class, these voices are bound up with a sense of nationality: that matrix of collective character that involves gesture and intonation, phrase and fable, and an immense array of common reference points that are seldom consciously apprehended (until they start to disappear)—anything from the shape of post boxes to newspaper fonts. There are so many British people with whom I have no common interests or shared values, yet there is a level on which I’m connected to them which I will never have with even my most simpatico American or European friends, people who are very much my cultural and musical compatriots. (2011, 337) Not having grown up in India, my accent does not convey my connection to the subcontinent, but the much maligned and ridiculed Indian accent is certainly a part of my inheritance. I feel a mixture of embarrassment and affection

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whenever I hear the sing-song cadences of Indian English. This feeling is supplemented with sadness whenever I  play recordings of my father’s voice—a dead man’s voice vibrates again, smudges the air and, in doing so, evokes a plethora of memories and emotions. The apparatus that preserves this lost voice is also fascinating. The apparent durability of the tape recorder takes on an uncanny resonance because it is no longer part of an active network of what we might call, with Heidegger, equipment. The object is out of time. It is no longer a part of an active network of everyday things. Let us explore this point further with reference to Heidegger’s famous tool analysis. First and foremost, Heidegger uses the term ‘equipment’ to designate things that we encounter in the world. These things enable us to do stuff—there is, he points out, equipment for writing, reading, sewing and so on (2006, 97). Crucially, it is not possible to talk about equipment in singular terms. In other words, no single piece of equipment is self-sufficient. Rather it is part of a much larger relational paradigm. For example, the tape recorder is related to other bits of equipment: magnetic tape, microphones, the power grid, plastic reel spools and so on. It was possible in 1963 to walk in a variety of stores that sold electronic goods and buy these items since similar machines were owned by thousands, possibly millions, of people. Today, domestic reel-to-reel recording machines are relics, occasionally available only in junk shops and on eBay. They are esoteric and no longer possess widespread utility. The salient point here is that my father’s tape recorder does not belong to the contemporary world. It exists as a material thing that is out of time. Old technology has a different way of being in the world. In some ways technological relics are like old people who no longer feel part of any social or political network. As we age our sense of belonging in the world begins to diminish, and fade, especially amongst those who feel lonely as a consequence of being alienated from familial, social and professional networks (Singh and Misra 2009). We cease to be as useful as we were in our prime, or so it seems. We increasingly become objects of contemplation, objects of scholarly inspection, curios in a junk shop full of detritus. The tape recorder is an uncanny object, too. It exudes an unsettling aura that testifies to what we might call its loss of world—that is, the erosion and disappearance of its original ontological context; the world of domestic analogue-recording technology no longer exists. More importantly, though, the tape recorder conveys, for me, the absence of my father and the world of my family in a particular place (Plaistow, London) and a particular time (the 1960s). The fact that we see the machine as a relic helps us better appreciate the spectral dimension of old objects. I  do not have the space to fully explicate Heidegger’s oft-quoted tool analysis here, but it is worth drawing attention to a few especially pertinent claims. Famously, Heidegger (98–99) made a distinction between things that are ready-to-hand (Zuhanden) and things that are present-to-hand (Vorhanden). Put simply, we apprehend a thing as being readyto-hand when we are using it in a pragmatic context. Our concern is with the item’s utility and the extent to which it enables us to perform a given task (such as making or replaying a sound recording). When the object is put to use,

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we are concerned with what it enables us to do. An object is present-to-hand when our relation to it is primarily theoretical—this mode of Being is analytical insofar as we attempt to apprehend the object because it has broken down or impedes a task. We become aware the thing’s qualities and characteristics in a kind of scientific manner. This distinction does not hold when an object is used as part of a performance like Vanitas. Both modes of Being play a role in the work’s dramaturgy. In order to make the creative work I need to use the object as a machine that replays my father’s voice, so it has a pragmatic function. However, because it no longer participates as an item in a network of equipment, my relationship to the tape recorder is also theoretical—I analyse it in terms that exceed its utility, and it is this vacillation between these two modes of Being that constitutes another key aspect of hauntological dramaturgy. In order to summon the Anto’s ghost, I need to use the tape recorder as a memory machine that unsettles temporal distinctions and as a thing that does not work properly—I need to refurbish its ancient components (valves, capacitators, wires, circuit boards and pulleys) before I can make it work. That said, the more we probe the utility of the object in dramaturgical contexts, the more we become aware of the complexities and contradictions that operate in our interactions with things, which are always deeper and more intricate that we can know. Rayner’s distinction between object and thing, a distinction she derives from Heidegger’s thought, helps us address this conundrum: Thingness is thus not an attribute of an object but something more like an event in its relation to an inseparable otherness: a moment when a material object is recognized as belonging to more than its representation, to more than is knowable, but not outside, for the thing also relates to thought via time and to mortality. These are also the gifts of the thing, as opposed to an object, which withholds or is lost. The more than means the thing is not exhausted by whatever it may signify. (2006, 106) This reframing of the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself ’ is also one of the most useful insights of OOO, which we will encounter in more detail shortly. Rayner claims that to have something that belongs to the other is to feel the other (2006, 89). This is certainly true. As I have already intimated, my fascination with the tape recorder and my desire to make it an integral part of Vanitas have a lot to do with the fact that it once belonged to my father. He must have touched the object many times, and I feel his spectral presence when I use the machine. For me, then, the tape recorder is a very literal memory machine. It is a recording mechanism that, as I have already noted, replays the voice of my dead father—it captured the tone, timbre and grain of his voice enabling me to recall (and manipulate his singular voice). At the end of the tape recorder section of Vanitas, I sing a duet with my father. AJ D’Cruz loved country and western music. He recorded himself singing Hank Locklin’s song, ‘Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On’—a tune that held sentimental value for him

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since he regularly played the song to console himself when he was separated from my mother (my father left India without his wife and child in order to find a job and establish a home with the encumbrance of a young family). In any event, the song’s lyrics expressed a sense of longing and loneliness that clearly moved my father to record his acapella version for fun. I doubt he played this recording for many people since he knew he was not much of a singer. The recording was made for his own amusement. With the aid of today’s digital recording technology, I rerecorded the song as a duet (supplementing the original recording with my voice and a simple musical accompaniment). I was never a fan of country and western music as a child and young adult. It was my parents’ music. They would play tapes of Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, amongst others, on the old tape recorder at every opportunity. These luminaries of country and western music would continue to provide the soundtrack to my early life when my parents replaced reel-to-reel tape recordings with stereo records and compact cassettes. I may have despised the genre in the past, but today I count myself as a genuine fan of country music (I’ve even made a pilgrimage to Nashville). Indeed, I cannot hear the music of artists such as Patsy Kline or Jim Reeves without being transported back to the first house I can recall living in with my family. The house in question was a two-up, two-down terraced dwelling in the east end of London, which was probably in need of renovation when my parents bought it in 1964. It seemed as though they were always redecorating the place. They brightened up the interior with wallpaper and painted the exterior with bright colours, which made the house distinctive amongst the plain brick facades of most of the other properties (the house next door was inhabited by one of my uncle Clem’s family who decorated his home in a similar manner). Visitors had no trouble finding these Anglo-Indian homes—if you somehow missed the brightly painted bricks you just had to follow your nose and open your ears, for the aromas of curries and the sounds of country and western music provided further clues to the location of the street’s only Anglo-Indian inhabitants. The tape recorder takes me back to this home by activating memories of its enclosures and fittings: the narrow staircase leading to the two upstairs bedrooms, the pristine ‘sitting-room’ with its settee and picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the tiny kitchen, the small backyard, which was little more than a square of concrete surrounding by strips of flowerbeds, which were always carefully tended by my mother and father. The tape recorder functions as a portal into this lost world. Gaston Bachelard writes eloquently and persuasively about the power of the poetic image to activate memory and imagination, especially when the image is connected to the house. The house for Bachelard is a privileged space that nurtures the poetic imagination. He claims that ‘the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’ and ‘it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time’ (28). I would argue that the objects that I used as dramaturgical building blocks

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in Vanitas function in a similar way to Bachelard’s poetic images even if some of the memories that these objects activate are unpleasant and traumatic (the sounds of country music were often supplanted by my parents screaming at each other)—Vanitas is not just a nostalgic celebration of lost worlds and lost lives since dreams can be nightmares, too. Indeed, Vanitas tells the story of my father’s struggles and frustrations and my, essentially, dysfunctional relationship with him, which brings me back to the tape recorder. I never sang with my dad when he was alive—my younger self would have been horrified and embarrassed by the prospect of performing country music let alone with his father. The tape recorder facilitated a belated reconciliation of sorts, a late (perhaps too late) acknowledgement of my father’s love for his family. It also enabled me to stage an encounter with his spirit. I use the word in two senses—the machine reminds me of aspects of my father’s temperament and way of being in the world as well as his spectral presence on magnetic tape. The machine’s enduring materiality is, in many ways, a source of comfort and inspiration for me since it not only facilitates a reckoning with my father, but it also functions as a key dramaturgical element in Vanitas. That said, Vanitas also engages with objects that have no enduring materiality. I will conclude this part of the chapter by investigating an immaterial object, one that only exists in my imagination as a consequence of a story my mother told me about my father’s journey from India to the UK in 1963. The final object I want to discuss is a lost object that only exists in my imagination: my father’s signet ring, an item that an unscrupulous jeweller stole from my father while he was en route to London in 1963. With his first pay check, he bought a Signet Ring, Initials inscribed in Rose Gold, A Princely symbol for a man of ambition, as decreed by timehonoured tradition, but the ill-winds of change threatened to blow away his modest railway commission, consigning him, in all probability, to a life of frustrated aspiration. He discussed the pros and cons of leaving with his wife, young and pregnant. They argued from dusk ‘til the first light of dawn. She reluctantly agreeing to leave the decision up to fate: Heads or Tails? ‘If it’s a boy we pack and go,’ he said. ‘If it’s a girl, well, we’ll make a go of it.’ When a baby boy arrived, he cashed in his provident fund so he too could quit India, just like the British did in the year 1947. He bought a one-way ticket to London on a slow P&O in March 1963. Money was scarce, so he left his wife and child behind until he could earn enough money to put them on a BOAC Jetliner, and protect them. From the strain of threading the Suez Canal after weeks on the high seas. The wheels of Indian bureaucracy grind slowly unless lubricated with baksheesh. Every minor visa clerk demanded that his palms be greased, and the government, too, were on the take. The ‘Chee Chee’ orphans were free to depart if they paid their dues to Mother India, who decreed that they could only take a measly sum of rupees out of the nascent Republic.

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So, Anto left India with subsistence funds and his treasured Signet Ring. He got off the boat at the ancient port of Aden where he sought a Jeweller to appraise his ornament. The merchant proved to be a cunning rogue, a silver-tongued conman who disappeared into the madding crowd. As soon as he grasped Anto’s last vestige of imperial prestige. This would not be the last time he felt the sting of shame as he watched his pride and dignity vanish with a cruel twist of fate. I have no clear idea about what my father’s signet ring looked like, but the story concerning its loss conveys so much information about his character that it plays as equal a role in Vanitas as any of his material possessions that have survived and become part of my inheritance. I recall that my father eventually replaced this lost object, affirming the importance of the object’s symbolic value. What does it mean to inscribe one’s initials on a piece of jewellery? The animated images that accompany the text cited earlier hint at possible explanations: the ring, or the story my mother told me about the ring, resonates with my memory of my father’s character—it recalls his pride, his ambition and his desire to craft a persona consistent with these personal qualities. And so Vanitas proceeds to tell a story about his life through a host of other material and immaterial possessions: an old Slazenger tennis racquet with a wooden frame press; a fragile piece of paper imprinted in my father’s handwriting with 26 alphabetical maxims (rules for moral conduct); British postage stamps given to me as presents by Anto when he worked as a postal and telegraph clerk in London (a job that enabled him to wear a suit to work) and the Central Post Office in Perth, Western Australia (a building that signified frustration and failure since Anto would never work within its walls—he never realised his ambition to secure clerical work when he moved his family to Australia); rosary beads that he used when leading the family in prayer (a nightly ritual he never seemed to fully comprehend or embrace); an orange Volkswagen Fastback, Anto’s first automobile and a machine that almost claimed his life; yellowing tickets to a 1972 football match at Upton Park, a reminder that my father did try to make me happy when I was a young child (I was a devoted West Ham United fan); and then there are the family photographs, films and sound recordings (items that remind me of his love of gardening, family celebrations, pomp, ceremony and music). And, finally, there is the letter. Taken together, these objects activate memory, imagination and emotion, which I weave into an aesthetic form to give shape to my father’s life, and to remind myself and those who witness my work of our fragility and mortality. What else can I say about these objects? How might my attempts to re-member my father through these items resonate with larger, more political and philosophical concerns? In the final section of this chapter, I will address this question by briefly glossing some contemporary ideas about objects before attempting to provide some kind of summary of what I  was trying to achieve with Vanitas, a work concerned with reckoning with the ghost of my father, who, despite all expectations to the contrary, remains a recurrent presence in my life.

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OOO and (IM) Material Thinking I have already mentioned that OOO and ANT embrace a flat ontology. In other words, they do not distinguish between real and imaginary objects or material or immaterial objects. And since this chapter’s focus is primarily on the hauntological dimensions of objects it seems that I  should engage with these relatively recent developments in philosophy, which focus our attention on objects as opposed to discourse, text, affect or some other form of philosophical fashion. Clearly, this book engages with a variety of theoretical discourses and ideas. This is partly a consequence of disciplinary and institutional convention and partly a matter of disposition and temperament. For most of my career I  have believed that dramaturgical practice is usually enriched by encountering ideas developed in adjacent disciplines, especially philosophy. I still hold this viewpoint, but I am now also aware that sometimes attempts to theorise or intellectualise creative practice can be redundant and tautological. Creative practice is now recognised as a legitimate research tool that generates new knowledge, which is not necessarily propositional. Yet, in most instances, the value of creative work within universities must be validated through some kind exegetical writing that locates the artistic outputs within theoretical and methodological frameworks that are certified by institutional norms. Bachelard recognises the limitations of academic approaches to understanding the power and function of art when he writes about the ways ‘objective’ knowledge misses the essentially poetic dimension of art, which is what usually grips us in the first place—all of the works I engage with in this book are those that touch my emotional core that have attracted my attention. With reference to poetry, Bachelard claims that the ‘grip that poetry acquires on our very being bears a phenomenological mark that is unmistakable. The exuberance and depth of a poem are always phenomena of the resonance-reverberation doublet,’ and he goes on to assert that ‘the psychoanalyst, victim of his method, inevitably intellectualises the image, losing the reverberations in his effort to untangle the skein of his interpretations’ (2014, 8). I believe the same could be said of all forms of creative practice and all forms of academic analysis. This is not to say that explication and interpretation have no value. Rather, an excess of intellectualising risks masking what Bachelard calls the ‘resonance-reverberation doublet.’ More recently, Rita Felski has made similar points about the limits of conventional academic modes of analysis and promoted the study of attachments. ‘Why,’ she asks, ‘do people seek out works of art? What are their differing interests and concerns? What are these encounters with artworks like?’ (2020, 1). For some time now, critics like Felski have questioned academic verities about critical practice, advocating a more expansive approach to academic criticism within literary studies (see The Limits of Critique 2015). While we would be foolish to discount the importance of critical thinking and astute cultural, political and aesthetic analysis, creative practice provides another alternative to generating knowledge. Indeed, it might be illuminating to study the reasons why artists are attached to certain ways of making, doing and presenting works of art.

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In the context of this chapter, which is essentially an account of hauntological dramaturgy from the perspective of an artist, I think it is important to find a way to explore the relationship between objects, memories and imagination by using theory, where appropriate, to better understand dramaturgical practice. One way to achieve this aim might be to see hauntological dramaturgy as a form of what Paul Carter (2004) calls material thinking. Barbara Bolt provides a succinct explication of this concept: The concept of material thinking offers us a way of considering the relations that take place within the very process or tissue of making. In this conception, the materials are not just passive objects to be used instrumentally by the artist, but rather, the materials and processes of production have their own intelligence that come into play in interaction with the artist’s creative intelligence. (2007, 29–30) Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, the process Carter describes is perhaps better described as immaterial thinking since artistic materials can take the form of immaterial things such as thoughts, concepts and imaginary objects. This appeal to Carter’s work brings us back to the status of objects in hauntological dramaturgy and the delayed encounter with contemporary ideas about objects. During my time as a performance studies academic, I have witnessed the linguistic turn, the performative turn, the ethical turn, the affective turn, the sonic turn. Turn, turn, turn. I’ve turned so much that I feel dizzy and disoriented (which is not necessarily a bad thing). OOO has generated the latest outbreak of synchronised gyrations amongst my colleagues or at least amongst those who still feel compelled to seek out the latest academic obsession. Perhaps OOO has something to say about the relationship between objects and hauntological dramaturgy? As I understand it OOO is an enterprise that attempts to think about the existence of objects outside their connection with human consciousness. In doing so, philosophers such as Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Levi R. Bryant and Quentin Meillassoux amongst others make the case against human exceptionalism—that is, the idea that the human beings are somehow unique and categorically different from all other beings, animals and objects. As I understand it, OOO, especially in Harmon’s articulation of the term, proceeds from three key axioms. First, it decentres human consciousness from the order of things, which is why it is best described as a post-human ontology. The corollary of this post-humanism is that things have an existence beyond human comprehension. In other words, there is no correlation between human consciousness and reality. Second, things—that is, everything in the world including concepts, thoughts, dreams and so on—cannot be reduced to what they are or what they do. As Harmon puts it, objects ‘cannot fully be reduced either downwards to their pieces or upwards to their effects’ (2014). Finally, all objects possess agency and exert forces of attraction on all other objects. This

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idea is apparently similar to ANT, which also advocates the agency of things (in a manner that resonates with Carter’s account of material thinking). John Law claims that ANT describes the enactment of materiality and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects, subjects, human beings, machines, animals, ‘nature, ideas, organisations, inequalities, scale and sizes, geographical arrangements’ (2007, 2). However, Harman points out that ANT is only interested in objects insofar as they function as actors within networks. Drawing on aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy, and Marshall McLuhan’s media theories, Harman argues that we need to pay more attention to the depth of objects outside the realm of human practice. Harmon insists on making ‘the thing in itself ’ a feature of his philosophy. He is also a philosopher who, like Heidegger and McLuhan, pays attention to the background and seeks to circumvent naïve questions about relationism and content. So how do these recent developments in philosophy relate to Vanitas in particular and the concept of hauntological dramaturgy in general? On the face of things, philosophical ruminations about the nature of Being, or the agency of objects, appear to have very little to do with the project I have described and explicated in this chapter. After all, my enterprise is avowedly humanist in the sense that it is about a work of art that is created by a human in order to memorialise another human—the objects that form an integral part of the work certainly pushed me to consider their material form and their function within various social and technological networks. I was certainly not thinking about Latour’s, Harman’s or Bryant’s when I was making the work. Yet these writers have shaped the way I have composed my after-the-fact account of the dramaturgical processes involved in making Vanitas. This is perhaps most evident in the way OOO’s flat ontology quietly accepts ghosts since it rejects the distinction between materialism and immaterialism. More significantly, though, Harman’s version of OOO affirms the unique status of art in all of its mystery, thereby forcing me to question the value of works, such as this book, that traffics in the explication and analysis of artistic works. Harmon writes: In an age when all the intellectual momentum belongs to context, continuity, relation, materiality, and practice, we must reject the priority of each of these terms, focusing instead on an immaterialist version of surprise and opacity. (2016b, Loc 305) A substantial part of this book is certainly about creative practice, and this chapter has attempted to shed some light on my own practice of hauntological dramaturgy since I believe that such a project has value for anyone interested in making art that uses objects to remember the dead and attend to the imperatives and responsibilities articulated by their ghosts, which often seek justice for humiliations suffered during life. That said, there is an essential mystery about art that we cannot wholly articulate in prose descriptions and academic

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analysis, as the advocates of OOO (and deconstruction) remind us. Nevertheless, this book does not attempt to provide the last word in hauntological dramaturgy. It is more concerned with identifying those dramaturgical practices of memorialisation that acknowledge the importance of spectral forces in life and art. To put the conundrum another way, following those scholars who promote practice as research methodologies, such as Arlander et  al. (2017), artistic practice is always philosophical since it involves theoria (the act of witnessing or watching), praxis (thoughtful doing whereby a skill or thought is embodied) and poiesis (the act of making that brings something new into the world). As I  hope I  have demonstrated in this chapter, Vanitas suggests the ways that hauntological dramaturgy is about witnessing and watching spectral phenomena, embodying or manifesting specific performance techniques with the aim of bringing something new into Being, an artistic work that harnesses the properties and forces that inhere in certain objects. The work, Vanitas, does not exhaust the Being of these objects. Rather, it uses them to illuminate aspects of one man’s life, aspects that I did not apprehend until I reckoned with a dead man’s ghost.

Cruel Optimism As previously mentioned, I wrote my father a letter on the anniversary of his death some time ago. I had obviously thought about him and his life over the years, and I have even written about our relationship as part of my investigation into Anglo-Indian history (D’Cruz 2006). Writing the letter gave me pause for thought about my reaction to his death. As I enumerated the various things I remember him doing for me, and as I pondered all the sacrifices he made for his family, I cried. It took me 30 years, but I was belatedly moved by my father’s death and angered by the humiliations he experienced as AngloIndian who never quite managed to find his place in the world. My dad often used to call his children ‘fatted.’ I was never quite sure what this phrase meant except that it probably had something to do with India’s cows (a species Hindus protect and indulge). The phrase also has biblical overtones summoning connotations of ritual sacrifice. Whatever the phrase actually meant, there was no doubting its admonishing force. I was an ingrate, and my father never ceased to make me aware of my blessings. I wrote the letter as a form of atonement, but it had other consequences for me. I became aware of how contemplating my father’s encounter was with what I have called, after Lauren Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism’ (2011). After sorting through the documents and other material traces of my father’s life on a trip to Perth a few years ago, I  discovered a cache of papers, job applications, references, job advertisements, medical records, legal correspondence, insurance policies and so forth. Amongst these papers was also a threepage hand-written manuscript, titled ‘Alphabetical Maxims,’ which laid out a list of 26 principles for living—I subsequently discovered that these maxims were known as ‘Lord Rothschild’s Maxims.’ The document was apparently

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composed by clerks working in Rothschilds and Co, a famous investment bank located in London (1911). Here are the first few entries: A Attend carefully to the details of your business. B Be prompt in everything. C Consider well and then decide positively. D Dare to do right and fear to do wrong. And so it goes. I  dimly recall my father quoting these phrases to me when I was a teenager. He seemed convinced that by following these maxims one could find a righteous path through this precarious life. I remain unconvinced, and I am still suspicious of any text that purports to dispense an infallible ethical code. My father’s maxims, along with the other objects I used to map the broad contours of his life, tell a story about thwarted ambition, prejudice and precarity. The precarity I recall as a key component in my father’s life manifested in the corporeal adjustments he was forced to make throughout his life in terms of dress, comportment, speech and a general orientation to changing circumstances. By wearing his clothes and engaging with the sundry material traces of his life within the context of a public performance, I hoped to atone for being such a ‘fatted’ son. I also hoped to give his life some sort of belated aesthetic shape, a profile that might release the affective intensities and anxieties that marked his bittersweet movement through life.

Coda Dear Carol, Apologies for not giving you a copy of this chapter before publication. I know you wanted to read it. A few years ago, when I performed a version of Vanitas with you in the audience, I could see you felt like leaping onto the stage and contesting some of the things I said about dad. I was actually hoping you’d interrupt proceedings—it certainly would have given the work a sharper dramatic edge. The spectacle of the two of contesting the veracity of our respective memories might have genuinely instructive in a kind of Brechtian way. As I recall, you were mildly offended by the theatricality of my performance. You felt I was being ‘false,’ to use one of dad’s phrases. In other words, you thought my performance was insincere and exploitative. What right do I have to talk about the private life of our dead father in public? Rest assured, dear sister, my motives were genuine. As you know, I didn’t really mourn dad’s death. I moved on with my life pretty quickly and left you to comfort and take care of mum. Almost 30 years after his death, I felt compelled to write him a farewell letter. For the most part, I expressed my gratitude for his sacrifices. As you know, he worked hard and overcame all sorts of humiliating setbacks to give us a ‘good life.’ The letter lay dormant for a few years before I decided to build a performance about my relationship with dad. The first time I performed the piece in rehearsal I choked up. I felt almost overwhelmed by belated grief. The same

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thing happened when I performed in front of an audience (crying, as I discovered, has dramatic impact). The more I repeated the performance, the more I found myself straining to produce genuine tears. Perhaps you saw through my hammy ruse, I don’t know. The impulse to confront dad’s ghost, as I’ve already pointed out, was, I think, sincere. Your comments, though, made me doubt my sincerity. Perhaps I was playing for the applause. Actually, I know this to be the case. I wanted the piece to work as a performance, so I deliberately tried to engage the audience, and I was very pleased with myself for eliciting a positive response. I could see that you were unimpressed as I took my bows. Later, actually a few years later, you told me that you were concerned about how I was going to represent dad in a film based on the performance you witnessed. You asked a couple of questions that stopped me in my tracks: What would dad think of the performance? How would he feel about you talking about his struggles and humiliations in public? Had I listened to his ghost attentively? Am I actually seeking justice on his behalf or just feeding my own ego? Did I consult mum? What would she make of Vanitas? I don’t want to sound defensive, but I did think about some of these questions as I developed my dramaturgy. I made sure I ended the performance, for example, with a photograph of dad dressed ‘up to the mark.’ I know he was a proud man, so I wanted to represent him wearing his finest clothes (not that this gesture lets me of the hook, though). While revising this chapter I  was struck by the absence of any ethical interrogation of my work (the preceding chapter raises all sorts of ethical questions about the Wooster Group’s decision to deliberately violate the privacy of some of Gray’s relatives, yet I make no mention of my own ethical responsibilities). I  could bang on about how all ethical choices are violent—you are a much better scholar then me, so you will not be impressed by me talking about how all ethical decisions enact forms of violence or that violence is a condition of possibility for an ethical act. At the end of the day, you want assurance that I’m paying due respect to dad’s life. I can’t give you any guarantee that my creative work does any such thing, but your questions, your scepticism about my motives, have certainly unsettled me. I was tempted to rewrite this chapter and address the ethics of my so-called hauntological dramaturgy in a more formal way. Instead, I’ve chosen to write this letter, which you might also see as a dubious gesture (with suspect ethical motives). I will close by confessing that I’m not sure that you will read this book in the foreseeable future, if ever, but if you do, perhaps long after I’m gone, I hope you will forgive me for making our private conversations part of a public work (albeit one with a very small and specialised audience). Be sure of one thing, though: I do care about what you think of my work, and over the years I have accrued a massive debt to you as a generous scholar, sister and, above all else, a friend. All my love, Glenn

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References Abraham, Nicholas. 1994. “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology.” In The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, edited by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, edited and translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Arlander, A., B. Barton, M. Dreyer-Lude, and B. Spatz, editors, 2017. Performance as Research Knowledge, Methods, Impact. London and New York: Routledge. Auster, Paul. 1988. The Invention of Solitude. London: Faber and Faber. Bachelard, Gaston. 2014. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin Books. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bolt, Barbara. 2007. “The Magic Is in Handling.” In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt. London: I.B. Tauris. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2006. Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature. Bern: Peter Lang. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2020. Vanitas. Multiplatform Work. https://vimeo.com/472469046 Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Felski, Rita. 2020. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 2005. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin. Harman, Graham. 2014. “Art Without Words.” ArtReview. Accessed November 4, 2021. https://artreview.com/september-2014-graham-harman-relations/. Harman, Graham. 2016a. Object Oriented Ontology: A Theory of Everything. London: Pelican. Harman, Graham. 2016b. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2006. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Kipling, Rudyard. 1993. “His Chance in Life.” In Plain Tales from the Hills. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. Latour, Bruno. 1996. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt 47: 369–81. Law, John. 2007. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” Accessed November 4, 2021. http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf. “Lord Rothschild’s Maxims.” 1911. Accessed December 26, 2020. www.rothschildarchive. org/collections/treasure_of_the_month/treasure_of. Rayner, Alice. 2006. Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Yehuda, Rachel and Amy Lehrner. 2018. “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms.” World Psychiatry 17, no. 3: 243–257. Singh, Archana, and Nish Misra. 2009. “Loneliness, Depression and Sociability in Old Age.” Industrial Psychiatry Journal 18, no. 1: 51–55.

5 Re-membering David McComb Sonic Hauntology and Uncanny Australia

Introduction: Hauntology and Retromania As we have seen, the concept of hauntology is closely related to the experience of temporal disjunction. Since the 1980s several scholars have noted western culture’s widespread obsession with the past. Fredric Jameson’s voluminous writings about postmodernism identified the features of a culture shaped by the logic of late capitalism—that is, a culture formed by the rise of multinational corporations, globalisation and new communications technologies (1991). As part of his project to identify the cultural features of postmodernism, Jameson drew attention to the role mass media played in disseminating images from previous decades. In short, film, television, advertising and fashion gave people unprecedented access to a vast storehouse of prior aesthetic forms, which generated the ‘mix and match’ practice of postmodern art, which displaced the modernist impulse to ‘make it new.’ Suffice it to say, Jameson saw ironic pastiche as an increasingly dominant aesthetic technique in the artworks produced after the Second World War (it is worth underscoring that postmodernism, for Jameson, is a temporal concept that marks the distinctive elements of a specific historical period). The art of this time, apparently, dissolved the distinctions between high culture and popular culture (if they ever truly existed) ushering an era of aesthetic activity that mimicked the promiscuous flows of global capital, which disturbs our sense of historicity. Put in general terms, artists adopted a dramaturgy that selected and combined elements from a diverse set of genres and time periods, which, in the vocabulary of hauntology, intensified the sense that time is out of joint—thus, postmodern culture makes it increasingly difficult to discern historical specificity. Artists pull objects, ideas, images, writings and sounds out of time. The fertile dialogue between Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds in the mid2000s used Derrida’s concept of hauntology as a point of departure for rethinking some of these postmodern themes. Both writers were especially focused on unpacking the implications of hauntology for popular culture, especially film and a relatively obscure ‘sub-genre’ electronic popular music associated with the Ghost Box label and bands such as Burial and the Caretaker—I put the term ‘sub-genre’ in scare quotes since I agree with Adam Harper’s argument that hauntology is ‘not a genre of art or music, but an aesthetic effect, DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-6

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a way of reading and appreciating art’ (2009). As noted in the introduction to this work, hauntology is also about an approach to making art. For Fisher, hauntology gets a ‘second life’ in the sphere of music criticism and responds to what he describes as a cultural impasse: namely the failure of the future (2012, 16). This engagement with lost futures is what distinguishes hauntological music from the cool ironic aesthetic of postmodernism. So what, exactly, is a lost future? Let us risk a reductive summary. As Fisher sees it, electronic music, in both classical and popular music genres, once signified or evoked the future. For example, composers tasked with supporting films set in the future exploited magisterial washes of synthesiser pads and the arpeggiated sweeps of metronomic bleeps to convey these sci-fi worlds. The Dr Who theme and the Theremin score for the film Forbidden Planet are two obvious examples of how electronic sounds communicated future worlds. However, as mentioned earlier, Fisher contends that by 2005 electronica no longer sounded strange. Twenty-first-century electronic music had failed to progress beyond what had been recorded in the twentieth century: practically anything produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the 1990s. Electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection. (2012, 16) This inability of electronic music to evoke the future is symptomatic of a more troubling political malaise: the inability to think of an alternative world to the present, which takes us back to the ‘end of history’ debate I glossed in Chapter 2. Fisher describes this inability to conceive of alternatives to the present social formation as capitalist realism (2009). For Fisher and Reynolds, the lost futures signified by electronic music haunt the present. Resonating with some of the Freudian ideas I have used in earlier chapters, Fisher believes that haunting is a form of failed mourning that refuses to give up the ghost or—and this can sometimes amount to the same thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism. (2014, 22) The music released by the Ghost Box label, as I have already indicated, replaces the sly irony of postmodern citation with something quite different. Fisher argued that [the] Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s: not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box’s hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must

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have prompted the sounds we are hearing: forgotten programmes, uncommissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up. (2014, 134) Simon Reynolds adds that this music is marked by ideas of a lost utopianism: the post-welfare-state era of benevolent state planning and social engineering. Derrida writes about the spectral nature of the archive; Ghost Box-type music often has a musty and dusty aura, like ‘a museum come to life,’ as Mike Powell put it. (2011, 329–330) This may well be true, but I cannot say, in good faith, that I find this particular genre of music compelling. And while I can certainly discern substantive evidence for Fisher’s and Reynolds’ arguments in the Ghost Box catalogue, I want to pursue some of their critical insights about music and hauntology with reference to the music of David McComb and the Triffids, a band whose music has very little to do with the genre of electronic music analysed by Fisher and Reynolds. Nonetheless, I will use their music to further develop the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by addressing questions of nostalgia, mourning, memorialisation and lost futures in the context of the Australian alternative music scene of the 1980s, which was marked by the rise of songwriters with literary ambitions and theatrical modes of presentation (Nick Cave, Dave Graney and David McComb are the most obvious examples of this trend). Let me provide a little more context before summoning the ghost of David McComb. In his book, Retromania, Simon Reynolds writes that contemporary popular culture has ‘gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, tribute albums and box sets, anniversary festivals and live performances of classic albums: each new year is better than the last one for music from yesteryear’ (2011, ix). Reynolds believes that this situation impedes musical innovation and makes it increasingly difficult to discern the ‘pulse’ of the present ‘because in the 2000s the pop present became ever more crowded out by the past, whether in the form of archived memories of yesteryear or retro-rock leeching off ancient styles’ (2011, x). Reynolds confesses an attachment to the modernist penchant for innovation, which is why he rails against what he sees as the apparent atemporality of the present. I am not so sure that past visions of the future never materialised (a fact Reynolds openly acknowledges throughout his work, especially in those passages concerned with the relationship between retromania and the Internet). Of course, we do not have flying cars, phasers and colonies on Mars, as envisioned by science fiction, but the present world is full of technological innovations that have significantly altered everyday life. The Internet, the smartphone and social media have facilitated the rise of what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls surveillance capitalism—that is, the unscrupulous mining of personal data for profit by companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, to name the most prominent culprits.

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The algorithms used to commodify data by these multinational titans have also shifted the most energetic sites of cultural activity. Popular music is no longer as central to culture as it was during Reynolds’ youth, which is why he sometimes sounds like a curmudgeonly baby boomer who is perhaps looking for the pulse of the present in the wrong places. Personally, I am perplexed by many current cultural trends that mark a distinctive ‘present.’ For instance, I don’t understand why some Internet influencers attract a staggeringly high number of followers. I also find the antics of figures like Bhadbabie and PewDiePie, a Swedish YouTuber who began his ‘career’ by posting videos of himself playing videogames, bewildering. I could provide many other examples that testify to my general antipathy towards contemporary cultural fashions, but it is sufficient, I think, to underscore the fact that I may be too old to grasp the salient features of today’s youth culture. It is also worth noting that popular music no longer occupies a central place in western culture, at least in terms of galvanising or representing a cultural zeitgeist. Perhaps contemporary culture is too fragmented and polarised for any single cultural form to have the sort of reach and influence of 20thcentury film, television and popular music. This is all by way of saying that it is never easy to discern the ‘presentness’ of the present since, as I have consistently argued, time is always out of joint (if we follow the logic of deconstruction). This is certainly true even on an experiential level. I am also surprised when I watch films made in the 1980s. I do not recall the world of shoulder pads, spandex, poodle hair and mullets since I lived in an alternative culture where people dressed in black clothes or retro styles precured from Salvation Army counters—or what we in Australia call Op (for opportunity) Shops. The bands I followed during this period were a diverse bunch. Some experimented with synthesisers and drum machines while others, like the Triffids, developed a distinctive sound that was not, for the most part, marked by the obvious use of 1980s technology—they found a way of integrating synthesisers (and the occasional drum machine) into a form of gothic rock that sounded out of time. To my ears, most of their music has a kind of atemporal quality, which belies Reynolds’ observation that: Our cultural memories are shaped not just by the production qualities of an era (black and white, mono, certain kinds of drum sound or recording ambience, etc.) but by subtle properties of the recording media themselves (photographic or film stock that screams seventies or eighties, for instance). (2011, 331) No doubt, the analogue production qualities of the Triffids music locate them in time to a certain extent, but their music certainly doesn’t ‘scream 80s’—their sound is distinctive. So much so that the influential British music magazine the NME declared (in its January 5, 1985 issue) that 1985 was going to be the year of the Triffids. Alas, this was not to be. Here is another kind of unrealised future, which continues, as we shall see shortly, to haunt those admirers of the band who were disappointed by the fact that the NME’s prophecy did not come to

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pass. Some of these people have not given up the ghost, so to speak, and at the time of writing several projects, including a documentary film, may yet realise the day of the Triffids (at least on a modest scale). Enter, once again, the ghost.

1981, First Sighting This is a photograph of David McComb, the lead singer and main songwriter for the 1980s  Australian  band, the Triffids. I  snapped this picture with a nofrills Praktica SLR as part of a class exercise whose purpose I can no longer recall (I was a student at the Western Australian Institute of Technology in 1981, and David was a member of my photojournalism class). A  few years ago, I  found the 35 mm negative of this image amongst a pile of forgotten papers and files from my student days and decided to finally develop it, thereby bringing the longforgotten picture into the realm of visibility. David was 19 years old when he posed for my camera. He didn’t know it, but he had already lived more than half his life. This is a tragic fact—he looks so young and innocent, almost cherubic, in this shot. I didn’t know David very well. At best, we were passing acquaintances, briefly thrown together by a common interest in photography. He seemed an affable sort, always friendly and polite in class. I only ever exchanged pleasantries with him on a few occasions. I was aware he was in a band called the Triffids, but I didn’t become a fan until a few years later, so I was unaware of his extraordinary talent when we crossed paths all those years ago. Long before I saw him perform on stage, I was conscious of David’s charisma—he seemed to have many

David McComb, 1981.

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friends, and people spoke about him with admiration and reverence. By 1983, after attending my first Triffids gig, I knew why—he was a captivating, enigmatic performer, and, in my view, easily one of the best songwriters of his generation. The fact that relatively few people acknowledged his genius during his short life is inexplicable. This chapter attempts to compensate for this oversight by contributing to the increasing number of tributes that memorialise his spirit and singular talent. It will follow my encounters with McComb as classmate, fan and critic in a roughly chronological order (for the sake of clarity—an ‘out of sequence’ temporal structure would be more in keeping with the spirit of this book but would make for a frustrating reading experience). For the most part, each encounter will provide the pretext for engaging with the sonic dimensions of hauntological dramaturgy since sound is an especially important feature of hauntological art. Mark Fisher conjectures that hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension. The pun—hauntology, ontology—works in spoken French, after all. In terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here, the recorded voice, the voice no longer the guarantor of presence. . . . Not phonocentrism but phonography, sound coming to occupy the dis-place of writing. (2014, 120) At the time of my first encounter with  McComb, I  hadn’t heard his singing  voice. In class, I  don’t recall his speaking voice  being especially unique. He possessed a refined Australian accent, which belied his power as a rock vocalist, so let us defer engaging with the sonic tele-technologies that  preserve his disembodied voice for the moment and return to unpack the spectral dimension of the photograph. I’m the first to admit that the image is ordinary in technical and formal terms. Largely, my fascination with the image is personal. David looks so cool and, in a way, out of time, a bit like his music. His clothes and hairstyle, for example, don’t look like they belong to the 1980s. Of course, there were many people who dressed in a similar way during this period, although it is hard to appreciate the fact when you look at films and photographs from the era. As previously mentioned, mainstream hairstyles and fashion in the 1980s look abominable today. David McComb was nothing if not elegant and tasteful, even in his everyday student garb. I wonder what he was thinking while gazing into the lens of my camera, standing so tall and straight. I  suspect he was hoping this impromptu photo shoot would come to a swift end. Who can tell? For me, the image evokes a strong sense of melancholy laced with a bittersweet nostalgia for a person and an era that has passed. Roland Barthes believed that the essence of photography lies in the brute fact that ‘the thing has been there’ (1981, 76). Photography, in his view, is testimony: ‘[W]hat I  see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject’ (1981, 77). The photograph, for Barthes, always speaks of the past and, ultimately, about death. Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in the wake of his beloved mother’s death and not long before his

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own passing. The book is a curious blend of dispassionate analysis about the ontology (hauntology) of the photographic medium and a moving account of Barthes’ experience of grief. After providing an insightful analysis of the ways that photography works as an artform and  a journalistic archive of the past, Barthes proffers the thesis that the true power of photography lies in those personal images that evoke the past and enable the dead to return as spectres. Moreover, Barthes contends that the chemical reaction that occurs when film is exposed to light captures a material instant that is extracted from the flow of time or at least what humans perceive as the flow of time. So Camera Lucida implies that photography is hauntological insofar as it disrupts time and provides a space for ghosts to (re)appear. In the final section of his extraordinary work, Barthes informs his readers about his quest to find an image that captures the spirit of his dead mother. He sorts through numerous photographs before finding a portrait that satisfies his desire to behold his mother’s being. He decides not to include the picture in his book since his audience cannot possibly appreciate its personal significance . Most images we choose to preserve have personal associations that are not easily communicated to others. For me, the picture of David McComb reprinted in this chapter functions as a portal into my past (which is part of my present and future). It triggers a plethora of memories that will provide material for the following ruminations on the sonic dimension of hauntology, but it also stands as a reminder that David McComb was ‘present’ at the Western Australian Institute of Technology in 1981, and the light reflected from his body, the light emanating from his corporeal presence, preserved an ‘ordinary instant’ in the life of an extraordinary man.

1983, Second Sighting What does it mean to say, ‘I am haunted by the music of the Triffids?’ In simple terms, I am saying that I have never forgotten the band’s songs—they have stayed with me for nearly 40  years, and while I  continue to play their recordings on a regular basis (sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for analytical purposes) their melodies and lyrics never cease to surprise me by revealing something new. I suspect this is not an unusual experience. We often reinterpret art as we grow older, seeing nuances and complexities that we missed on previous encounters. But this form of attachment, and emotional investment, is only part of the equation. For me, music, more than any other artform or experience, has the power to disturb my sense of time by evoking half-forgotten emotions and experiences (I will return to the theme of time later in this chapter). I make this observation knowing that almost any object can facilitate daydreams of past lives—for Proust it was, famously, a madeleine biscuit; a perfume or a blue sky might perform the same trick of others. I am not suggesting that music acts like a literal portal into the past. Rather, music is a different kind memory machine, to use Carlson’s phrase in the present context. Put simply, the Triffids’ music often conjures memories of seeing the band perform

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by generating dream-like images of old gigs (which is a very different experience from seeing archival videos, which seem oddly flat and disengaging). That said, when I hear a song like ‘Red Pony’ I can almost (but not quite) feel the atmosphere of those distant suffocating summer nights spent in smoky pubs and clubs, watching throngs of black-clad bohemians shake, shimmy and stare at the band in wide-eyed wonder. In my mind’s eye, I can often see my group of friends, barely out of adolescence, singing along to the Triffids’ rendition of ‘Suspicious Minds.’ They’re young, definitely drunk and appallingly off key but smitten with an exuberance and enthusiasm rarely found in people over 25. One of them takes large sips from a hip flask he’s snuck into the gig, as he whispers something in his girlfriend’s ear. Another fiddles with his Sony Walkman, which he uses to surreptitiously record the band. I am obviously the boy with the portable cassette recorder, but he seems more of a doppelganger than a young version of myself. I cannot disentangle the music from these personal memories. And while my memories of my glory days as a young post-punk music fan are important to me, they are of little consequence to anybody else. My memories are banal in themselves, so it is important to take a more measured approach to understanding sonic hauntology by recognising that the personal experience of being haunted by music is only part of the picture. Of course, I’m not the only person haunted by the music of the Triffids. Since David McComb’s untimely death at the age of 36, his friends, colleagues and family have kept his memory alive by performing his songs, writing about his work and even issuing an album of rare songs that McComb never recorded himself. At the time of writing, Jonathan Alley, a Melbourne-based broadcaster and film maker, has just released a feature-length documentary about McComb’s life titled Love in Bright Landscapes (2021). Thirteen years in the making, the film, which, like Rumstick Road, makes extensive use of family archives, is filled with ghosts (many of the interviewees died before Alley completed the film). These ‘tributes’ make it clear that I am not the only person haunted by the music of the Triffids. With reference to Triffids songs, the novelist D.B.C. Pierre writes that I call them true and great art because the haunting grows, culture drags their relevance with it day by day, and I am now certain this brief eruption of songs is a farewell waved and sung from the shore of a friendly and innocent past. (2009, 330) Niall Lucy, a Derrida scholar I  have cited throughout this book, was also a friend, fan and proselytiser for McComb’s music (as were several other Australian academics of my vintage). In many ways, it is not necessary to share my opinion about McComb’s value as an artist to appreciate why an engagement with his work develops the themes of this book. For the record, McComb’s music is distinguished by a literary sensibility, a gift for haunting melodies and

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an impassioned, dramatic vocal delivery. There will be, no doubt, many readers who do not share my opinion about the significance of McComb’s work and do not see the qualities I have just enumerated. Some may even be mystified as to why I have devoted a chapter of this work to a relatively unknown figure from the world of popular music. I make no apology for this decision because, as Philip Auslander pointed out many years ago, the relative neglect of music performance by performance studies scholars does not make sense since ‘musicians are performers, after all, and it would be eminently reasonable to discuss them’ (2006, 3). I would add that most genres of theatre incorporate music, which is why scholars like Adrian Curtin speak of a ‘sonic turn’ in performance studies (2014, 5). Further, sonic dramaturgy plays a major role in the increasingly popular genre of Australian gothic theatre. Miles O’Neil (2021) provides a detailed account of the ways sound designers evoke the uncanny Australian landscape in ways that both resonate with and depart from the sonic palette of the Triffids, which I describe in this chapter. McComb was a dramatic performer and his songs lent themselves to theatrical performance since he often wrote from the point of view of disturbed characters: a suicide in ‘Tarrilup Bridge,’ an arsonist in ‘One Soul Less on Your Fiery List,’ a desolate lover struggling against his emotions and the natural world in ‘The Seabirds,’ a deranged and murderous preacher in ‘Chicken Killer’— apparently, McComb often approached singing as a form of acting (Butcher 2011, 358), but this is almost beside the point since my focus here is primarily on the connections between recorded sound and hauntology. I do not aim to denigrate the power of live music, which, obviously, cannot be easily disentangled from recordings. Indeed, I will make several references to live performance in this chapter, but I am mostly haunted by the songs as I encounter them as recordings. As Reynolds astutely points out: [i]n a sense, a record really is a ghost: it’s a trace of a musician’s body, the after-imprint of breath and exertion. There’s a parallel between the phonograph and the photograph: both are reality’s death mask. With analogue recording, there’s a direct physical relationship with the sound source. Music theorist Nick Katranis uses the analogy of fossilisation to explain the profound difference between analogue (vinyl, tape, film) and digital (CD, MP3). Analogue captures ‘the physical imprint of a sound wave, like a creature’s body pressed into what becomes a fossil’, whereas digital is a ‘reading’ of the sound wave, ‘a pointilised drawing of it’. A supporter of analogue, Katranis asks rhetorically: ‘Do you like your ghosts to rub up against you?’ Roland Barthes likewise described the photograph as ‘the ectoplasm of “what-had-been”: neither image nor reality, a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch.’ (2011, 312–313) It is one thing to be haunted by the music and quite another to unpack the haunting qualities of the music itself, which I mostly describe in experiential,

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as opposed to musicological or technological, terms. I first heard the Triffids as a live band performed in the relatively small number of music venues in Perth and Fremantle that hosted so-called independent bands. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Perth music scene was dominated by cover bands who played in huge suburban beer barns to large crowds. The Triffids were part of an alternative music scene that was primarily located in the inner city. Most fans seemed to be arty, middle-class university types (like the band itself). On first impression, I was as much impressed by McComb’s music as I was by his stage presence (by the time I became a fan, the band had developed into a formidable live act—a palpable contrast to their early embrace of fey amateurism). That said, I will focus on McComb’s recorded oeuvre to identify the sonic qualities of hauntology in more detail. I still listen to music in the dark, especially when I want to hear an album in its entirety. I do this because, for me, music is best approached as an immersive experience, and the suspension of sight helps me develop an imaginative relationship with sound. As the phenomenal world of vision recedes, the virtual worlds conjured by words and sounds emerge and draw me in. Listening to an album in this way is a bit like watching a movie. Immersive media or an immersive approach to media attunes the listener to virtual worlds and voices. Isabella Van Elferen argues that this immersive experience ‘can be so all encompassing that the ordinary world disappears. All ears, only the boundlessness of the musical journey exists’ (2012, 7). Approached with this degree of focus, time and space dissolve, and it’s possible to enter a dream-like reverie, or so it seems to me under the right circumstances. Brandon Labelle makes a similar point when he unpacks the relationship between darkness and sound. He writes: Darkness is mobilized to remove us from a particular context and to reorder the sensible in accordance to absence or erasure—a negation by which something else may emerge. There is no particular body or space to which the acousmatic sonic object is contextually bound; rather, it circulates to incite a sonic imaginary—a form of listening which accentuates sound’s capacity to extend away from bodies and things, and to request from us another view onto the world, one imbued with ambiguity. (2018, 33) I’m ashamed to say it, but like a lot of people of my age, I do not have more than a faint acquaintance with contemporary rock music. Most of the music I value was produced in the latter half of the last century, and Triffids records are still on high rotation. Now and then an artist or album captures my attention, and I listen with the same focus and concentration that I bestow on the music from my youth. This is not a common experience since the music that people are exposed to in their formative years tends to stick with them throughout their lives. According to neuroscientific research, human beings tend to be most receptive to the sounds they become attached to in adolescence (Levitin 2007). As I stated earlier, music is not only consumed differently today, it does

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not occupy the same cultural space it did in the 20th century. This observation may be especially pertinent to guitar-based rock music, which, while still popular, no longer dominates the charts. The salient point here is that the following remarks about McComb’s music have more to do with spectrality and commemoration than with musicology or cultural analysis. So, without further ado, I will unpack the haunting qualities of the Triffids’ music with a focus on their album, Born Sandy Devotional (McComb 1986).

1986, Born Sandy Devotional: A Hauntological Reading McComb once remarked that most popular music produced in Australia during his youth lacked atmosphere. The most distinctive thing, for me, about the Triffids as a band was the way they developed soundscapes for McComb’s songs, which often evoked a gothic mood. In literature, this gothic mood is characterised, in the most general terms, by supernatural mystery, morbidity and gloom, although scholars, such as the editors of the Encyclopedia of the Gothic, caution that any meaning we assign to the term is ‘prone to critical shift even while its terrain of texts, authors, and media forms seems ever to expand and redefine what such an organizing term as “Gothic” might mean’ (2016, xxxiv). Ken Gelder, writing in the same volume, observes that ‘[m] elancholy and morbidity came to define aspects of the colonial Australian sensibility, underwriting a counternarrative to the optimism and ideals of discovery, expansion, and nation-building’ (2016, 55). More importantly, for the present context, Australian gothic narratives often see the outback as a haunted space, populated by malevolent forces. Roslynn Haynes contends that the ‘very emptiness of the desert led the explorers to people it with ghosts’ (1999, 82). Australian landscapes figure prominently in McComb’s music and in much of the commentary generated by his mature songs. This is especially true of the album’s most famous song ‘Wide Open Road.’ This tune is the closest thing the Triffids had to hit record in Australia (it reached the lower regions of the pop music charts in 1986). However, it has garnered a reputation as a quintessentially Australian song. Here is part of Chris Coughran’s analysis of the song. The narrative voice ‘crying in the wilderness,’ conveying a sense of emotional pain intensified by geographic isolation, makes a mockery of that expansive sense of optimism enshrined in seminal American texts such as Whitman’s ‘Song of the Open Road’ or Kerouac’s On the Road. In stark contrast to those ebullient paens, ‘Wide Open Road’ evokes Australia’s notorious ‘tyranny of distance,’ effectively transposing it into the private and utterly personal contours of an inner, emotional landscape. These inner and outer topographies alike exude forsakenness; consolation neither pours forth from on high, nor may be located within: ‘The sky was big and empty/my chest filled to explode/I yelled my insides out at the sun/ At the wide open road.’ (2009, 271–272)

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Coughran’s reading of the Triffids’ most celebrated song resonates with the Australian gothic tropes and themes I have just identified. Indeed, the songs on Born Sandy Devotional derive their haunting quality from the persistent connection between internal emotional states and the sublime qualities of the big, empty Australian desert, which is an integral part of the Australian gothic tradition (visible in Australian literature, painting and other art forms, including popular music—Nick Cave is the most obvious exemplar of this tradition in popular music). But all of this means very little if the song fails to connect with listeners on an emotional level. I had heard the Triffids perform ‘Wide Open Road’ on many occasions, and I had played Born Sandy Devotional regularly in 1986, yet I never fully appreciated the song’s power until I heard it being played on the radio one day, a few weeks after an especially painful relationship breakup. I recall driving to work and having to pull into the side of the road and stop my car when the song came over the airwaves. I was overwhelmed by emotion. Not usually prone to tears, I started crying. The song released something deep inside of me, and I simply could not continue my journey. It was as though I was hearing the song for the first time. Oliver Sacks writes about this phenomenon in his book, Musicophilia. ‘The power of music,’ he writes, ‘whether joyous or cathartic, must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace’ (2008, 328). Rita Felski adds that talk of the ineffable has often been taboo—seen as evidence of Romanticism, elitism, mysticism, or other thought crimes. Yet most people can point to novels or movies or music—whether Mozart or Mötley Crüe— that affect them strongly in ways they find hard to articulate. (2020, xii) The key point here is that no matter how an artist composes, frames and performs a work (in any medium) the work can never wholly resonate with all people at all times. In a sense the spectator or, in this case, the listener must be attuned to the work in question. And this process of attunement to a work of art is rarely something that can be achieved through rational analysis alone, so I readily concede that the readings of McComb’s lyrics and music that I offer in this chapter can only point to compositional patterns and strategies, which may or may not resonate with any given listener. Further, my intention is not to fix the meaning of the works I unpack but, rather, to draw attention to their spectral dimensions as compositions that summon ghosts (including the spirit of their composer and the spectres that may have haunted him). Bleddyn Butcher reveals the song’s autobiographical dimension in his biography of McComb (2011). Apparently, the song was inspired by McComb losing his then girlfriend to another Australian rock musician, whose signature guitar stylings are mimicked in the thin guitar lines at the end of the tune. This bit of salacious information does not fix the song’s meaning, or invalidate other readings, but it does multiply the song’s ghosts.

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Clearly, McComb followed what we might call a form of dramaturgy in the selection and sequencing of the songs as well as in the production of the album, yet the term ‘concept album’ doesn’t do justice to Born Sandy Devotional, which unfolds a bit like a radio play comprised of short narratives. Butcher, writes: Born Sandy  Devotional  is a pop masterpiece, a collection of songs which somehow exceeds the splendid sum of its parts. Dave began with the idea of writing a series of songs exploring a single theme [unrequited love] . . . the frustrated lovers are given different voices and perspectives: ‘lone pilgrims and petulant suicides, maudlin confessors, wanton hysterics and brutal dupes . . . Dave creates a fractured sense of community. His castaway lovers have all washed up in the same place, a desolate spot in a desperate region stretched under a big empty sky. They battle the unforgiving elements, and they battle with apathy. The odds are remote, and they know it. They feel their remoteness. They’re bound by desert and sea, besieged by the landscape, daunted by distance and defeated by heat. They’re where the action isn’t. They sizzle in obscurity. (2011, 34) They sizzle because they are in pain. The anguish that often accompanies traumatic loss is one of the album’s persistent motifs. Moreover, as Anthony Elliot points out, in the context of unpacking the mourning of John Lennon, ‘creative work is integral to the process, often unconscious, of mourning lost love’ (1999, 5)—we know, from his biographer and the testimony of his friends, that McComb was unlucky in love. This does not, however, wholly account for his obsession with this theme, nor does it suggest that his biography is the key to understanding his artistry. David McComb brought a rare sophistication to the art of song writing, which is never more evident than on this album. His lyrics here are poetic without being forced or pretentious, and, more often than not, they’re imbued with a paradoxical sense of melancholy, tender and transcendent, deranged and insightful. His protagonists, often possessed by a feverish intensity and panic, wounded by a lover’s abject dismissal, find themselves marooned in a solitary space emptied of solace. The band creates compelling washes of sound that support the songs, providing a cinematic bed for these intricate ruminations on lost love. The songs explore various heightened states of being: states induced by love’s traumatic aftershocks. McComb’s characters roam through his landscape of love, some delirious with fever, other stoic with resignation. They fall into its ‘frighteningly silent abyss,’ and few attempt resurrections. Of course, this virtual landscape has much in common with the Australian outback. The lonely, barren expanses of the island continent’s unpopulated land provide an appropriately desolate metaphor for songs about unrequited love, the album’s major theme. Yet Born Sandy Devotional is no simple-minded paean to Australia. The country’s landscape is inherently mysterious, especially so for European settlers who experience the country as uncanny. This

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is obviously another Freudian term that resonates with hauntology. Jacobs and Gelder point out that [a]n uncanny experience may occur when one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar; one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously. This simultaneity is important to stress since, in Freud’s terms, it is not simply the unfamiliar in itself which generates the anxiety of the uncanny; it is specifically the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar—the way the one seems always to inhabit the other. (1994, 23) They go on to say that white ‘settler’ Australians are unsettled by the Aboriginal conception of the land as sacred, which generates anxiety about ownership of the country. They write: In this moment of de-colonisation, what is ours is also potentially, or even always already theirs; the one is becoming the other, the familiar is becoming strange . . . we often imagine a future condition of reconciliation—but the uncanny can remind us of just how irreconcilable this image is within itself. . . . It is not simply that Australians will either be reconciled with each other or they will not, rather these two possibilities (reconciliation and the impossibility of reconciliation) co-exist and flow through each other in what is often a productively unstable dynamic. (1994, 23–24) The album does not foreground this particular postcolonial dynamic, but it does evoke this sense of ‘uncanny Australia’ by regularly invoking the unsettling qualities of the Australian landscape (the song ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ carries an Aboriginal association in its suffix). The album’s very title is mystifying and puzzling. It’s taken from a song that doesn’t appear on the album, a song McComb was never sufficiently happy with, so while the Triffids played the song live, they never officially released a definitive version (an incomplete take appears on In the Pines). The deluxe edition of the remastered album contains a revelatory booklet containing McComb’s various notes for the recording. On the back cover, he points to the title’s ambiguity by noting its grammatical structure. ‘Born’ is a verb, an action. ‘Sandy’ is a proper noun (a boy’s name or a girl’s name) or an adjective, a qualifying description (as in the line, ‘a sandy beach’). ‘Devotional’ can also be a noun or an adjective. So what does all this mean? We can read the title as being about devotion to some person called Sandy—an object of desire. Alternately, it may be about devotion to a geographical region—devotion to sand and surf as practised by many West Australians. Thinking metaphorical, it may be about devotion to the childhood memory of sand and surf, devotion to some formative experience. The verb ‘born’ conveys a sense of inevitability, pre-destiny or

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perhaps vocation—born to be devoted to ‘Sandy,’ whoever or whatever ‘Sandy’ might be. Of course, there’s no imperative or injunction to settle on a definitive interpretation; it’s possible to luxuriate in uncertainty and temporal ambiguity. While the album’s title is opaque, there is nothing ambiguous about David McComb’s talent, although he seems to have had his doubts. The aforementioned booklet that accompanies the album contains a note McComb scribbled sometime in the 1980s: The biggest joy/spur is the perverse question hanging over my head 24 hour per day—am I the stuff of greatness or am I just another of the thousands of ugly despicable beings in their bedrooms clutching glasses of vodka, with a bunch of filthy exercise book. (McComb 2006) For me, the answer to the question is simple: David McComb was the stuff of genius, although his singular talent is not as widely appreciated as it deserves to be, which is why I think his is a restless spirit, a spirit that’s biding its time, waiting patiently for recognition. I’ll return to McComb’s spectre in the last section of this chapter. For now, I want to use his music as a point of departure for unpacking sonic spectrality. I will do this through engaging with selected tracks from Born Sandy Devotional. A gothic sensibility pervades the album. This is most apparent in the following songs: ‘Tarrilup Bridge,’ ‘Lonely Stretch’ and ‘Tender Is the Night.’ Let us start with the most obvious ghost story, ‘Tarrilup Bridge.’ This is perhaps one of the most eerie Australian songs ever recorded. Imbued with an unsettling darkness, it is a suicide song or more accurately a suicide’s song, for the song is narrated by a ghost. ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ is reminiscent of Bobbie Gentry’s more verbose ‘Ode to Bille Joe’—an exemplar of Southern Gothic sensibility. Gentry’s ballad also deals with a suicide but chooses a different point of view (Gentry’s narrator is the suicide’s girlfriend). Gentry provides an almost novelistic account of her characters’ lives, describing the minutiae of their lunchtime menu, and making extensive use of reported speech, McComb opts for a more unsettling approach by having the song sung by a spectre. ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ tells an apparently simple story. A rejected lover drives off the end of the titular bridge, leaving a note, the contents of which are not disclosed. She’s lost her love, her ‘blinding sun,’ so decides to end her life, having failed to numb her pain with alcohol. The concise verses don’t provide much more information, but they are pregnant with mystery. Why bother to pack a bag if you intend to kill yourself? To remove personal things from the purview of one’s erstwhile lover, perhaps? Why would the newspapers report the death of an everyday suicide? Was the singer a celebrity? If not, why make a movie about her life? The answers to these questions matter not, for the crucial fact is that somebody has done someone wrong in an affair of the heart. The use of the past tense in the line ‘I drove off the end of the Tarrilup Bridge’ suggests a ghostly voice, and Jill Birt’s vocal sounds disembodied,

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as though it’s coming from her character’s watery grave. Birt’s obviously untrained voice lends the song an air of fragility and drama—hers is a character’s voice rather than that of a conventional singer’s—the voice wavers in pitch and struggles with phrasing the lyrics to the pulse of the rhythm. In other words, Birt doesn’t raise her voice in the manner of a songbird—we don’t hear any histrionics, no feats of vocal gymnastics, no sustained notes, trills or other technical ornamentations (not that Birt is capable of such tasteless virtuosity). This song clearly adopts the ‘less is more’ maxim in terms of vocal performance but delivers a complex soundscape that reinforces the uncanny sentiment of the lyric. Suffused with muted sounds of applause, chatter and laughter that morph into a low moan, the song evokes a ghostly gathering. Some of the sound effects blend with Graham Lee’s Lap Steel guitar, so it’s difficult to discern where one ends and the other begins—Van Eferen identifies drones and ‘open-ended’ glissando sounds as formal features of gothic music (2012, 4). As the piece progresses, it’s possible to make out what sounds like a hum or a car’s engine. A  piano tinkle plays randomly, almost below the threshold of hearing. These sounds bubble under the surface of the song, providing a ghostly undercurrent to the instruments that are in the foreground of the mix. The song is in waltz-time and possesses an awkward lilting rhythm. The insistent minor-mode riff, played on bass, strings and the vibraphone, is suitably ominous (the sound effects and strings are drenched in reverb, which intensifies the other-worldly ambience of the song). The use of the vibraphone is especially effective. This instrument is used throughout the album to great effect. The vibraphone in the work’s opening song, ‘Estuary Bed,’ conveys a nostalgic, summery tone. Here, the same instrument is used to an altogether different end but, nevertheless, provides an abstract point of contact with the earlier tune. This sonic connection between songs mirrors the lyrical themes that repeated throughout the album in various guises. As far as I can establish, the bridge is McComb’s invention. No such structure exists, although its name sounds like a plausible Western Australian location. Several towns in the region end with the suffix ‘up’—Joondalup, Nannup and Manjimup, for example. These names come from the Noongar language, the language of the Aboriginal people who are the original inhabitants of Western Australia. ‘Tarrilup’ sounds like a place in the outback, remote, desolate and barren—a perfect landscape for a lonely death and one that resonates with Gelder and Jacobs’ concept of uncanny Australia: that is, the unsettling experience of feeling that you are located in a familiar and unfamiliar place simultaneously. ‘Lonely Stretch’ is the scariest song on the album. It brings side A of the original vinyl release of the album to suitably dramatic end. McComb carefully arranged the sequence of tracks on Born Sandy Devotional, so it’s no accident that its first act concludes with such a breathtaking climax. Thematically, he takes the previous scenarios apart and reconstitutes them as a summation of sorts. The character in this song is marooned in a lonely, remote landscape, like so many of the other figures given voice on this record. In this instance, he’s on

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a dark road on a black night, hopelessly lost. The metaphor is especially potent, for he finds himself in unexplored territory, battling with unknown forces and demons unleashed by making a ‘wrong turn,’ an ill-conceived decision (‘I never should have you out of my sight’). Christian imagery dominates the song. The lonesome traveller is a bit like Christ facing his last temptation in the desert, armed with a St Christopher’s medal for good luck and ‘empty shells’ for retribution should the opportunity arise. St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers, and the song’s demented narrator takes some small measure of comfort in fingering his talisman. Like any desperate man, he is superstitious and appeals to irrational powers to extract him from his unbearable pain. At various points in the song, he thinks he sees his lost love, but she is shadow, a spectre whose elusive haunting, presence, is impossible to verify. She torments him even though he concedes the relationship was doomed from the start (‘we were two wrongs / we were married at birth / and together make up an ugly flaming bird’). The reference to a ‘flaming bird’ suggests a hideous mutation of the phoenix, a mythical creature that rises from the ashes and symbolises rebirth and immortality. But McComb’s bird is an ugly mutation, one that produces an unsightly coupling of two ‘wrongs.’ Yet the singer’s longing for this unholy union remains steadfast. He is committed to this feted relationship despite its obvious perils. Sonically, ‘Lonely Stretch’ owes much to the uncompromising aggression of ‘The Birthday Party,’ and there’s more than a little of Nick Cave’s shamanic swagger and manic vocal delivery in McComb’s performance. I also detect a Springsteen influence in the stark, muted bass-string heavy strum of the rhythm guitar that opens the song, which evokes Nebraska. Initially, the guitar has only Graham Lee’s reverb-drenched lap steel guitar for company, sounding like an ethereal howl from the depths (that ‘open-ended’ glissando again—Lee’s otherworldly sound effortlessly moves from long gliding notes to a banshee-like wails as the song picks up pace). His menacing lines never fail to cut through the muddy mix, even when he’s using the instrument in a non-melodic fashion (which is most of the time). The band creates a heightened sense of drama with exemplary ensemble playing. Carefully orchestrated dynamics, alternating between loud and relatively soft passages, set a suitably spooky tone for this missive from a man grappling with extreme emotional distress, regret and disorientation. Instruments drop in and out of the mix to suit the dramatic requirements of the narrative. The Vibraphone reappears; its presence adds to the atmosphere and reinforces the thematic connection with the preceding tracks. The interplay between the bass guitar and drums after the singer extends the final vowel of the line ‘Look out now! I’ll be so good for you!’ triggers a transformation in mood and register, which leads to the final verse, which sees the narrator recalling that his ‘sweetie’ is tucked away in some distant place, a mere ‘spot on a map,’ presumably far away from his dark road. Immersing oneself in this song, with the lights out, can be both a terrifying and exhilarating experience. As Van Eferen notes, ‘immersion in Gothic music can move

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listeners into the liminal spaces of Gothic, between past and present, between God and the devil’ (2012, 8). ‘Lonely Stretch’ evokes such a liminal space both sonically and lyrically. Musical immersion’s transgressive potential often leads to assumptions of magical, transcendent powers. For exactly this reason music is used in culturally disparate rituals as a path to other dimensions: liturgical music has the specific purpose of making listeners transgress the here and now, and enter an unknown—often metaphysical—then and there. The strength of this liturgical performativity is relatively independent even of listeners’ engagement with its ritual context. (2012, 8) The song’s ritual character is perhaps more evident in performance. McComb embodied the protagonist’s desperation, which grows as the work grinds towards its inexorable end. By this stage, the singer whips himself into a frenzied state of mind, intoning the final part of the song as an incantation, a plea to the almighty to deliver him from the malevolence that he feels closing in on that isolated stretch of road. ‘Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham,’ he sings with the fervent power of a backwoods preacher. By invoking the biblical story of Jericho, McComb suggests that like Joshua his dramatic persona is engaged in a battle that is both violent and spiritual. In a strange way, ‘Lonely Stretch’ is about the redemptive power of song. The narrator sings to himself, and his voice gathers enough momentum to make the listener convinced that his exhortations to Abraham can make the walls of his spiritual prison come tumbling down like those of Jericho, which crumble in the wake of Joshua’s destructive trumpet. It is the song’s liturgical force that fractures space and time. Once again, these qualities are heightened in performance since McComb often appeared to be possessed by his character. This is not an unusual occurrence since, as Antoine Hennion contends, the singer is often part and parcel of the song he sings, in the form of the character he ‘impersonates’. . . . The singer has to become a character in whom are confused the singer’s own life history and those life histories of which he sings. (1990, 189) ‘Tender Is the Night (The Long Fidelity),’ a gentle ballad, provides a profoundly ironic coda to Born Sandy Devotional and evokes spectrality in a different way from the two previous examples. The lyrics foreshadow McComb’s premature demise at the age of 36, although it is impossible to know whether McComb saw himself in the song’s doomed character. This is almost beside the point since some of the song’s poignancy derives from the listener’s knowledge of McComb’s untimely end. The song has two parts. The first three verses tell

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a cautionary tale about a sensitive young man who literally fades away because of an unhappy love affair. The second section sounds like a long-distance conversation between lovers on opposite sides of the world (‘Let’s go out tonight / It’s getting dark earlier now / But where you are it’s just getting light’). The restrained, almost stark accompaniment to the lyrics gives the song a contemplative tone (there are no drums or percussion on the track). The subtle interplay between Birt’s washes of keyboard and Lee’s lap steel lines are largely responsible for creating this pensive atmosphere. Jill Birt sings the song in her inimitably naïve voice. She tells us about a gentle young man mortally wounded by ‘the pestilence sudden pleasure brings.’ This is a crucial line in the context of the song, but it also reintroduces the album’s major thesis: love is never a purely pleasurably experience, to put it glibly. Intense emotions can unleash untamed forces, producing ‘strange fits of passion’: feverish states of being that provoke people to commit all sorts of irrational acts from suicide to murder. To put it even more prosaically, we can’t always anticipate or guard against the ways pleasure and pain will come together, for love is a kind of pestilence, a disease, a curse that ultimately leads to ruin. Unlike many of the characters we’ve met on our journey through the McComb’s harsh landscape of love, the sad figure in ‘Tender Is the Night’ internalises his pain. Not one for histrionics, or explicit theatrics, the gentle young man takes pleasure in beautiful ‘things,’ but the ‘personal things’ those objects touched by his beloved are locked away as he just burns up inside. Not everyone rails against the perceived injustice of unrequited love by bellowing or trying to bring down the walls of Jericho. Quiet despondency is a common response to abject dismissal. The hapless character makes a point of isolating himself from his former love (‘he made a point of losing her address’). Birt goes on to tell another brief story about another man who takes pleasure in hurting—once again, the song refers to this paradoxical connection between joy and sorrow. Finally, the singer addresses her lover, asking him if he wants to forget someone, too, and issuing a threat—‘I left him, and I can leave you too.’ The song concludes with a touching invitation. The lovers are obviously in different time zones, but she asks him out anyway. They go out separately yet in a sense they are together—they remain faithful to each other despite the physical distance between them, at least for the moment. McComb joins Birt to sing the final verses of the song, providing a poignant conclusion to the album. Born Sandy Devotional fashions great beauty out of personal, unknowable cries and whispers. Let us not pass over this declaration too hastily since it is important that we acknowledge that the haunting quality of music is not reducible to a set of formal characteristics: minor key melodies, ‘open-ended’ glissandos, drones, repetitive bass lines, reverbs, echoes and so on, for it is artistry and spirit that imbues generic conventions with the power to affect listeners. So I was haunted by this album in 1986, and I continue to engage with its spectral qualities today. But how to pay tribute to this singular talent now that he is dead? How to seek recognition for his restless ghost?

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2006–2011 ‘Evil’ Graham Lee, the Triffids’ lap and pedal steel player has functioned as the de facto curator of the band’s archive since McComb’s death in 1999. He has overseen the release of the group’s remastered back catalogue and acted as the musical director for several ‘reunion’ concerts, which have taken place in both Europe and Australia. He also established a website and Facebook page devoted to McComb and the Triffids. These sites continue to promote the band’s legacy and current activities. They also provide a space for fans to engage in conversation about the group’s music and even exchange memorabilia. Reynolds’ concept of ‘retromania’ encompasses the desire to mine the vast archive of recorded music for lost geniuses such as Nick Drake or Karen Dalton, artists who attained fame and critical acclaim many years after their deaths. In 2009, Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy published a collection of essays, Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, and a slim volume of McComb’s poetry, Beautiful Waste: The Poems of David McComb. The first title is an eclectic collection of essays that are compiled with a vagabond sensibility (‘Vagabond Holes’ is the name of a McComb song). In his introduction to the collection, Niall Lucy writes that the ‘vagabond, after all, the very figure of aimless wandering, may assume any number of forms but inevitably travels an idiosyncratic route, often beating an inscrutable path to who knows where’ (2009a, 14). In keeping with this nomadic disposition, the book provides a range of critical essays, poems, images, anecdotes and remembrances about McComb and his art, which keep his spirit alive. Lucy, ever the Derrida scholar, contends that [e]ndings, even sudden deaths, are never as final as they seem. A book no more ends at a last word than a song ends on a conclusive note. When something intrigues us—a life, a work of art—it goes on intriguing us, long past the point at which it might officially be said to have passed away. There are always loose strands, or else only neat packages: mysteries, or else only facts. (2009a, 16–17) The eminent rock photographer and journalist Bleddyn Butcher took a more conventional approach to paying tribute to McComb when he produced a biography titled Save What You Can: The Day of the Triffids (2011). The book focuses on McComb’s glory days. It provides a detailed and insightful account of the McComb’s journey from precocious teenager to mature song writer on the cusp of eminence and celebrity. All three books are worthy acts of tribute and remembrance. They demonstrate the extent to which McComb’s colleagues, family and friends are willing to proselytise on his behalf. However, as powerful and compelling as these works are, I find the recent tribute album, Truckful of Sky: The Lost Songs of David McComb, especially poignant and most relevant to the concerns of this book.

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2020—Ventriloquising David McComb Unless very carefully curated, tribute albums tend to be tawdry and exploitative. They usually comprise of well-known hits that rarely improve on the originals. There are a few notable exceptions, though. Todd Haynes’ soundtrack for his experimental Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There (2007), is eminently listenable and contains a wide range of canonical and obscure Dylan songs performed with gusto and a taste for reinvention. The Leonard Cohen tribute album, I’m Your Fan is another notable exception to the rule that the sonic homage is best avoided. McComb actually contributed to the Cohen compilation, and the Canadian bard was impressed enough by McComb’s work, a collaboration with Adam Peters, that he apparently sent McComb a congratulatory fax. No doubt, McComb was delighted to receive a generous note of acknowledgement from one of his song-writing heroes (for the record, I don’t think the song in question, ‘Don’t Go Home with Your Hard On,’ (McComb and Peters 1991) is one of McComb’s career highlights; it’s certainly not one of Cohen’s best songs). We should never underestimate the desire for recognition, acknowledgement (and justice)—after all, most of the spectres that appear in these pages are, to greater or lesser extents, in need of recognition. Sound, as I  hope I  have already established, possesses a hauntological force, which is why the McComb tribute album is especially compelling: it comprises of songs McComb never recorded properly (they were mostly recovered from McComb’s archive by Graham Lee). While we do not hear David McComb’s voice on this remarkable set of recordings, his spirit manifests in every track. In his liner notes, Graham Lee writes: ‘Since he died in 1999 it’s through his songs that David becomes most alive to us’ (2020, 1). The album is certainly spooky and unsettling. McComb’s spectre, like the other ghosts in this book, is neither present nor absent, neither material nor immaterial. And like the other ghosts in this volume, McComb’s spirit puts time out of joint by erasing clear distinctions between past, present and future. As I listen to Truckload of Sky, it becomes evident that the musicians on the album are, in a sense, seeking justice for McComb, for he deserves a much wider audience than the one he had during his lifetime, for, he was, in their view (and mine), one of the greatest songwriters to smudge the air with his music—the relative neglect of his work is inexplicable for those fans, like myself, who are attuned to his singular voice (a voice whose singularity is formed by the voices, innovations and achievements of the other inhabitants of the tower of song, if you will). While several members of the Triffids play on the album, it does not sound like a Triffids record (primarily because of the absence of McComb’s distinctive baritone voice, but also because contemporary recording technologies give the music a discernibly different sound: no doubt, the result of the difference between digital and analogue recording technologies cited earlier in this chapter). Yet McComb’s spirit is a palpable presence on the album in a variety of ways. First, it is hard not to hear his writing voice (his compositional style)

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in every track. This is not dissimilar to perceiving the writing style of a wellknown playwright in the lines spoken by the actors who perform their plays. Indeed, the ‘characters’ in each of the songs, even those that invite biographical interpretation, have much in common with those whose pain and despair are chronicled on Born Sandy Devotional. This effect is heightened by the use of subtle musical quotations, which probably only connect with hardcore fans. For example, the album begins with ‘Kneel So Low’ which is almost a sequel of sorts to the opening track of Born Sandy Devotional, ‘The Seabirds.’ The songs are connected by nautical imagery (references to the ocean, the shoreline, the sand and swimming) and what we might call a ‘cold opening’—both tracks begin with a vocal with no musical preamble to set the tone (the effect is akin to entering a dramatic world in media res). Whereas the older song conjures the utter desolation of rejection, the narrator of ‘Kneel So Low’ rebukes his ex-lover for changing her mind—‘[I]t’s too late, baby, I’m the type that bears a grudge.’ Yet he acknowledges that things are complicated. She is after all ‘unforgettable, unlovable, unliveable.’ It is not until Graham Lee’s pedal steel guitar kicks in that the music evokes something approaching the sound of the Triffids (apparently, McComb instructed Lee to avoid cliched country riffs, which he dutifully did thereby exploiting the instrument’s glissandos for atmospheric effect rather than generic quotation). For the most part the song sounds like a standard rock track. It is hard to locate it in time. It certainly does not sound like contemporary music (it sounds more like typical alt-rock fare from the 1990s—distorted guitars, insistent common time signature). As a fan, I cannot help making comparisons with McComb’s older material, but the music does not carry a nostalgic force for me. On reflection, it certainly gives me pause to think about the relationship between music, time and commemoration. Had McComb lived to record these songs, would he have presented them differently? We know he was always looking for new sounds and often experimented with forms and techniques that were very different from the sounds he created with his band during his heyday. These experiments were not always successful. His excursions into the world of hip-hop, for example, were brave misfires. For the most part, the songs on Truckload of Sky are not especially adventurous in terms of sonic innovation. As I have already noted, certain instrumental tones, the pedal steel glissandos, for example, sound ghostly insofar as they recall McComb’s best-known work, but is this what he would have wanted? Of course. It’s impossible to know how McComb would have felt about the way his colleagues have ‘rescued’ his lost songs. The album as it stands is eminently listenable and on occasion, quite outstanding, but my point here is that it is always hard to know how to pay tribute to the dead (this is a persistent topic in the present volume). How does one engage with the ghost’s wishes when this elusive figure cannot talk back to their mourners? In general terms, singers are always engaged in acts of ventriloquism (and often required to lip-synch, a bit like Dickie Beau in Chapter 2). This is as true for singer-songwriters whose work always invokes, to greater or lesser degrees, the sounds of others since no song (or work of art) is wholly

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original—distinctiveness lies in the mix and blend of spectral voices. McComb was always forthright about his ‘influences’—he proselytised for acts as diverse as the Velvet Underground, 2Pac Shakur and the Pet Shop Boys. He also made extensive production notes for his songs, providing his bandmates with references to sounds on other songs that they might use to guide their playing. Cover songs, as I have already intimated, are acts of ventriloquism that usually succeed when the singer chooses not to imitate the original artist (Lou Reed, one of McComb’s heroes, also put his own stamp in the cover versions he performed—listen to his covers of John Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Foot of Pride’ to get a sense of how these performances depart from the original versions). We can only guess what the songs on Truckload of Sky might have sounded like with McComb singing them. The fact that they were never recorded, though, gives the singers on the album more room for interpretation, yet the performances on the album rarely fail to evoke McComb’s spirit. Rob Snarski’s contributions to the record are especially poignant since he was a close friend and bandmate of McComb in the Black-Eyed Susans (a band McComb formed as a casual collective towards the end of his tenure in the Triffids). McComb’s fans are accustomed to hearing Snarski sing McComb songs—McComb wrote a number of songs specifically for Snarski’s smooth, sonorous croon, which is probably why the Snarski tunes do not produce any radically destabilising effects. The same cannot be said for songs like ‘Second Nature.’ This tune is sung by Angie Hart, a vocalist known for making her broad Australian accent an integral part of her singing voice. Indeed, Hart’s gender and distinctive ‘grain’ reinforce McComb’s status as a song writer whose output is not tied to his own voice—the songs lend themselves to various vocal and musical styles. That said, J.P. Shilo’s contributions to the record provide the most unnerving moments on the album for me. If anyone is capable of ventriloquising McComb, it is Shilo— his tone, timbre and phrasing make him sound uncannily like McComb. This is not to diminish Shilo’s talent in any way. The man is no mere copyist, and he is magnificent on the song ‘Lucky for Some,’ which, as I read it, is a missive from a dying man. This song is truly haunting with its narrator starring up at a ceiling fan from his hospital bed while ruminating on how fickle life can be. Structurally, the lyrics are reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who by Fire’—the pensive narrator reels off a list of the ways some people seem doomed while others seemingly glide through life—‘some get branded / some get hung / some keep their hands clean / lucky for some.’ McComb was capable of emitting visceral howls when required, and Shilo, too, demonstrates his ability to convey raw emotion through exploiting the harrowing potential of the human scream. McComb was obviously in ill health when he composed some of the songs on this album (he had a heart transplant in 1996 and died in 1999) so it is not surprising that he wrote about mortality and human frailty in the face of impending death. While the song is much more than a mere autobiographical account of McComb’s hospital experiences, much of its power comes from his ruminations on the vicissitudes of fortune—the song recalls Skip James’

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distressing ‘Washington D.C. Hospital Center Blues’—another, spooky, dark song about illness and mortality. Shilo’s shriek, every bit as unsettling as James’ eerie falsetto, is confronting as all encounters with impending death tend to be. There are other spooky moments on the album. ‘So Good to Be Home,’ sung by Snarski, is, on one level, about a prodigal son flying back home after a long absence. As the lead singer in a travelling band, McComb must have viewed his hometown from the vantage point of a plane more times than most, yet there is something unsettling about the homecoming narrated in this song. I don’t think it’s a simple paean to Perth (despite the references to neat lawns and the river). It’s more like ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ or ‘Long Black Limousine’—I get the feeling that the song is about the yearning for home or the comfort that the idea or memory of home might offer in a time of crisis (it is hard not to read these lyrics in the light of McComb’s untimely death). There is something haunting in the Rob Snarski’s voice that conjures an uncanny mood, especially when he sings the following lines: Well it’s so good to be home Crawling up inside my old bed Pulling up the sheets around my head Crawling up inside Take it easy now It’s so good to be home. There is nothing in the words of the song to suggest that the singer is dreaming or in a delirious state. The song’s sense of unsettlement is conveyed through Snarski’s tone and phrasing, but the musical accompaniment also contributes to the tune’s ghostly, dream-like quality. The song begins with slow drones and high-pitched glissandos on the steel guitar before we hear Snarski’s voice— these sounds envelop the track in an other-worldly atmosphere, which makes it difficult to determine whether the singer/character can distinguish between the past and present. Claire Colebrook claims that we can locate the singularity of the Triffids in the way the band defied musical norms without negating them (2009, 303). Put simply, she contends that McComb’s music utilised traditional musical structures in new and distinctive ways by marrying, for instance, the conventions of a traditional folk ballad with cinematic sonics and the late-20th-century locutions as is the case with ‘Tarrilup Bridge’—a modal song that has much in common with the old ballad, ‘Butcher’s Boy’ (also narrated by the ghost of a woman who has committed suicide) but which twists this traditional forms to create something both sonically and thematically different. For Colebrook, a Deluezeian scholar, this ‘deterritorialisation’ of form unsettles time. The mode of time enabled by this music is less nostalgic—looking back to a present that is defined as a specific point in relation to a history laid out as a series—then it is expressive of time in its pure state. That is, what is given

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is not a demarcated mode of sound that could be located either as 80s music, or as retro or putatively timeless (as in those ‘easy listening’ modes that aim to be sufficiently generic to come from ‘anytime whatsoever’); rather, we are presented with temporally marked forms—the country or folk ballad—and then the deformation and variation. We hear the capacity for extended time—the time of pop music history or recognisable forms— in transformation; time is heard as intensive. That is, rather than hearing sounds as already formed and recognisable, sounds that would mark out times and populations—this is a 60s folk tune—we hear sound materials in their capacity to create time. (2009, 312–313) I would put it differently. There is a sense in which some Triffids songs are most definitely of their time. The gated drum sounds and saturated reverbs on their later albums scream 1980s. And the band were certainly not as sonically experimental as some other bands of the time (like, for example, Sonic Youth or even Talking Heads). Moreover, it is possible to detect ‘deformation and variation’ in most genres of music (and other art forms). That said, the unconventional use of the pedal steel and lap steel guitar with conventional and sampled strings certainly gives the band a distinctive sonic signature, especially when the drum patterns depart from a purely time-keeping role and follow the melodic lines of the other instruments. The ensemble certainly manages to generate compelling atmospherics, which challenge Mark Fisher’s throwaway observation that spectrality is not a ‘mere question of atmospherics’ (2012, 16). Atmospherics generate affects that play an important role in ‘creating time’ or generating spatial and temporal disjunction. If we have to speak of innovation (or singularity), then the Triffids’ claim to ‘originality’ lies, as Colebrook suggests, in the band’s capacity to fracture time, to put it out of joint by creating atmospheric, haunting sounds assembled from disparate places, periods and people. This is not to say that the sonic aspects of hauntological dramaturgy can be reduced to a prescriptive formula. For example, not all attempts to evoke the Australian landscape rely on drones, glissandos and ambient samples to generate uncanny affects as Miles O’Neil confirms in his account of sonic dramaturgy in Australian Gothic theatre (2021), for there are many ways to haunt and be haunted. As I have consistently pointed out, hauntological dramaturgy is a disposition rather than a set of definitive compositional principles. In the next chapter we will examine a different hauntological disposition by investigating what it means to be haunted by one’s own ghost(s).

References Alley, Jonathan, dir. 2021. Love in Bright Landscapes. Atticus Media, Australia. Auslander, Philip. 2006. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.

Re-membering David McComb 137 Butcher, Bleddyn. 2011. Save What You Can: The Day of the Triffids. Marrickville: Treadwater Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2009. “The Singularity of the Triffids.” In Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Coughran, Chris. 2009. “Love in Bright Landscapes: McComb’s Lyricism.” In  Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Curtin, Adrian. 2014. Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Elliott, Anthony. 1999. The Mourning of John Lennon. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press. Felski, Rita. 2020. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Captialist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: John Hunt Publishing. Fisher, Mark. 2012. “What Is Hauntology.” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1: 16–24. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books. Gelder, Ken. 2016. “Australian Gothic.” In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Harper, Adam. 2009. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Accessed September 2, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music)#cite_note-harper09-10. Haynes, Todd, dir. 2007. I’m Not There. Endgame Entertainment, USA. Haynes, Roslynn. 1999. Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hennion, Antoine. 1990. “The Production of Success: An Antimusicology of the Pop Song.” In On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon. Jacobs, Jane M., and Ken Gelder. 1994. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kierkegaard, Soren. 1992. Either/Or: A fragment of Life. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books. Labelle, Brandon. 2018. Sonic Agency. London: Goldsmiths Press. Lee, Graham. 2020. Liner Notes, Truckful of Sky: The Lost Songs of David McComb, vol. 1. Melbourne: Lost Records and Tapes. Levitin, Daniel J. 2007. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. London: Penguin. Lucy, Niall. 2009a. “Introduction.” In Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Lucy, Niall. 2009b. “Towards a Minor Music.” In Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. McComb, David, and Adam Peters. 1991. “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard On”. Written by Leonard Cohen. I’m Your Fan. Atlantic. CD recording. McComb, David. 2006. Liner Notes. Born Sandy Devotional CD Reissue. Domino Recording Company. McComb, David. 2009. Beautiful Waste: Poems by David McComb, Fremantle: Fremantle Press. O’Neil, Miles. 2021. “Conjuring Sonic Demons in Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre.” Performance Research 25, no. 5: 66–73.

138  Re-membering David McComb Pierre, D. B. C. 2009. “Farewell from the Wharf of Innocence.”  In  Vagabond Holes: David  McComb  and the Triffids, edited by Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Sacks, Oliver. 2008. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. London: Pan Macmillan. Van Elferen, Isabella. 2012. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

6 Can’t Help Thinking About ‘Me’ The Hauntological Dimensions of David Bowie’s ‘Auto-eulogy’

Let us begin this final chapter with a question posed by Mark Fisher: ‘[I]s hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a name for nostalgia?’ (2014, 25). The OED defines ‘nostalgia’ as an ‘acute longing for familiar surroundings, esp. regarded as a medical condition; homesickness’ and a ‘sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past’ (2021). Before explicating why Fisher believes that ‘hauntology’ is not a synonym for ‘nostalgia’ I will confess to having a sentimental longing for some of the time periods I have evoked in this book. As far as I can remember, which may not be very far at all, I thoroughly enjoyed my life in the 1980s. I participated in a vibrant musical sub-culture, which I partially described in the previous chapter, discovered the pleasures (and frustrations) of experimental theatre (which I alluded to in Chapter 1) and experienced the highs and lows of falling in and out of love—all this while consuming various intoxicants (that usually had the effect of heightening my senses) in a city renowned as much for its sun-drenched climate as its remoteness from the rest of the world. I was young, and the future seemed bright. I had dreams and aspirations; some were realised while others are still a source of regret, but back then, everything seemed possible; death, if I gave it any thought, seemed like a distant possibility. The future seemed as expansive as the big, bright West Australian sky. I certainly felt at home in Perth during the 1980s, and it is not incorrect to say I am often homesick for my salad days, to invoke a Shakespearean idiom. The world certainly opened up for me after my father’s death in 1985 (which I recounted in Chapter 4), which is why I feel attached to those cultural artefacts, like the music of the Triffids, for instance, that were important to me in my youth. I no longer feel at home in Perth. The kind of nostalgia I have just described is essentially conservative. There is little doubt that when I find myself luxuriating in this wistful reverie, I feel the world was a better place, for me at least, in the 1980s—the threat of nuclear holocaust, the ubiquity of casual racism, AIDS and the ascendancy of neo-liberalism notwithstanding. Nostalgia, in this reactionary mode, says that things were better then. Selective memory is a condition of possibility for this mood since nostalgia tends to bracket out anything that disturbs its sentimental appeal. To indulge in nostalgia DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-7

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is to be alienated from the present, which is why so many people of my vintage turn into curmudgeonly cranks. Often, the cure for this malaise is simple: go home. See how it feels. In my experience, you can never go home. And if you do, homesickness means that you are now sick of home. When I return to Perth, I feel like a ghost. I do not feel I belong to the city anymore. Often, I find myself ambling through its streets in a daze. I register familiar places of personal significance: cafes, bars, buildings, parks and beaches. These places evoke prised memories, but they also feel strange. Obviously, they have been transformed into different entities with the passage of time, but they still hold traces of my past lives, which sometimes have an unsettling effect on my mood. Put another way, the experience of visiting my hometown is uncanny. This, perhaps overused, word from the Freudian lexicon is actually a much closer synonym for hauntology since it conveys, as noted in the last chapter, the sense of feeling simultaneously attached to and repulsed by a place or thing. So, to answer the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: nostalgia is not the same thing as hauntology. Fisher contends that if nostalgia means ‘homesickness’ then the hauntological character of music produced by the Ghost Box record label is about ‘unhomesickness’: ‘unhomesickness about the uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube’ (2014, 77). You will recall that Fisher’s conception of hauntology, especially as it manifests in the music released by the Ghost Box label, is about lost futures—that is, speculative imaginings of future worlds that never materialised but, nonetheless, exert a palpable force on the present even though they have no material substance. He suggests that the popular modernist impulse embedded in the culture of post-war Britain provided a condition of possibility for such speculations about the future. He pointed out that Ghost Box artists were especially fascinated by a blend of science fiction film and television broadcasts that included the work of BBC Radiophonic Workshop, whose experimentation with electronics translated musique concrete into incidental music in radio and television drama; Nigel Kneale’s extraordinary BBC TV play The Stone Tape (1972), which drew upon T.C. Lethbridge’s idea that haunting may be actual recordings of traumatic events; and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973), with its sui generis condensation of paganism, folk music, and horror. The Britishness of this lineage is no accident—neither is the fact that most, but by no means all, of the artists that have been described as hauntological are British. The yearnings detectible in much hauntological music were no doubt stirred up by the expectations raised by a public service broadcasting system and a popular culture that could be challenging and experimental. (Fisher 2012, 18) British television transmitted a lot of strange and weird things during this time. As a child living in London in the early 1970s, I was captivated by Dr Who and the Glam rock stars that appeared on Top of the Pops, especially T. Rex and David Bowie (whose music was informed by a science fiction sensibility).

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Bowie’s vision of the future was a blend of optimistic possibility and dystopian terror, especially on albums like Diamond Dogs (1974), which was loosely based on George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949). Sonically, his work, especially on the albums that comprise his Berlin trilogy—Low  (1977), Heroes  (1977) and  Lodger  (1979)—shares the experimental characteristics of the electronic music Fisher associates with British futurism. Bowie’s artistic output is also an exemplary in its consistent engagement with hauntological themes such as fractured temporarily and identity, which I will further explore with reference to his late works in this chapter. Fisher stresses that music culture, as an ensemble of sound, fashion and pop art, ‘was central to the projections of the futures which have been lost’ (2014, 27). It also played a major role in preparing the population to enjoy a future that was no longer white, male or heterosexual, a future in which the relinquishing of identities that were in any case poor fictions would be a blessed relief. (2014, 27) Bowie was the ‘leper messiah’ that led the pack of popular modernists into the future by attending to the ghosts of the past. By now, it should be clear that hauntological dramaturgy is a critical and creative disposition that pays close attention to the way the logic of deconstruction unsettles verities about time, identity and mortality. This chapter will argue that we can apprehend these hauntological themes and creative strategies by attending to the life and death of David Bowie. So, for the last time, enter the ghost(s).

He’s Not There Todd Haynes’ unfairly maligned film, Velvet Goldmine (1998), tells us a lot about the spectres that haunt David Bowie’s music. The film is a kind of postmodern biopic with Bowie as its ostensible subject, but the ‘starman’ does not actually appear in the film either as himself or as a fictional character. Rather, the film tells the story of a Bowie-like figure, Brian Slade, who rises to fame by creating an alien-like alter ego, Maxwell Demon (the central character is actually an amalgam of various rock stars, but the Bowie parallels are impossible to miss). Apparently, Bowie had plans to make a similar movie about Glam Rock, so he refused to allow Haynes to use his music in Velvet Goldmine. While Bowie does not appear in the film, his spirit inhabits almost every frame, as I pointed out in my hauntological reading of this complex work (D’Cruz 2015). Indeed, the film is as much about the ghosts that haunt Bowie’s music as it is about Bowie himself. You do not need to play an album like The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) at maximum volume to hear Bowie ventriloquise the sounds of his heroes: If you listen very carefully to ‘Star’ you might hear the eerie jungle rhythms of barrelhouse blues, hammered out on the piano with double- time triads in the manner of Fats Domino or Jerry Lee Lewis. The song’s aggressive

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use of the keyboard also holds traces of the Velvet Underground’s percussive pounding on ‘Waiting for the Man’. You may also hear, scattered throughout the record, faint traces of such disparate singers as Noel Coward, Iggy Pop, Jacques Brel and Anthony Newly in Bowie’s vocal style and phrasing, and you can certainly hear a lonesome blues howl on the album’s only cover version—‘It Ain’t Easy’. And it is impossible to miss Bowie’s acoustic guitar, a ubiquitous element of the LP’s sound, and a sign of its connection with a much older folk tradition. Look at images of Bowie as Ziggy, and you may see even more ghosts in the cut of his clothes, his gait, his demeanour, the make- up on his face and his raw, animal grace. On stage, Bowie’s space alien rock star channels even more spirits from the outer limits of theatre history—mime, pantomime, commedia dell’arte and kabuki theatre mix it up with the aforementioned ghosts of old time rock and roll. (D’Cruz 2015, 262–263) The various musical intertexts I  describe in this passage should come as no surprise to any fan of music—even the most experimental, forward-looking artists can never wholly break with the past. The most interesting thing about the collection of spectres assembled by Bowie is that a lot of them come from the world of theatre. In fact, I think it is possible to argue that Bowie’s work is suffused with a theatrical spirit. Philip Auslander argues that Bowie ‘envisioned the rock concert as a staged, costumed, and choreographed theatrical performance, he understood his own performance his relationship to his audience in actorly terms rather than the communitarian terms that defined performance for psychedelic rockers’ (2006, 106). Simon Reynolds’ account of Bowie’s early career reiterates this claim. Simon Reynolds argues that Bowie’s early fascination with Anthony Newley, a now almost forgotten all-round British entertainer, had as much to do with the ‘shape and range’ of Newley’s career as his distinctive cockney voice, which Bowie was clearly trying to emulate on his first album (2016, Loc). He was, however, more than an old school song-and-dance man who acted in films and on television. Reynolds notes that Newley’s other trademarks were an absurdist-existentialist humour tinged with fatalism, and performance that comments on itself, characters that step in and out of persona, action that breaches the fourth wall. A  classic example of these traits is Newley’s song ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’, the blues of a comic who feeds ‘the monster with the thousand eyes’—the insatiable, fickle audience. Performing the song on a British talk show, Newley hams it up in his inimitable style, miming putting on make-up in the dressing-room mirror of the audience’s gaze. (2006, Loc 1245) In short, Newley was more like a musical theatre actor than a pop star (in tone and visual style he was the antitheses of the early 1960s groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones whose music was haunted by black American artists).

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From the outset, Bowie had theatrical ambitions. He regularly referred to himself as ‘the actor’ and, as is well known, studied mime and developed a parallel career as a film actor (Auslander 2006, 109). He even appeared on Broadway in 1980 in The Elephant Man, and his performance as the titular character attracted rave reviews (Pegg 2016, 1422–1423). Bowie also had ambitions to write a work of musical theatre (as opposed to a musical) from a young age. He realised this ambition, as we shall see, at the very end of his life, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. For the moment let us note the role theatricality plays in his signature innovations, especially those related to his unsettling of heteronormative conceptions of sexual identity. Haynes’ film underscores the performative dimension of sexual identity from the outset. The film begins with an outrageous conceit: Oscar Wilde, the most significant ghost that haunts the film (and, arguably, Bowie’s career), is an alien from another planet who is deposited on the doorstep of a Dublin household in 1854. Haynes puts time out of joint by suggesting that Wilde is, in fact, a prototype glam rock star who precedes Bowie. In a key sequence at the beginning of the film set in a schoolroom, a group of children take turns to announce their future ambitions. Most express mundane aspirations: ‘I want to be a farmer’; ‘I want to be a barrister.’ Young Oscar says he wants to be a rock star! What has Oscar Wilde, celebrated playwright and wit, got to do with Bowie and rock and roll? Haynes’ film suggests that its Wilde’s rebellious nature and personal style mark him out as a distinctive personality type that haunts the dandyism of the rock revolution which was as much about personal style and the public presentation of self as it was about music. As Terry Eagleton notes, Wilde also anticipates some of the key insights of poststructuralist thought by seeing ‘language as self-referential, truth as a convenient fiction, human identity as an enabling myth, criticism as a form of creative writing, the body and its pleasures pitted against a pharisaical ideology’ (1997, 3). Wilde and Bowie, then, are connected through the way they both shatter the ‘enabling myth’ of human identity. Bowie’s notoriety as a cultural icon rests on his reputation as a shapeshifter who unsettles common sense assumptions about identity. It has always been hard to pin David Bowie down. He has over the course of a long career constantly reinvented himself by creating and then discarding a plethora of personas—Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, the Goblin King and the button-eyed Lazarus. Sean Redmond argues that ‘his process of renewal means that Bowie constantly kills himself, an artistic suicide that allows for dramatic event moments to populate his music, and for a rebirth to emerge at the same time or shortly after he expires’ (2013, 377). It is important to acknowledge, with Auslander, that Bowie never presented a consistent persona or sung in a single voice (2006, 111). We will have cause to revisit this observation towards the end of this chapter in the context of Bowie’s final works, but, at this point, we need to underscore the relationship between reinvention and identity. In the early 1970s Bowie became the figurehead of the Glam Rock movement, which proclaimed ‘that identities and sexualities were not stable things but quivery and costumed’ (Hoskyns 1998, xi). Bowie is

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often celebrated for disturbing binary conceptions of sexual identity, and there is little doubt that his cultural significance as an artist will, to a great extent, always be tied to the queer qualities of his art. There are, of course, other ways of unpacking the cultural and political significance of the way Bowie unsettles common verities about the nature of identity. Tanja Stark points out that death is a motif that recurs throughout Bowie’s work (2015, 62). She documents Bowie’s obsession with death in great detail, suggesting that his fascination with this morbid theme is connected to an existential anxiety about mortality, which reaches an apex with The Next Day (2013) which ‘dripped death like a bleeding beehive of blood, a honeycombedcatacomb of cryptic mystery, rage and resignation’ (2015, 61). Writing a year before Bowie’s untimely death in 2016, Stark was obviously unaware of how Bowie’s final album, Blackstar (2016), turned these drips of death into a terrifying torrent. For most people, death is a remote possibility that only comes into focus with time: our faces fall, hair thins, flesh sags, bones become brittle and disease saps our vitality and energy. Unless death comes suddenly and takes us by surprise, corporeal frailty makes us aware of temporal finitude. However, the future is always part of the present for those people, like Bowie, who consciously confront the inevitability of death. Stark makes a convincing case that Bowie was haunted by death long before he was struck down by an unexpected heart attack while performing onstage in 2004—she enumerates the many examples of Bowie songs that deal with the theme. Following Stark’s lead, it is possible to make connections between Bowie’s music and the existential strain of continental philosophy. Stark proffers a connection with Kierkegaard’s thought (2015, 61–62), but I think Martin Heidegger’s concept of Being-unto-death provides a more explicitly hauntological framework for interpreting Bowie’s fascination with mortality. For Heidegger, human Being, or Dasein, is characterised by its finitude. In other words, human existence is temporal, which is why living authentically, for Heidegger, entails reckoning with an ontological conception of death (for Heidegger’s conception of Being-towards-death is very different from a biological or medical conception of death) (2006, 290–291). This Heideggerian concept is about taking an existential stand towards death rather than simply fearing the biological end of life (2006, 292). Most people flee from acknowledging the possibility and the inevitability of death, which defines Dasein. Heidegger writes: ‘Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is’ (2006, 289). To put it glibly, Being, for Heidegger, is time, and time, as I have consistently argued throughout this book, is always out of joint, for death is always already part of life. I will return to this ontological/existential conception of death with reference to Bowie’s songs ‘Black Star’ and ‘Lazarus’ (2016). For now, let us note that Bowie’s artistic output during the last 5 years of his life addressed temporality, mortality and spectrality in overtly existential terms. Bowie himself was an avid reader and an autodidact, so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that works of philosophy might have influenced his song writing—he was certainly familiar with Albert Camus’ 1942 novel, The

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Outsider (O’Connell 2019, 19). Bowie’s lifelong interest in mystical, esoteric and occult literature, especially the works of Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Levi, probably had a more direct impact on his creative work, but Jake Cowan makes an astute observation about the place of death and mortality in Bowie’s work when he notes that there is ‘an impulse of mourning that structures the singer’s relationship to his past life, his afterlife, and the quasi-present living and dying, the rising and falling of his alter egos’ (2018). This temporal disjuncture brings us back to the concept of hauntology and its implications for rethinking what we mean by the term ‘identity.’

The Enabling Myth of Identity, Mortality and Auto-eulogy I have already pointed out that Bowie created his personas from the vocal stylings, fashion sense and physical gestures of his heroes (D’Cruz 2015, 262). The ghosts of various rock and roll luminaries bleed through Bowie’s characters. What is especially notable about Bowie’s output towards the last phase of his career, for Lisa Perrott, is that ‘his ghostly references shifted from other stars to his own self-constructed star(s)’ (2019, 120). Usher and Fremaux make a similar point when they note that ‘during the 1990s, Bowie takes elements of his own personality and interests, magnifying and manipulating them to offer new versions of self ’ (2015, 57–58). I would add that the tension between celebrity life and ordinary life also becomes an important theme in Bowie’s work. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Bowie had certainly adopted a more chatty, selfdeprecating stage persona (especially on his David Bowie Storytellers session in 1999, which was released on CD/DVD in 2009). While he may have eschewed the glam and glitz of his glory years on stage, Bowie found new ways to experiment with sound and vision as the video clips made for his last two albums, The Next Day (2013) and Blackstar (2016). These clips also suggest a more complex interest in ghosts and questions of identity, legacy and inheritance, which Jake Cowan labels ‘autobituary’—that is, ‘an alternative form of self-writing (and autodeictic mourning) beyond the narrative closure attempted by ordinary autobiography’ (2018, 2). I prefer the term ‘auto-eulogy,’ since it carries a performative association: in short, a eulogy is delivered whereas an obituary is published. Writing a eulogy entails summing up a life by praising the recently deceased. The eulogistic tone is generally wistful, mournful, poignant. We can apprehend these qualities in Bowie’s final works, which can be read not only as reflections on his career but as ghostly exhortations for us to remember him (whoever he might be), and, in so doing, remember ‘our own’ affective investments and attachments to his work. Bowie’s dramaturgical strategies in these final works, I  will argue with Cowan, engender temporal disjunctions that resonate with the concept of hauntology and provide a ‘means of assisting and joining his listeners in their work of mourning’ (2018, 2). David Bowie announced the release of his penultimate album, The Next Day on his 66th birthday, 8 January 2016, without fanfare or forewarning. He also

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uploaded a video clip for the record’s lead single, ‘Where Are We Now?,’ to his website. The song’s tone is pensive and reflective. The tempo is funereal, and the lyrics are enigmatic. In the first verse Bowie names some of the places he frequented while living in Berlin: Potsdamer Platz (a transport hub divided by the Berlin Wall), the Dschungel (a Berlin nightclub frequented by Bowie and Iggy Pop), KaDeWe (Berlin’s most famous department store)—locations that are now either significantly transformed or non-existent. Those familiar with Bowie’s biography will know he retreated to Berlin to recover from his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Bowie identifies his tenure as the Thin White Duke as being a low point in his personal life—the temptations of Los Angeles may have fuelled his creativity, but they almost killed him, too. Bowie was looking for new experiences in a new city, and he settled on Berlin. In Berlin, he found a greater degree of anonymity and freedom. His friend and collaborator, Tony Visconti, recalls that David just liked living in Berlin. There was so much of it, in those days, that was fantastic, fantasy-like, that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. The impending danger of the divided military zones, the bizarre nightlife, the extremely traditional restaurants with aproned servers, reminders of Hitler’s not too distant presence, a recording studio 500 yards from the Wall—you could’ve been on the set of The Prisoner. Bickerdike and Sparrowhawk take a different view, suggesting that Bowie ‘craved escape from his “everyday” life of celebrity excess, and wanted to encounter what he saw as the “ordinary” existence of average people’ (2015, 50). The truth may be somewhere in between these two views or something entirely different again. It is difficult to make any kind of definitive declaration about Bowie’s motives for moving to Berlin. That said, the video clip for ‘Where Are We Now,’ does seem to blend the ordinary with the extraordinary, the everyday with the fantastical, and the present with the past. On one level, Bowie’s song is suffused with nostalgia for a place that no longer exists. Berlin is no longer a divided city, although it retains some of the fantasy-like characteristics Visconti recounts. The refrain, ‘where are we now?,’ suggests that the singer is disoriented and possibly uncomfortable with the present. Tiffany Naiman argues that the song ‘utilises the performative possibilities of traces, of memories. By performing partial memories and embedding sonic spectres, Bowie’s song brings the past very much into the present—a present imbued with melancholy’ (2015, 306). In Tony Oursler’s video clip Bowie appears with a mostly expressionless female companion (Oursler’s wife, Jacqueline Humphries, who apparently bears a resemblance to Bowie’s long-time assistant, Corinne ‘Coco’ Schwab). Oursler shrinks their faces, so they appear to be part of a co-joined gorilla-like puppet. This puppet sits on a miniature model of a gymnast’s pommel horse, which is placed on a desk surrounded by sundry items, mostly abstract objects—a giant model ear, a small bottle, a glove and so on. The video-maker projects images of Berlin on a screen, which is immediately behind Bowie and his partner. The video cuts between

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various framings of the puppet, the room and the projections, which occasionally occupy the full screen. Oursler also superimposes the song’s lyrics on the video, so it is impossible to mishear the names of Bowie’s favourite Berlin haunts, which now function as sacred sites for Bowie fans who can pay to go on a walking tour of Bowie’s Berlin. Bickerdike and Sparrowhawk suggest that this tourist attraction transforms the Berlin ‘into a location that is both mystical and spiritual for the diehard Bowie fan’ (2015, 52). Bowie looks old and drawn. He maintains a mostly dour, pensive expression for the duration of the video. Three minutes into the clip, we see a full-scale image of Bowie standing in the studio. He holds a notebook, and his thumbs stroke his arm and the notebook respectively as he maintains a grim facial expression. He looks slim and fit in black slacks and a black T-shirt with the words ‘Song of Norway’ emblazoned on its front. One of Bowie’s early girlfriends, Hermione Farthingale, played a small part in a movie titled Song of Norway (1970). Die-hard Bowie fans will know that Farthingale fell in love with one of her Song of Norway co-stars and subsequently left Bowie. He was heartbroken and traumatised by the experience. It is impossible to know the extent to which Bowie contributed to the clip, but the images I have just described indicate that the video engages with Bowie’s personal memories, possibly intimate memories. The clip suggests that Bowie is yearning for a lost place and a lost love—he is haunted by the city of Berlin and the memory of an old girlfriend. Lisa Perrott points out that the video is suffused with hauntological affordances—‘signs that have become attached to shared cultural memories of particular times, places, sounds, visual imagery, cultural forms and iconic performers’ (2019, 129). When these signs are remediated, she goes on to say, they ‘may evoke an affective sense of temporal disjuncture’ (2019, 120). This observation has much in common with the anarchival impulse I have described in previous chapters. As I read her, Perrott is saying that Bowie reanimates the ensemble of signs we associate with his work. This process conjures ghosts that disturb linear time. Sean Redmond makes a similar point when he notes that the song compels him to ask: where am I now? I look back at the promise of my youth, at the hopes, aspirations and dreams I forged back then, and find the mismatches, the cracks, as well as some successes. There is an overwhelming awakening within me as I do so, a heightening of my senses, but also a deep and profound sadness as I experience my own mortality, and newly experience the span of my life as it has been lived. (2013, 382) Drawing on Jane Bennett’s concept of enchantment (2001), Redmond suggests that to be enchanted (by a song, a figure like Bowie, or David McComb, or any kind of thing) is to experience a form of temporal stasis that unsettles chronological time. I think this observation highlights another kind of hauntological affordance—artistic works often afford nostalgic affects. Indeed, it is not possible to bracket personal memories and associations from any analytic

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practice (hauntological or otherwise); in fact, we are often drawn to those artistic works that resonate with our personal memories. Redmond’s experience of being enchanted by ‘Where Are We Now’ points to the ways our aesthetic attachments connect with the concept of hauntology. Earlier in this chapter I described the uncanny feeling I get when I stroll around my former hometown, Perth, Western Australia, a place suffused with nostalgic memories that are synchronously pensive and disturbing. Bowie’s clip evokes this sensation, which makes me feel like a flâneur. In his reading of the clip, Daryl Perrins suggests that Bowie performs the role of a spectral guide into liminal space—that is, space between and betwixt ‘past and present, personal and public history’ (2015, 332). Tiffany Naiman makes a similar observation when she argues that ‘[l]oss, memory, and melancholy, which are all internal private experiences, are made public (collective) through Bowie’s video for the song—a strolling visual and sonic display of the ghosts of a divided Berlin’ (2015, 318). Obviously, I am not the only person who sees the spectral qualities of ‘Where Are We Now.’ In the second part of this chapter, I want to explore the songs Blackstar and Lazarus (2016) and the musical play, Lazarus (David and Walsh 2015).

Blackstar Even the most casual Bowie fan will tell you that ‘Stars’ figure prominently in Bowie’s oeuvre. Ana Cristina Mendes and Lisa Perrott suggest that stars, celestial bodies as opposed to celebrities, ‘have a spectral dimension, since they are luminous, but not always visible. Stars might seem static and omnipresent, but they are constantly transforming, changing appearance, ageing, living and dying’ (2019). In the aftermath of his death, various commentators have speculated about what the term ‘Blackstar’ might mean (Pegg 2016, 85–94; Rogers 2016; Culbert 2020). One of the most compelling readings of the song suggest that Bowie may have been referring to a Black Star as a literal celestial body (Pegg 2016, 86). In physics a Black Star is a quantum-corrected black hole— that is, cosmic matter in a liminal state between collapse and singularity; singularity is a point in spacetime where the density of a star and its gravitational force become infinite (Barceló et al. 2009). So a Black Star is an entity poised between collapse and boundlessness. This concept, especially in this reductive form, might have provided Bowie with a compelling metaphor to describe his position as a terminally ill cancer patient—he knew he was dying as he recorded the album, so the thought that his collapsing body was on the verge of an encounter with the infinite might have appealed to his spiritual sensibility (Bowie had a lifelong interest in Buddhism, of which I will say more in a moment). For now, it is sufficient to note that the celestial reading of the song resonates strongly with the concept of hauntology and spectrality that I have been elaborating throughout this book. Just as we cannot see ghosts, we cannot see Black Stars. We can, nevertheless, apprehend their effects on spacetime. The song itself, the titular opening track, is a 10-minute epic that recalls the first song on Station to Station (1976). Both works are of a similar length,

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and, more to the point, they both make references to the occult. Black Star is an ominous sounding song. Its offbeat drum patterns are unsettling, and Bowie’s multi-tracked vocals are spooky—they sound ritualistic and sombre. The chords have an ambiguous sound too. I suspect Bowie composed the first section of the song using power chords, which omit the third degree of the triad. The flattened third forms a minor chord—the omission of this interval creates the ambiguous sound (that is neither major nor minor). As stated in the chapter on David McComb, music is a spectral art insofar as it can’t be seen—it is heard and felt. Bowie sings over the mournful tones that establish the song’s ominous atmosphere: In the villa of Ormen, in the villa of Ormen Stands a solitary candle, ah ah, ah ah In the centre of it all, in the centre of it all Your eyes. The villa of Ormen does not exist. ‘Ormen,’ however, is a Norwegian word that means snake. For those equipped with this knowledge, the song’s connection with the occult is intensified (since the snake invokes both biblical and esoteric associations). The image of the solitary candle also supports the idea that the song is painting a picture of some kind of mystical ritual and referring perhaps to the fragility of life itself. And, in the centre of it all: your eyes. Who is the singer addressing? His wife? His former lover, Hermione Farthingale? Himself? As the song progresses, we learn more about the ritualistic scene: ‘On the day of execution / woman kneel and smile.’ The third verse repeats the first, and each verse concludes with the refrain: ‘at the centre of it all, your eyes.’ Donny McCaslin’s sax repeats and improvises around the melody sung by Bowie over a bed of synthesiser washes and bleeps (that recall Bowie’s Berlin era collaborations with Brian Eno). The tone of the song begins to slowly shift and morph into a different musical register at approximately 3 minutes and 52 seconds. The end of the song’s first section is marked by the voices fading into expansive, gothic-style reverberation effects before the song changes to a major key, and Bowie sings in a more melodic and emotive voice: Something happened on the day he died Spirit rose a metre then stepped aside Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried (I’m a Blackstar, I’m a Blackstar) Thematically the song shifts from the foreboding tone of the funereal ritual to an uplifting, soaring vocal that implies resurrection or reincarnation. The use of the third person suggests an omniscient narrative point of view suggesting that Bowie (as the singer of the song) is watching his own death. Moreover, the eyes referred to in the first part of the song could

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conceivably be Bowie’s asymmetrical eyes, although, for the purposes of my argument, this possibly autobiographical reference is not as significant as the fact that ‘eyes’ (and the word’s ghostly homonym ‘I’s) are, apparently, at the centre of it all—your eyes, the sensory apparatus for apprehending the material world. As we shall see, Bowie’s eyes take on a different resonance in the song’s video clip. Jake Cowan’s perceptive reading of the song identifies a set of apparently paradoxical disjunctions that resonate with Derrida’s neologism, hauntology. The previous chapters in this book note, in different ways and to different degrees, the extent to which undecidability marks the figure of the ghost: an entity that is neither dead nor alive, material or immaterial, visible or invisible. ‘Hauntology’ is itself a haunted term (in Carlson’s sense) since the Heideggerian conception of human Being bleeds through it. As I have already mentioned, Heidegger saw death as always already a part of human Being. Death is always a possibility, and, ultimately, it is an inevitability. Derrida’s conception of différance, as we have already seen on numerous occasions throughout this work, confounds the notion that an entity is self-sufficient. Nothing is complete in and of itself. Consequently, there is no self-sufficient identity; the self is also an ‘other.’ This is not to say, however, that we necessarily experience the self as other—more often than not our social and political conditioning makes the ‘I’ the centre of it all, and this has consequences for how we interact with the world, other people and everything we encounter, for the self-sufficient ‘I’ enables us to draw illusory boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, us and them. Put another way, the ‘I’ at the centre of it all generates a metaphysics, ethics and epistemology based on binary logic. This contrasts with Derrida’s metaphysics. For him, the logic of the trace, which flickers and vacillates between presence and absence, past and future, unsettles the very concept of a stable centre. Everything bleeds into everything else. Nothing stands alone. Cowan is correct in detecting the conceptual constellation (self-life-death-other-writing) in the lyrics to ‘Blackstar.’ Bowie, the cracked actor, the master of changes, personas and masks, was a restless and curious autodidact whose interests were wide and varied, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that he was familiar with some of the philosophers and philosophical concepts glossed in this chapter, but if he wrote Blackstar (song and album) as an ‘auto-eulogy’ I  suspect that he might have developed his constellation of concepts from those mystical traditions that played a more prominent role in his life. My favourite David Bowie album is Hunky Dory, and ‘Quicksand’ is my favourite track on the album. In this characteristically cryptic song, Bowie invokes ideas and motifs that will reappear with some consistency over his long career. Thematically, the work expresses impatience with the ‘logic of Homo Sapiens’ and questions whether to ‘herald loud the death of man’ while also conveying an interest in certain Buddhist concepts: namely reincarnation and the illusion of identity and reincarnation (the line ‘You can tell me all about it on the next Bardo’ refers to indeterminate

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state between one life and another). The lyrics to the song’s bridge resonate with the Buddhist notion of the empty self: Don’t believe in yourself Don’t deceive with belief Knowledge Comes with Death’s release Ah, ah, ah, ah. ‘Blackstar’ also refers to enlightenment at the moment of death (even the ‘ahs’ connect the two songs). It is pointless attempting to integrate the disparate references to historical figures, esoteric, philosophical and religious ideas into any kind of coherent thesis about life. The song’s sonorous vocal and grand melody convey a yearning to transcend the ordinary world and contemplate what it might be to be a mortal with the potential of a superman. More than four decades later, Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ is still filled with Buddhist references. The transformation of the ‘he’ that has died into a Blackstar suggests reincarnation (on the next Bardo, perhaps—somebody took his place and bravely cried, ‘I’m a Blackstar’).

Lazarus In many ways, Bowie spent a large part of his career coming back from a plethora of figurative deaths. As we know, he had a penchant for killing off his various personas, so he never got bored as an artist. On occasion, he also courted death by abusing himself with drugs and alcohol. If he had a shtick it was for constant reinvention and musical innovation. He also famously made a career ‘comeback’ in 2013 after years of apparent inactivity. For these reasons alone, Bowie as Lazarus makes perfect sense. As a black star, poised between collapse and expansion, situated on the cups of nothingness, he had much in common with the biblical figure, Lazarus of Bethany. At the risk of stating the obvious, the video clip for ‘Lazarus’ is heartbreaking. Bowie looks as frail and vulnerable as the terminally ill cancer patient he undoubtedly was when the video was recorded in late 2015. The first part of the clip shows Bowie as the button-eyed Lazarus lying on his back on what looks like an old-fashioned hospital bed. The clip’s unusual aspect ratio generates a sense of claustrophobia. The work begins with a mysterious, somewhat menacing figure emerging from an old wardrobe and attaching itself to the underside of Bowie’s bed. In this sequence, my eyes are drawn to Bowie’s shock of unnaturally stiff, grey hair. The camera does not flatter his face—the close-up shots reveal every line and crevice, and the button eyes placed on the bandage that cover Bowie’s eyes are, for me at least, simply frightening. I gasped in dismay the first time I saw Bowie dance in front of the wardrobe some 2.05 minutes into the clip. His thin frame moves with assurance despite his condition—he looks puny and weak, yet he sings and moves with energy and defiance. Here is a man, I thought, who is bravely exploiting his impending death for the sake

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of his art. He looks fearful for the duration of the work, yet the clip’s final shot, which sees Bowie enter the wardrobe, suggests that perhaps death is not the end. As an image, the wardrobe, for many people, will evoke C.S. Lewis’ famous book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). In this novel, the wardrobe is a portal into another world, Narnia. The ‘Lazarus’ clip suggests that Bowie’s ‘button eyes’ character is also entering another world. Bowie intones the song’s lyrics as though he’s unhinged and perhaps hallucinating: Look up here, man, I’m in danger I’ve got nothing left to lose I’m so high it makes my brain whirl Dropped my cell phone down below Ain’t that just like me? The overall effect is as harrowing as those other hospital bed missives I referred to in an earlier chapter—‘Washington D.C. Hospital Blues’ (1965) and David McComb’s ‘Lucky for Some’ (2020). In keeping with Bowie’s lifelong interest in reinvention and reincarnation, he titles this most disturbing track ‘Lazarus,’ a reference to the biblical figure who appears in the Gospel according to John and famously rises from the dead: ‘And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth. Jesus told them, “Unwrap him and let him go!” ’ (John 11:1–44). Bowie’s final project was also titled Lazarus. This project fulfilled Bowie’s ambition to write a musical (Pegg 1466) and provide an opaque, yet compelling auto-eulogy, which cares for Bowie’s legacy. Roms reminds us that the nature of legacy is essentially performative—a legacy is constituted by an act of promise. This act has a complex temporality: it takes place in the present (as a ‘will’), refers to something that remains or is ‘handed down’ from the past, but is only fully realised in the future, when the now-still-present giver will no longer be here and her will will be fulfilled in her absence. (2013, 40) If we see the musical play Lazarus as an act of promise (made by Bowie when he was still alive) we need to identify the remains or traces of his work that are bequeathed to the future through the medium of performance. Bowie played Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicholas Roeg’s film, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), which was based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis. Both novel and film tell the story of an alien, Newton, who comes to earth in search of water in order to save his home planet which is in the midst of a drought which threatens its existence. In short, Newton develops and sells various electronic products, based on his planet’s advanced technology, in order to fund a project that will enable him to return to his family and save his planet. Newton establishes a relationship with a young woman, Mary-Lou, who introduces him to television, alcohol and sex. Newton’s life spirals out

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of control when he becomes addicted to alcohol. His situation becomes even more desperate when his former confidant Bryce (a former college professor) exposes Newton as an alien. On the eve of launching a rocket to his home planet, Newton is arrested by what appear to be government agents and subjected to a barrage of invasive and cruel experiments. On Earth, Newton does not age. He eventually walks out of the crumbling scientific facility that once functioned as his prison. Subsequently, he leads a dissolute life as an alcoholic. He cannot return to his home, and he cannot die. At the end of the film, Newton is a hopeless wreck. Tevis claimed that Newton was ‘an emotional self-portrait. I was writing to some extent out of my own estrangement and sense of alienation, and the growing fear that the only way I could deal with it was by staying drunk’ (cited in Comp 2017). It is not hard to see why Bowie might have been attracted to playing Newton: First, by his own admission, his life was a mess in the mid-1970s. He was heavily into various intoxicants, especially cocaine. His behaviour also became increasingly erratic as the pressures of celebrity became unbearable in the wake of his first major flush of success. Alan Yentob’s BBC documentary, Cracked Actor (1975), captures Bowie’s fragile state during this period. Second, and most obviously, Bowie’s reputation largely rested on his alien personas, and his lyrics are awash with dystopian science fiction references. As I observed earlier, Todd Haynes’ homage to Bowie and the Glam Rock Movement, Velvet Goldmine (1998), begins with the conceit that Oscar Wilde was an alien who inaugurates a distinctive form of subjectivity that Bowie and others draw on for their own artistic purposes in the 1970s. Roeg thought the extremely thin Bowie looked eerily like an other-worldly figure on Yentob’s film so offered Bowie the part of Newton. Bowie never really lost his connection with this character, whose sense of alienation resonated with Bowie’s own frustrations and ambitions to transcend the trapping of ordinary life. Further, Newton’s immortality provided another point of interest for Bowie’s whose songs often deal with themes of life and death. As Simon Critchley points out: Gracchus, Lazarus and Newton are all figures who cannot die and cannot live. They occupy the space between the living and the dead, the realm of purgatorial ghosts and spectres. Perhaps Bowie is telling us that he also occupies that space between life and death, that his art constantly moved between these two realms, these two worlds, while belonging fully to neither. Bowie is dead and not dead. (Critchley 2014, Loc 984) It is no surprise, then, that Bowie’s final project, the stage musical, Lazarus (2015), is a kind of hallucinogenic ghost story that restlessly wanders between past, present and future as it puts time out of joint. Bowie began work on this project before his cancer diagnosis, so it is unwise to see the play as some kind of final statement since, as we have already established, Bowie has been concerned with hauntological themes throughout his entire career. That said, Bowie’s

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work during the last 5  years of his life takes a reflective turn and becomes increasingly self-referential. From the cover art on The Next Day (2013) to the songs and video clips I have explicated in this chapter, it is clear that Bowie was engaged with questions concerning mortality, heritage and legacy. And the musical Lazarus, a collaborative work with the celebrated Irish playwright, Enda Walsh, functions as an exemplar of what I am calling ‘auto-eulogy,’ for the play is certainly haunted by the manifold spectres of David Bowie. The play opened on 7 December 2015 at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, a fitting venue for a musical that eschewed the conventions of Broadway. Lazarus garnered mixed reviews. Most pundits found the work incomprehensible but engaging, nonetheless. Alexis Soloski’s mostly enthusiastic review captures the dominant response to the project: ‘[I]t will be many years before we see a jukebox musical as unapologetically weird as Lazarus, an almost incomprehensible and oddly intriguing new play with songs by David Bowie, directed by Ivo van Hove’ (2015). While undoubtedly unconventional as far as musicals go, Lazarus, in many ways, displays many of the features of hauntological dramaturgy, a dramaturgy in alignment with Bowie’s hauntological approach to composition and staging. Indeed, those familiar with Bowie’s artistic oeuvre, his aesthetic tastes and the details of his biography are unlikely to find the show unintelligible—it certainly makes more ‘sense’ if you are a Bowie fan, but the show’s haunting qualities do not wholly rely on having a comprehensive grasp of his past. Some familiarity with Roeg’s film, though, makes the experience more compelling, but Bowie’s art, as I have consistently stated in this chapter, is marked by ambiguity and malleability, so the question of whether Lazarus is intelligible in terms of traditional dramatic categories is a moot point. Of course, audiences look for meaning and patterns, and Bowie and his collaborators certainly plant enough clues to keep his fans engaged in their own dramaturgical activities. The play, as previously stated, is a ghost story haunted by a plethora of spectres from Bowie’s past. Sometimes, these spectres manifest as characters, but the most intriguing manifestations take the form of those persistent concepts and ideas that belie the commonplace notion that Bowie’s career was all about changes. Most obviously, the figure of the alien haunts Lazarus—literally, of course, in the form of Newton, the titular character Bowie plays in The Man Who Fell to Earth and whom he reprises in the stage play. For me, Lazarus captures Bowie’s artistic spirit and releases an affective charge that fills me with a renewed appreciation for his work. The play also reprises themes, motifs, figures and compositional strategies that recur throughout his long career. In short, the work is a theatrical anarchive pervaded with recycled and reworked material from Bowie’s career: songs, films, video clips, concepts, costumes and mood. It is also clearly a play about death and the experience of coming to terms with mortality. In 2003, Bowie remarked that his work is marked by an undiminished idea of variability. I  don’t think there’s one truth, one absolute. It’s an idea that I have always felt instinctively, but it was reinforced

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by the first thing I  read on postmodernism, a book by George Steiner called In Bluebeard’s Castle. That book just confirmed for me that there was actually some kind of theory behind what I was doing with my work— realizing that I could like artists as disparate as Anthony Newley and Little Richard, and that it was not wrong to like both at the same time. Or that I can like Igor Stravinsky and The Incredible String Band, or The Velvet Underground and Gustav Mahler. That all just made sense to me. (Cited in Pegg 2016, Loc 70) This eclecticism, though, is generally used to investigate existential questions and conundrums: What is life, death, or mortality? Does stardom confer a kind of immortality on celebrities like Bowie? ‘So many questions in such a small amount of time’ (Bowie and Walsh 2016, Loc 539). Lazarus is primarily about what happens in the mind of a character who is staring down impeding mortality. Enda Walsh, Bowie’s co-writer, recalls his early discussions about the concept of the work and notes: We talked about the form—the shape of the story arriving broken and a little shattered. We talked about a person dying and the moments before death and what might happen in their mind and how that would be constructed onstage. We started talking about escape, but we ended up talking about a person trying to find rest. About dying in an easier way. (2016, Loc 65) This partly explains the play’s dream-like and hallucinogenic qualities—it takes place inside Newton’s head. In this internal space Newton interacts with a former business associate and friend, Michael, who expresses concern for Newton’s reclusive lifestyle in the first scene of the play. Newton has a personal assistant, Elly, who is clearly in love with him and even attempts to make herself look like Mary-Lou, Newton’s former lover who only appears as a video image. Elly’s attempt to transform herself into Mary-Lou recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo (1958) and echoes Bowie’s interest in doppelgangers (as evidenced in songs like ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and ‘Changes’; the video clips for ‘Blue Jean’ and ‘The Stars Are out Tonight’ also feature doubles). Elly may or may not be a character based on Bowie’s long-time personal assistant, Coco Schwab, and Mary-Lou may or may not be a cipher for Hermione Farthingale, Bowie’s long-lost girlfriend whom he references in the video clip for ‘Where Are We Now?’ mentioned earlier in this chapter. Dedicated Bowie fans will probably make these connections since both these characters recall key people in the life of David Jones, but it is the undecidability of the status of these characters that is of more importance in the present context. It is difficult to determine the extent to which Lazarus is autobiographical, and, in many ways, this is beside the point—the characters in the play resonate with aspects of Bowie’s life and work; they ‘bleed through’ the performance like the ghosts Carlson identifies as being inimical to theatre as an artistic form.

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Michael C. Hall literally throws himself into the part of Newton by bouncing around the small stage in a kinetic performance. Newton also engages with a young girl (later called Marley), a ghostly figure who acts as his muse and a kind of spiritual guide who facilitates Newtown’s journey into the unknown. And then there is Valentine—a sinister figure who kills Newton’s friend, Michael, and provides the play with an archetypical villain—a malevolent force that functions as a counterpoint to the young girl. At various times a chorus of three teenage girls occupies the stage and contributes backing vocals to the songs. We also have an interlude where a Japanese woman appears on stage (recalling the Japanese-themed scenes in Roeg’s film as well as Bowie’s interest in Japanese culture—his collaborations with Japanese artists are well documented in the V&A exhibition, David Bowie Is). I could go on and continue playing the ‘spot the reference’ game, which will either delight or infuriate the reader depending on their investment in Bowie as an artist. Hopefully, I have provided enough information to make some final observations about the ways that Lazarus functions as an auto-eulogy and facilitates a succinct reiteration of the concept of hauntological dramaturgy I have articulated throughout this book. In general terms, Bowie’s art manipulates the following dramaturgical principles: variability, ambiguity, performativity, alienation and spectrality—all of which we can perceive in condensed form in the final scene of the play in which Newton and the girl perform a radically reworked version of ‘Heroes.’ Their duet sees them sliding through what looks like milk on the bare stage floor. A small cache of Bowie albums is clearly visible, stage left. As the song ends, Newton lies on his back, centre stage, amongst the milky fluid, his body placed within the confines of what looks like a broad sketch of a rocket—the white masking tape outline is also crude enough to suggest a coffin of sorts. A camera is placed directly above Newton, so the audience sees his face on a projection screen as the girl disappears into the screen, and Newton sings the final lines to the song. The projection then moves off-screen, indicating that Newton is on his way home, wherever that might be. The reworking of the song as a kind of elegy and the final blast off into regions unknown is moving and puzzling. Where is Newton/Bowie now? The play works on its own terms as a piece of theatre, but it also functions as a conduit for all manner of spectres—people, things, songs, concepts, costumes—that gather around the proper name: Bowie. This off-Broadway work is no jukebox musical—rather it is an expression of care for Bowie’s legacy, a legacy the Bowie and his collaborators attend to with respect and love. As I stated in the introduction to this volume, ghosts hang around the living because they want us to care about their legacies, recognise their struggles and achievements, and give voice to their disembodied forms so they may echo into future worlds and contexts that we, the living, cannot possibly anticipate. Lazarus, when read through the lens of hauntological dramaturgy, is a work that unsettles simple chronology and the enabling myth of identity—that is, the idea that a self-identical subject persists over a duration of time, from birth to death. This concept also attends to the singularity of the ghost that issues the ethical injunction to ‘remember me.’ Lazarus is a

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work of mourning, a celebration of a singular life and an anarchival reanimation of fragments from Bowie’s career. Bowie, as we know, made his final public appearance at the premiere of the play. I wonder how he felt sitting in the dark watching his ghostly creations perform for an audience of which he was a member. I wonder what he felt as he turned to ‘face the strange’ one last time.

References Auslander, Philip. 2006. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Barceló, Carlos, Stefano Liberati, Sebastiano Sonego, and Matt Visser. 2009. “Black Stars, Not Holes.” Scientific American 301, no. 4: 38–45. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bickerdike, Jennifer, and John Charles Sparrowhawk. 2015. “Desperately Seeking Bowie: How Berlin Bowie Tourism Transcends the Sacred.” In Enchanting David Bowie: Space/ Time/Body/Memory, edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bowie, David. 1972. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. RCA Records, Sound Recording. Bowie, David. 1974. Diamond Dogs. RCA Records, Sound Recording. Bowie, David. 1976. Low. RCA Records, Sound Recording Bowie, David. 1977. Heroes. RCA Records, Sound Recording. Bowie, David. 1979. Lodger. RCA Records, Sound Recording Bowie, David. 2013. The Next Day. Columbia, Sound Recording. Bowie, David. 2016. Blackstar. Columbia/Sony, Sound Recording. Bowie, David, and Edna Walsh. 2015. Lazarus, directed by Ivo Van Hove. New York Theatre Workshop. Bowie, David, and Edna Walsh. 2016. Lazarus: The Complete Book and Lyrics. London: Nick Hearn Books. Kindle Edition. Compo, Susan. 2017. Earth Bound: David Bowie and the Man Who Fell to Earth. London: Jawbone Press. Cowan, Jake. 2018. “Autobituary: The Life and/as Death of David Bowie and the Specters from Mourning.” Miranda 17. http://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.13374. Critchley, Simon. 2014. Bowie. New York: OR Books. Culbert, Samiran. 2020. “The Blackstar: Persona, Narrative, and Late Style in the Mourning of David Bowie on Reddit.” Persona Studies 6, no. 1: 43–55. D’Cruz, Glenn. 2015. “He’s not There: Velvet Goldmine and the Spectres of David Bowie.” In Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory, edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Eagleton, Terry. 1997. Saint Oscar and Other Plays. Oxford: Blackwell. Fisher, Mark. 2012. “What Is Hauntology.” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1: 16–24. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester and Washington, DC: Zero Books. Lewis, C. S. 1950. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: The Bodley Head. Hardy, Robin, dir. 1973. The Wicker Man. British Lion Films, UK. Haynes, Todd. 1998. Velvet Goldmine, Screenplay. London: Faber & Faber. Heidegger, Martin. 2006. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

158  Can’t Help Thinking About ‘Me’ Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1958. Vertigo. Paramount, USA. Hoskyns, Barney. 1998. Glam! Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution. London: Faber & Faber. Kneale, Nigel, dir. 1972. The Stone Tape. BBC, UK. Mendes, Ana Cristina, and Lisa Perrott. 2019. “Introduction: Navigating with the Blackstar: The mediality of David Bowie.” Celebrity Studies 10, no. 1: 4–13. Naiman, Tiffany. 2015. “When Are We Now? Walls and Memory in David Bowie’s Berlins.” In Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory, edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. “nostalgia, n.” OED Online. June 2021. Oxford University Press. Accessed September 4, 2021. https://www-oed- com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/view/Entry/128472?redirected From=Nostalgia. O’Connell, John. 2019. Bowie’s Books: The Hundred Literary Heroes Who Changed His Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Oewell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Secker and Warburg. Pegg, Nicholas. 2016. The Complete David Bowie. London: Titan Books. Perrott, Lisa. 2019. “Time Is Out of Joint: The Transmedial Hauntology of David Bowie.” Celebrity Studies 10: 1. Redmond, Sean. 2013. “Who Am I Now? Remembering the Enchanted Dogs of David Bowie.” Celebrity Studies 4, no. 3: 380–83. Reynolds, Simon. 2016. Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century. London: Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition. Roeg, Nicholas, dir. 1976. The Man Who Fell to Earth. British Lion Films, UK. Rogers, Jude. 2016. “The Final Mysteries of David Bowie’s Blackstar—Elvis, Crowley and ‘the Villa of Ormen’.”The Guardian. Accessed July 1, 2021. www.theguardian.com/music/2016/ jan/21/final-mysteries-david-bowie- blackstar-elvis-crowley-villa-of-ormen. Roms, Heike. 2013. “Archiving Legacies: Who Cares for Performance Remains.” In Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, edited by Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Soloski, Alexis. 2015. “Lazarus Review—Bowie’s Baffling Starman Lands Off-Broadway.” The Guardian. Accessed July  19, 2021. www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/dec/08/ lazarus-review-david- bowie-jukebox-musical-off-broadway-new-york. Stark, Tanja. 2015. “Confronting Bowie’s Mysterious Corpses.” In Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory, edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Usher, Bethany, and Stephanie Fremaux. 2015. “Turn Myself to Face Me: David Bowie in the 1990s and Discovery of Authentic Self.” In David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, edited by Eoin Devereux et al. London: Routledge. Yentob, Alan, dir. 1975. Cracked Actor. BBC, UK.

Index

2Pac Shakur 134 120 Days of Sodom (Sade) 40 1984 (Orwell) 141 Abraham, Nicolas 18, 67, 74, 77, 81, 93 – 94 accent 99 – 100 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 96, 107 actors 33 – 34, 47 – 55, 83 – 84, 85 affect 10, 85 agential realism 73 Ahmad, Aijaz 57 AI technology 12 Aladdin Sane 143 Alley, Jonathan 119 ‘Alphabetical Maxims’ 108 – 109 Amazon 114 analogue recordings 120 – 121 anarchive 14, 16, 66, 73 – 87 ancient Greeks 30 Anglo-Indians 92 – 94, 97, 108 Anthony, Frank 93 Apple 35 Archive Fever (Derrida) 15, 29 – 30, 32 – 33, 44 archives: authority and 21 – 22, 30; 31, 34, 43 – 44, 66, 74 – 76; Derridean concept of 32 – 33; electronic archives 66; ethics of practices 14 – 15, 17, 31 – 32, 76 – 78; family archives 68; human bodies 30, 33 – 34; politics of 31, 35; psychic archive 30 – 31, 67; research practices 74; use in performance 12 – 14, 30, 43, 74, 86 – 87, 90, 97; video archives 24 – 25, 34 – 38, 40 – 44 Archons 30, 31 Aristotle 71 ‘arkhe’ 30

Artaud, Antonin 39 Artfilms (www.artfilms.com.au/) 37 atmospherics 17, 136 audience voices 43 Auslander, Philip 142, 143 AusStage 12, 15, 27, 29, 37 Auster, Paul 91 Australasian Drama Studies (journal) 25 Australia Council for the Arts 29 Australian landscape 122 – 130 Australian Research Council (ARC) 29 authenticity 26 – 27 authority 21 – 22, 27, 30, 31, 34, 43 – 44, 49, 61, 66, 74 – 76, 91, 97 auto-eulogy 17 – 18, 151 Bachelard, Gaston 95, 102 – 103, 105 Barad, Karen 73 Barba, Eugenio 9 Barthes, Roland 7, 38, 56, 117 – 118, 120 Baudrillard, Jean 38 BBC Radiophonic Workshop 140 Beatles 142 Beau, Dickie 9, 15 – 16, 47, 49, 50 – 51, 53 – 56, 75 – 76, 95 Beautiful Waste (McComb) 131 Behrndt, Synne 9 Being 3, 5, 57 – 58, 96, 101, 107, 108, 144, 150 Belvoir Street Theatre 24 Benjamin, Walter 22 – 23 Bennett, Jane 147 Berkoff, Steven 49 Berlant, Lauren 16, 108 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 32 Bhadbabie 115 Bickerdike, Jennifer 146, 147 Bierman, James 72, 75, 79

160 Index Bindi’s Boxes and Unpacking Bindi 1 – 3 (Cole) 26 Black-Eyed Susans 134 Black Star 148 Blackstar (Bowie) 144, 145, 148 – 151 Blau, Herbert 6 Bleeker, Maaike 34, 35 ‘Blood Is Thicker than Water’ (Gallagher) 26 Bluebeard’s Castle, In (Steiner) 155 ‘Blue Jean’ (Bowie) 155 Borggren, Gunhild 21 Born Sandy Devotional (McComb) 122 – 130, 133 Bourdain, Anthony 12 Bowie, David: archival recordings 12; autoeulogy 17 – 18; background 141 – 145; in Berlin 146 – 148; Blackstar 144, 145, 148 – 151; ‘Blue Jean’ 155; ‘Changes’ 155; Diamond Dogs 141; Heroes 141; Hunky Dory 150; ‘It Ain’t Easy’ 142; Lazarus 18, 143, 151 – 157; Lodger 141; Low 141; ‘Man Who Sold the World, The’ 155; Next Day, The 144, 145 – 146, 154; personas 143, 145; ‘Quicksand’ 150; Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, The (Bowie) 141 – 142; ‘Star’ 141; ‘The Stars Are out Tonight’ 155; Station to Station 148; theatrical ambitions 143; vision of future 140 – 141; ‘Waiting for the Man’ 142; ‘Where Are We Now?’ 146 – 148 Brantley, Ben 78 Brassier, Ray 106 Brecht, Bertolt 39 Brel, Jacques 142 Bridge, The (Reynolds and Jackson) 26 Bryant, Levi R. 13, 106, 107 Buddhism 150 – 151 Burial 8, 112 Burton, Richard 50 Burvill, Tom 29 Butcher, Bleddyn 124, 131 Butoh 30, 34 Cage, John 71 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 56, 117 – 118 Campbell, Alyson 58 – 59 Camus, Albert 145 Caretaker, The 8, 112 Carlin, David 21 Carlson, Marvin 5, 6, 18, 33, 49 – 50, 83, 86, 118, 155 Carter, Paul 106 Casey, Nell 82 – 83

Cave, Nick 123, 128 Chambers, Ross 58 ‘Changes’ (Bowie) 155 Chariots of Fire (Hudson) 16, 51 Charleson, Ian 15 – 16, 18, 47 – 48, 51 – 55, 59, 63 – 64, 75 – 76 Charles, Prince of Wales 48 ‘Chicken Killer’ (McComb) 120 Christian imagery 128 cinema 78 Circumfession (Derrida) 78 Cixous, Hélène 5, 44 Clarke, Paul 22 Class Act (D’Cruz, Glenn) 27 Cline, Patsy 102 Cocktail Party, The (Eliot) 84 Cohen, Leonard 132 Cole, Bindi 26 Colebrook, Claire 135 – 136 Cole, Helen 43 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 56 commodities 3 – 4 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels) 4, 56 Cornelius, Patricia 25, 27 Coughran, Chris 122 – 123, 131 country and western music 102 Cowan, Jake 145, 150 Coward, Noel 142 Cracked Actor (Yentob) 153 ‘Cream’ (Prince) 24 Critchley, Simon 15, 153 Crohn-Schmitt, Natalie 71 – 72 Crowley, Aleister 145 ‘Cruel Optimism’ (Berlant) 108 Cryptonymie (Abraham and Torok) 67 Cumberbatch, Benedict 48, 63 Curtin, Adrian 120 Daily Grind (Reynolds) 23 – 27 Davis, Colin 67 Davison, Richard 51 – 52 Day-Lewis, Cecil 51 Day-Lewis, Daniel 51 D’Cruz, Anto: death 89 – 90, 139; maxims 108 – 109; memorialisation of 16, 18, 90, 91 – 92, 95 – 97, 101 – 104; objects of 91 – 104; reel-to-reel tape recorder 98 – 103; signet ring 103 – 104; suits 89, 91 – 93, 96 – 98, 104 Dead Elvis (Marcus) 12 death 144, 150, 151 ‘Deaths of Roland Barthes, The’ (Derrida) 55

Index  161 decision-making 60 – 63 deconstruction 28, 57 – 58 deepfake technology 12 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 76 Dench, Judy 48 Derrida, Jacques: Archive Fever 15, 29 – 30, 32 – 33, 44; Barad’s reading of 73; on cinema 78; Circumfession 78; concept of différance 3, 5, 150; ‘Deaths of Roland Barthes, The’ 55; on decision-making 60 – 63; engagement with Levinas’ philosophy 14 – 15; ‘Fors’ 67; Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius 44; John Laws/ Sade play programme 38; on mourning 55 – 56, 78; Rogues 63; Specters of Marx 3, 4, 5, 15, 49, 56 – 58; ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ 15 deterritorialisation 135 – 136 dialectic 3 Diamond Dogs (Bowie) 141 Diamond, Elin 21, 74 Dickey, Colin 1 différance 3, 5, 150 difference 6 – 7 digital technology 12, 21 – 22, 34 – 38 Digital Theatre (www.digitaltheatre.com/) 37 documentation 73 – 74 Domino, Fats 141 Double Dialogues (journal) 26 dramatic text 7, 18, 33, 83 dramaturgical elements 9 dramaturgy 9, 63 dreams 41, 89 Dr Who 140 During, Simon 49 Dylan, Bob 132 Dyson, Jeremy 11 Eagleton, Terry 61, 143 ecodramaturgies 9 Eddy, Mary Baker 16 electronic archives 66 electronic music 8, 112 – 113 Elegy (Gallagher) 26 Elephant Man, The (Pomerance) 143 Eliot, T.S. 84 Elliot, Anthony 124 embodied memory 35 – 44, 48 – 49, 83 – 84 emotion 10 enchantment 147 Encyclopedia of the Gothic, The (Hughes, Punter, and Smith) 122 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) 56

Engels, Friedrich 4 epigenetics 94 – 95 equipment 100 – 101 Essiedu, Papaa 48, 63, 64 ethics 14 – 15, 17, 31 – 32, 76 – 78 Everything Is Going to Be Fine (Soderbergh) 83 experimental art 71 – 72 Eyre, Peter 52 Eyre, Richard 16, 51, 52 – 53 Facebook 35, 66, 114 family archives 68, 73 – 84, 119 family resemblances 49 Farrier, Stephen 58 – 59 Farthingale, Hermione 147, 149 faulty memories 15, 23, 38 – 42 Feingold, Michael 77 Felski, Rita 105, 123 Fensham, Rachel 34, 42 Filewod, Alan 27 film 7 – 8 Fisher, Mark 8, 17, 18, 58, 112 – 114, 136, 139, 140, 141 flat ontology 13, 96, 105, 107 For Ian Charleson (Charleson) 52 ‘Fors’ (Derrida) 67 Foucault, Michel 34, 38 Franklin, Aretha 59 Fremaux, Stephanie 145 Freud, Sigmund: account of dreams 41; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 32; ‘Note on the Mystic Writing Pad’ 30 – 31; psychoanalysis 10, 29 – 30, 41; on the uncanny 96 – 97; ‘Uncanny, The’ 11 Fukuyama, Francis 2, 56, 62 Gade, Rune 21 Gallagher, Jodi 26 – 27 Gardner, Lyn 43 Gelder, Ken 122, 125, 127 Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius (Derrida) 44 Gentry, Bobbie 126 Ghost Box 8, 113 – 114, 140 ghosting 7 – 8, 33 ghosts: auto-eulogy 17 – 18; digital technologies 12; figure of 5 – 6, 18, 57, 150, 155; function of 67; Hamlet 50 – 53; Marxism 2; in music 123; performances 6 – 8, 83 – 84; sinister motives 67 – 68, 69, 74, 81 Ghosts (Ibsen) 66 Ghosts (Rayner) 95 – 96 Ghost Stories (Dyson and Hyman) 11

162 Index Gidney, Henry 93 Gielgud, John 50, 54, 64 Glam Rock 140, 141, 153 Goblin King 143 Google 35, 114 Gordon, David 85, 86 Gospel of John 152 gothic music 126 – 129 gothic narratives 122 – 123 Grainge, Paul 7 – 8 Grant, Clare 36, 40, 42 Gray, Elizabeth (Bette) 18, 68, 70, 74 – 78, 81, 83, 84 Gray, Spalding 16, 18, 68 – 70, 76, 78 – 79, 81 – 85, 90 Grehan, Helen 15 Guattari, Felix 76 Gussow, Mel 75 Hägglund, Martin 3, 5, 15, 32, 58, 60 Hall, Michael C. 156 Hamletmachine (Müller) 40 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 1, 5, 7, 16, 47 – 64 Harman, Graham 13, 91, 106 – 107 Harper, Adam 112 Hart, Angie 134 Haunted Stage (Carlson) 6, 84, 86 haunting 58 hauntology: affective dimension 10; concept 2 – 6, 112 – 113; ethics of 14 – 15; object-oriented dramaturgy and 90, 91 – 104; popular music 8, 17, 112 – 136, 140 – 157; reading of Born Sandy Devotional 122 – 130; relationship between nostalgia and 17 – 18; temporal aspect 57 – 58, 75 Haynes, Roslynn 122 Haynes, Todd 132, 141, 143, 153 Hegel, Georg W. F. 3, 56 Heidegger, Martin 100 – 101, 107, 144 Heroes (Bowie) 141 Hirschfeld, Heather 56 historical losses 90 Hitchcock, Alfred 155 houses 102 – 103 Howes, Libby 68, 69 – 70, 85 human bodies 30, 33 – 34, 48 – 49 human exceptionalism 13 Hunky Dory (Bowie) 150 Huyssen, Andreas 8 Hyman, Andy 11 I Am Hamlet (Berkoff) 49 Ian Charleson Award 63

Ibsen, Henrik 66 identicality 34 identity 56 – 58, 59, 143, 144 Iggy Pop 142 immersive experiences 121 I’m Not There (Haynes) 132 I’m Your Fan (tribute album) 132 Incredible String Band, The 155 Instagram 66 intergenerational trauma 18, 67 – 69, 77 – 78, 81, 83, 85, 93 – 95 Invention of Solitude, The (Auster) 91 ‘It Ain’t Easy’ (Bowie) 142 Jackson, Donna 26 Jacobs, Jane M. 125, 127 Jameson, Frederic 8, 112 James, Skip 134 – 135 Jauss, Hans Robert 7 Jeck, Philip 8 John Laws/ Sade (Sydney Front): embodied memory of 35 – 44; as postmodern theatre 70; remembering 15, 23, 38 – 42; video archives 40 – 44 justice 2, 3, 5, 60 – 62 Kant, Immanuel 101 Katranis, Nick 120 Khan, Victoria 61 – 62 Kierkegarrd, Søren 60, 144 Kinnear, Rory 48, 63 Kinnear, Roy 48 Kirby, Joanna 52 Kneale, Nigel 140 ‘Kneel So Low’ (McComb) 133 Kobland, Ken 78, 80 – 81, 85 Lacan, Jacques 41 Laera, Margherita 6 Latour, Bruno 107 Lawson, Chris 50 Lazarus (Bowie and Walsh) 18, 143, 151 – 157 LeCompte, Elizabeth 16, 68 – 70, 75, 80, 84 – 86 Lee, Graham 127, 131, 132 – 133 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 70 Lehrner, Amy 95 Lennon, John 124 Lethbridge, T.C. 140 Leverett, James 68 Levi, Eliphas 145 Levinas, Emmanuel 14 Lewis, C.S. 152

Index  163 Lewis, Jerry Lee 141 Limits, Dusty 50 Lincoln Center 79 Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The (Lewis) 152 lip-synching 16, 50, 51, 53 – 54, 69, 85, 133 Little Richard 155 Locklin, Hank 101 – 102 Lodger (Bowie) 141 ‘Lonely Stretch’ (McComb) 126, 127 – 129 Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill) 72, 77 ‘Lord Rothschild’s Maxims’ 108 – 109 loss 90, 95 – 97 Love in Bright Landscapes (Alley) 119 Low (Bowie) 141 Luckhurst, Mary 4 – 5 ‘Lucky for Some’ (McComb) 134, 152 Lucy, Niall 2, 6, 60, 119, 131 Mahler, Gustav 155 Major Tom 143 Mancing, Howard 43 – 44 Man Who Fell to Earth, The (Roeg) 152 Man Who Fell to Earth, The (Tevis) 152 – 156 ‘Man Who Sold the World, The’ (Bowie) 155 Marat, Jean-Paul 36, 38, 40, 42, 44 Marat/Sade, The (Weiss) 38, 40 Marcus, Greil 12 Marranca, Bonnie 69 Marshall, Jonathan W. 30, 34 Martin, Carol 70 – 72 Marxism 2 – 3, 57 Marx, Karl 2 – 4, 61 Mary Celeste (cargo ship) 11 Massumi, Brian 10, 14, 74 – 75, 76 materialism 3, 13 material thinking 106 McCaslin, Donny 149 McClory, Belinda 24 – 25 McComb, David: archival practice of care 17, 131; background 17, 114; Born Sandy Devotional 122 – 130, 133; ‘Chicken Killer’ 120; first sighting 116 – 118; ghost of 18; ‘Lonely Stretch’ 126, 127 – 129; ‘Lucky for Some’ 134, 152; ‘One Soul Less on Your Fiery List’ 120; ‘Red Pony’ 119; ‘Seabirds, The’ 120; ‘Second Nature’ 134; second sighting 118 – 122; ‘So Good to Be Home’ 135; ‘Suspicious Minds’ 119; ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ 120, 126, 135; ‘Tender Is the Night’ 126, 129 – 130;

ventriloquising 132 – 136; ‘Wide Open Road’ 122 – 123 McKellen, Ian 48, 53 McLuhan, Marshall 107 méconnaissance 41 Meillassoux, Quentin 106 Melbourne Arts Centre 55 Melbourne Workers Theatre (MWT) 12, 23 – 28, 29, 31 memorialisation machine 7 – 9, 18, 32 – 34, 118 – 119 memory 7, 31, 35 – 44 Microsoft 35 Midnight’s Orphans (D’Cruz, Glenn) 92 Minchin, Tim 48 Morin, Emilie 4 – 5 mourning 50, 55 – 56, 78, 90, 124, 157 Müller, Heiner 40 Murphie, Andrew 74 Musicophilia (Sacks) 123 Naiman, Tiffany 146, 148 National Theatre 51 Newley, Anthony 142, 155 new materialism 13 new media dramaturgy 9 New Musical Express (NME) 17, 115 New Theatre 71 New York Public Library 16 New York Theatre Workshop 154 Next Day, The (Bowie) 144, 145, 154 Nietzsche, Friedrich 34 nostalgia 17 – 18, 139 – 140 ‘Note on the Mystic Writing Pad’ (Freud) 30 – 31 Nyatt School Redux [Since I Can Remember] (Wooster Group) 84 Nyatt School (Wooster Group) 84 – 86 object-oriented dramaturgy 90, 91 – 104 object-oriented ontology (OOO) 12 – 14, 91, 96, 105 – 108 objects 95 – 108 O’Brien, Richard 50 ‘Ode to Bille Joe’ (Gentry) 126 old materialism 2, 3 Olivier, Laurence 50, 51, 56 Olivier Theatre 51 O’Neill, Eugene 72, 77 O’Neil, Miles 120 ‘One Soul Less on Your Fiery List’ (McComb) 120 ontology 2 – 3 Orwell, George 141

164 Index Ostermeier, Thomas 11 Oursler, Tony 146 – 147 Outsider, The (Camus) 144 – 145 Paterson, Eddie 82 performance: dramaturgy 9; as embodied archive 30; embodied memory 35 – 44, 48 – 49, 83 – 84; ghosts 6 – 8, 33 – 34, 47 – 55, 83 – 84; memorialisation machine 7 – 9; sonic turn 120; spectrality as key feature 5; traces of 37; use of archives 12 – 14, 30, 43, 74, 86 – 87, 90, 97; video archives 34 – 39 Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (Grehan) 15 Performing Garage 84 Perrins, Daryl 148 Perrott, Lisa 145, 147 personal losses 90 Peter, John 51 Peters, Adam 132 Pet Shop Boys 134 PewDiePie 115 phantoms 55, 67 – 68, 74, 81, 93 – 94 Phelan, Peggy 5, 22, 37, 38 photographs 117 – 118, 120 Pierre, D.B.C. 119 Plato 56 politics 49, 61 – 63, 64 popular music 8, 12, 112 – 136, 140 – 157 Porter, Bruce 68 postdramatic dramaturgy 70 postmodernism 8, 39, 70, 112, 155 post-structuralism 43 preconscious 41 presence 2 – 3, 5, 95, 97 – 98 present-to-hand things 100 – 101 Prince 24 Proust, Marcel 118 psychic archive 30 – 31, 67 punctum 56 quantum theory 71 – 73 queer dramaturgy 9, 58 – 59 Quick, Andrew 68, 73 ‘Quicksand’ (Bowie) 150 Rayner, Alice 5, 6, 8, 90, 95 – 96, 97, 101 ready-to-hand things 100 – 101 Reason, Mathew 42 Redmond, Sean 143, 147 ‘Red Pony’ (McComb) 119 reel-to-reel tape recorder 98 – 103 Reeves, Jim 102

reincarnation 150 – 151 remembering 15, 23, 38 – 42, 55 – 56, 58 – 64, 156 – 157 Re-member Me (Beau) 9, 15 – 16, 47 – 48, 53 – 56, 95 repertoire 13 – 14 repetition 6 – 7 responsibility 2, 3, 55, 60 restored behaviour 6 Retromania 8, 17 Retromania (Reynolds) 114 revenants 30, 83, 96 Reynolds, Simon 2, 8, 17, 18, 90, 99, 112 – 115, 120, 142 Reynolds, Vicki 15, 18, 23 – 28, 29, 31, 33 Richardson, Ian 64 Ridout, Nicholas 14 Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, The (Bowie) 141 – 142 Roach, Joseph 6 Roadrunner (Bourdain) 12 rock music 121 Roeg, Nicholas 152, 156 Rogues (Derrida) 63 Rolling Stones 142 Romanticism 4 Roms, Heike 14, 22, 44, 152 Rorty, Richard 1, 61 Rosenthal, Cindy 79 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 39, 48 – 49, 62 Rumstick Road (Wooster Group): as anarchival practice 73 – 84; archival video recording 79 – 80; background 66 – 70, 90, 95, 97, 119; critical perspectives 70 – 73; as New Theatre 71 – 72 Sacks, Oliver 123 Sade, Marquis de 36, 39, 40 Save What You Can (Butcher) 131 Savran, David 69 – 70, 78, 79 Schechner, Richard 6 Schmitt, Carl 61 – 62, 64 Schneider, Rebecca 22, 30, 34 Schwab, Coco 155 Schweitzer, Marlis 12 Scott, Andrew 33 ‘Seabirds, The’ (McComb) 120 ‘Second Nature’ (McComb) 134 ‘Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On’ (Locklin) 101 – 102 Seton, Mark 29 sexual identity 143, 144 Shaffer, Anthony 140

Index  165 Shakespeare, William 1, 5, 7, 48 – 49, 52, 54, 56, 61, 62 Shilo, J.P. 134 signet ring 103 – 104 Sluger, Hans 49 Snarski, Rob 134, 135 Soderbergh, Steven 83 ‘So Good to Be Home’ (McComb) 135 Soloski, Alexis 154 Song of Norway (Stone) 147 Sorfer, Andrew 5 Sparrowhawk, John Charles 146, 147 Special Broadcasting Service TV 28 Spectator/ Burns (journal) 39 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 3, 4, 5, 15, 49, 56 spectrality: of archival objects 9, 32 – 33, 114; of Bowie’s music 144, 148 – 157; of objects 95 – 108; of old materialism 2; in performance 6 – 8, 18, 47 – 55, 63, 73 – 87; of photographs 117 – 118; spectral intertextuality 33; table 4; in testimonial writing 58; of Triffids’ music 122 – 136; turn in theatre and performance studies 4 – 6; writing as spectral activity 93 Spiritualism 4 stage props 91, 95 – 97 Staging the Audience (Grant) 36 ‘Star’ (Bowie) 141 Stark, Tanja 144 stars 148 Station to Station (Bowie) 148 Steedman, Carolyn 29 – 30 Steiner, George 155 Stevenson, Carol 25 Stone Tape, The (Kneale) 140 Stravinsky, Igor 155 Street Arts Company 24 structuralism 43 suits 89, 91 – 93, 96 – 98, 104 Sunday Times (newspaper) 51 superstition 10 – 11 surveillance capitalism 114 – 115 ‘Suspicious Minds’ (McComb) 119 Sydney Front 15, 23, 35 – 44 table 4 ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ (McComb) 120, 126, 135 Taylor, Diana 13, 35 Teaching Postdramatic Theatre (D’Cruz, Glenn) 36, 71 tele-technologies 85 temporality 5, 75, 112

‘Tender Is the Night’ (McComb) 126, 129 – 130 Tennant, David 48, 63 testimonial writing 58 Tevis, Walter 152 theatre: actors 33 – 34; dramatic text 7, 18, 33, 83; embodied memory 35 – 42; as memory machine 6 – 8, 18, 33; spectrality as key feature 5 Theatre and Ghosts (Luckhurst and Morin) 5 theatre and performance studies 4 – 5, 6 Theatre of the Real, The (Martin) 70 Theatre on Film and Tape (TOFT) 79, 80 Theatre Works 26 theatrical ghosting 95 – 98 ‘The Stars Are out Tonight’ (Bowie) 155 thing-in-itself 101 things 100 – 101 Thin White Duke 143, 146 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari) 76 Three Places in Rhode Island (Wooster Group) 68 TikTok 66 time 56 – 58 Top of the Pops 140 Torok, Maria 18, 67, 74, 77, 81, 93 – 94 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 14 trace 3, 37, 58, 150 transgenerational haunting 67 – 68 trauma 10, 18, 30, 34, 67 – 69, 77 – 78, 81, 83, 85, 93 – 95 T. Rex 140 Tricky 55 Triffids 17, 114, 115 – 135 Truckful of Sky 131, 132, 134 Turner, Cathy 9 Turner, Tina 59 uncanny 96 – 97 ‘Uncanny, The’ (Freud) 11 Unmarked (Phelan) 38 Usher, Bethany 145 Vagabond Holes (Coughran and Lucy) 131 Valk, Kate 84 – 85 Van Elferen, Isabella 121, 127, 128 – 129 van Hove, Ivo 154 Vanitas (D’Cruz, Glenn) 16, 90, 91 – 92, 95 – 97, 101 – 104 Van Kerkhoven, Marianne 9 Varney, Denise 34, 42 Vawter, Ron 68, 69 – 70, 86 veiling 8

166 Index Velvet Goldmine (Haynes) 141, 153 Velvet Underground 134, 142, 155 ventriloquism 133 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 155 video archives 24 – 25, 34 – 38, 40 – 44 Village Voice, The (newspaper) 77 ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (Derrida) 15 Visconti, Tony 146 ‘Waiting for the Man’ (Bowie) 142 Walsh, Enda 18, 154, 155 Walter, Harriet 48 Warren, Julian 22 ‘Washington D.C. Hospital Center Blues’ (James) 135, 152 Watt, David 27 Web 2.0 technologies 66 Weiss, Peter 39, 40 We See Fireworks (Cole) 43 ‘Where Are We Now?’ (Bowie) 146 – 148 Whither Marxism? (conference) 2, 56

Wicker Man, The (Shaffer) 140 ‘Wide Open Road’ (McComb) 122 – 123 Wilde, Oscar 14, 143 Williams, Hank 102 Withnail and I (Robinson) 50 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 49 Wizisla, Erdmut 22 Wooster Group: Nyatt School 84 – 86; Rumstick Road 66 – 84, 90, 95, 97, 119; Three Places in Rhode Island 68 working-class identity 27 – 28 Yehuda, Rachel 95 Yentob, Alan 153 ‘You Make Me Feel like a Natural Woman’ (Goffin, King and Wexler) 38, 40 YouTube 66 Zerdy, Joanne 12 Ziggy Stardust 142, 143 Zuboff, Shoshana 114