Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure 9781350055452, 9781350055483, 9781350055476

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Performing the Unstageable

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance. Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work under examination. By questioning existing critical paradigms, it is hoped that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for further exploration. Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty University of Leeds, UK Enoch Brater University of Michigan, USA Titles Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance Daniel Schulze ISBN 978-1-3500-0096-4 Drama and Digital Arts Cultures David Cameron, Michael Anderson and Rebecca Wotzko ISBN 978-1–472-59219-4 Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis Vicky Angelaki ISBN 978-1-474-21316-5 Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict Clare Finburgh ISBN 978-1-472-59866-0 Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History Maurya Wickstrom ISBN 978-1-4742-8169-0 Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Politics, Affect, Responsibility Marissia Fragkou ISBN 978-1-4742-6714-4 Robert Lepage/Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space James Reynolds ISBN 978-1-4742-7609-2 Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage Katie Beswick ISBN 978-1-4742-8521-6 Postdramatic Theatre and Form Edited by Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf ISBN 978-1-3500-4316-9 Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship Liz Tomlin ISBN 978-1-4742-9560-4 For a complete listing, please visit https://www.bloomsbury.com/series/methuen-drama-engage/

Performing the Unstageable Success, Imagination, Failure Karen Quigley Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Karen Quigley, 2020 Karen Quigley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. viii–ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Chekhov’s First Play (© Jose Miguel Jimenez) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5545-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5547-6 eBook: 978-1-3500-5546-9 Series: Methuen Drama Engage Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To my parents

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Performing the Unstageable 1 Stage Directions 2 Adaptation 3 Violence and Blood 4 Ghosts Conclusion: Success, Imagination, Failure Notes Bibliography Index

viii 1 39 83 125 163 203 211 244 258

Acknowledgements My first book has had a long gestational process, and a lot of people have helped me along the way. At Methuen Drama, many thanks to Anna Brewer, Meredith Benson, Mark Dudgeon and Lara Bateman for their editorial and administrative support, and to the anonymous readers of the proposal and the manuscript. The editors of this series, Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater, have provided thoughtful and rigorous responses at every stage of the process, making this a better book and me a better writer. Thank you to the various fora at which I have been able to present and discuss my work as it has developed into this form, especially IFTR, TaPRA, PSi, Trinity College Dublin and Université Grenoble Alpes. Thank you also to the Centre for Digital Humanities at Maynooth University for a Visiting Fellowship in 2016. My masters and doctoral research at King’s College London laid the foundations for my thinking about unstageability. I am very grateful for the mind-expanding supervision and generous mentorship of Alan Read there and for the support and guidance of Lara Shalson, Kélina Gotman, Josephine McDonagh, Aoife Monks, Simon Bayly, Joe Kelleher, Nick Ridout, Georgina Guy and Ioli Andreadi at various important points during that time. Spending  2011–14 teaching at the University of Chester was an enormous and joyful learning curve. Thank you to the Department of Performing Arts, especially to Jane Loudon, for showing me the ropes, and to David Pattie, for reading my work and suggesting this series for the book. Since  2014, I have been fortunate to be part of a group of passionate, inspiring people who work every day to make the study and practice of theatre a critical, political, creative and exciting process for our students and for each other. Thank you to the whole theatre team at the University of York for the warm and invigorating environment we share. Special thanks to David Barnett for reading some of this

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material, Ben Poore for gracefully catching all the balls I dropped while I was trying to finish the manuscript and Tom Cantrell for unflagging enthusiasm and emergency biscuits. Writing the acknowledgements to a book that wonders about the usefulness of hyperbolic terms, I am struck by how easily they apply to my magnificent friends and family. With Anne Marie Conlon, Michelle Fitzpatrick, Meadhbh Foster and Joanna Power in my corner, I am luckier than anyone deserves to be. Veronica Dyas, James Gallen, Eirini Nedelkopoulou, Ciaran O’Melia, Kevin Sheeky, Melanie Spencer, Emer O’Toole and Niamh de Valera have all been marvellous. Katherine Graham is an eternal cheerleader and a truly brilliant friend. Her frequent reminder that she was keeping a space on her shelf for this book was an excellent reason to keep writing it. My family in Dublin, London and Stockport are an endless source of love. Thank you to Danuta and David Burgess, Dominic and Iona Stewart-Burgess and Babcia; John Quigley and Daniela Filipe; and especially my parents, Anne Creaner and Killian Quigley, who have always made me feel listened to and understood (on any subject, but particularly on this one) and who have given me the kind of support and encouragement that cannot be fully represented in words: the unthankable… Finally, Adam Jacob Burgess has been an immeasurable (intellectual, emotional) and also very measurable (early morning cups of tea, all the housework, a new desk, reading every single word, reference-checking) help while I have worked on this project. Thank you for this wonderful life we get to live together.

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Introduction: Performing the Unstageable

1 ‘I’m scared of dying of cancer.’ Nadia Albina, exhausted and panting, gives up another of her deepest fears, before running full tilt at Hammed Animashaun, who is at least three times her size. As they’ve done three or four times already, the two performers grapple with each other, lurching towards the floor as Albina climbs up the side of Animashaun’s body and violently tugs at his vest while he lunges for her socks. The eventual prize is a piece of clothing, forcibly extracted via extremely physical wrestling. Over the course of an hour or so, supported by her nine fellow cast members, Albina tries to move a tyre using telekinesis, lick her own elbow, eat a whole lemon, hold her arms in a bucket of ice water and lead a vigorous dance routine to Proud Mary. She responds to a series of rapid-fire, intensely personal questions, impossible to answer, spanning lifetimes and minutiae, and plays the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, all while completely wrung out from the physical and mental limits of exertion of her time on the stage.

2 Explaining the premise of what we’re about to see, Colin Dunne clarifies that it’s not impossible to dance to Tommy Potts’s music, but it’s not a very good idea. Potts’s only commercial album, The Liffey Banks (1972), was a strikingly original foray into Irish fiddle playing that eschewed conventional beats, rhythms, time signatures, tempo and thus the instrument’s usually agreeable relationship with Irish

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step-dancing. The Liffey Banks’s mingling of the improvisatory spirit of jazz with traditional Irish airs presented (and continues to present) an extremely exciting offer to fiddle players, but an ‘undanceable’ set of airs for step-dancers. In 2015, Dunne, a dancer most famous for his re-creation of Michael Flatley’s central role in Riverdance in the 1990s, embarked on a collaborative project with director Sinéad Rushe and designer Mel Mercier to dance to, through and with Potts’s album. The result, Concert, investigates Irish dance through the lens of The Liffey Banks, wrenching its conventions apart and exploring its untapped potential for irregularity. Microphones taped to Dunne’s shoes, or draped across the sections of plywood flooring upon which he dances, magnify the sonic tension between the two performers and between the violin and the dancing shoes. Throughout, Dunne interacts with recordings of interviews with Potts or grainy footage of him playing. While these interactions are frequently a musical or rhythmic response across the decades between fiddle and feet, Dunne begins to speak to Potts through the editing of the clips, and Potts watches and critiques. ‘Not bad’, the musician appears to reply sardonically as Dunne collapses on a chair after a frenetic run of steps.

3 In the mid-1910s, uniformed soldiers sit and stand around, drinking out of tin cups and smoking cigarettes. The camera captures them sitting opposite each other down long trestle tables, mugging and joking at the lens. A small group leans against a wall, and one soldier nudges another’s helmet with the butt of a revolver. The soldiers tramp through Belgium, dig trenches, unspool treacherous reels of barbed wire. Half submerged in the mud, we can see bloated arms, torsos and faces. A rat. An abandoned helmet, its owner a few feet away, in pieces. The British Imperial War Museum commissioned the film director Peter Jackson to work with their footage of the First World War, as part of the museum’s commemoration of the war’s centenary.

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Jackson and his team experimented with the black-and-white flickers of the early-twentieth-century cameras to carve out They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). The deeply technical venture uses the latest digital film technologies to colorize, sharpen and  3D-enhance the archive material, bringing its people and places to us in images that seem immediately contemporary. This task was utterly impossible on the fiftieth, seventieth or even ninetieth anniversaries of the end of the war, but in 2018, the unimaginable becomes real, even hyperreal, as we see men who would now be well over 100 years old with uncanny clarity and crispness as they sing, march, drive tanks and shoot guns in their teens and twenties.

4 A crowd gathers around the Blockwerk organ in the medieval St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, on 5 October 2013 to hear three notes played (D sharp, A sharp, E). Since 5 July 2012, the organ has played two notes, a C and a D flat, which will sound until 5 October 2047 and 5 March 2071, respectively. The three new notes join them, creating a five-note sound that will last until 5 September 2020. With no time signature or tempo marking, John Cage’s organ work As SLow aS Possible (ASLSP) has been played variously over twenty-nine minutes, seventyone minutes and eight hours since its premiere in 1987. In 2000, a project dedicated to taking Cage at his word used the age of the Halberstadt church’s organ (the world’s first ever twelve-tone organ keyboard, constructed in  1361) as its departure point for a  639-year rendition of the piece.1 Cage aficionados from all over the world attend the note changes (which always take place on the fifth of the month in tribute to Cage’s birthdate), and the performance will continue until 2640. These four examples, traversing theatre, performance, dance, film, digital technology, music and philosophy, share a key feature. There is something impossible about what is happening, and the performance

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exists in full view of this. The artists above do not ignore the fact that it is impossible for anyone to experience the full performance of ASLSP, that Tommy Potts’s music is impossible to dance to, that it is impossible to move a car tyre across a stage with your mind, that it is impossible to make  100-year-old footage appear completely fresh. Nevertheless, Albina keeps her focus on the tyre, Dunne’s feet navigate Potts’s idiosyncratic rhythms, Jackson’s team transforms ten frames per second into twenty-four and Halberstadt’s organ holds two notes down for seven years. The impossible is performed into being. It is not sublimated to the performance but remains as a central aspect of it. The contemporary trope of theatre and performance that we can do anything on stage, that everything is stageable, is paradoxically tempered with an ongoing appetite for staging what is unstageable. What we can only imagine in real life is made concrete and material on stage, and evocations of anything we can dream up are strengthened and supported as technology mounts, as genres and media expand and traverse each other’s boundaries, and as the ontologies of theatre and performance become ever-widening gyres of possibility. In this book, I hope to reflect on and observe the counterpart to this breadth of expansion: the unstageable. This chimerical and contingent term presents a shifting terrain of language, time and context. Performing the Unstageable problematizes the easy assumption that everything is possible for the theatre by examining how theatre and performance use impossibility as a spur to artistic endeavour. In particular, it will investigate how writers and makers highlight and perform the concept of unstageability through their dramaturgical, scenographic and performance choices. Furthermore, the work of the audience is emphasized throughout as an integral part of understanding what unstageability might mean, and how it can function as a meaningful part of theatre and performance-making. Rather than thinking about a fixed ontology of the unstageable, this book investigates and celebrates its contingency. Instead of imagining what might be unstageable for the theatre, I’ll be exploring how the unstageable operates as a more tangible challenge to theatre and performance. What does it mean to perform

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the unstageable, to work physically with impossibility? What does the unstageable look like when we can perform and stage everything? The unstageable constantly structures and focuses the staged and the stageable. Our theatre history tends to show what theatre has done, what it has been able to do. Implicit in that narrative is a parallel story of impossibility, generative resistance and creative thinking and practice. The four examples opening this chapter also articulate the book’s premise that an understanding of the unstageable arises through an investigation of the relationship between text and performance. In each of the above cases, the text (a list of impossible acts, an album of undanceable music, a pile of old archive footage, an organ score with no tempo markings) conjures a creative spark in makers which reaches beyond replication or mimesis. Furthermore, although the rest of this book is entirely concerned with theatre and performance, the reach of these opening examples across dance, film and music is a deliberate attempt to emphasize the extent to which a relationship to impossibility permeates culture across media, genres and audience. As we will see, this also speaks to a more general sense that the world as I have observed it during the period of writing this book is simultaneously confronted with global crises and conflicts that seem impossible to resolve, and the myriad domestic, individual impossibilities of daily human lives. Alain Badiou writes that ‘a theatre of the possibility of the impossible [is] not a theatre of identification, but a theatre of transformation. Of real transformation’.2 In this context, the theatre’s continuing interest in trying to stage the unstageable becomes a radically hopeful act, articulating ways of acknowledging impossibility and situating it at the heart of a practice, rather than ignoring it or assuming that it does not exist. While the prefixes ‘un’ and ‘im’ might seem to suggest a negative approach to possibility or stageability, I want to frame Performing the Unstageable as an essentially hopeful project. Following Jill Dolan’s sense of performance as a utopian gesture, one that encourages us to see the theatre as a space of possibility for transformation and community, the series of examples under discussion in this book similarly offers ‘moments of transformation’ and a reading of theatre that sees value in exploring what seems impossible to stage.3

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In many ways, the theatre has always existed as a space dedicated to the offer of the impossible. The first performance described in this book’s opening, Secret Theatre’s Show  5, or A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts (2014),4 presented a set of impossible questions and actions, with a randomly selected Protagonist (drawn from Secret Theatre’s ten-strong ensemble) at its centre each night. The Protagonist, Albina on the night I describe above, worked through a series of vocal, physical and emotional responses to the questions and actions put to her, encircled and lifted up (sometimes literally) by the ensemble, who joined Protagonist on the eclectic journey, while keeping her at its centre. In an interview about the performance, Secret Theatre performer Matti Houghton observed that ‘part of your brain says “I know that you cannot do that,” but then there is also another part of your brain, which is the hopeful part, that goes “Maybe, maybe this could happen”’.5 Houghton’s description pithily relates the paradoxical struggle between knowing that something is impossible and hoping that it’s possible. The hope, the attempt, the creativity and the productivity inherent to such trying at the theatre is what this book is interested in exploring. Amongst all the other things they do, theatre-makers show us people we have never met, doing things we can’t imagine, in places we never knew existed. The theatre finds practical solutions to implausible problems. It revels in paradoxes – from the principles of suspension of disbelief at the heart of mimesis to the uncertainty we encounter when performers from a seemingly other world engage with us interactively as we meet them in our present.6 My thinking towards and writing of this book have happened between  2009 and 2019. In these times (as in so many other times), we appear to be living in a world of mounting impossibilities, where huge swathes of our fellow humans cannot find a place to live safely; where our planetary environment is in urgent crisis due to our relentless consumption of its resources; where increasingly precarious employment and extreme poverty continue to be absolute norms in the most developed of countries; where the rise of the right in Western political discourse in the aftermath of global financial crisis sees

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nations turning inwards, putting themselves first and international communities and responsibilities second; and where our physical and digital technological apparatuses allow us to exist in artificially controlled bubbles of information and opinion, blocking out the views of anyone who disagrees with us and ignoring opportunities to look up and connect. Interestingly, the past decade in theatre has been one of connection: the wild success of immersive, intermedial and interactive performance practices; the advancement of live theatre broadcasts from Broadway, the West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Metropolitan Opera into cinemas around the world; and the growing awareness that theatre urgently needs to move away from a model that sees a dominance of white, middle-class men in playwriting, directing, reviewing, executive and artistic directorship roles. In this atmosphere and environment, I have found the theatre’s continuing commitment to performing unstageability to be exciting, moving and inspiring. This unstageability has never been straightforward to grasp or hold on to. It has repeatedly spun out of my grip as I have tried to write about it. It has variously meant ‘things that we find technically or technologically difficult to put on stage’, ‘things that people find difficult to watch at the theatre’, ‘things that are socially inappropriate to put on stage’, ‘things that the theatre can’t do yet’, ‘things that some theatres can’t afford to do’, ‘things beyond literal mimesis’, ‘things that some bodies on stage can’t do’. These descriptions do not present taxonomies of the unstageable but begin to provide a map of the evolution of my thinking on this topic. I have thought about unstageability as literal, concrete, abstract and philosophical, and what appears in these pages combines elements of each. I have also, during most of the period of writing this book, been teaching in theatre departments at two universities in the UK. I encourage my students to consider that theatre and its making and spectating cannot occur in a vacuum but are always informed by and read in light of its political, ethical, aesthetic and critical contexts. I invite them to engage with what seems impossible, whether that takes the form of staging unstageable images from plays, creating a

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performance from a single object, encountering challenges to their preconceived ideas or confronting the demands of critical reading and writing at university level. In all of these cases, I try to support my students to see the seemingly impossible as an ally to their learning, to feel the uncomfortable feelings that an impossible challenge generates, to embrace failure and error and to understand the value of the attempt. I will spend time in this book exploring how the theatre stages impossibility, how it performs the unstageable, and what the value of studying this is. What might an engagement with unstageability at the theatre show or teach us about the world or about each other? How can the theatre be a model for a radical mode of generative impossibility? In short, what does it mean that we keep trying to do what we can’t? And, if nothing is truly unstageable for the theatre any more, why is the performance of the impossible still so prevalent? The epistemology of the unstageable performs in dialogue with the stageable and the staged, providing context and support while moving away from binaries of can and cannot in relation to theatre practice. With that in mind, the project of this book is situated at the interstices of a number of subjects within theatre and performance, including questions of failure, antitheatricality, closet drama, theatre technologies and the materiality and politics of the invisible. Its four principal areas of enquiry – stage directions, adaptation, violence and ghosts – present a range of focal points that return to the above questions in different guises, thinking with impossibility rather than trying to circumvent it.

Impossible terms: Defining the unstageable But what does unstageable mean? Etymologically, the word ‘unstageable’ is featured in a list of words in the Oxford English Dictionary to which the prefix ‘un’ can be applied, ‘used to express negation’.7 It is also clearly dependent on the ‘able’ suffix, denoting ‘the capacity for or capability of … performing the action denoted or implied by the first element of

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the compound’.8 In other words, the suffix ‘able’, when joined with the word ‘stage’, forms the word ‘stageable’, indicating ‘able to be staged’ or an ability to be subjected to or perform the action of staging, to use the OED’s partially theatrical definition. However, the potential suggested by the ‘able’ suffix becomes problematized by the addition of the prefix ‘un’, couching the word ‘stage’ between the negative and the possible. Of further interest here is the suggestion that the word is performing an action, in this case staging. As we will see, the phrase ‘staging the unstageable’ peppers press releases and reviews of theatre productions, suggesting the term’s performance of its own hyperbole. Such etymologies remind us that the stage is a crucial part of that which is unstageable and that the unstageable constantly returns (as this book will) to the place of staging, the theatre space. In an initial historical exploration of its use in relation to theatre and performance, the OED suggests that the first use of the word ‘unstageable’ occurs in 1897 in Werner’s Magazine. Here, a reference is made to ‘[s]ome of the best literary and unstaged or (as managers claim) unstageable plays’.9 A tension between text and performance in relation to unstageability is clear in this statement, with the implication that theatre practitioners differentiate (or should differentiate) between unstaged and unstageable texts. The same entry also shows an April 1975 edition of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, referring to ‘[g]hastly statistics about the vast number of totally unstageable scripts that come pouring through the post on to the desks of successful theatre people’.10 In this context, unstageability seems to connect to quality and to be antithetical to ‘successful’ theatre-making. A more sustained use of the concept in English appears in a short article by Colbert Searles in November  1907, which examines the stageability of the work of the sixteenth-century French playwright Robert Garnier.11 The article takes the form of a critique of Eugène Rigal and Gustave Lanson, contemporaries of Searles, who had previously suggested in Revue d’histoire litteraire de la France that Garnier’s plays were not suitable for the stage. Searles systematically despatches the difficulties and inconsistencies his colleagues raised in

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relation to Garnier’s plays, using terms including ‘dramatic probability’ and ‘stageability’, and implying the latter’s counterpart, unstageability. In his discussion of Garnier’s third play, Cornélie, published in  1574, Searles notes that the play ‘contains nothing absolutely unstageable’, even if Garnier’s rhetorical style is such that the stageability of the play is potentially ‘contestable’.12 This example suggests the existence of the word in a more considered context than the OED’s examples and furthermore advocates unstageability as a possible indicator of the relationship between text and performance, as well as an earlytwentieth-century distrust of the concept of unstageability.

From sublime to unrepresentable In On the Sublime, written in the first century ad, Longinus defines sublime writing in terms of both how it is distinguishable from other writing and how certain kinds of style can be destructive to sublimity, concluding with a diatribe regarding the lack of sublime authors in his own time. The fragmentary treatise refers to the power of language in poetry or prose to engender strong or overwhelming feelings in the listener or reader, ‘a certain loftiness and excellence of language’ which ‘takes [the reader or listener] out of himself ’ [sic].13 For Longinus, this sublimity of language can be traced to any of five possible sources (or a combination of more than one) relating to the construction of the writing and/or the drive behind it, including ‘grandeur of thought … treatment of the passions … the employment of figures [of speech]… dignified expression … majesty and elevation of structure’.14 In this mode, the effect of sublime language on the person listening is that ‘it does not merely convince the hearer, but enthralls him’.15 Thus, in the first century ad, it becomes possible to discover (through Longinus) a certain sense of beyond, of something that surpasses. In On the Sublime, the sublime writer’s work must ‘extend beyond what is actually expressed’, and the reader or listener should accordingly be affected ‘beyond the mere act of perusal’.16 Longinus, in his discussion

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of the phrasal action of ‘taking the reader or listener out of themselves’, does not specify where the reader or listener is taken to in their reaction to the sublimity of language, though he is suggesting that they are taken beyond themselves in some way. Longinus’s sense of the sublime contributes significantly to a trajectory of thought towards the unstageable, in its demands as well as its themes. He notes that ‘grasp[ing] some definite theory and criterion of the true Sublime … is a hard matter’, and the paradoxical challenges of defining the sublime, the unpresentable, the unrepresentable, and thus the unstageable, remain key to the work of this book.17 Additionally, the centrality of the imagination of the hearer of sublime language is an important link to theatre, and Longinus specifically mentions that, in succumbing to the kind of feeling occasioned by the sublime, the poet ‘imagines himself to see what he is talking about, and produces a similar illusion in his hearers’.18 However, from Longinus’s first-century positive depiction of sublimity for both the poet and the listener, we find a more anxious sense of its invocation in the eighteenth century, an apprehension around ideas of unpresentability and unrepresentability that continues to permeate their appearance in twenty-first-century thought. Longinus’s work was translated into English for the first time in  1652 by the poet John Hall, but it was not mentioned in critical work in English until the beginning of the eighteenth century.19 It was at this point that the work of critics such as John Dennis and Joseph Addison began to resurrect the idea of the sublime, though specifically moving the discussion in the direction of the sublime in nature, and the work of the observer of nature as distinct from the hearer of sublime language. Furthermore, Dennis and Addison (amongst others) began to distinguish the beautiful from the sublime in natural contexts and were particularly concerned with the positive aspect of the Longinian sublime.20 For example, Addison, in an article in Spectator in  1712, lists a number of pastoral descriptions and relates how observers are ‘flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them’.21

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Following on from this, in an attempt to identify whether such feelings originated in the image seen or in the mind of the observer, Edmund Burke used one of the principal medical discourses of the time, the nerves, to suggest that the mind and body were interrelated, that external sensations worked on the mind and thus that the sublime was produced from within, as a form of ‘exercise of the finer parts of the [nervous] system’.22 He explored the sublime in terms of ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’, and from the beginning, his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful connects the sublime with terror and pain. An example of Burke’s contrast with previous work in this area can be seen in his definition of the effects of sublimity, described above by Addison as a sense of being ‘flung into a pleasing astonishment’, but noted by Burke as ‘that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’.23 Chapter 3’s exploration of the theatre’s ability to imagine unspeakable violence and bloodshed on the stage retains some of Burke’s dread and investigates the relationship between what is shown and what is imagined by the audience. Burke’s exploration of the sublime in negative and psychological terms is an important one for considerations of the unrepresentable and the unstageable. However, it is not merely the internal explanation of the sublime that relates to later examinations of unrepresentability, but also Burke’s discussion of the specific kinds of external sensations applicable to the internal development of the feeling of sublimity. In  1735, Hildebrand Jacob suggested a list of prompts to the natural sublime discussed by critics such as Dennis and Addison, including oceans, mountains and moonlight, but also including ‘great ruins … magnificence of architecture … and things in fine statues or paintings’.24 Implicit in this list is the suggestion that the representation of a landscape, in a painting for example, could provoke the same feeling as the actual landscape. In other words, a feeling of sublimity could be induced with the re-creation or representation of a sublime prompt, although Burke’s differentiation between representation and reality problematizes this. Burke observes that representation ‘is never so

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perfect, but we can perceive it is imitation’.25 Furthermore, he reminds us of an audience’s reaction to the real: a ‘most sublime and affecting tragedy’ could be performed with high production values and a captive audience, but an announcement in the theatre reporting that ‘a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square’ would cause the theatre to empty.26 Burke here is illustrating ‘the comparative weakness of the imitative arts’ to provoke a feeling of sublimity in the spectator, anticipating later understandings of the unpresentable and unrepresentable.27 Burke’s example implies that there is something that remains out of reach for the theatre at a certain moment of crisis, something that art, even sublime art, is incapable of attaining. Over 200 years later, in ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’ Jacques Rancière would discuss the ‘incapacity on the part of art’ to represent ‘certain entities, events or situations’, calling for a questioning of the nature of any live transaction in which a fiction is being mediated.28 For Kant in 1790, the sublime divides into two parts: mathematical and dynamic. Combined, the effect of the sublime is to convince the mind that it possesses ‘a power surpassing any standard of sense’.29 Mathematically, the feeling of sublimity arises in relation to an inability to grasp the concept of infinity, and the idea that an awareness of this inability (plus an awareness that infinity exists as a concept) gives the observer of this a pleasurable sense that ‘merely to be able to think the given infinite without contradictions requires a faculty in the mind that is itself supersensible’.30 In other words, when the imagination attempts to comprehend something impossible in a rational way, it cannot. However, the fact that this inability is perceptible causes a feeling of sublimity, because there is an awareness of what the complete thing might be, even if the mind or imagination cannot grasp it. The dynamic sublime relates more directly to nature, and the feeling that nature’s power is frightening, but that the human mind is independent of and superior to nature. The pleasure associated with both of these aspects of the Kantian sublime was as troubling for Kant as Burke’s was anxiety-inducing for him: Kant refers to the ‘rapidly alternating repulsion … and attraction’ of the mind in relation to the inadequacy

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of the human imagination in the face of the mathematical sublime, and the powerlessness of the human being when faced with nature.31 More recently, Jean-François Lyotard has considered these ideas in relation to art and to concepts of unpresentability in art specifically. In Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, he notes that Kant’s sublime, as described above, can be read in terms of the presentation (or realization) that there is an unpresentable. For Lyotard, the Kantian mathematical sublime ‘becomes unpresentable for the faculty of presentation’, in this case the imagination.32 In Lyotard’s The Inhuman, the nature of this unpresentable is such that ‘one cannot show (present) an example, a case, even a symbol. The universe is unpresentable, so is humanity, the end of history, the instant, space, the good etc’.33 In this sense, the sublime is unpresentable because by its nature it eludes representation. However, returning to Lyotard, ‘one cannot present the absolute [Kant’s collective term – in this context – for Lyotard’s list of unpresentables above]. But one can present that there is some absolute’.34 Thus, for Lyotard, the fact that something is not presented is not equivalent to its nonexistence. It is necessary to develop a sense that what is unpresentable still exists, even if it is not presented. Bringing this together with Lyotard’s more famous work on the postmodern condition, the presentation of the unpresentable involves an avoidance of grand narratives and totalizing principles. Alternative Lyotardian strategies require the establishment of a feeling for the unpresentable, as it cannot itself be represented in words or images. Furthermore, there is a distinction for Lyotard between the unpresentable and the unrepresentable. In Heidegger and ‘the jews’, Lyotard argues for the  ongoing unpresentability of the Holocaust in order to do justice to the horror of the event. Referring to the unpresentable in this case as ‘the Forgotten’ (or ‘the Immemorial’), Lyotard makes a distinction between an everyday notion of forgetting, which is ‘representational, reversible’, which could be remembered through some kind of representation, and ‘a forgetting that thwarts all representation’.35 He suggests that it might be possible to ‘forget the crime by representing it’, allowing the representations to cloud the enormous wrongness

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of the event.36 Thus, the Forgotten cannot be remembered through representation and, ‘in order not to be forgotten as that which is the forgotten itself, must remain unrepresentable’.37 For Lyotard, therefore, the Holocaust is not only unpresentable but unrepresentable. As David Carroll observes, Lyotard ‘makes the unrepresentable what all representation must strive to represent and what it must also be aware of not being able to represent’.38 For example, in an extraordinary analysis of four photographic images taken secretly in  1944 by a Jewish inmate of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, Georges Didi-Huberman suggests an antithesis to Theodor Adorno’s assertion that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.39 One of the central claims of DidiHuberman’s work, Images in Spite of All, is a response to the notion of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust or the impossibility of imagining what an adequate representation or image could be of an unimaginable subject.40 To take a well-known example of the artistic realization of this idea, Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film, Shoah, a documentary consisting of interviews with Holocaust survivors and footage filmed during visits to some of the Polish concentration camps in the 1970s, does not directly show the gas chambers in which inmates of the camps were murdered. As Robert Faurisson notes, the sudden, ever-so-brief appearance of the so-called gas chamber, almost pitch dark, can only be noticed by a specialist. The unprepared viewer might believe that Lanzmann has clearly shown him a gas chamber. This is pure sleight of hand.41

And yet, as Didi-Huberman proposes, despite textual and visual declarations of the impossibility of representation of the Holocaust, images taken of and from the ‘unimaginable’ place have survived, a moment of contact with the time and place, of ‘contact with the real’.42 With this in mind, he urges the reader not to ‘invoke the unimaginable’ in thinking or talking about representations of the Holocaust, for in doing so we relegate it to the arena of the unsayable/unthinkable/ unrepresentable, and move increasingly far away from beginning

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to understand what happened in terms of representation.43 He acknowledges the significant difficulties attached to the idea of what such representations of the Holocaust might look like or involve but, ‘in spite of our own inability to look at [the images] as they deserve’, exhorts us to try.44 Additionally, Didi-Huberman concedes the dubious power of these specific images and the fetishized status they could potentially acquire. With this in mind, he notes that they are ‘neither pure illusion nor all of the truth’, but that in any case they present an obligation to attempt to make some movement beyond the notion that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, as suggested by Adorno’s famous declaration.45 DidiHuberman’s particular take on this aspect of a post-Holocaust ethics of representation suggests that to label something (a historical event, a historical figure, a human body, an animal, an object) unstageable assigns it too easily to the realm of that which is unthinkable or unimaginable, leaving it unstaged as well as unimagined. This terrain allows the performance of the unstageable to appear in an ethical capacity, with a responsibility to articulate that which is impossible to articulate. Jacques Rancière takes up an opposing position to the Lyotardian unrepresentable, as well as a disagreement with Lyotard’s use of the Kantian (and Burkean) sublime. For Rancière, representation is a particular arrangement of art that is produced in and by specific historical, social and political contexts, or what he refers to as ‘the distribution of the sensible’.46 In this arrangement, Rancière observes two representational circumstances. The first of these is the Platonic ‘straightforward tale, one without artifice’, associated with what Rancière refers to as ‘the ethical regime of images’, and the second is ‘a new art of the sublime’.47 It is this second, ‘new’ representative mode that, for Rancière, ‘[records] the trace of the unthinkable’ and relates to Burke and Kant’s notions of the sublime.48 Thus, in this sense, unrepresentability arises less from the inability of representation to represent, and more from the historical, social and political shift from one regime into the next. In particular, the shift to the aesthetic regime (or modernism) heralds a disintegration of the ‘rules of appropriateness

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between a particular subject and a particular form … [in this regime there is] a general availability of all subjects for any artistic form whatsoever’.49 If unrepresentability occurs in the movement between one regime and another, then unstageability can be seen as a theatrically-specific condition of Rancièrean unrepresentability. Contextually contingent, and arising at moments of particular crises in theatrical form, this book explores incidences of unstageability and the theatre’s response to them. This notion of unstageability relates to what I regard as a response to the Lyotardian sense of representing the unrepresentable, and representing that there is an unrepresentable. The staging of unstageability (or staging that there is an unstageable) emerges in modernist anti-theatricalism, and in the postdramatic theatre in the form of productions that explicitly acknowledge impossibility through performance. Martin Puchner has referred to twentieth-century anti-theatrical tendencies (and their Platonic and closet drama origins) as ‘a suspicion of the theatre’, and the concept can be traced to the work of theatre practitioners from Artaud to Maeterlinck to Beckett, though in radically different ways.50 Such a sense of suspicion appears to dispense with the idea of an ‘unstageable’ existing beyond such work or beyond a turn of phrase. However, this book uncovers a body of work that performs the unstageable into being, using the materiality of the theatre as a creative spark for doing so.

(Im)possible theatre histories A complete history of unstageability at the theatre could cover neglected or lost plays, the offstage, anti-theatricality, closet drama, explicit material on stage, changing social mores, changing theatrical conventions, technological advancements and censorship. All of these categories indicating unstageability are necessarily affected by cultural and historical context spanning nations and centuries. The brief examples

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below stand in for this much broader history but point towards this book’s particular interests in performing unstageability at the theatre. The widespread practice of performing violence offstage in ancient Greek drama indicates an early relationship between what could appear on stage and what could not, and arguably constructs the offstage as an unknowable space where cruelty plays out. Far from ‘out of sight, out of mind’, Andrew Sofer warns about our tendencies to treat offstage action or objects as indexical signs and calls for a new understanding of and vocabulary for ‘theatre’s capacity to alter our perceptual field through means beside the visual’, which reinforces the value of theatre’s invisibilities as important and equal allies to their visual and material counterparts.51 Chapter 3 will discuss the history of unspeakable violence on stage in relation to the changing tastes and mores of audiences, the varying visualities of staged bloodshed and the ‘reported action’ approach taken in some contemporary performance, but the example of an early awareness of theatrical impossibility is a helpful foundation for the history of unstageability. In England, a large number of early modern plays became unstageable in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, falling out of the repertoire due to audiences’ reactions to violence, death or abuse. Nahum Tate’s famous  1681 rewriting of King Lear with a happy ending is a famous example, and stemmed from contemporary audiences’ desire for more decorum and sentiment at the theatre, regardless of genre.52 Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure became unstageable at this time due to its sexual content. Jonathan Bate writes about the ‘literal unstageability’ of a rape victim during the nineteenth century due to audience morals, and the effect of this on productions of Titus Andronicus during the nineteenth century, including heavy editing and rewriting.53 However, staging violence was not the only reason for the removal or refashioning of plays for fluctuating audience requirements. Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women and most of his other plays vanish from the stage after the Restoration, and they do not reappear until the 1960s.54 Michelle O’Callaghan identifies ‘hybridity’ of genre as the reason for the unstageability of Middleton’s plays for the three centuries following

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their premieres. As Ronald Bryden noted in his review of Trevor Nunn’s production of The Revenger’s Tragedy for the RSC in 1966, ‘[b]alancing terror and absurdity, it points the way back to a kind of theatrical response killed off by naturalism and the novel: the suspension not only of disbelief, but of belief, too’.55 Hybridity of genre returns as a rationale for unstageability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we will encounter with the work of Chekhov in Chapter 2. The parallel histories of staged and unstaged plays can also be traced through the lens of closet drama, or what Brander Matthews has referred to as ‘that bastard hybrid, the so-called closet drama, the play that is not intended to be played’.56 This genre of playwriting reaches back to ancient Greek writers, including Plato and Xenophon, who wrote many of their philosophical reflections in the form of dialogues, not for performance but for reading only. Martin Puchner speculates that, for Plato, ‘the closet drama [was] a form specifically designed to keep the theatre at bay, but also, and more importantly, to take its place’.57 This might appear to categorize closet drama as an essentially anti-theatrical endeavour, but the inherent performativity of closet plays suggests a more complex relationship with the theatre.58 Closet plays were frequently written for what we would now term rehearsed readings, taking place in private houses for the enjoyment of their occupants and guests.59 Such plays allowed writers to explore the farthest corners of their imaginations in both form and content, exploring ideas and stories with ‘a lack of action or dramatic impulse, excessive length or time span, technically unfulfillable stage directions, a super-abundance of characters or locales, and/or a weight of abstraction considered unsupportable in theatrical terms’.60 Kimberly Jannarone identifies that ‘[c]loset dramas allow their authors the possibility of complete abstraction, allegorization, unlimited scope, exuberant actions beyond stageability’.61 Without the intermedial, interpersonal demands of stage production, playwrights including Jane Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Finch (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), Sarah Siddons, Elizabeth Inchbald, Joanna Baillie, Lord Byron, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy and

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William Wells Brown (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) embraced unstageability and impossibility. Conversely, plays written to be professionally produced became inadvertent closet plays through their perceived unstageability. Catherine Burroughs articulates the complex relationship between intentional closet dramas and plays relegated to the closet due to censorship, but staged in subsequent decades or centuries.62 In a new collection, Burroughs also brings us Jonas Barish’s posthumously published notes on taxonomies for closet drama, lending additional weight to the idea that the unstageability of closet drama is not straightforward. Barish organizes closet dramas into plays ‘written against the stage … with … deliberate contempt for stageworthiness’; ‘plays written essentially for reading’; plays written ‘with insufficient stage savvy, so that performance becomes difficult, unprofitable, or unsuccessful … after a few performances the inapplicability of the thing to the stage becomes too glaring, and performance lapses’; and plays that can be rewritten as ‘successful stage vehicles’.63 For some playwrights, writing for the closet in this context stemmed from a sense that their contemporary theatre was not yet equipped to stage their plays. In the nineteenth century, Joanna Baillie wrote plays as a closet dramatist for this reason, deftly criticizing the theatre of her day in the prefaces to her published works, emphasizing its inability to stage her plays and anticipating a future context when the theatre would better serve her texts. Keenly aware of the contingency of the unstageability of her playwriting, Baillie asserts that ‘present circumstances are unfavourable for the reception of these plays upon the stage’.64 The ‘present circumstances’ to which she refers correspond to acting style, lighting design, directing and even theatre spaces and genres, and what Baillie appears to be seeking (actors who speak to each other instead of the audience, smaller stages, more nuance and subtlety in design and technical staging, especially lighting) would be the cornerstone of the theatre practice of Constantin Stanislavski, Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia and others by the end of the century. Significantly, Baillie apologizes for her ‘impertinen[ce]’ in raising in such detail the matter of the contingent unstageability of her plays. This acknowledges the

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confusing and contradictory tactics frequently required by practitioners of the impossible: Baillie discusses the impossibilities of staging her published plays even as she offers them to the reader/audience for future productions and dissects the limits of the theatres upon whose stages her earlier works have been produced. However, this note of selfconsciousness is almost immediately dispensed with as she relates an ‘almost irresistible desire to express [her] thoughts’ on the subject.65 For Baillie, rather than her plays not being ready for the stage, in this case the stage is very much not ready for her plays. In other cases, a play’s impossibility arose from its contextual location not between genres, but between artistic moments or movements. Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was first published in 1867 but not produced until 1876. The postponement of a production was due in part to the play’s closet drama features as outlined above (abundant landscapes, timescapes, technically impossible stage directions, enormous allegorical scope) but also attributable to the post-Romanticist, preModernist context of the late nineteenth century. Situating Ibsen within the artistic context of his time, and simultaneously reclaiming his work for modernist literary criticism, Toril Moi conjectures that Ibsen, then, suffers a peculiar kind of double erasure, in which the antitheatricalist modernists find him too theatrical, and the pro-theatrical avant-garde does not find him theatrical enough.66

Straddling at least two significant artistic movements, Peer Gynt’s contradictions correspond very clearly to Rancière’s understanding of the unrepresentable above, which emerges in gaps between two representative regimes. In the twentieth century, the emergence of a theatre practice controlled by and focused on the figure of the director, combined with the advent of modernism and the avant-garde, encouraged an understanding of unstageability beyond social mores or technical impossibilities that threatened to ignore the theatre entirely. Martin Puchner refers to the ‘modernist ideal of difficulty’ and the retreat of playwrights in the early twentieth century away from the stage and the

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audience and back towards the principles of closet drama.67 However, while the closet may have birthed the modernist drama, Puchner observes a ‘diegetic’ approach to representation in twentieth-century writers, including Yeats, Brecht and Beckett, who heralded ‘the return of anti-theatricality to the stage’.68 Clare Warden similarly refers to the ‘Gordian knot’ of the Symbolist movement of the modernist avantgarde: ‘[O]n the one hand the symbolists feared the materiality of the stage would destroy their attempts to explore the metaphysical, yet, on the other, they constantly presented their enquiries in performance.’69 A diegetic theatre thus interrupts and fragments theatre writing, dramaturgy and production through strategies of dissociation ‘of … gestures from their actors, of isolating stage props and spaces’.70 In his study of modernism’s denunciation of and subsequent return to theatre practice, Puchner finds that [t]he negation and rejection inherent in the term anti-theatricalism is … not to be understood as a doing away with the theatre, but as a process that is dependent on that which it negates and to which it therefore remains calibrated.71

This balance between performance and its rejection offers us writers like Samuel Beckett. In Endgame, Hamm cannot stand up, while Clov cannot sit down. Joe in Eh Joe finds it impossible to speak, while Mouth in Not I finds it impossible to stop speaking. In Happy Days, Winnie is immobilized; in Footfalls, May’s pacing is unstoppable. These characters’ insurmountable qualities combine with Beckett’s exacting stage images and directions to create pictures of bleak humour, hopeful hopelessness, abandonment and meaninglessness. The audience is simultaneously afterthought and essential; their understanding and entertainment is subservient to their feeling and response. Alan Schneider, directing Jessica Tandy in the New York premiere of Not I in  1972, recalled Beckett’s request that it be played faster, at the ‘speed of thought’, and his declaration that he was ‘not unduly concerned with intelligibility’.72 Moving towards twenty-first-century theatre, and influenced by turns to the postmodern and the postdramatic, this book hopes to articulate

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the shift away from performing the calibration between negation and acceptance of the theatre that Puchner detects. To paraphrase Lyotard, the theatre swings from performing impossible things to performing that there are impossible things. In the twenty-first-century examples I will explore, makers are not suspicious of the theatre or fearful of its materiality but use its apparatuses to acknowledge impossibility and unstageability as dramaturgical techniques. For example, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (Chapter 2) looks at the impossibility of a writer of colour writing ‘without someone trying to accuse me of deconstructing the race problem in America’, what happens when Jacobs-Jenkins adapts a ‘terminally dated’ nineteenth-century play about anti-miscegenation and slavery, and the unstageability of blackface on the twenty-first-century stage.73 However, these questions are not subsumed or absorbed by its form or content; they appear explicitly as impossibilities. For Jacobs-Jenkins, they are its form and content. Another track through the history of the unstageable follows the work of recovery of neglected plays or the ‘lost classic’.74 As mentioned, there is a substantial level of interest in plays that have never been revived or restaged or plays that were never printed in the first place.75 In Anglophone and especially British theatre, this conversation frequently revolves around Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who tend to be completely obscured by the success of the English early modern theatre’s ultimate canonical figure.76 The Arden Early Modern Drama, for example, states in its general editors’ preface that it is committed to make ‘wonderful but sometimes neglected plays as intelligible as those of Shakespeare to twenty-first century readers’.77 The American Shakespeare Centre’s occasional ‘Bring ’Em Back Alive’ series in the mid-2000s featured readings of plays by lesser-known early modern playwrights.78 The unstageability of these texts is variously explained by their reception by the general public or by key stakeholders (theatre managers, artistic directors, funders) at the time, their appropriateness for theatre audiences of later decades and centuries and the shift in popularity of genres.

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The labour of rehabilitation described in such projects is also frequently a political one, and sees voices and identities that were excluded from canons and under-represented in mainstream theatre or publishing begin to come to light. For example, Amelia Howe Kritzer’s Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850 highlights plays that had ‘fallen into obscurity’, even though their writers had enjoyed high levels of success at the time of their premieres.79 Naomi Paxton’s collection of suffrage plays reminds us that ‘[t]here were over 400 female playwrights in Britain between the years  1900 and  1920’ and that the neglect of these writers ‘not only means the loss of their individual merits as performance pieces and as a slice of theatrical history but also a loss of a breadth of women’s voices and experience’.80 Other examples include Yvette Nolan’s work on Canadian First Nations performance and Lynette Goddard’s on contemporary black British writers, Kate Newey’s writing on Victorian women playwrights and Melissa Sihra’s on Irish women playwrights.81 In the contemporary Anglophone theatre, projects like Margherita Laera’s Translating Theatre address the lack of foreign-language writers in the British theatre repertoire, particularly the dearth of new European plays in translation that appear on British stages.82 These examples and many others show the neglect and disappearance of plays and voices to be culturally and politically contextual, and their re-emergence indicates a performing of the previously unstageable that demonstrates awareness of social justice.

Contingency In what follows, I will be referring to the historical contingency of unstageability and theatrical impossibility. By this I mean that our ideas and concepts of what is unstageable for the theatre vary through historical and geographical specificity, over genre, style, form and content borders, and across political, ethical and ideological positions. The example of Joanna Baillie above gives an indication of how this might operate for a practitioner in contextual terms. Of course, this book also

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operates contingently, as its time of enquiry stops at publication. As you are reading it, the ongoing development of theatre’s staging possibilities presents continuing opportunities for the theatre to stage any number of playwrights’, directors’, dramaturgs’ or scenographers’ imaginings. The theatre is pursuing the future (where things will be stageable that seem to be unstageable now) or rejecting the past (where things now seem unstageable that were previously stageable). Either way, I seek to trouble easy assumptions about the fixity of unstageability, suggesting that the theatre can keep pushing its representational boundaries to discover new possibilities for staging. If the history of the theatre maps on to the history of ideas, the interlinked evolution of both histories encompasses possibility – including what the theatre is able to stage at any given time. Contingency thus provides a helpful theoretical framework for thinking about the unstageable due to its inextricable links to the idea of possibility and potential, and its reliance on interlinking networks of contexts. As Robin Mackay suggests, ‘contingency refers to the attempt to think events that take place but need not take place: events that could be, or could have been, otherwise’.83 Contingency in a business, budgeting or planning sense refers to the idea of providing for unseen possibilities or things that might happen. If the unstageable is contingent, it is reliant upon other factors and forces, or even determined by them. Accordingly, thinking contingency together with unstageability opens the theatre up to radical modes of engagement with possibility. Such thinking invokes Reza Negarestani’s assertion that ‘[c]ontingency is the concomitant expression of possibilities (any possibility regardless of its rational necessity) and no possibility at all – anything can happen, but equally, nothing might ever happen; it is the simultaneous suspense of infinite likelihoods and inexplicable frozenness’.84 In a way, this makes performing the unstageable a choice, a form of agency. This choice or agency belongs variously to theatre-makers at all levels of production. It emphasizes the idea that if unstageability is contingent, then its performance or staging may happen in a manner co-present with a

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range of contextual factors, but that such a happening is only one of many possibilities. While the precarity and potential lack of autonomy suggested in this thinking might be troubling, Mackay is also keen to point out the positivity inherent to a consideration of contingency and the work of art. He recognizes that if the postmodern condition is one of ‘mourning for lost certainties’, an understanding of contingency releases us from such a state and allows us to more helpfully consider ‘events that just strike, that befall us, from outside any pre-registered set of possibilities’.85 Applying this to the theatre, the creative spark engendered by working with what seems impossible to stage could be expanded and enhanced, as possibilities become limitless. Indeed, seen in this light, the contingency of the unstageable becomes a useful tool for navigating not just theatre, but the world more generally. The examples explored in Performing the Unstageable harness the relationship between impossibility and creativity in a variety of changing and contextual settings, but are united by the implicit or explicit optimism associated with performing what seems unstageable in a particular context.

Unplayable, imagined, invisible, untranslatable: Terminologies and tensions Other analyses of the role and function of impossibility in theatre and performance studies tend to emphasize aspects of the unstageable in terms of its relationship to failure or misperformance, to philosophical concepts of impossibility or invisibility, or to censorship. For example, Alice Folco and Sevérine Ruset have recently investigated the historical and contemporary resonances of ‘l’injouable’ (literally translated as ‘the unplayable’), which in French is a polysemic word used to bring together ‘everything that resists staging under a single term’, whether this is to do with theatre, opera, ‘music which defies/challenges interpretation’, video games or certain sports in relation to a difficult

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ball to hit or a difficult terrain to play (e.g. in golf).86 With a range of interlocutors across two edited journal editions and a number of international symposia looking mostly at European theatre, Folco and Ruset have led the charge to firstly historicize and contextualize the multiple definitions of unplayability established from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and then to explore their significance for theatre-makers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As they observe, the nineteenth-century French theatre considered ‘unplayable’ anything that did not seem immediately and obviously stageable. However, from the middle of the twentieth century, theatremakers began to prefer the openness and challenge associated with what seems unplayable, rather than considering the term as related to something that actors could not satisfactorily do. Folco and Ruset quote the director Antoine Vitez’s statement that ‘the dramatic work is an enigma that the theatre must solve … to play the impossible is to transform the stage and the work of the actor’, reminiscent of Heiner Müller’s sense of literature as a form of resistance to the theatre, which will be examined in Chapter 1.87 In French theatre, Folco and Ruset note that l’injouable has lost its essentialist meaning: using quotation marks, they refer to the ‘reputably unplayable’ or ‘a priori unplayable’. They also examine the idea of déjouer l’injouable, or foiling/outwitting the unplayable (a version of what we might call ‘staging the unstageable’ in English), looking at the complex or delayed route to production taken by various texts or theatre projects which offered ‘a particular resistance to the practitioners’, including the work of Jean Lambert-Wild, Sarah Kane, Maguy Martin, Falk Richter and Forced Entertainment.88 This recalls the examples of Baillie and Ibsen above and the relationship of resistance between text and performance as crucial to an understanding of how the unstageable is performed on the modern stage. Furthermore, in choosing to work on the word ‘unstageable’ as distinct from unplayable or unperformable, I am keen to emphasize the theatre stage as the space in and through which the unstageable is considered, dismissed, reinforced or performed into being. As mentioned above, in exploring what is or is not brought to

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the place of staging (as well as what is or is not performed or played once we arrive there), I encounter my project of impossibility. In his recent collection Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, Daniel Sack asks his multiple collaborators to imagine beyond theatre’s spatial, gravitational, temporal, political, linguistic and historical limits, and to look, think, dance and write into playfully defying what theatre can do. Reminiscent of Forced Entertainment’s Dirty Work in relation to its offer to the reader/audience, the value of the impossible or unstageable image, scene, world or action appears here as a creative energy, a source of power, a way of encouraging the theatre to keep pushing beyond its representational boundaries. Imagined Theatre’s ultimate challenge to the reader is to ask them to question whether anything is impossible for or in the theatre, using the impossible itself to show how much is possible. Paraphrasing Derrida’s words on the untranslatable, it is clear from Sack’s book that nothing is impossible, but the ‘impossible’ remains and should remain.89 The collection therefore operates as a theoretical guide to the impossible, suggesting a range of imagined actions and events that invite exploration of the borders of the possible for the theatre. As Sack writes, ‘Imagined Theatres gathers together what may initially seem impossible, in order that its readers might interrogate where that impossibility lies and what lies are obscured by calling it “impossible” (For is anything truly impossible in a theatre?)’.90 Sack’s offer invites us to see the imagination of impossible images as a positive thing, as something that generates flights of thought far beyond constraint. His argument is that an easy labelling of something as impossible requires further thought about the harm such categorization can invoke. Thinking this together with my own argument advances a subtly distinct point – to observe that nothing is impossible for the theatre is not identical to asserting that everything is possible for the theatre. For me, the question of whether anything is truly impossible in a theatre is extended through an analysis of how impossibility is acknowledged – not through the imagined construction of ‘so many birds that the flapping of wings is just one huge hum that the audience hears in their

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ears, in their sinuses, in the resonators of their bodies, their chests’, but the process of articulating the impossibility of such an image and the exploration of how a response to its writing can be evoked on stage.91 If we assume that nothing is impossible for the theatre, I argue that this obscures the value of the work of understanding and performing the unstageable in material terms. Thus, in Performing the Unstageable, I aim to make the implicit imaginative processes suggested by Sack explicit, not just by wondering what the theatre can do but beginning to understand how it does so in production. It is also important to acknowledge how this study sits alongside ideas of failure and misperformance in theatre and performance studies. In work by Sara Jane Bailes, Simon Bayly, Alan Read and Nick Ridout, seismic breakdowns or tiny collapses of theatre’s established practices and conventions (from acting to design to the role of the audience) encourage us to think about the terms of the theatre event and how we might trace and test its limitations, particularly in the postdramatic theatre.92 Ridout discusses theatre’s broader failure in terms of our contemporary unease at ‘its status as a bourgeois pastime’, as well as the inevitable breaking down of the ‘huge machine’ upon which theatrical production depends, and what is revealed in the accidents and misperformances of such breakdowns, from corpsing to audience participation to animals on stage.93 Read similarly makes a distinction between ineptitude on the part of the performer and any momentary (or otherwise) ‘collapse’ of the theatrical world on the stage.94 This sort of failure, for Read, tends to work on the audience in a captivatingly productive way, leading to ‘an increased level of attention and participation’, rather than distraction at the failure.95 Bayly devotes much of The Pathognomy of Performance to an examination of ‘the minor slips … that affect the undertaking of any complex enterprise’, in this case performance.96 Bailes is concerned with the failure of representation and theatre’s susceptibility ‘to all kinds of failure, especially when it is live’, examining performance theatre companies such as Forced Entertainment and Goat Island, whose work highlights the failure of the performer’s body to do something (Goat Island’s

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The Lastmaker) or explains what we could be watching if conditions were different to the way they are ‘tonight’ (Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular).97 Failure and unstageability are close companions, as both are concerned with the limits of what is possible and what happens when those limits are reached (and breached). Both are interested in the destabilization of binaries of correct and incorrect ways of staging and the multiplicity of approach opened up by this acknowledgement. Failure has been reclaimed performatively as a positive and generative force in contemporary theatre, although Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki observe in the recent Beyond Failure that ‘theatre’s relationship with failure is as ancient as the theatre itself ’, citing Aristotle’s discussion of hubris in the Poetics as the result of a failure to recognize one’s own limits.98 As Bailes reminds us, there is an implication that failure leads to learning or deeper knowledge (or better failing, in Beckett’s case), and the creative qualities of failure at the theatre are of value when studying impossibility and the unstageable. However, as Margaret Werry and Roisin O’Gorman point out, the neoliberal rhetoric that failure must make us stronger and more resilient (thus making us better at living in the late capitalist state of precarity) is perhaps less useful for theatre and performance than its role as a strategy of complex resistance.99 I see my work on unstageability as supplementary to these studies of the productive missteps of the theatre. If scholars of theatre and performance failures are primarily interested in what emerges when theatre breaks down in the face of its limitations and demonstrates ‘thing before us … coming undone’, I am trying to uncover what happens when theatre steps up instead. To apply this thinking to my four opening examples, the fact that Nadia Albina fails (and will continue to fail) to move the car tyre is subservient to the hopeful impossibility of the act in the first place. For me, this is not an action that is trying to articulate failure, or one that will split its representative seam and reveal the theatrical event in all its paradoxical pretence. It is an impossible act, an unperformable action, and its staging simultaneously acknowledges, disregards and reaches

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beyond its impossibility. Similarly, Colin Dunne’s project with the music of Tommy Potts is interesting to me not because of the moments of failure to connect, but because of the work in making the ‘undanceable’ album something to dance to and through. I am focused on the new abilities of the technologies Jackson deploys and the uncanny valley we negotiate as 1910s footage appears with twenty-first-century polish, rather than the gaps or slips between the historical material and its present-day reincarnation. Finally, John Cage’s ASLSP could be an illustration of the failure of spectatorship, as it will never be heard: for me, the impossibility of the task (combined with the optimism of the idea that the organ, the performance, and even human perception of art and music will see the piece to its conclusion in 2640) speaks to all the things we don’t and can’t know about time, space and the future. This study also owes a debt to the work of Andrew Sofer, particularly in relation to the literal unstageability of the offstage and the incorporealities of theatre. His book Dark Matter looks at ‘the “not there” yet “not not there” of theatre’ and takes seriously that which never appears on stage but cannot be regarded as absent as a result.100 Expanding discourse around liminality and the porosity of theatrical boundaries at spatial and textual levels, Sofer maps theatre onto quantum physics in order to present new insights on theatre’s known unknowns. In quantum mechanics, dark matter is invisible and we do not know what it consists of, but we know it must exist because of how our galaxies are held together and apart and how the universe is expanding. Back in the theatre, the quantum dramaturgy of the offstage can be understood in light of its departure from classical narrative conventions such as cause and effect, with indeterminacy and open probability of plot and character operating as prevailing characteristics. Thus, while offstage and invisible actions and locations are not stageable (or staged) for an audience, their indispensable existence through reference, disappearance and imagination allows Sofer to weave a phenomenology of the immaterial from masks to unseen or dead characters, from offstage sexual action to hidden traumas. The self-acknowledged ‘ontological fuzziness’ of his project reminds

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the reader of the value of thinking into theatre’s negative spaces and impossibilities without dismissing them out of hand, creating porosity between theatre’s fixed points and its more detachable, flexible mysteries. Impossibility remains an attractive area of study in related disciplines beyond theatre and performance studies. In translation studies, for example, the concept of untranslatability is a familiar and consistently investigated one. It represents ‘the conversion of translation failure into something of value and interest’, resting on the paradoxical central idea that equivalence of translation is an impossible task, that the perfect translation eludes the translator, but translation continues nevertheless.101 Equally, the word functions as a noun, and an untranslatable is ‘a term that is left untranslated as it is transferring from language to language … or that is typically subject to mistranslation and retranslation’, as Emily Apter writes.102 The publication of Barbara Cassin’s  2004 bestselling Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, translated (with all the appropriate freight associated with such a project in this context) ten years later as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, suggests a continuing appetite for thoughtfully, playfully and actively exploring the impossibility of translating words and texts between languages in philosophical and practical terms. Indeed, Cassin reminds us in her introduction that ‘[t]o speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question … are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating’.103 The position of the untranslatable at the heart of translation practice continues to be a satisfying paradox for theoreticians and practitioners to invoke. For example, the international group Outranspo, founded in 2012, consider untranslatability to be a generative challenge. Their trilingual name spells out ‘Ouvroir de Translation Potencial’, which could be translated into English (again, not unproblematically) as ‘workshop of potential translation’ (following the Oulipo – Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle – group from which Outranspo drew their inspiration). Outranspo’s collective work, amongst other things, has established a lengthy list of ‘translational prefixes’ or writing constraints. These

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prefixes include methodologies such as ‘soundtranslation’, which uses the sounds of words to construct intralingual translation. For example, in an article describing Outranspo’s multifaceted translations of Donald Trump’s tweets, group members Camille Bloomfield and Lily RobertFoley show that ‘We are not a democracy’ could be soundtranslated as ‘weary nod at a mock crazy’.104 At the theatre, the untranslatable can also appear as a strategy of untranslation, destabilizing the relationship between text and performance. Nina Raine’s play Tribes, about a family with three adult children, one of whom (Billy) is deaf, uses subtitles as a way of doing this. Audience subtitles emerge in the play when Billy is finding it impossible to express himself vocally to his family as he describes falling in love. As Raine’s text explains: ‘Subtitles start to come up as Billy struggles, with ends and beginnings of words, and they look at him, uncomprehendingly.’ From this point, spoken and subtitle (in bold) text appear in the script in tandem at various points, though the staging of Billy’s vocal language is untranslatable to his family: When I met her, something just clicked in my head. Billy  When I met her … something … jus … -lic … my head. It was like a light being lit in my mind. It was li … a ligh … be- li … in my mind. I thought, she’s the one. I tho – she – the … nn. I wanted to tell you. I -anted to -ell you.105

Later in the play, subtitles are also used to translate Billy and Sylvia (his girlfriend)’s BSL conversations, some of which are not interpretation or translation of the conversation underway in Billy’s family home, but are comments on events taking place or Billy’s family’s reactions. BSL is untranslatable for Billy’s family without his or Sylvia’s help (which they do not always provide). The audience’s understanding of more of the conversation than Billy’s family thus destabilizes vocality as central to

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the play at such points and positions the untranslatable as a key strategy for communication in the play, and as an image about connection and desire. Similarly, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Purgatorio positions the untranslatable as a subversion of visuality. In this piece about domestic life gone extremely wrong in a barely survivable way, we encounter a family of three – a husband and wife, and their son. During an offstage scene in which the son is sexually abused by his father, who has climbed a staircase to his room and left the space of our viewing, we hear shouts and moans from beyond the stage. Throughout the piece so far, surtitles have been projected onto a scrim stretched across the mouth of the proscenium, providing translations of the (French) spoken and unspoken action on the stage. The projected translation has been reliable up to this point (we assume), but during this scene, it sets up an alternative course of action, using stage directions. These stage directions, at the moment of the father’s movement towards his son’s (offstage) room, disengage from the action on the stage. In this other scene, described via the surtitles only, the father puts on some music and the family dances together. Pausing on the words ‘the music’, which remain projected onto the scrim for much of the scene, a clear separation between the vocal action on (and visual action off) the stage, and the alternative space set up by the surtitles, emerges. The untranslatability of the abusive act underway for the characters offstage recalls Apter’s definition above of the untranslatable term. Like mise-en-scène or déja-vu, the action of Purgatorio is left untranslated, and the action of its translation (the surtitles) describes something else entirely.

Performing unstageability Each of the book’s four chapters investigates a major area associated with theatrical impossibility: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. In Chapter 1, the productive resistance between text and performance is staged as an encounter with the unstageable

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stage direction. I offer a range of examples of exciting, provocative, impractical invitations from playwrights to production teams, and look at dramaturgical and scenographic responses. The technical, literal dimension of the unstageable (i.e. the relationship between the theatre’s technologies and capacities at a particular time or in a specific context) is a factor. However, the chapter focuses on the creative spark kindled by grappling with staging challenges in terms of dramaturgy and meaning, acknowledging the value of understanding unstageability in terms of what theatre can’t do (yet) and appreciating moments of ‘how did they do that?’ as experienced for audiences. In Chapter 2, I explore one of theatrical adaptation’s inherent characteristics – the gap between adapted text and adaptation. Following Frances Babbage’s call that the adaptation of literature at the theatre should (and must) harness its disruptions and dislocations productively, I argue that these impossibilities exist in an intramedial adaptation context also. I invoke Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (using Chekhov’s Platonov as an adapted text), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (using Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon as an adapted text) and Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (using F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in its entirety) in order to suggest a dramaturgy of impossibility, in which the adaptation specifically addresses the unstageabilities of its adapted text and generates new approaches to adaptation in the process. In Chapter 3, one of the theatre’s most ubiquitous and paradoxical unstageabilities is addressed. The theatre’s ability to stage unimaginable violence stems from its position as a space in which we can (almost, sometimes, mostly) safely explore and question the world and how we can explain it to each other. However, the lines between unstageability, unwatchability, social mores, desire and welfare become porous when we consider violence on stage. Using examples from the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, the work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Forced Entertainment and Tim Crouch, this chapter also looks at the work of the spectator, dissecting the relationship between what we see and what we are asked to imagine, and how the theatre performs unstageable violence and horror to its audiences.

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Finally, in Chapter 4, another persistent trope of the unstageable appears. The relationship between culture and its stagings of ghosts is long and complex, balancing our images of what cannot be seen with what is brought to the place of seeing. This chapter explores the Wooster Group’s Hamlet and Dead Centre’s Hamnet, creating a critical dialogue between scenography and meaning, citing costume, stage design and screen technologies in order to wonder about the stage ghost’s appearances and disappearances in these two productions. The ghost in Hamlet thinks with impossibility rather than about it, and this acceptance of performing unstageability creates a new encounter with ways of seeing and understanding. These examples are not intended to be exemplary. There is no perfect performance of unstageability, no ideal dramaturgical articulation of impossibility. The figures we will encounter as the gatekeepers of unstageability vary from directorial voices in our headphoned ears, to children staring at us, to whiteface makeup, to gold leather trousers. The examples I think through, about and within this book are thus offered to the reader as divergent approaches to and understandings of what the theatre might be up to when it works with texts, ideas, images or actions that seem resistant to staging. They occupy a range of genres, aesthetic and scenographic approaches, narrative and dramaturgical techniques. They were performed live in a range of spaces for multiple and different audiences, and many continue to be read as plays or engaged with as performance documentation. While they are mostly situated in theatre of the past twenty years, some reach right across the modern theatre period, permitting critical engagement with unstageability in theatres and societies beyond the immediately contemporary. This allows me to explore the generative creativity of performing unstageability in transgeographical and transhistorical capacities, without losing sight of contextual and contingent relationships across the book’s themes. The Anglophone theatre (primarily of Ireland, Britain and the United States) is a mainspring of Performing the Unstageable, with examples also drawn from French, Italian and German theatres. As the book’s central themes have unfolded, I have become increasingly aware that,

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while there may be unifying impossibilities across theatre traditions and contexts, the contingency of unstageability is paramount. With that in mind, I aim to provide some moments of pause on four key thematic areas – stage directions, adaptation, violence and ghosts – looking at particular approaches to these topics and the theatrical impossibilities they contain.

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1

Stage Directions

Look Back in Anger: Tensions between text and performance On the stage of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, time stands still for a moment. The actor Vanessa Emme pauses and stares at the actor Clare Dunne. Dunne stares back at Emme. Dunne is playing Alison in the Gate’s production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, directed by Annabelle Comyn. Emme appears in the same production, playing Helena. However, before we meet Helena in Act Two, Emme plays an actor who, sitting upstage right, reads Osborne’s stage directions into a microphone. Jimmy and Alison Porter’s flat appears in this production as a dank, grey pod, almost as if it has been dropped onto the Gate stage from another time or planet. Around and behind this pod, which includes a long, low window cut into its back wall, we can see many of the recognizable trappings of theatrical rehearsal and production, including the walls of the theatre space, costume rails, lights attached to bars, microphones on stands, trailing cables. A familiar tradition of realist acting plays out inside the Porters’ flat. Similarly, an identifiable approach to rehearsal or sound recording materializes in the offstage/ onstage world around the flat, with Emme’s neck and upper torso swathed in a thick scarf against the presumably chilly recording studio, a disposable coffee cup at her feet. The actors playing Jimmy, Alison and their friend Cliff are visible in the offstage/onstage space before Osborne’s play begins, chatting with Emme, stretching, drinking water and so on. Emme’s reading of Osborne’s stage directions so far has variously set the scene, described the action taking place on stage (in

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the flat) or given insight into characters’ psychologies. This has become a familiar part of the production. However, towards the end of Act One, Osborne’s stage direction reads as follows: He puts his face against her belly. She goes on stroking his head, still on guard a little. Then he lifts his head, and they kiss passionately.1

This direction appears during a rare moment when Alison and Jimmy are alone. After a scuffle between Jimmy and Cliff, during which Alison was injured, Cliff has gone to the local shop to buy cigarettes. Jimmy, in this private conversation, confesses that he injured Alison deliberately as an outlet for his sexual desire for her. Alison is confused by this (and in the audience, we already know that she is trying to find the words to tell Jimmy that she’s pregnant). At the Gate, Emme reads this stage direction aloud, as she has been throughout the act so far. As has also happened consistently so far, Ian Toner, playing Jimmy, has already anticipated the stage direction (or the stage direction has described an action he is already engaged in) and has his face in Dunne’s lap. Emme reaches the end of the stage direction. On stage, in the flat, Alison has not stroked Jimmy’s head, nor has there been a kiss of any kind. Dunne looks helplessly towards Emme, whose pointed pause after reading the stage direction begins to seem instructive, as if she’s silently asking Dunne to perform what she has uttered. Dunne’s performance of inability to comply with this stage direction is intensely readable to the audience. The Porters’ relationship is dysfunctional and exhausting. Alison is pregnant, injured and ‘not sure of herself’.2 While running their household, Alison also tends to Jimmy’s insecurities, absorbs his abusive comments and behaviours, and tries not to let her depression and disappointment completely overwhelm her in the meantime. In this moment, in having the stage direction read aloud and not fulfilled performatively by the actor, Comyn is indicating some sort of resistance between the text and its production. Furthermore, the production was performed in Dublin in the Gate Theatre in January  2018. In October  2017, Dublin-based theatremaker and activist Grace Dyas posted on her blog about the former

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artistic director of the Gate, Michael Colgan. In this piece, she accused him of sexually harassing and bullying her, showing screenshots of text messages between her and Colgan as part of her evidence.3 Dyas’s sharing of her story, which was picked up by Irish national media outlets including The Irish Times and RTÉ, empowered a number of other women to speak about Colgan’s similar behaviour towards them.4 In March 2018, the Gate (under the artistic directorship of Selina Cartmell since Colgan’s retirement in April  2017) released an independent investigative report into abuse of power at the theatre, including fourteen recommendations for future work at the theatre.5 Comyn’s production of Look Back in Anger was the first production to open at the Gate since the commissioning of the report in November 2017 and, as a play that revolves around an abusive relationship between a man and a woman, was loaded with additional freight of contextual meaning. The resistance demonstrated between Emme and Dunne in this moment could extend to a consideration of Osborne’s play more broadly, particularly in relation to its status within the dramatic canon. The allegations about Colgan revealed multiple stories of women being silenced by power, forced to do things they didn’t want to do, to be touched in ways they didn’t want to be touched. Osborne’s 1956 play sits at the heart of the twentieth-century Anglophone canon. It is considered to be a groundbreaking intervention into postwar British theatre and a catalyst for fundamental changes to how language, anger, politics and class were staged in the UK. The moment shared between Emme and Dunne, then, can arguably be read as an opposition to the word of men, or to the patriarchal (and in this country’s case, Catholic) status quo to which Ireland has so long been in thrall. In short, Dunne’s refusal to represent this stage direction encapsulates a turning of the tide in Irish theatre in  2017 and  2018, chiming with other recent national and international anti-harassment and empowerment movements and campaigns in the entertainment industries, including Waking The Feminists, Time’s Up and #MeToo. The above moment from Look Back in Anger thinks towards some of the key concerns of this chapter in three ways, although it is important to note that it is an unusual example to consider: stage directions are

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not normally read out to the audience. As Anne Ubersfeld observes, stage directions ‘determine a pragmatics’, and their realization in performance does not involve their utterance.6 Thus, if an audience member has not read a play in detail before attending a production (which is extremely unlikely for most theatregoers), they will have no idea which stage directions are being fulfilled or otherwise, and to what purpose. Nevertheless, the example from Comyn’s production allows for a departure point for further discussion. Firstly, it questions the relationship between text and performance, and shows how this relationship is productively problematized when written stage directions seem impossible to stage. Secondly, it reminds us that an unstageable stage direction does not have to be impossible on technical or conventional grounds (e.g. impossible to achieve due to budget constraints, theatre’s technological capabilities, a perception of the audience’s social mores). Thirdly, this example also advances a connection between stage directions and the political power of theatre production. As this chapter will illustrate, using a range of stage directions from the contemporary Anglophone theatre, stage directions represent a particular locus of unstageability. The resistance between the playtext and its production can be an ideological as well as an aesthetic or practical one. Furthermore, the status of the stage direction is fragmentary and hybrid. Even from a legal perspective, there is confusion about the extent to which copyright extends to stage directions in some context, particularly in relation to their staging for production.7 Stage directions occupy liminal space and uncertain status on the page and are positioned in different font styles to dialogue, with different indentation and formatting. Even taking into account the British theatrical tradition of deference to the writer, including their presence in rehearsals (especially for premieres), stage directions still seem more optional, more movable than dialogue. Patrice Pavis asserts that they ‘are not the ultimate truth of the text’ and notes that Edward Gordon Craig considered stage directions to be ‘an insult to his freedom’.8 With this in mind, the chapter will discuss the writing of unstageable stage directions as a form of creative resistance, a challenge from the

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playwright to the director, designer, production team and cast. Such moments of unstageability in playwriting create the opportunity for a dialogue to unfold, sometimes through huge swathes of time and space in the case of productions of extant plays, between playwrights and theatre-makers. This dialogue shows the relationship between text and performance to be a fluid spectrum. It both reinforces and challenges the centrality of the writer to the British/Anglophone theatre tradition. Understood in this light, the playtext is shown to be not just a blueprint or an instruction manual for putting a production of a play together but a provocative document of challenge. Ella Hickson makes the challenge inherent in this offer absolutely explicit in The Writer when she writes before Writer’s delivery of the first three stanzas of ‘Quarantine’ by Eavan Boland: ‘No pressure, but just in terms of defending the whole of art, this should be totally magic’.9 I suggest that any writer, in the creation of unstageable stage directions, is asking the production team not to replicate her image or idea, but to use it as a spur or an inspiration. Thinking diagrammatically, if the writer has travelled from (a) to (b) in their creative process towards writing the unstageable stage direction, it is my contention that the writer is suggesting to the production team that they do not pause at (b) and try to represent or replicate it, but that they travel onwards from (c) to (d), a further distance covered, but in a different capacity.

(a)    (b) (c) (d) (a)  Initial idea for stage direction (b)  Writing of stage direction (c)  Reading of stage direction (d)  Staging of stage direction In this chapter, and as Performing the Unstageable attempts to make clear throughout, there is no suggestion that the writing of unstageable stage directions necessitates that such stage directions will be (or

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must be) impossible to stage, paradoxical as this may seem. In the example above, Alison’s inability to kiss Jimmy or stroke his head did not stem from technical unstageability, but from a psychological and contextual impossibility stemming from the actor’s refusal to carry out the instruction. In what follows, I draw attention to impossibility as it reveals itself through stage directions, with a view to problematizing previously clear lines between what is stageable and what is unstageable, and thus to acknowledge the value of the impossible for theatre writing and making.

Stage directions: A history Moving swiftly through the history of stage directions (or didascalia) at the theatre reveals an evolution of function as well as of form and content. In the ancient Greek theatre, stage directions were largely implicit and were not written down in the way that we would recognize them today. Much of the didascalic text was written into the commentary of the chorus, explaining the action taking place and suggesting its motivations. Thus, implicit stage directions formed a crucial part of the dialogue, with all necessary staging information included therein, including references to setting, what Gay McAuley refers to as ‘textual space’.10 For example, in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the title character is chained to a rock at a cliff-edge of the Caucasus Mountains, as a punishment from the god Hephaestus for stealing fire. The action of the play (which consists of Prometheus’s conversations with a Chorus of Ocean’s daughters, Ocean himself, Io and finally Hermes) takes place at the cliff-edge and around it. Midway through the play, Io, a former priestess of Hera, enters. Io has been sexually pursued by Zeus, turned into a cow by his jealous wife Hera and condemned to wander the earth alone being constantly stung by a gadfly. In relation to the text, we understand that Io must have, at some stage between her entrance at line 561 and line 747, been on the rock with Prometheus and the Chorus and then come down from it, because at line 748 she

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announces that she ‘could climb to the lip of the precipice, dash myself down/And be quit of all my troubles’.11 Aeschylus only mentions this implicitly, and we understand retrospectively that the movement must have taken place. However, explicit clues to or hints at production also begin to appear in the ancient Greek plays. Peter Arnott finds fourteen marginal stage directions or notes (not intended to be spoken by the actors) across the extant plays which would conform to our definition of a stage direction today, mostly describing setting or set dressing (e.g. ‘high-encircling walls … doors wrought in bronze’ in Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis).12 By the Middle Ages, stage directions were referred to as ‘rubrics’ (from the Latin rubeus meaning red) and were written in red ink, with a clear separation from the dialogic text. In the mystery and morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the need to explain the separation between the different spheres of sky, earth, heaven and hell meant that precise description became increasingly necessary, and explanation more important. This emphasis on clarity of didascalic text led to opposition and conflict about how such text should appear on the page. A particularly heightened case of this appears in French theatre of the seventeenth century. As the discourse around stage directions became typographical and positional, different playwrights adopted different perspectives. Corneille wrote stage directions in the margins of the dialogue, but Racine and Molière favoured integration into the text (in the manner of the ancient Greek examples above). By the following century, Diderot’s discussion of the theatre and its apparatuses had moved the conversation towards an articulation of ‘pantomime’. For Diderot, ‘pantomime’ (far from its Anglophone meaning today) referred to a more natural gestural language for actors than the stylized and exaggerated gestural approach of conventional theatre at the time, and was the writer’s responsibility to write into a playtext before it was realized on stage. Essentially, Diderot suggests that stage directions should include a description of how the actor’s body and emotional landscape should perform, in a way that had not previously arisen in relation to stage directions. As he notes,

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Performing the Unstageable pantomime is part of the play … the author must seriously attend to it … if it isn’t familiar to him, he will neither be able to start, to carry out, nor to end his play convincingly … Stage directions are the simplest means by which the audience can learn what it can expect from its actors. The poet tells you: Compare this play with the one of your actors, then judge.13

Diderot’s words suggest a hierarchical relationship between the text on the page and in performance, almost as though the playtext and its stage directions work together to ensure that the actors can perform the play and that the stage directions give a clear sense of how a production might unfold.

Stage directions and impossibility: Closet drama and beyond The approach to stage directions espoused by Diderot was productively problematized from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries onwards, as the psychological and literary narrative powers of the stage direction became significant to playwriting and the status of the stage direction began to change. As Primož Vitez notes, stage directions during the twentieth century became ‘a true discourse’, urging a greater collaboration between the text and its didascalic writings.14 From this book’s perspective, an interaction with impossibility and unstageability lies at the heart of such discourse. Stage directions before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a timorous relationship with impossibility or the unstageable, with a functional, literal quality for the most part. However, as mentioned in the Introduction, writing dramas not intended to be staged permitted much more freedom when writing stage directions. While closet drama is not strictly part of the linear history of the stage direction as it was developing on stage, it seems crucial to include it as a moment when experimentation with stage directions began to evolve.

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Before the rise of closet drama, there are some notable exceptions that might be said to pave the way for later generations of writers to explore impossibility. A classic focus for this thinking is Shakespeare’s famous stage direction in The Winter’s Tale, written in 1609–11 and performed for the first time in May  1611: ‘Exit pursued by a bear’ (3.3.58).15 Significant to this stage direction is the lack of necessity to the plot that a bear kills the man he pursues, Antigonus, as he ‘could have conveniently perished with the offstage mariners’.16 Thus, it is interesting to speculate about possible meanings that could be derived from the image contained within the stage direction. Of course, much scholarship on this stage direction has explored the historical and contemporary possibilities for its staging, including the use of humans in bear costumes, flashes of lightning and shadows and, memorably, the use of two polar bear cubs given to James I in  1609 following an expedition to the Arctic. More significant to my purpose here is a consideration of what the idea or image of the bear might be doing in this stage direction. Why a bear? Potentially, the stage direction constitutes a genre-based shift from tragedy to comedy. Louise Clubb ventures that the use of the bear is an attempt by Shakespeare at creating a liminal space (though she does not use this term) between the urban and the rural, between evil and its possible remedies, and between tragedy and comedy. The very ambivalence of the bear as a figure or image, Clubb argues, contributes to this approach, as it is both more and less terrible than the other wild beasts, because it is humanoid, capable of upright posture, ambiguous in reputation and in habitat … If not completely at home in both pleasance and wood, it nevertheless moves between the two more easily and plays more roles in the human stories than can the other animals.17

With this in mind, if Shakespeare is encapsulating a desire for a kind of liminality in the figure of the bear and its seemingly unstageable act, the stage direction begins to take on a more porous status in relation to the text and its performance, appearing perhaps in the hinterland between the two.

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With this in mind, another way of thinking about impossible stage directions in theatre history is to consider a genre of playwriting that was written specifically to be read and not to be staged. As we have already seen, closet drama has been shown to be particularly useful throughout the centuries for those for whom the staging of their drama was not possible. For example, the work of women playwrights was not produced upon the stage for the first time until the mid-seventeenth century, and even then it appeared with limited regularity until the mid-nineteenth century. As a result, many women playwrights of this period chose to write closet dramas, plays that were written and read aloud in small domestic spaces, frequently accessible only through their bedrooms.18 The tradition of women’s closet drama was not the only function of the genre, however. There were particular times in particular places throughout history when no playwrights could have their plays staged. For example, in England in 1642, under the force of the Puritan Long Parliament, an ordinance was issued banning all public productions of stage plays, effectively closing down all theatres in England. The ordinance demanded that ‘public stage-plays shall cease and be forborne’ by stating that, as it was during the period of the Irish Confederate Wars (Eleven Years War) and simultaneously the first English civil war, fought between supporters of King Charles I and supporters of the Puritan parliament, ‘public sports do not well agree with public calamities’.19 This is not to say that no theatrical activity of any kind took place from 1642 until 1660, when the ordinance was lifted and the theatres reopened, as the ordinance’s reach did not extend to private performances. Furthermore, as P. A. Skantze reminds us, pamphlet writing was not covered by the ban, and in the hands of playwrights including John Milton and Richard Overton such documents became closet dramas of a kind, creating a ‘pamphletheatre’ that used theatrical techniques in a purely print-based format and had a far-reaching effect on English theatre in text and performance in the second half of the century.20 As the first civil war in England drew to a close in  1646,

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some theatres attempted to reopen at the beginning of 1648, only to be further overpowered by a subsequent Puritan ordinance, declaring that the Act of Stage-Playes, Interludes, and common Playes … hath beene prohibited by Ordinance of this present Parliament, and yet is presumed to be practised by divers in contempt thereof.21

As Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve observes, ‘[w]hen the Puritans passed a law suppressing plays, plays were really suppressed’.22 The abolishing of theatre licenses and literal demolishment of some theatre buildings forced many actors into service jobs and many playwrights, particularly those of a political bent, into various forms of closet drama. In terms of the content of closet drama and its stage directions, Martin Puchner describes how closet drama permits its writers to create forms more ‘exuberant’ than the fully staged theatre could allow. He discusses how closet plays such as Goethe’s Faust II and Flaubert’s La Tentation de Sainte-Antoine explore free-floating, often allegorical theatricality, whose constant changes of scenes, large casts of characters, sudden appearances and disappearances, and strategic mixture of hallucination and reality wilfully exceed the limits of theatrical representation.23

Further to possible characteristics of closet drama, Wiebe Hogendoorn, in ‘Reading on a Booke: Closet Drama and the Study of Theatre Arts’, assembles what he sees as some of these traits. Hogendoorn notices, ‘a lack of action or dramatic impulse, excessive length or time span, technically unfulfillable stage directions, a super-abundance of characters or locales, and/or a weight of abstraction considered unsupportable in theatrical terms’.24 As mentioned already, Kimberly Jannarone, in her discussion of the purposeful unstageability of Alfred Jarry’s Caesar Antichrist, similarly recognizes the ‘complete abstraction, allegorization, unlimited scope, exuberant actions beyond stageability’ possible for closet drama stage directions.25 As Marta Straznicky observes,

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Performing the Unstageable stage directions in the closet plays are often expansive, ranging well beyond basic indicators of action to encompass matters of costume, scenery, mood, motivation, attitude, and even narrative details from earlier in the play. Such descriptive, as opposed to imperative, directions are more characteristic of the study than the stage, and even resemble in several of the plays the introspective techniques of prose fiction.26

The elaborate nature of the closet play’s stage direction here is ‘presumably … a substitute for the visual experience of playgoing’.27 For example, in Aristomenes by Anne Finch, published in 1713, we see this unusual approach to stage directions take shape. Towards the end of the play, the titular character, about to lead his army into battle, makes a rousing speech to the soldiers. He embraces his key commander, Demagetus, and then turns to his son, Aristor: He embraces Aristor, but seems disorder’d, and not to feel him in his Arms, which he often clasps about him. Aristom  Thou dost not fill my Arms, ‘tis Air I grasp: Nor do my Eyes behold thee – Where is my Son, ha! Where is my Aristor? Aristor  Here my dear Lord, here pressing to your Bosom. His Voice seems to Aristomenes to be low and different from what it was usually.28

These two stage directions, written for a closet drama audience, invoke a peculiar blend of the psychological, the speculative and the subjective. Recalling Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy and its hallucinatory power over him, Aristomenes appears to be having a premonition of some kind. If so, his unsettled feelings are warranted: upon finding his lover, Amalintha, injured following a kidnapping attempt by the evil Clarinthus, Aristor will, by ‘Opening his bosom’, kill himself.29 Aristomenes is, with difficulty, restrained by Demagetus and others from following suit. Furthermore,

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the use of ‘seem’ across both stage directions hints at Finch’s ability to see the stage direction as a descriptive tool, a borrowing from prose fiction-writing techniques. The second direction in particular is not straightforwardly interpretable. The actors playing Aristomenes could perhaps show surprise or disbelief at hearing Aristor’s voice at this point, but nevertheless, the stage direction seems more interested in suggestion and inspiration rather than fulfilling an objective. In many ways, Finch’s writing here anticipates many examples of stage directions from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century playwriting and even the work of writers such as Eugene O’Neill, who frequently employed the stage direction as a mode of discussion about what was going on within a character’s mind. A novelistic, almost cinematic convention emerged in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage directions, which often gave a huge amount of detail about set design, stage furniture, suggested casting and the world beyond the play, particularly in the opening stage direction. These descriptions were rarely stageable, either to the degree of accuracy required or because of their internal or psychological dimensions. Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) begins with a long description of every aspect of the manor kitchen, including its building materials and decoration, from the ‘big cook-stove built of glazed bricks’ to ‘two shelves … trimmed with scalloped paper’ and ‘a big Japanese spice pot full of lilac blossoms’. The start of Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919) is just one example of the writer’s altering of the printed playtext form to include prefaces and passages of narrative, veering away from technical stage business and towards intricate description. Not only are we presented with a description of every item in the room of Captain Shotover’s chaotic boat-shaped house, Shaw relates precisely what can be seen from its windows, and thus where the house is situated. Ellie Dunn is described in no less detail, before a word has been spoken. Eugene O’Neill describes the atmosphere rather than the aesthetic of Professor Leeds’s study in Strange Interlude (1928). The unstageable emotional instruction is one of many O’Neill stage

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directions that could have been part of the New York Neofuturists’s playfully farcical show The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill Volume 1 in 2012 (Volume 2 followed in 2014): [A] cosy, cultured retreat, sedulously built as a sanctuary where, secure with the culture of the past at his back, a fugitive from reality can view the present safely from a distance, as a superior with condescending disdain, pity, and even amusement.

Finally, Act One of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) opens with a description of Mrs Alving’s garden room and its position on the edge of a ‘gloomy fjord landscape … veiled by steady rain’. Act Two opens with ‘The same room’ and Act Three with ‘The same’. On stage, the unchanging nature of the set design would make it clear that the setting was identical throughout the play. Ibsen’s repeated stage directions, visible only to the reader, give us further insight into the unchanging nature of the characters’ morals and ideologies and the extreme damage that this causes. The influence of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total theatre, or a fully coherent presentation of text, performance and all aspects of mise-en-scène) combined with the rise of naturalism on the stage (trying to present a true likeness of reality) and an increasing interest in the psychological workings of the inner life of the mind can all be seen in the above stage directions. Furthermore, Puchner has suggested that this approach to didascalic writing may have been indicative of the modern drama as a reading drama, but that the tendency towards elaboration was in fact concerned with performance: ‘language that mediates, describes, prescribes and interrupts the mimetic space of the theatre’.30 Later in the twentieth century, the attempts made by the earlier writers above to create extensive and naturalist articulations of space and character (though still evident in the works of playwrights such as Arnold Wesker) gave way to a more experimental range of approaches to expressing language and working with theatre texts and stage directions, a shift away from psychological realism and emotion. An extract from the opening of Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls (1976) reads:

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Pacing: starting with right foot (r), from right (R) to left (L), with left foot (l) from L to R. Turn: rightabout at L, leftabout at R. Steps: clearly audible rhythmic tread. Lighting: dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head. Voices: both low and slow throughout.31

While this may appear to be an extremely controlled and controlling direction, its openness is deceptive. There are multiple approaches to taking a pace, even one for which length and direction are prescribed. We should hear the ‘clearly audible rhythmic tread’ of the steps, but this could appear in various ways. Enoch Brater has written about the steps in Footfalls tracing, endlessly, the infinity symbol on the stage floor, another clue that Beckett is keen ‘to point out the possibilities, limitations, and relativities implicated in our perception of time and space in his theatre’.32 As actor Sam McCready puts it, ‘Beckett defines the limits; accept those limits and you become alive in a fresh, unencumbered way.’33 The (re)turn to minimal or no stage directions in the plays of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers as varied as Gertrude Stein, debbie tucker green, Horton Foote, Simon Stephens and Caryl Churchill embraces an increasingly porous relationship between text and performance, with fewer instructions or directions from the playwright. However, some of the examples below explore a twenty-first-century approach to many of the above tactics of the history of the impossible or unstageable stage direction, creating new understandings of the textual offer from the writer towards the theatre space and the bodies it contains.

Writing about stage directions A survey of the critical literature on stage directions reveals a largely semiotic approach to their analysis, stemming mostly from the so-called ‘semiotic turn’ in theatre and performance studies in the  1970s and  1980s, and dating broadly from the  1980s and  1990s in terms of publication. To take a few examples: in a still frequently referenced resource for undergraduates in the UK, Elaine Aston and

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George Savona’s 1991 book Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance explores the semiotic approach to theatre in terms of a specific methodology for analysis. In looking at stage directions, they note that this area remains an ‘underdeveloped topic’, possibly due to reader perceptions regarding stage directions as interruptions – they are not what the reader is looking for when she is reading a play.34 With this in mind, Aston and Savona offer a way of semiotically reading the stage direction from the page towards the stage, creating categories for the stage direction that take in the ‘functionalistic’, ‘sociometric’, ‘atmospheric’ and ‘symbolic’ properties that didascalia might encapsulate.35 Such categorization also extends to the typifying of stage directions. Aston and Savona’s final tally reveals fifty-seven different types of stage direction, from ‘intra-dialogic technical elements’ (e.g. in Hedda Gabler, ‘Just draw the blinds, my dear, will you? That gives a softer light’) to ‘extra-dialogic reaction’ (e.g. in Top Girls, ‘They are quite drunk. They get the giggles’).36 Michael Issacharoff understands stage directions as ‘potential speech acts … one of the major forces contributing to the cohesion of the dramatic script’.37 In Discourse as Performance, Issacharoff acknowledges the complexity of the question of what stage directions are, where they belong and what should be done with and for them. For him, ‘the focus of didascalia is usually not the content of an utterance as much as the material circumstances of its production as envisaged by the author’.38 This differs from Aston and Savona in so far as the latter claim the relevance of intra-dialogic stage directions, and Issacharoff does not consider these to be part of the stage direction category. However, he notes that the author’s voice is always present in the didascalia and that this could be considered to be a metatext, creating what he refers to as a ‘stereophonic’ effect – the voice of the writer in the didascalia, combined with the voices of the players in the dialogue.39 As Aston and Savona do, Issacharoff too attempts a classification of stage directions, with four distinct types – extratextual, autonomous, unreadable and ‘normal’ – and two different functions – verbal and visual.40 Quite apart from the difficulties of a taxonomy of ‘normal’, it is interesting to

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note that the ‘readability’ of Issacharoff ’s ‘unreadable’ stage directions refers to a lack of poetry or lyricism and an emphasis on technical terminology ‘intended solely for the stage manager or the producer’.41 For Issacharoff, the value (and readability) of a stage direction appears to be directly related to the poetic quality of its writing. Another classification of stage directions comes from Marvin Carlson, who, like Issacharoff, looks thematically across stage directions in terms of what they do to or for the text, revealing ‘attribution’ (identification of which character is speaking), ‘structural’ (the division of the play into units), ‘locational’ (the identification of new scenes or acts), ‘character description’, ‘technical’ (lighting, sound and other technical indicators) and ‘conduct of actors on stage’ as categories.42 However, unlike Issacharoff, Carlson disagrees with the idea of the stage directions forming a ‘mediating text’ that disappears during the performance of a play – for Carlson, the audience still ‘reads’ the stage directions, but in a different way (we read the resulting image on stage). He notes that a complete survey of didascalia today would have to include some that in fact could never or could only with great difficulty be realized on the stage, and which are written not to guide stage realization but for the understanding and enjoyment only of the reader.43

The implication of this thinking for the relationship between text and performance is less a strategy of productive resistance and more one of resigned defeat. Carlson suggests here that impossible or difficult stage directions should remain on the page, with the reader, and does not consider the idea of a creatively resistant relationship between the stage direction and its production. I will argue below that Sarah Kane’s Cleansed provides us with a clear example of a play in which the most challenging stage directions are intended to be just that – a challenge to future directors and designers, and not text-bound ideas residing only in the mind of the reader. Helpfully, Patrice Pavis differentiates between the semiotics of text and the semiotics of performance and makes a clear distinction between

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stage directions and mise-en-scène.44 He embraces the ‘uncertain’ textual status of stage directions and rejects the notion that they might be considered part of a ‘recipe’ – as if, when stage directions are combined with the text in the correct way, a performance can be produced, like a cake.45 The complexity Pavis hints at is further compounded when the idea of what we might think of as unstageable stage directions is considered. This option is not explored by any of the semioticians of stage directions (Carlson’s dismissal notwithstanding), and it is not difficult to see why. The emphasis on classification and taxonomy in the semiotic approach would leave no room for conceptual or abstract considerations of stage directions, or what it might mean (politically or theatrically) for a writer to create a stage direction that is specifically intended to be impossible for the theatre (at any given time) to stage. In terms of approaching the topic, many scholars who write about and analyse stage directions tend to explore them using a taxonomic and/or comparative methodology. For example, there is a significant body of work on stage directions of the English Renaissance and early modern theatre, particularly regarding Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Much of this work is primarily interested in comparing editions of texts with each other, noting differences, omissions or idiosyncrasies in stage directions which have travelled, piecemeal, through time to the present day, turning up on the page in edition after edition.46 A key voice in this discussion is Alan Dessen, whose exhaustive work mapping early modern stage directions has allowed for significant quantitative clarity on how these directions functioned and what their purpose might have been. For example, in a  2001 article, substantiating his  1999 A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama,  1580–1642, Dessen methodically works through the  500–600 extant plays of the British Renaissance, searching for mentions of the body or body parts and anatomizing stage directions from head to toe.47 This comprehensive survey work is important for any consideration of how stage directions function and how they might contribute to meaning-making at various points in time and on various international stages. However, narrowing the focus considerably, my purpose for the

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remainder of this chapter is to analyse in some detail a short selection of stage directions that encapsulate elements of the contemporary unstageable stage direction. In discussing unstageable stage directions on the contemporary (mostly Anglophone) stage, I am deploying three groupings for what follows: Body Parts, Stage Moves and Imagination Drives. Exploring the connections between impossibility and stage directions in contemporary theatre, I find that some of the most noteworthy of these arise broadly in relation to either the body (of the actor or character) or the space (of the setting or the theatre). In addition to this, I will look at some stage directions that do not necessarily pertain to either grouping, but which articulate imaginative possibility and encapsulate a sense of thinking beyond theatre’s conventions at a particular time. Unlike the more structuralist or semiotic approaches described above, these categorizations are not intended to be instructive or exclusive, nor do they denote a prescriptive set of characteristics or instructions. However, the bracketing together of stage directions in the below clusters contributes to the understanding of how unstageability is conceptualized by writers and why it might be appealing to theatre-makers. In what follows, a discussion of both text and performance is significant to our understanding of unstageable stage directions and how they make meaning. As I have shown, closet drama’s unbounded exploration of stage directions contributes significantly to the history of the impossible stage direction on the page. However, the relationship between the stage direction in the context of the playtext and how it is explored by a director, actor, designer and production team provides further evidence that unstageability is a compelling and creative force in theatre-making. If the stage direction remains within the pages of the playscript, its potential explosive power as a challenge to theatre cannot be unleashed. Thus, the critical investigations of the stage directions below will frequently reach across their text and performance iterations. Beginning to theorize this sense of what unstageable stage directions might be said to be or to do in the work of the playwright recalls Heiner Müller’s view that dramatic literature’s relationship to the theatre should

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appear as a particular concern of the playwright’s vision for theatre writing and practice. Müller notes in 1975 that ‘literature has the task of offering resistance to the theatre’, a sentence that has gathered force in the four decades since it was first uttered.48 It seems that the notion of a literature that compels theatre to reinvent its forms, and reconsider the functions of representation every time it produces a dramatic work, shows the literary unstageable to be an agent of resistance within literature, a challenge to the theatre at all levels. This challenge, for Müller, is not merely formal, but political and structural. The resistance between literature and theatre is not change for change’s sake, but an attack on the institution of the theatre. A focus on unstageable stage directions provides an effective illustration of Müller’s call, as a stage direction (not intended to be spoken on stage) encourages a conversation about the relationship between text and performance and engenders a series of choices about this relationship. Müller also notes in the same interview that ‘[o]nly when a text cannot be done the way the theatre is conditioned to do it, is the text productive for the theatre, or of any interest’.49 He discusses in detail this relationship between text and theatre, a relationship that he saw more as a challenge from one medium to another, in this case from text to theatre. Müller takes the position that the playwright should not continually think of a play in terms of a potential production, as this stifles both the playwright and the writing. He mentions that ‘[t]here are enough plays which serve the theatre the way the theatre is’, and so it is clear that his interests lie in creating texts that move away from this subordinate role and instead use text as a confrontational tool in order to spur theatre into a constant state of reawakening and rethinking of its own representational boundaries.50 More generally, the power of stage directions as a locus for examining this resistance and challenge lies in the ability of stage directions to create a world beyond what is immediately said on stage. Müller’s own Hamletmachine, which will be discussed below, explores the stage direction’s possibilities along these lines, thinking away from direction or instruction and fully towards challenge, defiance and confrontation.

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Body Parts When a stage direction calls for an onstage body to be forcefully altered in some way, a particular relationship is set up between the text, the performer and production team, and the audience. Inevitably, a direction to harm the body of the character draws attention to the corporeality of the actor playing that character, and the two can become indistinguishable even as we recognize they are discrete. From an audience perspective, and borrowing from Bert O. States, ‘something indisputably real leaks out of the illusion’; we are asked to engage with the paradox that the character’s body is injured or destroyed, while the body of the actor (we presume and hope) remains intact.51 As Chapter 3 will demonstrate, announcing or reinforcing the fictive nature of physical violence or blood on the stage often does nothing to mitigate against a reaction of disgust (pleasurable or otherwise): it can distort and enhance it. The relationship between violence and impossibility at the theatre may at times refer to unstageable technological feats, but much more often communicates the theatre’s position as a privileged space for the articulation of otherwise unspeakable horrors. Gore and bodily fluids are challenging to stage, but the impossibility contained within such images or stage directions is frequently aiming to reach further than our instant reactions of recoil or disgust, towards the aspects of life we find hopeless or unmanageable, and how bodies, spaces and imaginations can show us other ways to be. Thus, an examination here of a short selection of stage directions specifying impossible bodily violence will begin to articulate the gaps between unstageability and staging that this book is concerned to uncover throughout. A famous starting point for considering this type of stage direction can be seen in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In this play, Tamora’s revenge on the title character, Titus, a Roman general who has taken her captive, is played out by her sons Chiron and Demetrius. They rape Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, and cut her tongue and hands from her body. This action happens offstage in the script (though many contemporary

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productions stage aspects of it), but Lavinia’s entrance in Act  Two, Scene Four shows ‘her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out and ravisht’.52 The acts of rape and violence are described in this scene by Lavinia’s uncle, Marcus Andronicus, in a manner that recalls the ancient Greek theatrical tradition of violence being enacted offstage and described onstage (as with Oedipus blinding himself in Oedipus Rex, described by a Messenger after the fact, or Medea’s murder of her children, whose bodies emerge on a chariot from the skene building after their death). As David Palmer puts it in a description of Marcus’s speech, ‘[this] lament is the expression of an effort to realise a sight that taxes to the utmost the powers of understanding and utterance … Marcus’ formal lament articulates unspeakable woes’.53 Of course, referring to this stage direction as straightforwardly unstageable or impossible would be inaccurate. Titus Andronicus is frequently staged, and the approach to Lavinia’s entrance in  2.4 is explored in a range of ways. For example, Peter Brook’s 1955 seminal production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Laurence Olivier as Titus and Vivien Leigh as Lavinia, featured red ribbons streaming from the latter’s arms and mouth. This chimes with Eugene Waith’s observation that having Lavinia onstage obstructs the poetry of the language and its aim to encourage the audience or reader to picture images in their minds. For Waith, ‘[a] physical impersonation of the mutilated Lavinia should not block our vision’ (vision in this context being our imagination as audience members).54 Lucy Bailey’s production for the Globe in 2006 (revived in 2014) took a spectacularly gory approach to the violence in the play, with blood pouring from Lavinia’s mouth, and spectators fainting in their dozens. This addition of literal unwatchability in the audience suggests that the impossibility of this stage direction (or its trace) is to do with horror rather than logistics – through fainting, the body signals its inability to witness. The impossibility remains a paradox. Of course the actor’s hands and tongue are not cut off. However, the choice Bailey makes (as we will see with Katie Mitchell’s production of Cleansed below), foregrounding a quasi-naturalistic style of performance, requires the audience to focus solely on the impossibility of what is happening at that moment.

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However, a crucial clue to the utilization of a stage direction as a strategy of resistance between text and performance (even in the early modern period) can be found two scenes later. Shakespeare’s love of puns and wordplay has been widely documented, and in Act  Three, Scene Two, Titus (who in the previous scene sacrificed his own hand in exchange for the lives of his sons) is in conversation with Marcus about the violent events that have occurred. Titus, in asking Marcus to change the subject, says, ‘O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none.’55 In the midst of a despairing and outraged speech, this moment of wordplay seems enticingly incongruous and hints at comedy in the midst of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy. This thread runs through the following discussion of examples from Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, reinforcing JL Styan’s lyrical musing about thrusting the ridiculous into the tragic and bringing an additional facet to an exploration of seemingly unstageable stage directions: If hot steel is plunged into cold water, there is a tempering; if yellow is poured over blue, there is a new colour, the brighter for the brightness of the originals. In dark comedy there are moments when, in counterpointing [their] effects, the author takes [their] play to the very edge of disintegration.56

Cleansed In a discussion about her first play, Blasted, during an interview with Dan Rebellato, Kane remarks that ‘what I attempted to do and I think I probably succeeded, was to create a form for which I couldn’t think of an obvious direct precedent’.57 Kane seems to be indicating here that she aims for her writing to push theatre in new directions, presumably without a clear set of rules for how to approach production. In the same interview, discussing her third play, Cleansed, she notes that the play ‘can only be done in the theatre. It may not be represented naturalistically. It’s completely impossible to do Cleansed naturalistically. I wanted to do something that was totally theatrical’.58 David Greig, in his introduction

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to Kane’s Complete Works, develops this point, observing that ‘[e]very one of her plays asks the director to make radical staging decisions … In a Kane play the author makes demands but she does not provide solutions’.59 While it is unlikely that she read the Müller interview cited above, and while authorial intent remains a shaky terrain for discussion of performance in the wake of poststructuralism, a similar impulse towards exploring the resistance between literature and theatre seems to be an initial writing motivation for Kane. Simon Hattenstone notes that ‘Sarah Kane went to university wanting to be an actress. She then realised that actors were powerless, so she decided to direct. She then realised that there was hardly anything she wanted to direct, so she began to write’.60 The idea that ‘literature has the task of offering resistance to the theatre’, as Müller advocates, is integral to Kane’s third play, Cleansed. As Kane suggests about her play, ‘[t]he only thing that could ever be done with it was it could be staged … [y]ou may say it can’t be staged, but it can’t be anything else either’.61 The contradictory idea of a writer insisting on the theatricality of her play, while acknowledging its huge challenges for production purposes, seems to encompass precisely Müller’s directive. The seemingly unstageable permeates Cleansed from beginning to end, particularly in terms of its stage directions, and yet (as with many of the examples in this chapter) it has been staged numerous times by many different directors around the world. Cleansed looks at the theme of forbidden and all-consuming love amongst the inhabitants of an ominous institution, which has been set up in a university campus. The inmates of this place are controlled by Tinker, a puzzling, violent figure who inflicts various brutal tortures upon his detainees (Carl’s tongue, hands and feet are removed; Grace is raped and beaten; Graham is given a lethal dose of heroin; Robin is force-fed a box of chocolates), apparently in a bid to test their capacity for love. The seeming unstageability of this play stems in many ways from the stage directions, redolent of Antonin Artaud’s The Spurt of Blood in their determined Surrealism. For example, images such as ‘The rats carry Carl’s feet away’62 or ‘Out of the ground grow daffodils. They burst upwards, their yellow covering the entire stage’63 could be said to correspond to conventional

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notions of what seems very difficult or impossible to stage. Indeed, until Katie Mitchell’s 2016 production for the National Theatre (Kane’s debut at the theatre, seventeen years after her death in 1999), the only high-profile professional productions of Cleansed in the UK since its premiere in 1998 had been rehearsed readings, notably at the Royal Court in 2001, and the Sheffield Crucible in 2014. At both of these readings, the stage directions were read aloud by actors, placing them firmly in the context of the play’s dialogic encounters. Ken Urban notes that, at the Royal Court, [e]ven though the stage directions were merely read … the play had the impact of a punch in the gut … Tinker performs unspeakable, not to mention unstageable acts … [but] hearing each one listed by Macdonald [the director] conjured up images horrifyingly imaginable.64

Arguably, the simple fact that Cleansed appeared in these incarnations as a reading and not as a production can be seen as evidence that Kane’s attempt to create resistance between literature and theatre through use of a logistical unstageable succeeds. It seems from Urban’s observation above that merely hearing the stage directions read aloud almost makes theatre recoil somewhat, leaving it to the audience’s imagination to fill in the unstageable gaps. Additionally, it could be argued that the unstageability of the seemingly unstageable stage directions becomes displaced in a rehearsed reading context. The impossibility of daffodils covering the stage or rats eating people’s hands, or indeed the entire idea of amputating parts of Carl though the actor’s body remains unharmed, becomes less of a problem when it is confined to the imagination. As an aural spectator, the irreversibility of decisions, the indivisibility of decisions and actions and the circulation of love and other interrelational business come to the surface readily in the context of a rehearsed reading, and are potentially more fascinating to the mind than the question of how to inject heroin into an eyeball on the stage. Indeed, Kane’s own awareness of this challenge becomes more obvious when individual stage directions are read and analysed. For example, a direction such as ‘[Tinker] takes Carl by the arms and cuts off his hands’ will pose some obvious problems to a naturalistic approach.65

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Perhaps the production team practise sleight of hand, bulk-buy fake blood, block the actual ‘cutting’ moment from the audience’s view by clever staging and so on. Indeed, Katie Mitchell’s production in 2016 involved the chilling placement of a square of plastic sheeting on the floor,66 the wheeling on of a large box-shaped machine into which Carl’s hands (and later, feet) were inserted. We heard a sickening whizzing noise, screams from Carl, the withdrawal of his mangled, bloodied hands from the box and the removal of all evidence as quickly as possible, leaving Carl writhing in agony on the floor. However, returning to the text, an additionally interesting hint about a possible interpretation of this moment can be found in the reading of a stage direction that follows. Kane tells us that ‘Carl tries to pick up his hands – he can’t, he has no hands’, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Titus’s punning plea to Marcus above.67 The sinister comedy and humorous observation here could be read as a conscious nod to the theatres and practitioners that will house and produce the work. Again, audiences watching a production of Cleansed would not necessarily be aware of the humour of the writing of such a stage direction, but that fact can also be seen as an added challenge from literature to theatre, from writer to director. If humour is inherent even in the writing of something that the audience will not usually see (or interpret as funny even if Carl does try to pick up his hands), it could suggest that the writer is not primarily concerned with the naturalism of the production, or even with the logistics of theatre production at all. Kane seems to posit that it should not be crucial to adhere to every detail in as realistic a fashion as possible, but rather that the impossibilities she has created are embraced in the same spirit in which she has embraced the impossibilities of love in the play. She spoke in interview about the staging of this particular moment, commenting that I think the less naturalistically you show these things the more likely people are to be thinking ‘what is the meaning of this act’ rather than ‘fucking hell, how do they do that!’ That’s a far more interesting response to elicit from an audience.68

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The Beauty Queen of Leenane In Martin McDonagh’s 1996 play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the most challenging stage direction in the play appears in Scene Seven but is set up in Scene Two. The play revolves around Mag and Maureen Folan, a mother (aged seventy) and daughter (aged forty), living together in the rural community of Leenane in the west of Ireland. Mag appears to us as a selfish, childish, manipulative, frail and lonely woman, and Maureen as a trapped, frustrated, mentally ill carer with nobody else in her life. Their relationship is violently dysfunctional, though appears to be based on some kind of codependent love. The action of the play springs to life when Maureen re-establishes a connection with old flame Pato Dooley, briefly returned to Leenane from a job in London to attend a going-away party for his uncle, who is himself returning to Boston after a summer holiday at home in Ireland. Mag, wise to the implications of Maureen falling in love and moving away from her, does everything in her power to sabotage any chance of a relationship. Crucially, Pato writes to Maureen, asking her to join him in his planned emigration to America. Mag intercepts the letter and burns it. Upon finding this out, Maureen tortures her mother with scalding oil and flees the house to try and connect with Pato before he leaves. Back home, in a monologue delivered to Mag (who appears in silhouette in her customary rocking chair), Maureen describes how she caught Pato in time, and that a romantic reunion scene occurred, complete with kisses through the open window of a train, and assurances to join him in Boston within the week. However, the end of this monologue reveals that Mag is dead and that Maureen has killed her with a poker. In the play’s final scene, we learn from Pato’s brother Ray Dooley that the information in Maureen’s monologue was a hallucination or figment of her imagination (Pato travelled by taxi, and there is no train station in Leenane), and that Pato has left for America and is engaged to another woman. The final image of the play is Maureen leaving the house with a suitcase.

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A focus on Maureen’s torture of Mag in Scene Seven articulates another example of the close relationship between impossible stage directions and comedy, though we begin with horror and terror. The stage direction reads: Maureen slowly and deliberately takes her mother’s shrivelled hand, holds it down on the burning range, and starts slowly pouring some of the hot oil over it, as Mag screams in pain and terror.69

In the Druid production in 2016, directed by Garry Hynes, Aisling O’Sullivan performed this stage direction with precision, care and breathless slowness. This pace and deliberateness is significant in the writing of the stage direction and was followed through by O’Sullivan – it reminds us that Maureen has been driven mad by her situation, or perhaps that she has not recovered from the instance of mental illness she suffered in England, for which she appears to have been institutionalized, before being released into the care of her mother. The stage direction was performed in a recognizably realistic way, without applying metaphor or an abstract approach – the pain and violence were clear and unambiguous, and evoked vocal audience responses of gasps and groans. Marie Mullen as Mag roared in pain when her hand was forced to the hot stove and recoiled desperately in horror and agony as Maureen poured the chip pan of boiling oil onto her. Despite the melodramatic nature of the scene, the Grand-Guignolesque violence of the stage direction did not appear to be titillating or exaggerated in performance, but a cold and clinical violence borne of Maureen’s long life of pain and suffering at the hands of her mother. The Druid production’s casting of Marie Mullen as Mag invites further interpretation of this particular stage direction. Mullen had played Maureen in the original production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996, and her return to the stage as Mag created additional meaning for Maureen’s torture of her mother: in so doing, she is torturing herself, and a further structural mirror appears within the play. The same stage direction played twenty years later sees the torturer become the tortured and suggests an

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additional layer of impossibility – the Folans’s inability to escape their relationship and its violence. Furthermore, a comedic twist is found by the end of the scene, allowing McDonagh to join Kane and Shakespeare in the context of this chapter’s articulation of the close relationship between impossibility and humour, ambivalence and uncertainty. Following Maureen’s burning of Mag’s hand, body and face as the scene progresses, Maureen ‘steps over Mag, who is still shaking on the floor, and exits through the front door’.70 However, after a pause, Maureen ‘breezes back in’, having forgotten her car keys. As the stage directions tell us, ‘She grabs her keys from the table, goes to the door, turns back to the table and switches the radio off … She exits again, slamming the door’.71 The (frequently bashful) return to a scene to retrieve something forgotten, having departed from the stage in a temper, has a long tradition in theatre and screen comedy. Another example from the same year of The Beauty Queen of Leenane’s premiere can be found in the Christmas special of the television series Father Ted, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews’s 1990s sitcom about a trio of Catholic priests living on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland. In a scene from this episode, Ted storms out of the festive, painstakingly decorated living room of his parish house when his housekeeper tells him that he’s (only) the second-best priest in the country. As he slams the door, a Christmas decoration falls to the floor. Ted angrily returns to retrieve his jacket, slams the door again, and a second decoration falls down. Finally, Ted sheepishly sneaks back into the room a third time to grab his keys, tiptoes from the door and closes the door as silently as he possibly can. As the door is gently eased shut, the entire room’s decorations drop from the ceiling and walls. Maureen’s actions here, to which the audience at Druid’s production appeared to respond in the context of comedy (albeit faintly and nervously), show Martin McDonagh’s mingling of the extraordinarily violent, and the recognizably comic, puncturing the horror and impossible torture of the previous stage direction while raising ethical questions around the writing and its staging. As with each of the examples across ‘Body Parts’, and as we will see again in Chapter 3, any negotiation of the

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unstageability of the text in relation to violence necessarily involves a consideration of what an audience is being asked to watch alongside what the production is making visible. The visuality at play then, whether extremely naturalistic or abstract, presents an ethics as well as an aesthetics of the unstageable stage direction.

Stage Moves Moving away from characters’ or actors’ bodies, another clutch of unstageable stage directions focus on the idea that the space of the setting and/or the theatre could distort and change in impossible ways. In both cases below, a gap is articulated between the stage direction and the stage space, and even the laws of physics and gravity give way as the world turns upside down or shifts our perspective irrevocably.

Wild Towards the end of the 1998 film The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, the titular character Truman Burbank literally hits a wall. Having begun to escape the artificially constructed set of the television show upon which (unbeknownst to him) his entire life to date has taken place, he finally meets the edge of his reality. Truman’s fear of water, cunningly planted by his producers, has kept him tethered to the seaside town he was born in, but he overcomes this after a series of events convincing him that his reality may not be all there is, and sets sail in a small boat towards whatever lies beyond. The show’s producer, Christof, directs his team to create a huge storm, with thunder and lightning, to try and drive Truman back to land. Despite concerns that Truman will die on live television, the storm is constructed, but after Christof realizes his star’s single-minded drive to escape, he calms the storm. Truman sails on towards the horizon, until the tip of his boat punctures it. The camera pulls back to a wide shot, and we see the horizon as a painted set, the edge of the enormous dome that holds Truman’s world.

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A similar revelation that the world can be peeled away or dismantled is integral to the stage directions in the final act of Mike Bartlett’s 2016 play, Wild. Here, Bartlett draws heavily on the details of Edward Snowden’s leaking of classified National Security Agency material to the international press in  2013. This material, revealing the extent of the NSA’s private surveillance of the public as an apparent counterterrorism measure, saw Snowden become one of the most significant whistleblowers in American history, fleeing to Hong Kong and thence to Russia, where he has sought asylum and continues to live at time of writing. In Bartlett’s play, directed by James Macdonald, Jack Farthing plays the central character Andrew, looking extremely similar to the Snowden we have come to know from television, print and online media. Pale, with cropped hair, glasses and a ubiquitous hoodie, he lies low in a hotel room in Moscow and is visited separately by Woman and Man, two seemingly trustworthy WikiLeaks-style supporters who appear to offer him vague protection and support of some kind. However, in Scene Four, Woman and Man meet with Andrew together. Like Truman, Andrew begins to realize that the hotel room might not be what it seems: Andrew picks up the chair and throws it at the wall. It disappears through a previously unseen gap. Which has been there the whole time. An optical illusion.72

Once the previous reality has been punctured, Woman and Man set about dismantling the rest of Andrew’s hotel room. In the stage directions, Woman ‘takes one corner of one of the walls and peels it away’73 and folds up or deflates some of the props and furniture on the stage. The climax of this scene comes with the stage direction ‘The whole room tilts ninety degrees.’ Rather than using this as an image or a metaphor, or showing it using actor reaction or behaviour, Miriam Buether’s set for the premiere production at Hampstead Theatre sees the entire stage space appear to shift ninety degrees, revealing the set where the play has taken place to be a box set into the frame of the space. This enormous, world-shifting tilt does the inverse of many

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of the stage directions discussed so far and chimes with Mitchell’s interpretation of Kane’s Cleansed or Hynes’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, although here we see a naturalistic rendering of an unnaturalistic= event. The literal interpretation of this seemingly impossible stage direction evoked a vocal and physical audience response. It did not seem quite possible to believe that this could be happening. From my seat in the back of the stalls, it was possible to discern many audience members tilting their own heads to the side, keeping pace with the shift of the space, as if maintaining parity with the stage could enable understanding of the movement underway. This stage direction and its literal realization begin to overturn the relationship of creative challenge suggested in many of the stage directions we have explored so far. The stage direction calls for the room to tilt ninety degrees. Buether makes the room (and the audience’s heads) tilt ninety degrees. The room on stage moves, not to expose limitations of gravity or architecture, but in a literal repudiation of such limitations. A faux-dumb move that says ‘No one ever told me there weren’t any tilting walls in the theatre’.

X Much like the play itself, the stage directions in Alistair McDowall’s 2016 play X defy categorization. However, many of the more demanding or imaginative stage directions address theatre’s spatial possibilities directly (or indirectly) and suggest vast worlds of scale and perspective for a director and production team to explore. The play is set in the common room of a research base on Pluto. The crew of the small space station have lost contact with Earth, their scheduled spaceship for the return journey has never arrived and they are realizing that they cannot make it home. The usual workplace stresses, including bickering, boredom and cliquishness, manifest themselves in this strange environment. Crucially, as the crew begin to understand that something has gone wrong with their space station’s clocks, time and space begin to lose any linear or secure meanings, and the play begins to distort and distend.

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Some characters hallucinate, misremember, forget how to use language and collapse into hopelessness, while others die and reappear. In the playscript, the second act (called ‘A_ct Two’) sees the neat divisions of the first act into scenes (labelled according to Roman numerals) vanish. At the top right-hand corner of each right-hand page, we have been accustomed to seeing ‘Act One, IV’ (for example) printed, as scenes continue in a linear manner from I to VII. In A_ct Two, we see ‘[ ]’ at the top right-hand corner of each right-hand page, a clear indication that linearity has left the world of the play, even typographically. Of course, many contemporary plays depart from linear narrative structures and Aristotelian imperatives; this is nothing new. McDowall suggests that his use of structure in X begins to seem like a symptom: ‘[his] anxiety’s gotten into the form of the play itself, the plays are anxious, the plays are fidgety, they don’t stay in the right order and they skitter around and things drop off ’.74 Further to this, McDowall appears to be specifically drawing our attention to this gap between our expectations of a printed playtext and the territory occupied by X. Towards the end of A_ct Two there are nine fragmentary scenes, labelled according to Roman numerals, a twisted return to Act One’s conventions. After these, the top right-hand corner of each right-hand page shows ‘X’, suggesting that the final moments of the play form a tenth scene, perhaps, or a pun on the connotation of ‘X’ as an erasure or obliteration. The nine fragmentary scenes are all written as stage directions. For the eighth of these nine scenes, the following direction is written: VIII Gilda cowers against a wall. A gigantic nightingale lies on the floor, injured, bleeding. Gilda appears the size of an infant next to it. She shrinks from the bird’s laboured breathing. Hands begin to push from within the bird’s chest, a swallowed figure wrestling out from within the flesh.75

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Although the nightingale described in this stage direction is an isolated occurrence, the birds have been mentioned obliquely across the play. One of the older characters, Ray, keeps a whistle instrument to remind him of birdsong. We understand that birds have died out on Earth and that most of the younger characters have never seen or heard a live bird. In their staging of this stage direction for the Royal Court premiere, this idea was taken full advantage of by Vicky Featherstone and Merle Hensel as director and designer, respectively. In performance, the nine fragmentary scenes appeared as snapshots, with snap blackouts between each of them and a clear building of pace. Before VIII, Gilda screamed onstage, and a sharp blackout plunged the auditorium into darkness. Almost immediately, the lights flashed up to show an enormous black bird lying on its side on the stage with Gilda leaning on it. As specified by McDowall, and using Gilda for scale, the bird appeared at least five times larger than the human. Again, extremely quickly, another snap blackout and flash up of lights. The bird disappears and Gilda is again crouched on the floor, howling with furious pain. The entire sequence described appeared to last around ten seconds. This use of pace suggests that Featherstone and Hensel add to our sense of impossibility by inserting another factor of impossibility  – time. In the audience, we cannot quite believe what has just been revealed to us in the flash of lights. I venture that this is a very clear example of a response to Müller’s call for literature to offer resistance to the theatre. In this case, theatre is resisting back at literature, while building on the challenge offered. The impossible stage direction mentions nothing about speed or pace. Featherstone and Hensel ignore the pushing hands and swallowed figure of McDowall’s direction. Nevertheless, what is achieved captures the impossibility of the image and carries an audience to a deeply unsettling place where time and space seem to have abandoned the play and its production. Going back to the text, it might be possible that this enormous nightingale is a way of imagining a nightingale if you have never seen one (because birds no longer exist) and have no reference point. Alternatively, we

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recall the distortion of size and scale in dreams, and even the idea that nightingales, dinosaur-like, became extinct because they were too large to sustain themselves on Earth. As in Wild, prior understandings of the facts of space and time become shaky and uncertain, and the stage space provides a unique forum for the playing out of worlds beyond the reach of classical mechanics.

Imagination Drives Finally, we come to a group of stage directions focusing on imagination and experimentation, specifically encouraging makers to think beyond theatre convention and practice. If the three examples below have anything in common, it is an approach to stage directions that attempts to break new ground, create new challenges and provoke new resistance in the relationships between text and performance. I have grouped them together as they do not specifically refer to the work of the theatre space or the performer’s body, as the loose taxonomies so far have suggested. They do, however, in many ways, connect to the above histories of unstageable stage directions in their novelistic and cinematic thinking about storytelling, to closet drama in their scope and ambition and to modernist twentieth-century practice in their paradoxical response to and retreat from the theatre space. The below three stage directions could be joined by any number of others, including ‘M begins a journey across five dimensions’ from Philip Glass’s 1000 Airplanes on the Roof; ‘They cross the Andes’ from Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun; ‘“Ne sifflez pas” aux vents, aux ombres – si je compte, comedien, jouer le tour – les 12 – pas de hazard sans aucun sens’ from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Igitur,76 and Artaud’s famous direction in The Spurt of Blood: There is a noise as if an immense wheel were turning and moving in the air. A hurricane separates them. At the same time, two stars are seen colliding and from the fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if falling in a vacuum: then three scorpions one after

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another and finally a frog and a beetle which come to rest with desperate slowness, nauseating slowness.

Hamletmachine The third and central scene of Heiner Müller’s play Hamletmachine is called ‘Scherzo’. In classical music, the scherzo (literally ‘a joke’ in Italian) is frequently the liveliest, most playful or most rhythmic movement of a piece of music (e.g. a symphony, a sonata or a string quartet). While scherzi originated as light-hearted or humorous responses to a key theme or melody line (a famous example is Monteverdi’s Scherzi Musicali in the  1600s and  1630s), by the early eighteenth century, Beethoven was expanding and experimenting with the scherzo form. In his hands, the scherzo became a detailed game of rhythm and melody, exercises of release from a main theme or overarching narrative. This approach to scherzi was carried on by Romantic and modernist composers, including Mendelssohn, Chopin and Scriabin, with one of the most prominent examples being Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in 1897 (popularized through its use in the Disney animated film Fantasia in 1940). The idea of a musical movement that focuses on providing contrast and nuance, or a new way of seeing the overall piece within which it sits, draws a parallel with Müller’s ‘Scherzo’ in Hamletmachine, which creates a new world to add to the strange worlds already established in the first two scenes, and irrevocably alters the shape and scope of the play as it continues towards the fourth and fifth scenes. Similarly, the musical scherzo’s humorous function perhaps gives a tonal hint about production and performance style. As David Barnett observes, by naming the scene in this way, ‘Müller gestures to a contrast between the subject matter and its performance’.77 Finally, the technically challenging nature of many scherzi (by comparison with other movements in the same works) points directly to the unstageability of the images in Müller’s scherzo and the enormous challenges that would be presented to a design and production team if they aimed to evoke the scene literally.

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This scene consists of a long stage direction, two lines of dialogue (between Hamlet and Ophelia), a further lengthy stage direction, a single line of speech from a disembodied voice and a final stage direction. While much of the scene could be staged by following the stage directions (e.g. ‘The dead women tear his clothing from his body … Striptease by Ophelia … Horatio. He dances with Hamlet’),78 the direction ‘On a swing the Madonna with breast cancer … The breast cancer shines like a sun’79 gives more pause for thought in terms of (im)possibility. What Müller appears to be indicating here is a practice of the very resistance between literature and the theatre that he calls for. In this moment, a gap opens up between the text and its performance – the text (the literature) presents a challenge to the performance (the theatre), and the two begin to detach. As Sue-Ellen Case notes in her analysis of the play in The Domain-Matrix, [w]ithout a land, or an audience, the performance text maps what is impossible to stage … [t]hese suggestions are so technically absurd that they call for the performers to conceive of something quite different, but somehow appropriate … the performance becomes more and more distant from the text … the performance runs loose from the text.80

The resistance suggested here between unstageable stage directions in the text and their impossibility of realization in performance is further confirmed when we understand something of the play’s production history. Müller directed Hamletmachine himself a number of times (in  1985, and as part of Hamlet/Maschine in  1990–3). As Jonathan Kalb observes in The Theatre of Heiner Müller, ‘Müller disregarded almost all his own stage directions on the several occasions he directed Hamletmachine’, including those for ‘Scherzo’. Similarly, in one of the most significant productions of the play’s history, Robert Wilson’s (1986) did not attempt to stage the stage directions outlined above (although the Scherzo was nonetheless stylistically apart from the other four scenes which were very similar) and the production ‘was almost completely uncontingent on the play’.81 ‘Scherzo’ thus remains an important focal point for the history and practice of writing unstageable

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stage directions, a further reminder of the value of such stage directions not in terms of mimesis or realization, but as a creative conduit. Not staging ‘Scherzo’ is an indication of the unstageable stage direction’s power to push beyond an instruction for literal representation, and towards a wider conversation about the theatrical medium, its possibilities at a particular time, and how these possibilities could be extended and reimagined.82 As mentioned above, for Müller this is in part the task of the writer (indeed, for Müller it is the fundamental job of theatre) but is also the responsibility of the production team or those who will realize a play. Indeed, as Barnett describes, rehearsals for the premiere in 1977 were abandoned because Gerhard Winter, due to play Hamlet, became irreconcilably frustrated with the impasse between his understanding of Müller’s text as ‘an understandable, explicable, interpretable play’ (or his desire for it to be so) and the impossibility of approaching Hamletmachine with such rational thinking or practice.83

The Clean House At the beginning of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, we find Matilde telling a joke in Portuguese, with no translation provided. The assumption (the play premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in  2004, followed by a major Off-Broadway production in 2006) is that most of the auditorium cannot understand her. As the play unfolds, we learn that Matilde is a Brazilian cleaner hired by Lane and her husband Charles (both doctors) to clean their house. However, Matilde, despite her chosen (or forced) profession, hates cleaning and does not do the job, to Lane’s frustration. Virginia, Lane’s wayward sister, adores cleaning and strikes a bargain with Matilde (in secret, she will clean her sister’s house). The play’s action builds to a pitch when it is revealed that Charles has fallen in love with Ana, a patient who is dying of breast cancer and refusing post-mastectomy treatment. Ana learns that Matilde’s mother died laughing at the perfect joke (a trope with its own history, including Monty Python, Mary Poppins, Little Shop of Horrors and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest) and asks Matilde (played by the

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same actor who plays Matilde’s mother in a non-verbal image sequence at the beginning of the play) to perform the same service for her. This doubling of casting is just one example of the myriad ways in which, in The Clean House, Ruhl is dealing in specific and expansive images, laden with meaning. For example, at one point, Ana and Matilde are on Ana’s balcony, surrounded by apples. They bite into each apple in turn, and ‘if they don’t think it’s a perfect apple they throw it into the sea’.84 At this point in the play, Ana’s balcony is set above Lane’s living room, so the discarded apples land here, creating a different resonance for each of the three women – perhaps a reminder of Charles’s choices for Lane, a moment of luxurious optimism and hedonism for Matilde, a signal of the swift passage of time and life for Ana. In a play liberally sprinkled with gestures towards the impossible (trying to think up the perfect joke, wanting to save the life of someone who doesn’t want to live, telling a joke to American audiences in Portuguese, wanting to be euthanized by a joke), Ruhl’s use of stage directions is consistently arresting and works towards playful suggestion and inspiration rather than instruction. Indeed, Ruhl describes her stage directions generally as ‘a love letter to future collaborators who I’ve never met’.85 For example, in a long stage direction at the beginning of Act Two, in which Charles performs surgery on Ana, Ruhl repeats the phrase ‘it would be nice’ twice during the construction of the image. Both times, Ruhl suggests that, if the actors playing Charles and Ana are good singers, ‘it would be nice if’ they could sing at particular points (Charles, ‘an ethereal medieval love song in Latin about being medically cured by love’, Ana, ‘a contrapuntal melody’).86 Ruhl’s use of ‘it would be nice’ is thus acknowledging the potential impossibility of the moment she lays out (based on casting choices or the specificity of the song) and leaves the image open. This conditional mood also recalls Stacey Gregg’s constant use of ‘maybe’ at the start of stage directions in her play Scorch (2015). This monologue play is about a gender-curious teenager called Kes, their deepening uncertainty about their gender and sexuality, and the legal ramifications of their sexual relationship with another teenager, a cisgender girl. Gregg’s ‘maybe’ (e.g. ‘Maybe Kes

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strikes a few poses’; ‘Maybe now, an impossibly accomplished movement sequence; this is how it feels to be fully bodily present and realised’) reflects Kes’s disquiet and wariness about their identity and how it is received by those around them, as well as their frequent need to draw strength and energy from their LGBTQIA support group, represented by the audience in some scenes.87 Returning to Ruhl’s The Clean House, in one scene between Lane and Virginia: For a moment, Lane and Virginia experience a primal moment During which they are seven and nine years old, Inside the mind, respectively. They are mad. Then they return quite naturally to language As adults do.88

As Paul Castagno suggests in a discussion of this scene, Ruhl is creating ‘moments for the actors to explore unabated their physical self unhinged from the text’.89 Words no longer apply to this moment, or the moment has ceased to draw its power from the verbal or speech. Extending Castagno’s argument further, it seems that this stage direction, delving inside the minds and thoughts of the characters and detaching the performance from the text, responds clearly to the sense of a productive resistance between text and performance, between writer and production team. ‘Inside the mind’ is crucial to Ruhl’s acknowledgement of the impossibility of the task she has set. In the text, her writing compares to the psychological stage directions of George Bernard Shaw or Eugene O’Neill, which frequently suggest approaches to acting motivated by particular emotional realizations, for example ‘[Rose] seems to be aware of something in the room which none of the others can see – perhaps the personification of the ironic life force that has crushed her.’90 However, an important difference in The Clean House is that abstraction becomes action – ‘They are mad. Then they return quite naturally to language … ’. Although this is information that seems

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impossible to convey to an audience, reading Ruhl’s stage direction we begin to understand how the actors might be moving and speaking, as well as thinking and feeling, rather than understanding an intense physical or psychological description of a character or a reaction, as Shaw or O’Neill might write. Interestingly, Ruhl makes her thoughtful relationship between dialogue, stage direction and production clear when she suggests in performance notes for The Clean House that ‘[t]he director might consider projecting subtitles in the play for some scene titles and some stage directions’.91 As we might expect, one of the suggested projections reads: ‘Lane and Virginia experience a primal moment during which they are seven and nine years old.’92 With this additional proposal, Ruhl reminds us that a stage direction might seem unstageable, or impossible to convey, but that such impossibility can be foregrounded rather than ignored or omitted. Thinking back to Comyn’s production of Look Back in Anger, and to Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s production of Purgatorio, the audio or visual display of seemingly impossible didascalia stages a form of resistance, too.

Each Slow Dusk Rory Mullarkey’s Each Slow Dusk was written for Pentabus Theatre, a rural touring company that focuses on bringing plays on tour around the UK, mostly to village halls and/or out-of-the-way places. Mullarkey was commissioned by Pentabus to write Each Slow Dusk as part of the company’s response to the centenary of 1914 and the start of the First World War. The first act of the play consists of a long series of stage directions, divided by font in the published text into three characters: a private, a corporal and a captain, who are all the same age (nineteen and a half) and have been sent out on a night patrol in northern France towards the end of the war. The three characters have very different personalities and very different reactions to the task at hand. The corporal is excited about the patrol and the violence it will probably involve, the captain is hesitant about its necessity and

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its dangers and the private is terrified and homesick, but determined not to let either emotion show. The second act is a monologue, set in the present day. A British visitor to the battlefields of northern France grapples with the ‘remembrance industry’ and with her own uncertainty around what remembering the war’s events might mean to her. Mullarkey’s stage directions in the first act comprise the characters’ descriptions and explanations of their physical and emotional actions or reactions. For example, one of the corporal’s opening directions is as follows: He’s kicking him awake … He likes kicking people and he’s good at it. He thinks of it like football. He’s also good at football. He’s good at pretty much everything which involves doing damage or the propulsion of an object by force, physically.93

In September 2015, in a panel conversation as part of the ‘Are We On The Same Page?’ symposium at Royal Holloway, University of London, Mullarkey noted that the writing of unstageable stage directions was something that was particularly interesting to him. Indeed, he explained his writing of Each Slow Dusk in a way very similar to Ruhl’s articulation of the purpose of her stage directions, Kane’s description of writing Cleansed and Müller’s discussion of resistance: I write a series of challenges or provocations to various collaborators down the line … in terms of the finitude of something and whether you can watch a performance that’s entirely separate from what you would get from reading a text. The last original play that I wrote, I tried to do that, I tried to make something that would be completely unrecognisable, by essentially describing the actions – as stage directions that would be completely impossible to stage.94

It can certainly be suggested that Mullarkey subscribes to the notion already outlined in this chapter that literature has the task of offering resistance to the theatre and that this resistance could be said to gather momentum in the unstageability of his stage directions. Mullarkey’s articulation of the writing of ‘challenges or provocations’ additionally suggests an eagerness for creativity in the production teams that moves

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beyond the recipe-based approach to stage directions that has already been mentioned, in this case by emphasizing the gaps between text and performance rather than dismissing or ignoring them. However, it is telling to note Mullarkey’s reaction to the direction taken by the production team in their realization of Each Slow Dusk. To quote Mullarkey: I hoped … that something explosive and amazing would be realised on the stage, but because of the considerations of where it was being performed, which was kind of rurally, around village halls, what was actually staged was that some actors came in and said all of the things that I wrote [laughter from audience], so essentially this thing that I hoped would be open and explosive became a kind of monologue play or whatever.95

This begins to reinforce a correspondence between writing unstageable stage directions and the desire for a challenge to be radically explored and expanded, in order to push theatre beyond its conventions and limits, and to consider what might lie beyond them. As stage directions constitute the entire text in the case of Each Slow Dusk, this aspect of playwriting is further complicated: the strategies of resistance are more explicitly signified and staged when there is no dialogue between characters, and no option to ignore stage directions.

Conclusions We began with an examination of the Gate Theatre’s production of Look Back in Anger and how its vocalizing of stage directions articulated an impossibility surpassing challenges in technical, economical or appropriateness terms. We close with a further discussion of the staged expression of unstageable stage directions in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Purgatorio, which has already been explored in relation to untranslatability in this book’s introduction. The piece opens with a domestic interior scene, a stage contained within a box set and further framed with a scrim cloth between the audience and the performer. A woman washes dishes

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at the sink and prepares a meal, and a boy, her son, plays with a toy at the kitchen table. Tablets are administered to him by his mother, with the gentle chide, spoken in French and translated via surtitles projected onto the centre of the scrim: ‘Take your medicine’. These projected phrases, will, shortly, also describe what is happening on the stage, as well as what is not. For example, the boy’s father arrives home. The projected surtitle reads ‘the Third Star will turn on the TV’ just before he does so. Later on in the production, the father and son remain offstage, but the sexual abuse of the child by his father is staged aurally. During this scene of offstage shouts and moans, the surtitles on the scrim set up an alternative, virtual scene, not visible on stage. These stage directions, as the father ascends the staircase to his child’s bedroom, disengage from the action on the stage and portray a different course of events. In this other scene, described via the projected titles, the father puts on some music and the family dances together. Pausing on the words ‘the music’, a phrase which remains projected onto the scrim for much of the scene, a separation between the action on (and off) the stage and the alternative space set up by the stage directions becomes clear. In this context, the projected stage directions are unstageable, not because they are technically unfulfillable for the theatre, but because they refer to a happy family life without abuse. This chapter has attempted to create a space for the discussion of unstageable stage directions that looks beyond cutting them from a production or editing them out of a text when they appear impossible to bring to the stage. The liminal and uncertain role of the stage direction in both text and performance becomes further complicated when we consider a stage direction that is deliberately challenging for the stage. As we have seen, the writing of actions and images that reach past the scope of conventional or contemporary theatre practice invokes a relationship between text and performance that is not predicated on instruction or evasion, but on creative resistance and challenge. From the literal realization of unstageable stage directions to their creative exploration as a departure point for staging, this chapter has found that the role of impossibility in bringing a production to the stage is unexpectedly important, and the negotiation and performance of unstageability invokes creativity across all aspects of theatre practice.

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Adaptation

The generative relationship between adaptation and unstageability remains one of paradoxical purpose. In the context of adaptation studies, Linda Hutcheon wonders at length why writers (and makers of various kinds) are so eager to embark on the hazardous work of adaptation, at the mercy of all who respond pejoratively to such endeavours. She notes economic motivation as significant to an engagement with the adaptation process (particularly regarding the adaptation of classic novels to film or television, usually involving star casting and large production budgets), as well as the goal of contributing to cultural capital (including critiquing it), and a sense of personal or political impulse guiding the work. Hutcheon warns that adaptation theory should factor these various reasons for adapting into its thinking and evolution in order to fully understand how adaptations come about, though with the ambitious caveat that such an approach would require a reassessment of the extent to which the intentionality of the author is a component of critical theory.1 In the wake of poststructuralism, this is a formidable request. However, in the context of this chapter’s examinations of Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon and Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, the focus on the rationale for the adaptations coming from inherent unstageabilities within the adapted text rather than from the authorial desire of the adapter shifts intentionality away from the author and onto the text itself. Concerns about unperformability or unstageability are frequently linked to theatrical adaptation, and terms such as ‘impossibility’, ‘unfilmable’, ‘unstageable’ are used much more comfortably in the theatrical dimensions of both adaptation studies and translation studies than in other corners of theatre and performance studies.2 Of course, much of this discourse tends to invoke the impossibility of fidelity to a

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source text, or equivalence in translation, but the idea that the concept of impossibility is so easily summoned and acknowledged as part of these processes is intriguing. This perhaps speaks to the theatre’s intrinsic adaptive practices as productions are realized from text (regardless of whether this is a playtext, a movement score, a series of ideas or a nonfiction document) to performance space. However, questions of fidelity or equivalence are not the interest of this study, but rather the relationship between the supposed unstageability of the adaptation and the theatre’s strategies for dealing with such tropes. For instance, recent examples in European and American theatre labelled as unstageable either in advance of their premiere or sometimes (excitingly for this book’s purposes) following it include adaptations of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,3 Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. The performability factor in the criticism levelled at these adaptations usually speaks to the challenges of bringing novels or autobiography to the stage in a meaningful way (the unadaptable), and what is lost in the transfer from one medium to another, comparing and passing judgement on the relative value of each medium. As Frances Babbage notes, writing about adaptations of literature to theatre, ‘assertions [of unstageability] may be judged representative of the wider rhetoric that would find dramatic adaptations inevitably wanting beside their prose counterparts’.4 While this chapter will close with a discussion of a literary adaptation of sorts, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (2006), which uses the text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1926 novel The Great Gatsby in its entirety, it opens with a consideration of the practice of contemporary theatrical adaptation which brings apparently unstageable plays to production (or back to production), either through rewriting or through reinterpretation. I am referring to this as intramedial adaptation, following Roman Jakobson’s practice of classification of translation into interlingual (translation between two different languages) and intralingual (changes made within the same language).5 Of course, there is always an intermedial shift from page

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to stage in the bringing of a playtext to production (Gatz functions as a variety on intermedial adaptation), and I remain mindful of that. My aim is to (slightly artificially) hold intramedial adaptation apart from intermedial adaptation for much of this chapter in order to focus on impossibility and unstageability as dramaturgical strategies of adaptation. Using Margherita Laera’s taxonomies of theatrical adaptation, it is also important to note the intertemporality of these three productions.6 An Octoroon’s action takes place in our contemporary moment and in plantation-era Louisiana. Chekhov’s First Play shows us nineteenth-century Russia, followed by a disintegrating, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Finally, Gatz’s unabridged reading of Fitzgerald’s  1926 novel takes place in a late-twentieth-century office space. As Laera suggests, however, further temporal distinctions can be drawn, including the time of publication, the time in which the performances (and the texts upon which they draw) are set and time as mentioned in the world of the performance itself. In order to clarify which text/ production I am discussing when, influenced by Linda Hutcheon’s work on the adapted text and the adaptation, I will be using ‘adaptation’ and ‘adapted text’ as distinct from ‘source text’, ‘original text’, ‘target text’ and so on. For example, Chekhov’s Platonov is the adapted text, and the Dead Centre piece, Chekhov’s First Play, is the adaptation. That said, we will also encounter the resistance shared by all theatre-makers featured in this chapter to the classification of their work as adaptation (versus the seemingly easier acknowledgement that the theatrical tasks upon which they embarked in order to create their productions were tinged with the impossible).

Adaptation and the canon The adaptation process has long been seen as an opportunity to respond to a canonical text by a canonical writer. Adaptations of classic English writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens

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and Thomas Hardy for theatre, film or television usually promote the text and its writer, and engage with (or avoid) a critique of either contemporary society or culture, or the context of the adapted text. As Julie Sanders writes, [A]daptation and appropriation tend on the whole to operate within the parameters of an established canon, serving indeed at times to reinforce that canon by ensuring a continued interest in the original or source text, albeit in revised circumstances of understanding.7

This seems to be a safe structure within which to work as an adapter, and there are long production histories that bear witness to such reinforcement. In the context of intramedial theatrical adaptation, which is the focus of this chapter, there is a similarly extensive history of this approach, particularly in relation to Shakespeare, though also ancient Greek dramatists such as Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschlyus; early modern playwrights including Marlowe and Webster; and Ibsen and Chekhov in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, Chekhov’s work has been the basis for a number of intramedial adaptations, including Thomas Kilroy’s transposition of The Seagull to Ireland’s west coast and Brian Friel’s Afterplay, which imagines an encounter between Prozorov from Three Sisters and Sonya from Uncle Vanya. As Sanders continues, the relationship between the audience and the adaptation in this context is one of renewed interest, ‘inviting us as readers or spectators to look anew at a canonical text that we might otherwise have felt we had “understood” or interpreted to our own satisfaction’.8 With that in mind, in the case of Chekhov’s first play, Platonov, there seems to be a particular and unusual response to the canon underway. While it cannot be denied that Chekhov is a canonical playwright, especially in the Western world, Platonov is not a well-known Chekhov text, and its production history, especially compared to what we might call the ‘big four’ (The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters), is very slim and almost entirely derived from adaptations. Thus, there is little sense that an audience at David Hare, Michael Frayn or, as we will see, Dead Centre’s productions based on Chekhov’s

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Platonov might be ‘looking anew’ at a familiar text from the canon or seeking fresh insight into a recognized play. On the other hand, the discussion of Gatz below will reveal the challenges of working with a canonical novel, which has been adapted for film, television, theatre and opera with regularity since its publication. Sidestepping this lineage completely, Elevator Repair Service worked with the text to subvert and problematize conventional concepts and practices of theatrical adaptation, creating a fluid spectrum of representation between the book and the stage which became much more about the process and labour of reading a novel word by word, and the intimate staging of the literary imagination’s solitary power, than it did staging a synopsis or an element of a canonical story.

Adapting unstageability This chapter also explores the inherent impossibilities attached to the work of adaptation and translation. Katja Krebs notes that, in response to ongoing discourse in translation studies about ‘resistant translation’9 and the challenges of equivalence (finding an ‘equivalent’ word from a source to a target language), such equivalence is a paradox, as ‘a translation that achieves equivalence … ceases to be a translation’.10 Frances Babbage similarly observes that adaptation requires ‘admitting and even actively embracing the difficulties’ of the adapted text.11 In the same way, this chapter’s investigation of impossibility of adaptation as a dramaturgical structure or device speaks to the impossibility of equivalence at the heart of any translation or adaptation process, but swiftly moves beyond the latter trope in order to consider the question of what happens on stage when impossibility is invoked in this context. In resisting or subverting traditional approaches to adaptation on stage by staging an acknowledgement of the impossibility of the task, such resistance is sublimated to the stage itself. The chapter, then, proposes that staging impossibility could be seen as a dramaturgical structure when creating and producing

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adaptation. Embracing the challenges and difficulties attendant upon the adaptation process (on the page and in production) through acknowledging them within the postdramatic and/or metatheatrical frame generates a positive approach to that which seems difficult or challenging. The upside to seeming impossibility can be explored through a range of dramaturgical techniques. To take a few examples pertinent to this chapter, the potentials of the dissolve, the explosion and the juxtaposition in textual and visual terms all provide fruitful means of engaging with processes of adapting unstageability. In film practice, a dissolve is an editing technique in which one shot is faded out while another shot is faded in, rather than fading to black in between or sharply cutting from one shot to the next. Usually, a dissolve is employed to signify a move from one moment or space to another. In the cases of Chekhov’s First Play and An Octoroon, the dissolving shifts between characters or worlds create space for the acknowledgement of impossibility within the theatrical medium, and slides into different styles or forms of performance further substantiate this. In Gatz, the subtlety of such dissolvings is key to the work of the audience at the production, as we follow what begins as a solo verbatim reading of The Great Gatsby taking place in a dingy office, but gradually morphs into a conquest of the workplace and workmates as the space and characters are transformed by the events of the novel. An explosion is, of course, a sudden and extreme change, usually a violent transmission of energy or a blowing apart of something. As we will see, this technique is used to particularly impressive effect in An Octoroon, causing seismic shifts in the narrative of the play, its production and scenographic elements and its reception by the audience in performance. Finally, juxtaposition is a common technique in the theatre (particularly in the postdramatic or metatheatrical traditions), as it has been across postmodern and poststructuralist practices. The bringing together of incongruous forms, content, aesthetics emotions, characters, styles or genres is frequently used as a reminder to an audience that they are watching a theatrical event, as is the juxtaposition of the virtual and the actual. Chekhov’s First Play’s juxtaposition of naturalistic acting on stage with directorial

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commentary in audience headphones provides a productive clash of tone and content, articulating the gaps in the adaptation process and reminding us of theatre’s generative fallibility in this intramedial regard.

Text and performance As in other parts of this book, this chapter will be exploring productive approaches to impossibility and unstageability in adaptation using both text and performance analysis. In Chekhov’s First Play and An Octoroon, the published playtext yields exciting connections between the adapted text and the adaptation, allowing for a textual understanding of seeming impossibilities in the adapted text and how the adaptation has problematized, investigated and reshaped these. The analysis of productions of both plays provides a crucial understanding of the contemporary adaptation and how impossibility can be a dramaturgical device through which an adaptation can thrive. Both productions articulate the inherent impossibility of the task underway, announcing unstageability even (and especially) as it is being staged. Thus, a detailed investigation of aspects of live acting, directing, design and dramaturgy, as well as the work of the audience in the process of creating meaning, become instrumental to the understanding of both adaptations. As this book’s introduction emphasized, however, it is important to note that this is not a binary approach intended to invite an impulse for correctness – scanning the text for things the production did not do or found impossible to do, surveying the production and noting where it has departed from the text or raising questions of fidelity or equivalence. Instead, in the interplay between the text and performance, as Patrice Pavis reminds us: There is an undeniable relationship between text and performance, but it does not take the form of a translation or a reduplication of the former by the latter, but rather of a transfer or a confrontation of the fictional universe structured by the text and the fictional universe produced by the stage.12

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Chekhov’s first play and Chekhov’s First Play The late theatre scholar Edward Braun opens his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Chekhov with a description of the discovery in 1923 of a previously unpublished and untitled play by the Russian playwright, who had died nineteen years earlier, in 1904. As Braun puts it, the complete lack of interest in this finding seems very strange to us now, but at the time, Chekhov was about the last dramatist likely to excite the new revolutionary avant-garde … the MAT was still in the grip of the artistic paralysis to which it had been reduced by the events of  1917, and seventeen more years were to elapse before it staged a new production of Chekhov. Finally, the prospect of a ramshackle text almost three times the length of any other Chekhov play would have deterred most theatres even at the best of times.13

The discovered play, probably written in 1878, and known in English variously as Untitled Play, Fatherlessness or, most famously, Platonov, thus began its public life inauspiciously, with very little interest in its theatrical production, especially in Russia.14 The play had minor productions in Germany and (what was then) Czechoslovakia in 1928 and 1929, respectively, and there was a more decisive attempt to bring it to the twentieth-century repertoire in the 1950s. In the UK, Michael Frayn’s  1984 adaptation Wild Honey and David Hare’s  2001 Platonov were well received and both have been revived in recent years. The former is drawn from Frayn’s own translation of the play and Hare uses Helen Rappaport’s ‘literal’ translation for his. More recently, The Present, Andrew Upton’s 2016 adaptation for Sydney Theatre Company, starring Cate Blanchett as Anna, transferred from Sydney to Broadway.15 Upton’s play, directed by John Crowley, was an intertemporal adaptation, bringing the action to post-Communist 1990s Russia. This chapter will focus on a new play (also intertemporal to an extent), using Laurence Senelick’s  2006 translation of Platonov as a departure point,16 which premiered in Dublin in 2015.

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Chekhov’s play is set on Anna Petrovna’s rural estate in Russia towards the start of the summer. Anna is the debt-laden widow of General Voinitsev and is considering a strategic marriage to the wealthy, elderly Porfiry Glagoliev. However, her heart is more interested in Mikhail Platonov, the young and impoverished village schoolmaster, who is married to Sasha and has a young family. Platonov, meanwhile, is attracted to Anna but starts an affair with Sofya, his former girlfriend and Anna’s stepson’s new wife. The local horse-thief, Osip, is jealous of Anna’s love for Platonov and tries unsuccessfully to kill him, before rescuing Sasha from a suicide attempt (related to her husband’s affair) via oncoming train. Subsequently, we find out that Osip has been lynched by a mob of villagers and that Sasha has made another attempt on her life. Platonov, who has been injured by Osip in a scuffle about Anna, drinks heavily, considers suicide and attempts to re-seduce Maria Grekova, a chemistry student. Sofya enters, takes Platonov’s own gun and kills him. The supposed unperformability of the text stems from many of the classic tropes of unstageability or unperformability in the Western playwriting tradition, some of which have already appeared in relation to characteristics of closet drama – length of play, number of cast, complexity of locations, actions and/or plots, size and scale of stage images, technical demands, appropriateness to current social mores of potential audiences. We even have a sense that Chekhov may have agreed that the play was unstageable. Michael Frayn describes a letter written by the young Anton Chekhov to a famous actress of the period, Marya Nikolayevna Yermolova, to whom he also sent the play. The letter has been partially erased, but some of what remains reads ‘I am sending you … Have no fear. Half of it is cut. In many places … still needs … Yours respectfully, A. Chekhov’.17 However, even with Chekhov’s presumed cuts, the play is more than twice the length of a typical play of the period, and this is referred to consistently as a crucial issue with its performability, as are its repetitious and long-winded dialogue, huge cast (some of which are very undeveloped characters) and multiple tangential storylines.18 Aspects of the unstageability of the play are also

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related to tone, genre and the reach of its ambition. As Frayn puts it in the introduction to his adaptation, Wild Honey, ‘it is altogether too much. It has too many characters, too many disparate themes and aims, and too much action. It is trying to be simultaneously a sexual comedy, a moral tract, a melodrama, a state-of-Russia play, and a tragedy’.19 For David Hare in discussion of his adaptation, ‘Platonov does have, in its very wildness, a sort of feverish ambition, a desire, almost, to put the whole of Russia on the stage’.20 Stuart Young posits that tonal peculiarities [combine] elements of farce, satire, melodrama, black humour, and even tragedy … Although Platonov is interesting because it seems to prefigure the peculiarly Chekhovian blend of comedy and tragedy of the later plays, its combination of disparate, allegedly incongruous styles and tones is commonly judged to be clumsy.21

Frayn agrees: Worse still, at any rate for the adaptor who is trying to find a practical solution to all these problems, is a defect that foreshadows one of the great glories of the later plays – a fundamental ambiguity of tone between comic and tragic, which will eventually be resolved into a characteristic Chekhovian mode, but which appears here mostly as an indeterminate wavering.22

In the introduction to her  2013 adaptation, Sons without Fathers, Helena Kaut-Howson also begins to suggest this relationship between unstageability and adaptation. She briefly lists the play’s ‘defects’ in a recognizable way, citing its length, ‘unwieldiness’ in structure and inconsistency in style and tone, but acknowledges that, in spite of these, ‘Chekhov’s untitled play begins to be recognised for its own remarkable qualities, its directness and energy, its very wildness and contradictions, above all by the audacious design at the heart of it’.23 Indeed, as this book has so far indicated, these perceived unstageabilities could also be seen as a strength of the play and are arguably historically and technologically contingent. As Senelick continues, ‘[f]or all its overstatement, what makes this play a real portent of Chekhov’s mature

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work is the unsteady listing from the comic side to the serious’.24 Critics of Platonov and its stageability or otherwise generally agree that much of the play’s interest lies in its function as a chaotic blueprint or prototype for the themes, characters, ideas and tropes that we would come to know and herald as genius in Chekhov’s later works. Some of these themes (property woes, financially troubled widows, samovars, loaded guns) are certainly visible in Platonov and are clearly being worked out and thought through by the playwright. However, Hare cautions us that reading Platonov only in these terms potentially detracts from the value of the material and themes ‘whose special interest is that they never occur again’.25 He seems specifically to be referring to the killing of Osip in the last act and the ending of the third act, which features a night express train hurtling straight for Platonov’s wife Sasha. As Hare puts it, ‘No wonder commentators dismissed this ambitious story of steam trains and lynchings for “uncertainty of tone”.’26 With this gargantuan, sprawling play in mind, how might we identify a creative spark stemming from the seeming unperformability of this early Chekhov text? Dead Centre’s production of Chekhov’s First Play takes on this challenge, specifically addressing the unstageabilities apparently so tantalizing to a range of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century writers and adapters including Hare, Frayn, Upton, Trevor Griffiths and Helena Kaut-Howson, amongst others.27 I use the word ‘dissolving’ a lot when I write about Dead Centre. Across their oeuvre, things keep shifting and changing – ‘the point’, our perspective, our priorities, our sympathies, the very air around us and our sense of what is real. Images bleed into each other and overlap; sounds surround us, curdle and then separate. In Chekhov’s First Play, as in much of Dead Centre’s other performance work, what we thought we knew about the show rocks and glides away from us, and a new horizon comes into view. Chekhov’s First Play suggests an exciting approach to adaptation of seemingly or previously unstageable or unperformable texts in its reframing of the relationship between adapted text and adaptation through processes of dialogic engagement between the two. For me, intramedial theatrical adaptation in this particular case

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presents an ideal framework for thinking about unstageability because the adaptation is self-conscious and self-reflexive, highlighting what seemed impossible or unperformable in the adapted text. Instead of the adaptation working hard to stitch disparate aspects of a text together or skim over the text’s previous problems (as Hare does in his Platonov) or to find a particular route through and coherent tone for the play (as Frayn does in his Wild Honey), Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play acknowledges the adapted text’s unperformabilities and works into and with them to create a new piece of performance. The piece responds to Platonov, questions its history of unstageability and leads its audience to blur the boundaries between stage and auditorium, between acting and representation and, ideally, it seems, between art and life. An early hint at this in Dead Centre’s published playtext is that all the character names appear as follows, for example: ‘Anna Petrovna Voinitseva, the widow of a general, later nobody’.28 Dialogue for the Chekhovian characters in Part One of Chekhov’s First Play stays largely within the boundaries of the action of Chekhov’s first act, showing Anna Petrovna’s guests gradually arriving for the first lunch of the summer after a long winter social hiatus. In performance, the actors are also working within the confines of what we might think of as naturalistic acting, in the tradition of Chekhov’s frequent directorial collaborator at the Moscow Art Theatre, Constantin Stanislavksi. The audience wear headphones, and Bush Moukarzel, the piece’s co-director (and playing The Director), speaks into our ears, gently glossing and commenting on what is happening on stage. This mostly provides additional and playful context about the play, its rehearsal process and production journey, though Moukarzel finds it difficult to conceal his directorly irritation when the actors apparently miss a line (or a few pages) or mispronounce a name (there seems to be some conflict on stage as to whether it’s ‘Platonov’ or ‘Pla-to-nov’). In performance, just as the audience become accustomed to this approach to the actor-director-audience relationship (reminiscent of DVD commentaries), Moukarzel’s voice distorts beyond recognition, a pounding soundtrack engulfs us and a wrecking ball takes half the

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back wall out. Anna’s mansion becomes an abandoned Celtic Tiger–era property development opportunity complete with pneumatic drill, the samovar and wine bottles make way for shots and lines, and the long skirts and tailored suits of Chekhov’s characters fragment until almost everyone is in their pants, or someone else’s. Huge images emerge and dissolve, bleeding into each other across the stage. Rebecca O’Mara, who had been playing a heavily pregnant Sasha, climbs up onto a table and throws herself down upon it. The pregnancy bump is revealed to have been a bag of watery blue paint, which explodes on O’Mara and drenches the table. Breffni Holohan, who had been playing Sofya, sits crouched on the floor as a rippling pool of dry ice fans out around her. Dylan Tighe, who had been playing Anna’s stepson Sergey, smears flammable paste on the wrecking ball and sets it on fire. And then, a man from the audience, like us, wearing headphones, just like we are, gets up out of his seat, steps right across the barrier between stage and auditorium and is led through various actions by the other characters, by this stage firmly in their ‘later nobody’ roles. He is, we learn, Platonov. He’s danced with, kissed, given a shot of alcohol, told secrets, asked to play a song – but, unlike, say, the immersive theatre practices of British company You Me Bum Bum Train, he’s always rescued at the last second – the guitar is whisked away, his hand is held, he’s led away, he never has to answer the question. He doesn’t ever try to speak or to get involved in any way beyond the passive. He’s not panicking, but he definitely doesn’t seem to know what’s going on. He stands in for the rest of us, quietly observing, but not getting in the way. Eventually, we’re returned to a version of our Chekhovian opening. The actors glow palimpsestically with the marks of the sequence just past. Moukarzel has been reminding us throughout of Chekhov’s famous assertion about a gun onstage in the first act needing to be discharged by the last, and we are not disappointed. Using this particular performance piece (in its text and production forms) as a case study here articulates the relationship between the Chekhov text and the Dead Centre piece, and how the latter addresses both the unperformability of Platonov and its critical dismissal

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as unstageable or unperformable. Chekhov’s First Play forges a relationship with its adapted text’s pitfalls and problems and explicitly acknowledges the creative challenges posed for theatre-makers who consider working with Platonov. Interestingly, the unperformability of the text is also implicitly evidenced in Chekhov’s First Play in the stage images it invokes, in its relationship with the live audience (and one audience member in particular) and in its evocation of questions about what theatre is and does, and where its boundaries lie. I want to suggest some of the ways in which Chekhov’s First Play lays out, plays with and problematizes some of the unperformabilities of Chekhov’s text, and how Dead Centre’s production reveals intramedial theatrical adaptation as a lens through which to investigate the creative power of the seemingly unperformable. During Part One, shortly before the wrecking ball opens up the piece (literally and figuratively), it appears to dawn on The Director that his dramaturgical strategy of cutting anything he didn’t like or ‘get’ about the play may have been misguided – he notes at one point that he’s cut all the servants from the play and realizes he could have made them the focus, for example. The refrain ‘So I cut it’ echoes throughout this section of the play, and The Director’s reflections become more melancholy: ‘It was hard to decide what matters, and who you can just … throw away’.29 And ‘I cut all the good people. There’s nothing here’.30 The response to Chekhov’s clash of tones and genres, part of its labelling as unstageable as mentioned above, is evident in the device of The Director’s commentary and the response it engenders in the audience. In a way, this aspect of the production calls to mind Linda Hutcheon’s sense that the spectator of adaptation is, in a context in which they’re aware of adaptation, oscillating between the adapted text and the adaptation. This builds on her utilization of the same image of oscillation in her work on parody and irony in the late  1980s and early  1990s. For Hutcheon, an ‘oscillating yet simultaneous perception of plural and different meanings’ is key to the formation of irony.31 However, in order to perform this oscillation – to be in on the joke, to appreciate the

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irony – the reader/spectator must belong already to a discursive community that possesses certain enabling knowledge, and she finds a similar necessity at play in spectating adaptation. As I have mentioned, it is unlikely that the audience at Chekhov’s First Play would be familiar with the adapted text in any of its formats. However, I argue that canonical perceptions of Chekhov permit some degree of recognition or some kind of layered meaning or connection through which the spectator/reader might oscillate. Building on this assumed knowledge, The Director’s commentary in Part One lets us in on some of the enabling information and presents us with a mode of pleasurable oscillation: ‘property, of course, is one of Chekhov’s main themes … See, that’s the sort of thing I’ll be doing throughout the commentary, unpacking key themes, making connections … ’.32 And: ‘Eating is used as a metaphor here. They’re rich they never stop eating. But they’re always hungry’.33 And: ‘A rare cock joke from Chekhov there. A feature of his early work … ’.34 Further to this, the widely held sense that Platonov’s main function is to be a sprawling microcosm encapsulating the features of Chekhov’s later work is interrogated with glee. Indeed, the construction of the title, suggesting that this is Chekhov’s ‘first’ play, is a provocatively imaginative glimmer. The title almost positions Chekhov as waking from a postdramatic fever dream of wrecking balls, strange intravenous drips and headphones into his better-known career as one of the most famous European realist playwrights. Towards the end of the play, the Chekhovian gun takes out an offstage seagull, which falls to the stage with the weight of that eponymous play’s long production history. The sound of the axe at the end of The Cherry Orchard is called to mind in the destruction of Anna Petrovna’s house by wrecking ball and pneumatic drill, and her response echoes Ranevskaya’s departure from her estate. Chekhov’s First Play speaks to the impossibility of adapting Platonov while applying the same rules of structure within which the adapted text exists. This is partially a question of content, but also of form and structure. Thus, Part One is trapped in an admission of its own

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impossibilities and inadequacies (with The Director as a guide to these impossibilities), and Part Two is released. The Chekhovian characters, similarly, dissolve, but we still see actors playing characters. During Part Two, Voinitsev alerts us to this shift when he says to Platonov (or Platonov, despite The Director’s pronunciation chastisements): I’m a terrible actor, Platonov. I never know what to do with my hands. But you – you always seem so alive, so in the moment, so present. You seem so natural. It’s like you don’t even know your lines. Pure instinct.35

This latter section of the production brings Chekhov’s characters into post-recession Dublin, where we understand the predicaments of the nineteenth-century Russian characters within a specific twenty-firstcentury Irish context. For example, in Chekhov’s play, Sofya recognizes Platonov’s attraction to her (and its mutuality) and begs her husband Sergei Voynitsev to leave town with her before either she or Platonov can make a romantic move. The transposition of this for Dead Centre sees Sofya excited to leave her husband and travel, to be free and untethered, ‘[a]nd I don’t have to pay my student loan back if I’m not living in Ireland’.36 Thinking specifically about the transition from the first to the second part of Chekhov’s First Play, there seem to be a number of reasons why the frameworks that have been laid out and set up in the first part distort to this extent. The wrecking ball and pneumatic drill are literal signifiers of a smashing up or breaking down of the production’s previous understanding of impossibility and unstageability. The move towards abstract images reveals a rent or tear in the fabric of our expectations. Crucially, there is also a gatekeeper of unstageability (or unadaptability) at work in Part One of Chekhov’s First Play. As any good gatekeeper should, The Director controls what goes in and comes out of the production – regulating not only our reception of the work but also our perception of what has been adapted and how. The Director’s explicit articulation of the gaps arising between characters and actors in Part One is reminiscent of a Brechtian methodology of practice, in which theatre ‘draws attention to the contradictions that drive the

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action’.37 However, I would suggest that Chekhov’s First Play pushes such an approach deeper into productive paradox and confusion, rather than aiming at clarity or coherence: THE DIRECTOR. I cut a whole scene between these two, which explains why Voinistev’s so jealous of his wife, why he thinks she’s in love with Platonov … I mean, he’s right to be worried, I’ve slept with her.38

The Director. becomes a custodian of the production’s impossibilities, while simultaneously acting as its dramaturg of the impossible. He is not just commenting on the action or feeding the audience behindthe-scenes tidbits. He is articulating the impossible task of adaptation. Furthermore, I suggest that The Director’s gatekeeper function falls away in Part Two, and any semblance of it is replaced by the audience member playing Platonov, whose physical presence on stage reminds us of these gaps and impossibilities. With this shift from The Director to Platonov, any acknowledgement of impossibility drains away and is replaced with the series of mounting images, building and dissolving. The switch from The Director to Platonov thus enables a shift in focus for the audience between an acknowledgement of the impossibility of the act of adaptation and an acknowledgement of its existence amidst the possibilities on show. The concept of a performance piece revolving around an audience member’s action has been well explored in recent years, though usually operating in site-specific or immersive contexts (companies such as Punchdrunk in the UK or ANU productions in Ireland). Here, though, the audience member is, it turns out, what the actor-characters have been waiting for. Platonov in Chekhov’s first play gives the characters’ lives meaning and their lunch parties a focal point. Platonov in Chekhov’s First Play releases the characters to become their ‘later, nobody’ selves. Finally, the audience’s oscillation between a sense that this character is a planted actor and a member of the audience remains another pleasurable one. My own conviction that the Platonov I’d seen in Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Theatre in September 2015 was a member of the ensemble was only dismantled on seeing Chekhov’s First

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Play for the second time at the Schaubühne in Berlin in April  2016, when my partner was approached by Moukarzel in the bar before the performance and asked whether he would participate in the performance.

Endings In Chekhov’s play, Platonov dies when Sasha shoots him. We could read this as a signal that someone unconventional or abnormal can’t survive in this rural Russian community, where isolation and boredom may mean that the only self-sustaining option is for neighbours and friends to constantly practise orderly, civil, conventional behaviours even when they feel out of control. Chekhov may be hinting that Platonov has finally run out of chances, or that his inability to commit to his family (or to any of his lovers) or to take his life seriously has caught up with him. Dead Centre’s response to this shows the key characters taking part in a game of Russian Roulette at the end of the production. The bullet chambers continue to be empty as the characters pass the gun around. The last person to try the gun is Platonov, at which point The Director stops the action, reminding us that the ending of Platonov may be another aspect of Chekhov’s early work that needs to take place in order for him to create his later plays. In Chekhov’s First Play, The Director reveals to the audience that: [w]e changed the ending … Chekhov’s first play had a gun in it and his second, and all the rest had guns in them in one way or another, until in his last play … it was gone. It’s like he got over it. He wrote away the gun. He realised his characters have to do something even harder than dying. They have to go on living.39

Perhaps, Dead Centre gesture again to a crucial aspect of their production’s title and recall the softening of some critics of Platonov – Chekhov’s first play may be unstageable, but its impossibilities and

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endless contradictions may well have enabled him to become the playwright we vividly remember a century after his death. However, if Chekhov ‘gets over’ his most famous prop, Chekhov’s First Play can only get to its conclusion by completely destroying the entire fabric that has been set up, dismantling the stage and decoupling the actors (further) from their roles. For example, if Sasha/O’Mara’s pregnancy was revealed to be false, then perhaps The Director of Part One becomes an unreliable guide, a shadier gatekeeper. Finally, the production stitches everything back together, the full cast gather around Anna Petrovna’s table. They have lost their voices (in the audience, we hear everything through PA and our headphones), and most of their costumes and accessories, and everything is different. This returning, too, could signify an acknowledgement of the impossibility of staging Platonov in the twenty-first century without the postdramatic intervention Dead Centre have provided. Thinking through the work of the audience in this production connects to Jill Dolan’s sense of a utopian performative. Seeing and hearing Chekhov’s First Play, and exploring the adaptation’s metatheatrical awareness, reaches beyond how we might assume our theatre spectatorship to seamlessly embrace the visual and the aural, and how our spectatorship of an adaptation might oscillate between what we know of the adapted text, and what we perceive of the adaptation. The visual/aural binary of spectatorship is challenged: we’re simultaneously seeing the actors onstage, but only sometimes hearing them. The effect of wearing headphones is that, at certain points in Part One, the actors’ microphones are turned down when The Director speaks to us. In Part Two, the actor’s voices play entirely through the soundscape in our headphones. The only ‘live’ line is said by Platonov at the very end of the production: ‘Hello’. Because we have seen The Director onstage at the very beginning of the production, we imagine him offstage in the wings and picture the words in our ears coming out of the human body we’ve seen. Due to the commentary, the characters, even in Part One, are cast across multiple worlds. They are everywhere and nowhere. In Part One, we are asked to imagine them in late-nineteenth-century

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rural Russia, but they’re simultaneously in a theatre or rehearsal room, trying to remember lines, skipping bits they can’t remember, thinking back to a sexual encounter with the director, feeling themselves in their pregnant body. Part Two is a placeless ontology, though also a broadly recognizable post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Drawing upon Dolan, the characters are nowhere, no-place, u-topos. Disrupting the usual methods of theatricality, and drawing our attention to these within the frame of performance, Dead Centre manifest Dolan’s articulation of the experience of the utopian performative. For her, these are small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense.40

Moments in Chekhov’s First Play that correspond to this description include the transition from one half to the other, The Director’s voice in my ears saying, ‘I’ve never felt like myself ’ as the soundtrack crescendos and the established scene evaporates.41 Similarly, the image of the active wrecking ball and pneumatic drill onstage create an ‘emotionally voluminous’ sense of space and possibility – if the walls can be shattered, then anything is possible. The cloud of dry ice around Sofya/ Holohan. Sasha/O’Mara’s pregnancy bump dissolving into blue paint. Additionally, the real-world personae of the actors, constructed for us by The Director in Part One, are themselves revealed to be fictionalized. Dead Centre, distorting realism’s mirror, hold out a distended fragment of fiction to us to see and hear. For me, this acknowledges how well theatre can tell a story while simultaneously articulating the impossibility of containing an adaptation within the maintenance of a fiction. This is a considered application of unstageability to a way of thinking about staging, using impossibility as a part of the dramaturgy of the adaptation or as a way of understanding the text. Dead Centre’s response to what they perceive as the unperformabilities in Chekhov’s text thus seems to be an articulation of the ethics and challenges of

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the adaptation process itself. In staging and highlighting their concerns about how adaptation might operate in the service of performability or stageability, the company presents a new perspective on adaptation as a methodology of thinking creatively about unperformability, and seeing the seemingly unperformable as an opportunity for expression and play, as distinct from a set of problems with no obvious solution.

The Octoroon and An Octoroon Dion Boucicault’s five-act melodrama The Octoroon (1859) is, on the surface, a love story between George Peyton, the heir of Terrebonne Plantation, and Zoe, a daughter of George’s uncle, whose mother was one of the plantation slaves. At the centre of a multi-strand plot, Terrebonne is in serious financial trouble, due to fraud and mismanagement by Jacob M’Closky (the villain of the play, also in love with Zoe). The Peyton family hope for the last-minute repayment of a debt from the past but face the prospect of selling their slaves at auction in order to save their estate. Zoe confesses her true parentage to George, despairingly noting that her ‘octoroon’ status (she self-identifies as being one-eighth black) means that they cannot marry due to miscegenation law. M’Closky discovers Zoe’s identity and realizes that a slave auction would mean that he could purchase her. When a letter promising the debt repayment arrives, M’Closky murders Paul, the slave tasked with its delivery to the Peytons, stealing the tomahawk of Paul’s friend Wahnotee (a Native American) in order to do so. George, in an attempt to save the plantation slaves, agrees to marry Dora Sunnyside, the rich daughter of a neighbouring family, but the slave auction takes place regardless, and M’Closky buys his prize. Meanwhile, Wahnotee’s murder weapon sees him accused of Paul’s murder. However, he is acquitted due to a piece of evidence which is completely standard and recognizable to us today but extremely technologically advanced at the time – a photograph. A camera, owned by M’Closky’s colleague Scudder, was left set up near the murder scene and happened to form the image of M’Closky murdering

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Paul. Unfortunately, the letter that caused the murder does not reach George in time to save Zoe, who has killed herself in order to escape her new fate as M’Closky’s (sexual) slave. When it first opened in New York in 1859, The Octoroon was well attended by audiences but presented a complicated picture to critics. As the new play opened four days after the execution in Virginia of abolitionist John Brown, as punishment for leading an insurrection against slavery, the timing of the premiere was potentially inflammatory. Further to this, anti-miscegenation publications found the prospect of Zoe and George’s interracial marriage shocking.42 However, the death of Zoe (and restoration of the white family unit) slightly mollified racist reviewers and caused critics to wonder how clearly Boucicault was positioning himself, even in the context of the subject matter. Indeed, the New York Times suggested that The Octoroon was a ‘cleverly-constructed, perfectly impartial, not to say non-committal picture of life as it is in Louisiana’.43 However, as recently as 1961, Stuart Vaughan’s production of The Octoroon for the Phoenix Theatre in New York was reviewed ‘far more for its intrinsic merits [as a play] than for its occasional sins of innocence against modern sophistication’.44 The programme note for the production describes it as ‘a play to entertain and move audiences’.45 In his New York Times review, Howard Thompson observed that the audience laughed at lines including ‘You are illegitimate but love knows no prejudice’ and ‘I’d rather be black than ungrateful’.46 Boucicault’s text is no stranger to adaptation, intermedial and intramedial, in its inspirations and in its influences. The 1859 playtext was itself an adaptation of a novel written in 1856 by Thomas Mayne Reid called The Quadroon (Boucicault raised the stakes for Zoe by increasing the invisibility of her parentage to ‘one drop [of blood] in eight’). The Boucicault play in turn inspired another novel, The Octoroon or The Lily of Louisiana, written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Silent films were made of the play in Australia in 1912 (directed by George Young) and in the United States in 1913 (directed by Sidney Olcott). This century, Mark Ravenhill’s 2013 adaptation for the BBC, part of a short season

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of plays curated by Ravenhill for BBC Radio 3, was filmed at Theatre Royal Stratford East in front of an audience. Ravenhill had previously directed a rehearsed reading of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon in April 2012 at Soho Rep in New York. Furthermore, Boucicault’s own rewritings of The Octoroon during its transfer from the United States to the United Kingdom in  1861 anticipate some of Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation work in An Octoroon. Boucicault grudgingly rewrote the play midway through the London run, in order to save Zoe from death by her own hand after receiving a stream of audience letters and other responses urging him not to kill her. As Peter Thomson notes, ‘Boucicault resisted the demand for a rewriting of the last act for as long as he dared. It was, in his view, a story that could not accommodate a happy ending.’47 However, after resisting three weeks of vigorous audience campaigning, Boucicault rewrote the fifth act in accordance with the English audience’s taste for happy endings to their melodramas, but with the following sardonic note in the theatre’s playbill: Mr B. begs to acknowledge the hourly receipt of many letters entreating that the termination of the Octoroon should be modified and the slave heroine saved from an unhappy end. He cannot resist the kind feeling expressed throughout this correspondence nor refuse compliance with the request so easily granted. A new last act of the drama, composed by the public, and edited by the author will be represented on Monday night. He trusts the audience will accept it as a very grateful tribute to their judgement and taste, which he should be the last to dispute.48

As Jennifer DeVere Brody points out, the English audiences’ conviction that the play should be rewritten could also have stemmed from a lack of interest in the ongoing ‘direct, systematic, and legal divisions of racial conflict’ and the distance between England and America in this regard.49 Arguably, Boucicault’s reaction suggests a fluid relationship between the playwright and his play in relation to its unstageability. His audience-focused rewriting of The Octoroon was not an isolated

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example. He changed the name and content of his  1857 play The Poor of New York depending on the location of its production. Thus, between  1864, the play variously became The Poor of Liverpool, The Poor of Manchester, The Streets of Islington, The Streets of London and The Streets of Dublin.50 This indicates an early sense that unstageability and impossibility were never insurmountable to Boucicault and that theatre was changeable depending on context – that a historically or contextually contingent unstageable could be brought to the stage in another way. The original title of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s  2010 Off-OffBroadway version of An Octoroon was The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon. As Verna A. Foster observes, ‘The indefinite article in [Jacobs-Jenkins’s] title evokes Aimé Césaire’s classic postcolonial confrontation with Shakespeare, Une Tempête, and marks his difference from Boucicault.’51 This shift from Boucicault’s ‘the’ to Jacobs-Jenkins’s ‘an’ is political and ideological.52 The use of ‘an’ could remind us that the experiences of slavery described in An Octoroon were widespread and endemic and that Zoe’s story is just one example of the many who were enduring such conditions, treatment and outcomes on plantations across America, perhaps comparable to the use of the indefinite article in Steve McQueen’s  2013 film Twelve Years a Slave. Arguably, the use of ‘the’ in Boucicault’s title suggests an isolated and unrepeated incident, or a conceptual, generalized example intended to stand for all such women and all such situations. Boucicault, writing at this particular time, would have been speaking to an audience who were relatively uneducated about slavery and were watching his plays for entertainment. Combining this with what we know of Boucicault as a shrewd businessman, it is possible that he may have wanted to suggest a general image of slavery, rather than asking his audiences to concern themselves that this was still a routine way of treating people on the other side of the Atlantic (the Slavery Abolition Act of  1833 had abolished slavery throughout the British Empire). In

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relation to this book’s concerns, Jacobs-Jenkins’s ‘an’ also suggests a commitment to uncertainty and destabilization in relation to his adaptation. An Octoroon is ‘a’ version or ‘an’ adaptation of Boucicault; it does not position itself as definitive. This argument is borne out in the text’s nonlinear structure, metatheatrical sequences and use of the audience (particularly in the play’s first scene). Jacobs-Jenkins’s play follows Boucicault’s storyline but takes as its starting point (and broadly as its overarching narrative) the concept of an African American playwright adapting The Octoroon, and how this might be possible. An Octoroon opens with a prologue from a character called BJJ, who details a conversation with his therapist in which she suggested adapting Boucicault’s play ‘for fun – I think it’s important to reconnect with things you feel or have felt positive feelings for’.53 This is followed by a long stage direction during which BJJ plays ‘loud, crude, bass-heavy, hypermasculine rap music’ and puts on whiteface makeup and a blonde wig (he will play both George Peyton and Jacob M’Closky once we arrive at the Terrebonne storyline). A brief and aggressive dialogue scene between BJJ and a character called Playwright, in which BJJ criticizes his inescapable status as ‘black playwright’, comes before Playwright’s announcement that he is Dion Boucicault, speaking to us as if he has time-travelled to the  2010s, while putting on redface makeup (he will play Wahnotee). He laments the loss of his nineteenthcentury career but admits the advantages of contemporary theatre (though these seem mostly limited to saving on makeup costs due to being able to cast people of colour in acting roles). After the Prologue, we begin to follow Boucicault’s story, though the Terrebonne plantation is frequently shown through the eyes of slaves Dido and Minnie (particularly in the first and final scenes, framing what happens throughout), two minor characters in The Octoroon who are given much more significant parts in Jacobs-Jenkins’s play (in a manner reminiscent of Katie Mitchell and Maja Zade’s 2013 production of Miss Julie, which placed Strindberg’s marginal maid Kristin at the heart of the narrative). Speaking with contemporary language and rhythms in

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contrast to the other characters around them (as Jacobs-Jenkins notes in a stage direction at the beginning of the first scene in an initial gesture to one of the impossibilities of his adaptation: ‘I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you’), Dido and Minnie complain about their work and working conditions, including rape by slave masters and overseers, and lament the impossibility of escape due to Terrebonne’s location in the midst of a swamp.54 The key departure from Boucicault’s plot can be found in Act Four, immediately following the climax of the auction (the slave auction at which M’Closky buys Zoe), which returns us to the world of the Prologue. BJJ and Playwright discuss the problems with each of their tellings of the story and remind us that the fourth act ‘is actually the most important of all the acts in a melodrama … it’s your last chance to really hit the audience with something big’.55 Then, because ‘we’ve gotten so used to photos … so the kind of justice around which this whole thing hangs it’s actually a little dated’, they describe to us Wahnotee being accused of Paul’s murder and narrowly escaping lynching because of the camera.56 A still image of a lynching is projected onto the wall of the theatre as we are returned to Boucicault’s world for the final scenes – M’Closky’s unmasking as the murder, the realization about the letter Paul was carrying, Zoe’s suicide before the news of Terrebonne’s survival reaches her. The play closes with Dido and Minnie packing for their new lives as slaves on a boat (having been sold to a Captain Ratts at the auction). A consideration of this adaptation’s constant reference to its own unstageability in text and performance (explicitly or implicitly) can be derived from a number of sources. In the first place, the provocation to create the adaptation from the therapist to BJJ (‘Why don’t you try adapting this Octoroon – for fun’) sets up an acknowledgement of the task’s inherent impossibility (‘So I did. Or I tried to’). BJJ subsequently reveals that this conversation was false: ‘Just kidding. I don’t have a therapist … I can’t afford one … You people are my therapy.’57 Thus, if BJJ (in the world of the play) has imagined this conversation, it could be argued that the impossibility of the task has been acknowledged in the head of the writer before the adaptation process begins. Further to this, Jacobs-Jenkins, in grappling with the adaptation of The Octoroon,

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is signalling to readers and audiences that the inherent impossibility attached to his work to adapt Boucicault’s play requires the fictive announcement that BJJ constructed this at the behest of his white therapist (and the denunciation of this). Moreover, it seems that this prologue was written in response to the first (and fraught) presentation of the play in 2010, which amongst other things resulted in a literally unstageable opening night – the play opened three days later than originally planned.58 Following the departure from this production of its director, Gavin Quinn, two of the white cast members also left the show.59 In a manner reminiscent of Boucicault’s response to his London audiences, Jacobs-Jenkins responded with a new version of the text, including ‘a new speech at the top of the play’, and undertook direction of the production for the final week of rehearsals.60 Further to this, BJJ’s Prologue, if written partially in response to the impossibilities that arose during the  2010 rehearsal process, also discusses casting in a way that uncovers the deep and generative unstageabilities at the heart of the adaptation. In Boucicault’s time, as mentioned, The Octoroon would have been played entirely by a white cast (some performing in blackface), with Boucicault’s wife Agnes Robertson taking the role of Zoe. Jacobs-Jenkins’s cast list for An Octoroon is, on the other hand, extremely specific (Foster deems it ‘fussy’) about the possible ethnicities of the actor playing each character.61 For example, and possibly in response to Robertson’s casting for the premiere, JacobsJenkins requests that Zoe be played by ‘an octoroon actress, a white actress, a quadroon actress, a biracial actress, a multiracial actress, or an actor of color who can pass as an octoroon’,62 thus showcasing the multiple options available for contemporary casting, of which ‘a white actress’ is only one (and potentially the least interesting choice for the role). BJJ notes in his conversation with his therapist in the Prologue that the attempt to adapt The Octoroon initially failed because ‘all the white guys [playing slave owners] quit … they all felt it was too “melodramatic”’.63 This leads BJJ to a nuanced discussion (with himself, and with us as readers or audience) about the extreme differences attached to the roles that black and white actors typically are asked to play:

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God forbid any actor of color not jump at the chance to play... a gritty, truthful portrayal of ‘the Black experience in America’, but the minute you ask a white guy to play a racist whose racism isn’t ‘complicated’ by some monologue where he’s like ‘I don’t mean to be racist! It’s just complicated!’ he doesn’t return your phone calls?64 Thus, Jacobs-Jenkins’s productive exploration of this impossibility of white actors playing racist characters leads him to the stipulation of black actors in whiteface (George Peyton/M’Closky); Native American, mixed-race or South Asian actors in blackface (Pete); and white actors in redface (Wahnotee) makeup, a response to the standard practice of the nineteenth-century cast and to other historical practices of black minstrelsy. This complex use of facepaint and casting recalls JacobsJenkins’s 2010 play, Neighbors, in which black actors in blackface play the Crows, a family of minstrels, who move into the house next door to a black professor and his white wife (played by a black and a white actor respectively), or  2014’s Appropriate, which explores race and blackness in America, but features an all-white cast. In An Octoroon, these transformations, initiated by the cosmetic, are additionally inter-bodily and detachable.65 For example, when BJJ is putting on whiteface makeup, he also drinks an entire bottle of alcohol very quickly without getting drunk and ‘gives himself a powerful wedgie’.66 Shortly afterwards, Playwright ‘very vividly and very intensely picks a mysterious wedgie that’s been bothering him. He also seems to become progressively drunker, more belligerent’.67 This transfer of the effects or consequences of BJJ’s actions onto Playwright and the unhooking of an actor’s actions from their own body are readable in light of BJJ’s discovery of the impossibility of casting his adaptation of The Octoroon and Jacobs-Jenkins’s understanding of the myriad impossibilities negotiated throughout his play. All of these detachable, shifting identity

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signifiers contribute to a sense that nothing is as it seems in this play. In performance (I saw the UK premiere of An Octoroon at the Orange Tree in 2017, directed by Ned Bennett), the audience cannot trust the most basic aspects of the theatrical machine: the floor the actors stand on is dismantled; the colours of actors’ faces melt and shift as facepaint mixes with sweat and drips onto clothes and furniture; and accents, origins and whereabouts all appear to be movable, impossible to firmly grasp onto. The impossibility in this play thus partially stems from its shaky and uncertain identity, deriving from Jacobs-Jenkins’s central question about how Boucicault’s play could possibly be adapted in the 2010s by a writer of colour and what the purpose of such an adaptation might be.

Audience The assumption that an audience could or should ever have a consistent or coherent reaction is always a fruitless and uninteresting one, but at the Orange Tree production, what we could think of as broad observed trends in audience response (without quantitative or qualitative research) seemed to be related to the small space and in-the-round configuration. The use of the round enabled the audience to watch each other as well as the action on stage, to consider who these other people in attendance were, and crucially, to examine what they were laughing and not laughing at. The spatial configuration also ensured that the actors used the full Orange Tree space, including audience entrance and exit doors, bringing further resonance to questions raised by the play about who is permitted to play whom on stage and who can appear in which parts of the theatre space. In the round, it was impossible to escape the actors’ gazes – and BJJ in particular spent significant periods of time in the Prologue and Act Four in silence looking at the audience, in order to further substantiate such a point. As well as the cast of characters, a cellist played a live, non-diegetic score throughout the production. Tonally, this appeared to have connections to melodrama, as it manipulated emotions and created

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controlled atmospheres. Reviews described the cello score as ‘smooth’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘cinematic’.68 Beyond classical or art music recitals, we might encounter solo cello being performed at drinks receptions, weddings or other events (on film or television and in life). The mellifluous string tones are a social lubricant, fading into the background, difficult to find fault with: the precise opposite of the effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’s play. During An Octoroon, the choice of such an instrument clashes with everything else we are confronted with throughout the production, setting up another impossible gap between the world of the play and the world many of us can comfortably return to at the end of the night. An Octoroon divided its audience along laughter lines, especially in relation to who appeared to feel they had permission to laugh at which moments and who did not. Critics writing about the production in 2017 report audience confusion and contradictions. Connor Campbell describes how ‘people squirm with discomfort, unsure if to laugh, when to laugh or if they are even allowed to laugh’.69 Holly Williams notes that the production ‘take[s] the piss’ but ‘still punch[es] the audience in the guts’, and feels ‘squirm-inducing, prodding at our anxieties over representation of race and who is “allowed” to play whom.70 Tom Birchenough traces the ‘growing unease’ felt by the audience, while Fergus Morgan finds himself ‘tease[d] relentlessly’ by the production.71 For Aliya Al-Hassan, the production ‘forces the audience to confront uncomfortable issues and yet remains funny’.72 An interview with Chris Myers, who played BJJ/George/M’Closky in the second New York production at Soho Rep in 2014, records a similar reaction, both onstage and in the auditorium. As Myers describes, ‘you’re constantly oscillating between “oh this fun” and “oh shit just got real”’.73 However, the position of white privilege occupied by many of the above reviewers of the production (and the typical Orange Tree audience more broadly) presents a particular way of watching An Octoroon which is challenged by Salome Wagaine. In her long-form review for Exeunt, Wagaine (a writer of colour) discusses the possibility that the play and its production are structured and framed assuming a mostly white audience and that its ‘knowing jokes about all

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the white people in [the audience], how it’s a white people party’ reveal multiple, structural, racial inequalities in the theatre industry (from artistic directors to audience demographics).74 These reach beyond the play’s historical frame and into our contemporary world, highlighting the impossibility of visibility and survival that thwarts so many creative artists beyond what continues to be an unfortunate norm of white, middle-class, university-educated privilege.

The camera As mentioned, a slightly more miscellaneous, but deeply significant, impossibility attached to this adaptation includes the use of the camera as a plot device. As Aoife Monks observes in discussion with Dan Rebellato about the production, the Boucicault audience were witnessing the first play to use a camera as a major plot device, and the camera’s ability to record a moment otherwise unwitnessed by human bodies would have been very exciting at the time.75 In The Octoroon, the value of the camera lies in the provision of objective evidence – to the extent that a camera can only capture the actions of the area in which it is placed – revealing a new possibility for dramaturgy and storytelling that has spawned an enormous industry of crime and murder mystery plays, novels, television shows and films, many of which hinge on evidence provided by the recording or capturing of a perpetrator’s actions when they are unaware. So many crucial, pre-denouement scenes in a crime or murder mystery narrative show key detectives (or a junior assistant/ technician) endlessly scrolling through CCTV footage, only to suddenly stop, rewind, play again, rewind, play again and finally see the missing part of the puzzle. Of course, CCTV and other devices have made nonhuman recording part of our contemporary world, and the UK is now the most-surveilled nation on the planet.76 Thus, the impossibility of this plot point in The Octoroon revolves around its transplantation to New York or London in the  2010s unscathed. Jacobs-Jenkins’s response to this was to project an image of a multiple lynching onto

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a portable projector screen in the centre of the space throughout the scene during which the photographic plate reveals M’Closky’s crime. The use of this image of racist murder instead of one showing M’Closky caught in the act of killing Paul gave the entire play a weight and a reality that recalled the irreconcilable impossibility at its heart. Far from the unstageability of Boucicault’s play now, or the unperformability of BJJ/ George/M’Closky for a white actor, the staging of this projected image underlined the racial inequalities and hatred that still engulf our society (the racist murder of James Craig Anderson in Mississippi in 2011 was widely described as a ‘modern-day lynching’) and the vast and urgent changes that still need to take place in order to address these.

Moments of transition As with Chekhov’s First Play, the moments of transition from Boucicault’s melodramatic world of Terrebonne to a more metatheatrical or postdramatic space and tone provide helpful material for analysing the adaptation’s relationship with and attitude to the impossible task underway. The porous movement between worlds is indicated in Minnie and Dido’s contemporary speech rhythms, as well as their retrospective analyses of slavery and its consequences: Minnie  I couldn’t read that sign out front, because I can’t read. Dido  I can’t read it, either. You know it’s illegal for us to read. Minnie  Yeeuh, but I was hopin’ you wuz one of them secret readin’ niggas. You know, like Rhonda. Dido  Rhonda can read?! Minnie  Shh, girl! It’s a secret.77

Indeed, as if taking part in the uncertainty surrounding the adaptation, Minnie and Dido constantly ask each other to verify their statements (Minnie repeatedly uses ‘She did?’ and ‘Right?’ in this regard) or to reinforce them:

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Minnie  Girl, is it just me or has it been really quiet? Dido  You know, I was just thinking the same thing. Minnie  Right?78

Moving from the body, with the actors’ makeup transformations and body transmissions, to the space, the establishment of the auction scene in Bennett’s  2017 production at the Orange Tree created a particular moment of transition that highlighted the impossibility of staging a slave auction in London in the twenty-first century. During the setup for the auction scene, the actors lifted the wooden stage floor up, board by board, to create various pens and crates for the display and purchase of humans, which slowly filled partway with murky water. This actorly labour began to seem like a lo-fi, lo-tech response to the astonishing theatrical coups, spectacles and tableaux of Boucicault’s time, which were as much of a box office draw as the plays and stories themselves. The aim of these spectacles tended to be to astonish the audience, to take them beyond a storyline into the realm of the extraordinary or sublime and to encourage, as magic tricks do, a wonder-filled questioning of how such tricks were possible, or stageable. In nineteenth-century melodrama at the theatre, no expense or effort was spared to dazzle the audience, with special machinery constructed, huge teams of scene painters and technicians assembled in order to create particular spectacles and effects and to conceal their trickery from those in the auditorium.79 However, in An Octoroon we’re shown how hard it is to lift floorboards out of the stage floor. The water pools slowly before filling the pit, the piping machinery is not hidden and the labour of the scene change is visible. The effort in this case is the effort of the onstage actors’ bodies, which seems appropriate in a play in which bodies, their skin colours and their statuses carry myriad possibilities and impossibilities. This transition scene makes any sense that we can escape into the magic of melodramatic spectacle impossible, and stands in for the process of adapting the unstageable more broadly in An Octoroon. The shift from melodrama towards a postdramatic and metatheatrical contemporary writing, the use of space and

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scenography and the production’s verbal and physical teasing out of its impossibilities throughout all speak to Jacobs-Jenkins’s foregrounding of the unstageabilities of the adaptation, bringing unspeakable acts (slavery, slave auctions, lynching) to the twenty-first-century theatre space with a keen awareness of their ethical and aesthetic impossibility.

The Great Gatsby and Gatz Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (2006), an eight-hour production that staged every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, demonstrates a different approach to how the theatre might present seemingly impossible adaptation tasks on the stage. Gatz also probes further the questions I am raising about the inherent impossibilities found in the processes of theatrical adaptation. In this case, the concept of resistance (of the material as well as the theatre-makers) to adaptation is opened up to address the theatre as a medium, and the transmutation that occurs is from a book to a theatre production (rather than the intramedial adaptations I’ve examined so far), though not in the way we might expect. In Gatz, Scott Shepherd plays an office worker who arrives reluctantly at his office for work and desultorily flicks on his computer. Bored as he waits for it to warm up, he idly rummages through his desk drawers. Extracting an old copy of Fitzgerald’s novel, and with a quick glance at the clock (9:38 am), he begins to read aloud. As his colleagues enter the office, equally unenthused at the prospect of another eight-hour grind staring at screens or spreadsheets, he continues to read audibly, growing in his interest in the story and his confidence in delivery. Gradually, we realize that Shepherd’s office worker is becoming Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby. The word-for-word reading continues. The quotidian movements of the company workers in their workplace begin to take on additional meaning as the dinners, travels and parties of Fitzgerald’s plot emerge, slightly before rather than after we hear them through Shepherd’s voice. The energetic colleague rifling through sports magazines in the office transforms into Jordan Baker, Nick Carraway’s

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girlfriend for much of the novel, and the office boss, commanding and terse, seems to embody Jay Gatsby’s swagger and menace. After about thirty minutes of one voice reading, Tom Buchanan’s vocal entry into Gatz makes utter sense, thoughtlessly interrupting Shepherd while jangling a bunch of keys. Although these characters (speaking the dialogue of their Fitzgerald counterparts) remain in their everyday work clothes, the clock stays fixed at 9:38 am and the set remains the shabby office we first set eyes on; the transformation of sound and lighting bring us right into Gatsby’s West Egg mansion, the party at Tom’s New York apartment and the confrontation at the Plaza Hotel. Perhaps the unabridged eight-hour reading (the length of the typical office’s working day) takes place in the worker’s mind in the ten minutes it takes his computer to sputter into life. In conversation with John Collins about this production, Aoife Monks observes that he is ‘suggesting that what was really energizing about Gatz was the impossibility of the project, the fact that you couldn’t stage a novel in the theatre’, chiming with the generative impossibilities embraced by Dead Centre and Jacobs-Jenkins elsewhere in this chapter.80 Furthermore, even though this production – the staging for theatre of a work of literature – appears to occupy much of the terrain of an intermedial adaptation, it is interesting to note that the company disagrees with such a classification. Collins notes that ‘adapting [The Great Gatsby] into a play did not strike me as a very interesting problem’81 and that ‘the point of not adapting it is to leave a lot … to the imagination of the audience’.82 Scholars and critics similarly find it impossible to straightforwardly categorize Gatz as an adaptation. Catherine Love mentions that the production is ‘at once paradoxically an adaptation and not an adaptation’.83 Jason Zinoman suggests that the production ‘adapt[s] without adapting’.84 Sara Jane Bailes wonders whether the play is more of a translation than an adaptation, something Collins himself mentions elsewhere.85 Julia Jarcho describes Gatz as a ‘production that isn’t a play’.86 Frances Babbage considers that the play is ‘not so much adapted, as adopted’.87 The resistance of this production to conventional processes of adaptation appears to operate at a number

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of levels. If we consider that much of the task of an intermedial (or indeed intramedial) adaptation is to overcome the challenges faced by trying to stage something that seems impossible to stage or to restage,88 it seems that, for Elevator Repair Service, the challenge in and of Gatz has shifted to a broader terrain. The problem exposed by the staging of Gatz is not only how difficult it is to put a whole novel on stage but, conversely, what it might be about the theatre that makes this so impossible. Elevator Repair Service reveal that there is something inherently unstageable at the heart of theatre, not just in the adaptation process itself. By allowing the production to catch on the skeins of the theatre apparatus and expectations, the limits of the medium are tested. Elevator Repair Service’s process of attempting to ‘[p]ut the book on stage and keep it a book’,89 then, simultaneously defies theatre while using the medium as a helpful constraint. The second part of Collins’s assertion merits further attention. The idea of putting a book on stage, in whole or in part, takes in wide-ranging modes of adaptation of literature for the stage, including short stories, novels, graphic novels, biographies, autobiographies and works of nonfiction.90 The impossibility suggested by ‘keeping it as a book’ begins to invoke properties of production techniques such as documentary, fact-based or verbatim theatre, where testimonies, interviews and documents (as they were originally spoken or written in the case of verbatim theatre) are used to make performance, usually involving a process of editing to a greater or lesser degree.91 Key proponents of these techniques range across a spectrum of approaches to editing, fidelity, the presence of the document/voice/ interview and staging. They include the extreme reportage approach of Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent’s tribunal plays, covering the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (Nuremberg), the Lawrence Inquiry (The Colour of Justice), the Saville Inquiry (Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry) and the Hutton Inquiry (Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Enquiry). Alecky Blythe’s ‘recorded delivery’ methodology features original interview material played through earpieces for the actors performing the characters, encouraging an emphasis on how something is being said, as well as its content. Breach Theatre’s

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It’s True, It’s True, It’s True (2018) presents a recent UK example of working verbatim from a document – in this case a transcript of court proceedings from  1612 which followed the trial of the painter Agostino Tassi, accused of raping a fifteen-year-old fellow painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. Every word spoken during It’s True, It’s True, It’s True is taken from the translated transcription, spliced with visual and choreographic sequences heavily influenced by feminist visual and live art. All of these examples position their interview/transcript material in particular ways (stacks, boxes and shelves of documents on a courtroom set for Norton-Taylor, headphones for Blythe’s actors, sheaves of paper and live tableaux of Gentileschi’s paintings for Breach Theatre), with varying overlaps between document and performance. In Gatz, although the production is not hailed as a documentary, nor does it involve a testimony-based verbatim methodology, we do see a document read word-for-word, as it was written by Fitzgerald, every last ‘she said’ and ‘he said’ intact. Like Norton-Taylor’s visible court transcripts in Bloody Sunday, Shepherd’s copy of The Great Gatsby remains in our sight throughout the seven hours of Gatz (although at certain points in the production he hardly seems to need it as a script). Thus, Elevator Repair Service are harnessing the tropes of a relatively recent tradition of contemporary documentary theatre. As with much verbatim theatre since the 1990s, the text in Gatz is encouraged to speak for itself, and the audience are required to make sense of what unfolds. The words are read to us; the actors do not perform depth of emotional engagement with the characters or events underway, but skim in and out of them, enjoying the duality on offer. Alongside a more general exposure of theatre’s fallibilities and breaches and a playful attitude to questions of representation, for Elevator Repair Service, staging the impossibility of the adaptation of the fictional novel is arguably negotiated through (implicitly) exploring nonfiction theatre methodologies, in this case verbatim theatre. This is not merely an intermedial adaptation, but an intergeneric and interideological one too.92 As Jonathan Kalb dissects, another challenge taken on by Elevator Repair Service in the midst of the generative constraints they find in

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their particular staging of literature is that of the contemporary theatre marathon.93 With recent examples including Druid Theatre Company’s DruidSynge (2005–6), DruidMurphy (2012) and DruidShakespeare (2015) cycles in Ireland, the National Theatre of Scotland’s The James Plays (2014) and the Chichester Festival Theatre/National Theatre’s Young Chekhov trilogy (2016) in the UK, the six-hour or nine-hour event performs its own kind of durational spectacle into existence. Opera has long been a lengthy affair (with Wagner’s Ring Cycle the most famous example), and Robert Wilson’s 1970s productions including Einstein on the Beach and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin lasted for five and twelve hours, respectively. However, Gatz, as Kalb suggests, is ‘deliberately antimonumental’ in this regard and works against the tropes of greatness and majesty implied (and sometimes explicitly referenced) by the typical theatre marathon – the heroic spectator admirably sweating through hours of spectacular, romantic theatre. Catherine Love describes fellow audience members arriving to Gatz armed with ‘pillows, flasks and snacks’, presumably after reading reviews that mentioned the strenuous commitment and endurance required of the (entirely seated) spectators of the production.94 However, moving away from the less interesting physical stamina (though of course this exists), the work of the audience at Gatz has much more to do with watching that gradual transformation of the scruffy office into the world of 1920s West Egg and Manhattan, the emergence of Nick, Jay, Daisy and company from the workplace employees and the realization that our picturings and imaginings are doing much of this gap-closing between the book and the stage. Again, if we consider the play to be an adaptation, this is a very different approach to the work of the audience at more conventional theatrical adaptations, where we might enjoy knowing the adapted text, and can almost allow it to function independently of the production, proudly or pleasurably oscillating between our own knowledge of the text and what the production might be doing (or not doing). At the time of writing (early 2018) for example, audiences watching To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway or Matilda or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime in the West End may have engaged with the novels long before

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seeing the commercially successful productions. Back at Gatz, the audience may be very likely to know Fitzgerald’s most famous work, but oscillation from the adapted text to the adaptation is not available to an audience in quite the same way: the whole thing is there for us. As a production incorporating and framing its own impossibilities (as we have explored with Chekhov’s First Play and An Octoroon), Gatz might appear to be taking up Heiner Müller’s statement about literature offering resistance to the theatre and reversing it. Perhaps, the resistance comes from the theatre itself. Fitzgerald’s novel has not been written to resist the theatre; the theatre is trying to resist the novel. In the kinds of plays that Müller was referring to, the writing of the play should have the aim of unsettling and resisting (easy) staging. Here there is no play, so an unsettling is activated by the theatre’s own shortcomings, and the distance that is held and maintained between the book and the production. However, as we have seen throughout this book so far, the theatre-maker (in this case Elevator Repair Service) sustains the result of such resistance as play and ingenuity. Early on, Ben Williams, responsible for the live sound design constructed throughout the show, leaps up in response to Myrtle’s (Laurena Allen) request that Tom Buchanan buy her a dog from a trader she has spotted from a taxi window. Becoming the trader, and answering Myrtle’s question about whether ‘one of those police dogs’95 is available, Williams extracts a cuddly toy, and Myrtle reacts precisely as if it were the dog (‘an Airedale concerned in it somewhere’) in question.96 The object is adaptable according to the whim of the story. At the theatre, a dog can be a toy and vice versa. A bored office employee can be Nick Carraway as he waits for his computer to turn on. The contemporary workplace can become a riotous, glamorous party in the Hamptons in the 1920s. All of these things can happen on the stage, without additional mise-en-scène or any attempt at verisimilitude. The seeming impossibility of staging the novel and ‘defy[ing] the gap between literary source and theatrical performance’, the resistance and subversion of adaptation practiced here reveal the theatre once again as a creative space for the negotiation and performance of seeming unstageability.97

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Conclusions This chapter has aimed to discuss how unstageability and impossibility can become part of the dramaturgical arsenal of playwrights and production teams, particularly in relation to theatre-making processes based on explorations or adaptations of pre-existing texts. If, as Hutcheon, Sanders, Krebs and others have observed, there is an inherent impossibility at the heart of the adaptation process, I argue that Chekhov’s First Play, An Octoroon and Gatz are deploying this impossibility as a positive thing and something to be positioned as central to the storytelling process. Both intramedial adaptations place particular characters (The Director in Chekhov’s First Play; BJJ and Playwright in An Octoroon) outside of or tangential to the main plot, acting almost as custodians or gatekeepers of the unstageable. Most references to impossibility are made through and by these characters, and the relationship between self-reflexivity and a narrator figure is seen to be a mechanism through which the generative impossibility of the adaptation is transmitted. As with the stage directions of the previous chapter, these gatekeepers might remind us of the importance of acknowledging resistance and impossibility, and staging their presence. Thinking about Gatz in relation to these concepts, it becomes increasingly clear that, as Frances Babbage reminds us, ‘if adaptation is regarded as a process of making fit, this need not mean ruthlessly fit into’.98 Elevator Repair Service’s production does not attempt to make the novel suitable for or adaptable to the theatre; The Great Gatsby and Gatz occupy the same space for eight hours, but both appear in their own capacities, with quieter (but no less exciting) meetings and minglings as they make sense of each other. Crucially, the dramaturgical and production style of Gatz allows for the establishment of one of the unstageable’s most significant focal points: the question of visuality. As seen already, the relationship between what we are shown on stage and what we are told about creates an interface between the impossibilities in the text, the theatre-makers’ negotiation of these impossibilities and

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the work of the audience. The next chapter emphasizes this trope of the unstageable still further by looking at violence, particularly physical violence related to the shedding of blood. Blood on stage is always challenging. It is one of the ultimate impossibilities of the theatre apparatus and strikes at one of its fundamental principles. Of course, no matter how much stage blood is involved (or how little), we know that the actor playing Lavinia in Titus Andronicus has not had her tongue cut out, nor has the actor playing Carl in Cleansed. However, as with the cuddly toy in Gatz, a red string emerging from a mouth, a spat-out clotted mouthful of food colouring and golden syrup or the delivery of the line ‘dentists make unnecessary extractions’ can each conjure equivalent meanings and audience reactions. The theatre’s role in staging blood is to tread the balance between visuality and imagination, measuring what Chiara Guidi calls ‘the fall into representation’ with precision. From graphic and visceral verisimilitude to bloodshed that happens only in our minds, the examples under discussion in the next chapter use a range of different ways to signal how blood on stage performs and how its impossibility can be harnessed to exciting (and sometimes unbearable) effect.

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Scientific discovery is, at its heart, always trying to show us something, and the ability to see further and in more detail is highly prized, bringing what has previously been invisible into view. In  2018, the  7-Tesla MRI machine can show a brain scan in a maximum resolution of one millimetre, revealing thousands of neurons packed into that tiny space. The XB540 FIB-SEM microscope at CERN can identify features the size of ten atoms. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is tracking the chemical by-products of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, almost 600 million kilometres away. In April  2019, the world was captivated by the first image of the event horizon of a black hole 55 million light years away from Earth, captured by the Event Horizon radio telescope network. Headlines around the globe proclaimed that we were ‘seeing the unseeable’: the black hole itself is unseeable, but the image showed a halo of dust and gas around its edges, beyond which all our laws of space and time disintegrate. As you are reading this book, these technological advancements in scientific looking will have been outstripped, pushing sight and seeing, clarity and visibility to new points, defying what we previously thought was impossible. At the theatre, and arguably in any form of storytelling, visuality is prized in a different way. In playtexts, plots and structures are carefully balanced and mapped, ensuring that the right information is revealed at the right time to the right character, and to the reader. Oedipus, despite a number of prior warnings, realizes that he has killed his father and married his mother; Mrs Alving grasps that Oswald has inherited syphilis from his father; and Chris Keller finds out that his father, Joe, deliberately sold damaged plane cylinders to the Air Force. In performance, audiences might be privy to a scene that our

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protagonist doesn’t see or might be told about something that is not seen on stage, possibly by a reliable chronicler, or possibly not. What we see (or don’t see) can also be explored in terms of scenography and use of space. For example, Michelle Read’s 2003 two-hander The Other Side was set in an unnamed African country and featured two women held prisoner in adjacent rooms by military forces, speaking to each other through the wall. In production, the entire stage and auditorium of the Project Arts Centre in Dublin were divided into two with heavy canvas sheeting by designer Marie Tierney, and audiences chose (or were randomly allocated) to sit in one half or the other, hearing the full play, but seeing only one side. The story was experienced significantly differently depending on the side chosen. For example, Kate, one of the two characters, was heavily pregnant, but never mentioned this aloud, even when struggling or in pain. Thus, Dervla, the other character, knew nothing of the pregnancy, nor did her half of the audience. Dervla had a supply of food, which became crucial the longer the imprisonment lasted. She did not share this information with Kate and joined her in complaining about the lack of food and water. Robert Icke’s  2017 production of Hamlet for the Almeida Theatre in London chose to show us Ophelia hiding Hamlet behind a sofa for the duration of Act One, Scene Three (in most playtexts, and in most productions, he exits after Scene Two). Hamlet thus witnessed Ophelia’s conversations about him with her father and brother, which ranged from embarrassing to protective. This overhearing (and Ophelia’s awareness of it) added sparky fun to their romantic relationship, while also poignantly reminding Hamlet of the value of a loving and supportive family, and the motivating power of his grief.

Seeing things A consideration of visuality and visibility at the theatre requires us to think about what and who and how we see, who is doing the looking, and what our acts of looking might do and mean.1 These processes are

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contextual and contingent, encouraging an understanding of when and where the seeing is taking place, who the ‘seer’ (to use Maaike Bleeker’s terminology) is and what their previous experiences have been.2 Furthermore, all of our looking and seeing practices become complicated when we bring the imagination to bear: although what an audience is given to see on stage (a woman mopping blood off a white floor) might be consistent, what we imagine in relation to it is multitudinously different. The use of imagination is historically and culturally contextual, but remains an important aspect of theatrical spectatorship, moving us past passive seeing and towards active creation, as Ulla Kallenbach observes: Theatrical spectatorship implies an active use of the imagination: the creative ability of seeing something as ‘something else’, of creating ‘presence’ out of absence, of blending fiction and reality [and] linking intertextual references.3

The return to an active theatre and performance spectator has been widely theorized in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century scholarship, from Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectator to Gareth White’s writings on audience participation and Marco de Marinis’s discussion of the dramaturgical work of the active spectator, to Susan Bennett’s critical analysis of the active/passive binary and Kirsty Sedgman’s ongoing explorations of how theatre spectators feel about what they’re seeing, how they experience their time at the theatre and how this experience can be policed by others as a form of exclusion.4 Susan Kattwinkel reminds us of the nineteenth-century theatre’s innovations in darkening the auditorium and distancing it from the stage space, and the multiple commercial, social and cultural activities partaken of by audiences at the theatre before this point.5 While physical audience invitations, activities or tasks vary as widely as performances do (particularly in immersive or interactive practices), the imaginative activity of the contemporary theatre spectator can broadly be conceived of as a negotiation or filling in of the gap between the visible and the imaginary. Ernst Gombrich suggests two possible avenues for this:

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[t]he beholder must be left in no doubt about the way to close the gap … [or] he must be given a ‘screen’, an empty or ill-defined area onto which he can project the expected image.6

In Gombrich’s view, the visible must either be so completely detailed that nothing could possibly be left to the imagination, or remain absolutely open to a full imagining of what is being suggested. Of course, it is impossible to know what ‘completely detailed’ could mean to innumerable viewers or seers, and furthermore, it is an unnecessary goal to pursue. As Gombrich continues, ‘[w]e cannot register all the features of a head, and as long as they conform to our expectations they fall silently into the slot of our perceptive apparatus’.7 Denis Diderot observes a similar difficulty of navigating the relationship between description and comprehension in his reflections on his own extensive description of a painting by Hubert Robert in his Salon of  1767. The gap between the two, for Diderot, is paradoxically increased as more details are added to his description of the painting, and the image is obscured rather than clarified during this process. As he puts it, ‘[t]here’s a surefire way to make our listeners mistake a flea for an elephant: just enumerate to excess the particulars of that living atom’s anatomy’.8 For Diderot, ‘the field of imagination is inversely proportioned to that of the eye’, and so, seeing more does not equate to seeing better.9 Returning to Gombrich, the extent to which a visual art form can be ‘empty or ill-defined’ and still provide something for a viewer is likewise not easily measurable. At the theatre, Dan Rebellato takes this argument a step further, wondering aloud what we’re actually doing as audience members when we are asked to imagine things, what we are looking at when we see things staged and what we picture as readers when we read a play. Rebellato observes that at the theatre ‘[w]e know we are watching people representing something else; we are aware of this, never forget it and rarely get confused’ and proposes ‘an entirely different model of theatrical viewing and the relation between stage and fiction’.10 This model is based on the idea that we could see theatrical representation as

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metaphorical, rather than fictional or focused on resemblance. In such a context, ‘actors give performances that become metaphors for the character, the stage becomes a metaphor for indeterminate imaginary worlds or determinate real ones’.11 For the purpose of this chapter, I suggest, using Rebellato’s model, that objects (or substances) on stage similarly become metaphors for other real objects, imaginary concepts or things. However, with this in mind, and as I hope to show below, this model immediately becomes fragmented when we watch acts of violence on stage. For example, audience members who faint at the sight of blood do not tend to find differentiation between whether the blood is real or fake, following Daniel Gilbert’s neuroscientific explanation that ‘[t]he region of your brain that is normally activated when you see objects with your eyes – a sensory area called the visual cortex – is also activated when you inspect mental images with your mind’s eye’.12 Or, as Lucy Nevitt writes of theatre audiences’ physical responses to violence on stage, ‘[y]ou know what pain is because you have felt it’.13 Gombrich, Diderot and Rebellato thus present us with interesting thought experiments about how to approach the gap between what is offered for us to see and what is left for us to imagine, and performing unstageable violence and blood at the theatre is an ideal ground for their exploration. With this in mind, the examples in this chapter attempt to study the relationship between the visible and the imaginary in part by examining their positions in relation to Gombrich, Diderot and Rebellato’s suggestions. The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol applies strict precision to its graphically realistic renderings of bloody violence on stage. Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia leaves us in no doubt about the origins of the representation of bloody violence we are watching, but nevertheless presents an image that becomes increasingly visible as associated with the real. Finally, both Tim Crouch’s The Author and Forced Entertainment’s Dirty Work describe bloody violence that we cannot visually see on the stage. All four examples present the theatre’s performing of unstageable violence as an intricate choreography of visuality, expectation and imagination.

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Unstageable blood In discussing violence on stage, this chapter is primarily concerned with examples of physical violence, particularly that which involves bleeding or blood loss. As with the multiple psychological, sexual and physical violences of theatre and performance,14 attention to ontology is never far from consideration when we think about blood on stage. How real is this violence? How real does it look? As Nevitt writes, violence in theatre and performance is ‘inescapably fascinated with the idea of reality’.15 And as I have found in this study so far, fascination with reality in theatre and performance leads to inevitable questions about imagination, representation, staging and unstageability. Furthermore, as we will see, violence on stage, particularly that which involves blood, deeply involves the audience. The impossibilities associated with staging blood are numerous, involving logistics as much as signification. It is a ‘complexly referential’ substance.16 Blood on stage presents theatre-makers with significant challenges to consider, ‘from research to experimentation to integration into the rehearsal process to cleanup’.17 However, the key unstageability here arises from the fundamental nature of blood on stage as necessarily fake. As Elin Diamond writes, Of all theatrical signifiers, stage blood is the most obtrusively artificial. The red blobs that indicate the fake tearing or puncturing of the body’s surface and signify violent pain, extreme suffering or death are so conventional as to be distracting, even embarrassing.18

The design and application of makeup design for injuries is highly specialized. Even preparation for the performance of bleeding (well before the bleeding occurs on stage) causes problems. Marin Ireland, who played Cate in the  2008 Soho Rep production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, recalled in the New York Times that ‘[f]or a little while we were planning to have blood all over my leg, but that went away for purely logistical reasons, because I’d have to have it on [at] the top of the show … We couldn’t find any blood that wouldn’t stick to my pants’.19

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Recipes for stage blood and techniques for its emergence are shrouded in secrecy, both from audiences and between theatre companies. Writing specifically about the Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, Mel Gordon notes that the theatre’s ‘single most celebrated secret involved patented blood recipes’, and an article in TIME Magazine states that ‘[t]he blood really curdled. It came in nine shades, and was mixed daily by Director [Charles] Nonon [the theatre’s last director]’.20 The proximity of audience member to bleeding actor further complicates things. As Christine Woodworth notes, With audience members merely a few feet away from the performance space, the execution of stage blood as a prop must be flawless or else runs the risk of destroying the illusion. A more stylised approach may offer a more reliable and predictable use of stage blood as a prop, assuming the audience enters fully into the theatrical contract of that abstracted world.21

This immediately sets up a narrative of unstageability, if the staging of blood is situated between doing so with perfect verisimilitude and working more conceptually but with complete support of the audience in the endeavour. Returning to Gombrich, the choice begins to be between conforming to expectations in terms of detail and providing vast spectatorial space for the negotiation of any gaps. However, despite being such a tricky substance to stage, we have continued to see plenty of blood at the theatre throughout its history. The powerful range of possible significations of stage blood draw theatre-makers towards it regardless of the difficulties attached. Andrea Stevens, writing about the early modern English stage but with sentiments that could equally apply to contemporary theatre and performance, observes that ‘[s]tage blood has the capacity to elicit a wider range of conceptual and emotional responses, including shock, pity, laughter, admiration of actorly skill, and recognition of blood’s allegorical or symbolic significance. Stage blood is a bloody nuisance indeed’.22 Stage blood is messy (costume designers need at least two costumes for pre- and post-bloodshed; stage managers need to clean stains out of carpets or mop liquid from

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floors). As with any stage prop or technology, it creates meaning and can behave badly; it speaks and performs. While this chapter looks specifically at bloodshed as a result of violence done to characters by other characters, all possible sheddings of blood on stage – including accidents, menstrual blood, blood lost during and after childbirth, medical blood letting or drawing, surgical work, self-harm, the blood of non-human animals, amongst others – have their own theatrical significations and unstageabilities.

Bloody histories The staging of blood, much like the concept of unstageability, is historically contingent. In ancient Greek theatre, violence took place offstage and was described onstage. The Messenger’s speech to the Chorus towards the end of Oedipus Rex, relating Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’s self-blinding using his mother/wife’s brooches, explains that Oedipus ‘rammed [the pins] into his eyeballs … At each blow their blood bathed his cheeks red, Not in drops but a dark downpour of rain’.23 Similarly, Jason’s description of Medea’s (offstage) slaughter of their children (and Jason’s new wife) in Medea observes that his sons are ‘dead, [d]rowned in blood’ and that his bride is ‘[s]oaked in blood’.24 This invisibility of stage blood played alongside the actual blood sacrifices and rituals that formed part of Athenian culture. Later, the gladiatorial and mock battle displays of ancient Rome featured bloody and fatal violence as spectacle. Medieval mystery plays and passion plays frequently showed religious figures (Jesus, and a range of martyr-saints) who had been beaten or wounded.25 The wide range of logistical, textual and dramaturgical approaches to staging blood in the early modern theatre was necessitated by Elizabethan and Jacobean plays’ frequent eviscerations, stabbings and beheadings.26 We arrive, bloodstained, at the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in the late nineteenth century, with a lineage of animal blood, sponges, pre-stained costumes and props, hidden blood vials, paint, vinegar and wine.

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In the contemporary British theatre, the writing of bloody violence into plays is frequently associated with the work of  1990s (so-called ‘in yer face’) playwrights such as Sarah Kane (particularly Blasted and Cleansed) and Martin McDonagh (especially The Lieutenant of Inishmore). Kane’s extremely belated National Theatre premiere (of Cleansed in 2016) saw director Katie Mitchell and designer Alex Eales collaborate on a production that graphically realized some of Kane’s more blood-soaked images, resulting in sustained attention from a number of national media outlets in response to the repeated faintings and walkouts from audience members throughout the run. Contemporary performance art and live art also perform and display bleeding and blood, but in the case of artists including Marina Abramovic, Ron Athey, Franko B, Martin O’Brien, H Plewis and others, the body of the performer bleeds, not the body of the character. The blood is real, and its evacuation from the body is also real, using scissors for Abramovic’s Rhythm 0, hypodermic needles for Athey’s Martyrs & Saints, cannulas in the case of Franko B’s I Miss You, piercing needles for O’Brien’s Taste of Flesh/Bite Me I’m Yours and menstrual blood in Plewis’s ritual as part of Marisa Carnesky’s Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman. Highlighting the performer’s body bleeding as distinct from that of the character begins to shift thought away from concerns about ontology and logistics and presents a range of different questions about display, endurance and care, as well as our ethical position as spectators witnessing the bleeding of another human.27 Following the more metaphorical line of response to onstage bloody violence explored most famously by Peter Brook in his 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, which used red skeins of thread to represent blood (and to which the Royal Court premiere of Cleansed in  1998 paid homage), the past decade has also seen a range of approaches to blood on stage which reach beyond what we might think of as the realistic or conventional. For example, the closing image of Ivo van Hove’s  2015 production of A View from the Bridge showed the play’s central characters frozen in tableau, bodies interlocking as they were drawn into Eddie’s final violent conflict with Marco and Rodolpho. At

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this moment, an intense red shower rained relentlessly down on the characters. This communal drenching in blood was a powerful signifier of every individual’s complicity in and contribution to the unfolding events and a unifying bond between the characters, who face into an uncertain future. The blood performed gesturally, aesthetically and metaphorically, as well as literally (the actors took their curtain call still red-soaked to the skin). Moving away from any literalization of blood, Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play used a pregnancy bump filled with blue paint, as we have seen in Chapter 2. Similarly, Van Hove’s  2011 adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers featured a dying character rolling a length of canvas sheeting across the stage while a disembodied voice described her suffering. Daubing herself with thick blue paint, she collapsed to the floor and rolled across the canvas, thrashing and screaming as the paint tracked her movements. These representations of blood are still visceral and powerful, but the departure from any sense that the blood is intended to perform or appear in conventional ways (e.g. emerging from an injury in a way we might recognize the human body to do) frees the theatre-maker to focus on the image itself and what it might begin to mean to its audience (who are themselves freed from wondering how the effect has been achieved, or recoiling from its verisimilitude). In these contexts, the image reaches right into us, and as Nevitt puts it, ‘[i]t does not occur to us to look away’.28 As we turn to examine the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Forced Entertainment and Tim Crouch, the extent to which we can ‘look away’ is constrained by formal, structural and aesthetic choices made by the theatre-makers, and the performing of unstageable violence emerges in the differing relationships between visuality, expectation and imagination.

Staging blood The twentieth-century Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol occupies an important position in relation to any discussion of unstageable violence.

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The theatre’s commitment to a graphically realistic and bloody form of horror theatre (we still refer to bloody spectacle on stage as ‘GrandGuignol’), combined with its sharp decline in the mid-twentieth century following a ‘golden age’ of stage gore and violence, articulates the inextricable relationship between unstageability and its historical, social and cultural contexts. Audience reactions at the Grand-Guignol similarly trace an intertwined fascination and revulsion, with regular attendance in the  1920s linked to the sought-after anticipation of loss of consciousness, vomiting or leaving the theatre space, and a precise reversal of these attitudes in the 1940s and beyond. There are multiple contradictions contained within a theatre form that embraces verisimilitude, obsesses over production and design details, while exploring melodramatic storylines and eliciting excessive reactions, all taking place in one of the most prominent western European cities during the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. Looking at the Grand-Guignol’s historical context as a performance style necessitates an examination of the major theatrical trend present at the moment of its inception, one which was to become the most dominant form in modern theatre practice. With the rise of realism and naturalism in the theatre towards the end of the nineteenth century, spectators in theatres across Europe began to bear witness to a theatre that advocated ‘an objective portrayal of daily life that appears true to the spectator’s … actual experience’.29 As actor-training methods intensified, and the figure of the theatre director began to assume a significantly larger role in the rehearsal and performance of plays, what had been the accepted style of theatre began to shift and change. The exaggerated gestures and overblown actions of melodrama and Romantic drama were replaced with an increasing focus on details from everyday life as dramatic stories and ‘ordinary’ people as dramatic protagonists, creating conditions, settings and characters with which the audience could identify.30 This new sense of subject matter and performance style was explored across mainland Europe, notably at the Théâtre Libre, founded by André Antoine in 1887 in Paris, which contributed extensively to the development of theatrical naturalism

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until its disintegration in  1893. Antoine himself succinctly sums up the main characteristics of the naturalism he attempted to convey to spectators, asserting how his theatre attempted to transport real-life surroundings onto the stage that would create a recognizable and accurately reproduced environment, as a literal embodiment for the deterministic effect of environment on character.31

During its brief, yet significantly influential lifetime, the Théâtre Libre played host to numerous plays by a wide variety of playwrights, one of whom was former police secretary Oscar Méténier. After the closure of the Théâtre Libre, Méténier continued his exploration of stage naturalism, combining this with his preferred writing style, short plays known as comédies rosses. These plays ‘looked at the lives and language of the Parisian underclass’, using mainly working-class characters and often drawing inspiration from Méténier’s own former career, combined with the fait divers in the Parisian newspapers, sensationalist news stories which reported on particularly gory or vitriolic murders.32 Méténier’s purchase of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol from the publisher Maurice Magnier in  1897 provided an ideal forum for the beginnings of Grand-Guignol, a combination of violent subject matter with staging techniques which drew on the naturalism seen at the Théâtre Libre. Méténier passed ownership of the theatre to Max Maurey after only two years as its director. Over the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, the Grand-Guignol would continue to develop the narrative and stylistic hallmarks initiated by Méténier, establishing the definitive horror theatre of the time. With the writer André de Lorde and the stage technician Paul Ratineau at his side, Maurey retained both the naturalistic staging advocated by Méténier and the gritty fait divers material of the comédies rosses, and proceeded to take Grand-Guignol further in both regards, increasing the emphasis on violence and horror in the subject matter, and producing set pieces with minute attention to naturalistic detail. As Richard Hand puts it,

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[t]he term Grand-Guignol is now synonymous with heightened horror, but it was never Transylvanian: its horrors were always the actual or the possible. It is a theatre that made its reputation through its explicit and realistic stage effects and, so the legend goes, its ability to drive people to unconsciousness or nausea: as a gimmick they even had a resident doctor and, it is claimed, the first bar within a theatre for those who needed a stiff drink.33

And in case this content should become predictable or boring either to first-time spectators or to regular guignoleurs, the structure of an evening at the Grand-Guignol was another essential feature of its power. This structure became known as la douche écossaise, meaning that dramatic pieces alternated with comedies throughout the performance, creating a ‘hot and cold shower’ effect.34 The fascination with verisimilitude and graphically realistic representation was achieved by the skilful incorporation of technical effects into the piece, as distinct from emphasizing them, particularly the different techniques of blood-letting following stab wounds or gunshots to the body.35 As I’ve mentioned, these techniques, as well as the theatre’s recipe for fake blood, were highly developed, and ‘jealously guarded property’.36 The complexity of the effects is explored in detail by John Callahan, who describes the amputation of a victim’s arm: This trick was accomplished by the woman pushing her arm down hard on a slat of the table made to roll over when pushed, the reverse side having been prepared with a fake arm dressed to match the actress’s arm at the shoulder. At the moment the slat rolls over, the actor crosses in front of her to keep the audience from seeing the manoeuvre. He then proceeds to dissect the fake arm, with much blood coming from the handle of the cutting instrument, being squeezed out through the blade.37

Callahan here suggests an important aspect of the Grand-Guignol’s technical effects that reached beyond the objects (and fluids) designed for the purpose. The logistical achievements of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol presented a particular challenge to its actors, and the theatre’s acting style developed accordingly. The interface between the

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naturalism drawn from the Théâtre Libre and the complex demands of the theatre’s technical effects required an extensive range of techniques from the actors involved, as ‘[m]any of the stage effects were utterly dependent upon the specialist skills of the performance for their successful execution’.38 Frantisek Deák refers to the actors’ ‘double role’, busy not only with the more conventional demands of a script and a character, but also with Grand-Guignol-specific elements.39 Despite the shocking subject matter and graphic violence on display at the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, what we know of audience members’ attitude to what was appropriate and inappropriate at the time was more political than it was aesthetic. Deák notes that ‘the victims in GrandGuignol productions were tortured and killed in many brutal and refined ways, but the French public and the authorities could not tolerate seeing someone guillotined on stage’.40 The position that the guillotine holds in French history engenders this reaction, an interesting phenomenon in the midst of a theatre form brimful of representations of violence and murder. Indeed, reactions to the violence and horror of Grand-Guignol productions were varied, ranging from fainting to ironic amusement. For some, the suggestive style of Grand-Guignol provoked a genuine reaction. For example, in a presentation of a surgical operation on stage, some spectators noted that they smelled ether, which was not used.41 In reaction to a staged blood transfusion, some spectators vomited or fainted. However, the productions of Grand-Guignol and the spectators’ reactions to them were not, in reality, a surprise for those in the audience. The Grand-Guignol’s reputation tended to precede it, and spectators were well aware of the sensations on offer, seeking the theatre out specifically.42 Critics describe ‘hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals’, screaming and crying, ‘the cries of shock and fainting in the audience’.43 For P. E. Schneider, writing in the New York Times, The most familiar of the Grand Guignol’s effects on spectators is to make them faint … it was rare indeed, in the good old days, not to see at least a couple of people, livid and tottering, fumble toward the nearest exit.44

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As blood continued to flow and bones continued to crunch inside the theatre, sending ever greater numbers of audience members into a swoon, Maurey continued to hype the Grand-Guignol experience throughout Paris via insistent advertising campaigns. As six people succumbed on viewing an eyeless actress, ‘a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull’, and no less than fifteen during ‘a realistic blood transfusion’, an extraordinary opportunity presented itself to the clever director-manager.45 The much-publicized hiring of an in-house doctor for the theatre, to tend to the many syncopal spectators in the auditorium, led to the circulation of an anecdote which has been mentioned in relation to Grand-Guignol ever since. The caricaturist Abel Faivre in the  13  December  1904 edition of Le Journal captured the essence of this anecdote, a Parisian daily newspaper published throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The cartoon is entitled ‘At the Theatre of Torture’.46 It depicts a man attempting to revive a woman who has, presumably, fainted. Standing outside a door labelled ‘TORTURE’, he holds a cloth to her face, possibly containing some version of smelling salts or other reviving solution. We see, to the right of the image, another man, apparently the theatre-manager. When asked by the first man where the house doctor is, the manager replies, ‘But Sir, he is unconscious, like everybody else here!’ The joke that the house doctor has himself succumbed to the material on show at the Grand-Guignol suggests the importance of audience reaction (and marketing) and reinforces the theatre’s commitment to the staging of graphic and bloody horror. The decline of the Grand-Guignol theatre as the century wore on had two distinct rationales at its root. From the beginning of the twentieth century’s two world wars, when violence and bloodshed began to become a feature of everyday life for millions of people in Europe, the significance of the Grand-Guignol as a form of theatre was diminishing.47 At this time, the unpolitical, unheroic and unpatriotic repertoire was looked on for a time as improper; second, it was doubted that the artificial horrors

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of Grand-Guignol would be strong enough in a time when so many people experiences the horrors of war; third, the question was asked whether, after eighteen years of existence, the formula of GrandGuignol was not worn thin.48

Nevertheless, the success of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol during and after the First World War defied the critics. New director Camille Choisy initially attempted to bring the daily reality of the war directly onto the stage in an attempt to maintain the relevance of GrandGuignol to everyday life at the time. Taking inspiration from the trenches in order to add to his already impressive repertoire of torture and murder narratives (and methods for their realization), the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol’s success continued for much of the time between the two world wars. However, during and after the Second World War, it became clear that the popularity of Grand-Guignol was fading, and the daily reality of the war, combined with the rise of horror films in the cinema (which could employ the Grand-Guignol’s techniques on camera to more sophisticated degrees), caused the eventual collapse of the theatre form. In contrast to the success enjoyed by the theatre during and after the First World War, the impact of world events in the 1930s and 1940s upon a performance style that relied on naturalistic representations of extreme and unspeakable violence was just too great. Indeed, in an article on the Grand-Guignol in a November 1962 issue of TIME Magazine, its final director, Charles Nonon, is quoted as saying that the Grand-Guignol ‘could never equal Buchenwald … [b]efore the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality’.49 The central contradiction of the Grand-Guignol thus suggests that the violence felt so real because it was inconceivable to think that it could exist. However, once the scale of the violence perpetrated during the Second World War became apparent, it was no longer of any interest for audiences to watch extreme violence playing out on stage. This reaches to the heart of the paradox of the Grand-Guignol: the performance is impossible because it seems inconceivable, but once the violence becomes a reality, it is no longer possible to watch it on stage.

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However, the relationship between the world wars and the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol does not provide the only rationale for the latter’s decline. A movement away from many of the Grand-Guignol’s fundamental components, including the sensational special effects and the typical evening’s structure, led to a shift in audience attendance and interest that could not be regained. Where audiences once recoiled in disgust during the 1910s and 1920s, they started to giggle with mirth in the 1940s. As the theatre continued on, ‘the sounds of skulls being crushed and bodies plopping into acid vats began drawing guffaws instead of gasps’.50 Thematically, the Grand-Guignol began to prioritize sex and comedy over horror and the supernatural, though new stage technologies for blood-letting, including ‘“blood” that coagulates as it cools’ remained a key aspect of its advertising.51 TIME Magazine recalled the efforts of the theatre to move with the times, with an adaptation of Rene Raymond’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which was as different from the old Grand-Guignol classics as a Tommy gun is from a thumbscrew. Amid knifings and kneeings, kidnapping and murder, the meaty blonde Miss Blandish (Nicole Riche) spent most of two hours in panties and bra, successfully pursued by drooling Gangster Slim Grisson (Jean-Marc Tennberg). A moving touch for Grand-Guignol fans: Old Ma Grisson, the boss of the gang, beats Miss Blandish into submission with a rubber hose so that Slim won’t be annoyed by her cries when he rapes her.52

This description, a frantic mixture of techniques aimed at the titillation of the audience, was an example of the attempts made by the Parisian Grand-Guignol in the 1950s to recapture its glory days, when ‘its 293 seats were filled nightly with a faithful, shuddering clientele’.53 However, Richard Hand and Michael Wilson duly note that [i]n the same way that we might nowadays be bewildered by how our ancestors laughed at what seem the weak or incomprehensible jokes of music hall and variety comedians, we must exercise extreme caution when making judgements about staged acts of violence which might today seem tame and unconvincing.54

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While it may be true that the Grand-Guignol’s ‘staged acts of violence … might today seem tame and unconvincing’, this is a fruitful point for exploration, not a closed moment of caution. It does not stand for the labelling of something that merely does not ‘work’ in the same way anymore, but rather for the acceptance that the possibilities of the unstageable emerge in distinct contexts. Thinking specifically in relation to the bloodshed at the Grand-Guignol, the relationship between verisimilitude and impossibility has a number of distinct features. Firstly, the visuality of the blood at the Grand-Guignol is simultaneously straightforward and complex. It operates almost literally, stage blood signifying human blood. In a theatre form so interested in the graphic realization of bloodshed, we are shown stage blood in vast quantities released at precisely choreographed moments of spectacle. There is little left to the imagination here – a chisel is sunk into a man’s head; blood emerges from the wound inflicted.55 A nurse murders her young charges and fills the stage floor with their blood; two women blind a third with a pair of scissors.56 The motivation for or consequences of these crimes are rarely dwelt on at the Grand-Guignol, much less important than the spectacle of melodramatic violence on display. However, as indicated above via Gombrich, the more detail we are shown, the less clear an image becomes. Arguably, as the blood at the Grand-Guignol became more specific and meticulous, the easier it became for the verisimilitude it held so dearly to topple it from its plinth. Furthermore, as the  1940s Parisian audience gained increasingly unfortunate knowledge and experience about the bloodshed of combat in wartime, the Grand-Guignol became progressively unstageable as a result. Finally, the application of Grand-Guignol’s painstakingly researched and executed techniques to horror film, so valuable to the ongoing development of the latter, weakened the former when faced with a small theatre instead of a cinema or home television screen. The Grand-Guignol presents a historically contingent unstageability that reaches across stage practice, contextual events, intermedial pressure and social mores. Its spectacular and visceral use of blood contributes to the theatre form’s continuing unstageability, as the impossibility of

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staging blood with full verisimilitude transforms the theatre of horror into a theatre of unintentional comedy. However, as we will see in the twenty-first-century work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, a retreat from verisimilitude can also invoke tragedy and horror, due to the identification and performance of stage blood as stage blood, rather than a seamlessly imitative fluid.

Staging stage blood Between  2002 and  2004, the Italian performance company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio developed a cycle of theatre pieces exploring ideas of tragedy as they resonated in ten cities around Europe: Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London and Marseilles. The resulting eleven-episode production was entitled Tragedia Endogonidia, translatable as ‘Endogenous Tragedy’ in English. The biological term ‘endogenous’ denotes something that grows or originates from within itself. Supporting this definition, Romeo Castellucci writes that the word is adapted from the vocabulary of microbiology; it refers to those simple living beings with two sets of sexual organs inside themselves that are able to reproduce continually, without need of another, according to what amounts, effectively, to a system of immortality.57

Castellucci notes the inherent contradiction in the juxtaposition of these two titular words. In tragedy, we often expect a downfall or destruction, and some sort of finality or catharsis, usually through death and its aftermath. For a tragedy to be endogenous, therefore, is at odds with a way of presenting that, traditionally, ‘presupposes the inevitable ruin of whoever comes up against the splendour of the hero’s solitude, which, soon enough, has its own death for an horizon’.58 The sited nature of the eleven productions presents another layer of meaning. As we have seen throughout this book so far, the idea of

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unstageability or impossibility shifting and changing through time is contingent and contextual. In the same way, tragedy means different things in each of these eleven productions and to each of these ten cities (of course, an endogenous tragedy must ultimately return to itself). Furthermore, following the initial periods of creation and production in the cities named above, Tragedia Endogonidia subsequently toured the world, shifting and adapting various parts of each episode as new cities became part of the project. The fourth episode, labelled BR.#04, was created in Brussels in May 2003 and then transferred to Dublin in September 2004, where I saw it. BR.#04, in the first of a series of dense and knotty images, opens with a woman in a maid’s outfit mopping the clean, white, marbled floor of the five-sided white cube of the stage space, the sixth side of which opens onto the auditorium. After a blackout, she has vanished and we see a baby on the stage, in a white sleepsuit, sitting and crawling around downstage. She is alone but for a pale machine upstage right, a robotic head-and-shoulders shape which spouts the alphabet in Dutch in a mechanical voice.59 In the next scene, she is held by a woman dressed in a black corseted dress with a bustle, her scalp showing clearly through her long, thinning black hair. The woman shows the baby a film of a bonfire. Another image finds an elderly man in a floral bikini on the stage, who seems lost and confused. He crawls towards us and gapes out at the darkness. He beats the walls of the stage gently, as if trying to slip through them. He dresses in a long, quasi-religious robe, and then in the outfit of a policeman. Later on, the woman in black pulls out her own tooth with a string held by a young boy in a Victorian jacket, heeled boots and a large black horn which is strapped to his head. Along with the maid from the first scene, these three figures build BR.#04 to a crescendo, with a binbag of bloody animal parts, flying hanks of black hair, a bright light contained in a sack. The maid fastens a leather collar around the woman in the black dress. Three long locks of black hair stream from the collar and are tied to the animal guts on the floor. Our three figures drag the guts upstage. A final image returns us to the elderly man, now sitting on the edge of a bed eating something out of a

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bag. He heaves himself under the covers and slowly sinks down into the bed, vanishing completely before our eyes to leave the bed immaculate and untouched. Returning to the moment when the elderly man dresses as a policeman reveals the central image of BR.#04. Another man, also dressed as a policeman, enters the space. He produces a plastic bottle of dark-red, viscous liquid and carefully pours it out onto the floor. He marks some points on the floor with lettered pieces of folded card: A, B, X, H. The liquid is readable to us as stage blood, and the cards seem to suggest the work done by forensic teams when examining the scene of a violent assault or murder, images recalled from the news or from crime television series. With this familiar narrative in mind, the next step in this back-to-front, corpse-less crime scene reconstruction would be to draw where the body would have been on the floor. However, instead of the chalky outline that might be expected, two further policemen enter. One of them strips to his underwear and lies down in the pool of blood created by his colleague moments before. The other two policemen, with pliable rubber truncheons, begin systematically to perform a very thorough and methodical beating of the third. Each slow, choreographed gesture is accompanied by an unusual and unnatural whacking sound, ringing out around the auditorium at a hugely amplified volume, ‘accelerating into a nauseous crescendo mixed with interference’.60 The recipient of the beating recoils with each beat of the truncheons, writhing in the pool of blood as it stains his skin and underwear bright red. The duration of this incessant battering is unclear to me, but appears to last at least ten minutes. He is then wrenched into a chair, and the remainder of the container of blood is poured over his head, running into his eyes, mouth and nose. He is shoved to the floor, wrestled into a black plastic body bag and a microphone is placed by his head, into which he speaks the Hail Mary. In the audience, the passing of time continues to be ambiguous. When writing about this production, Matthew Causey suggests that ‘[t]he beating continues for nearly five minutes’, while Nicholas Ridout estimates in his discussion of the image that it ‘felt like’ fifteen

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minutes, and Joe Kelleher, examining the same scene, describes it as ‘interminable’.61 The scene’s difficulty for the spectator is striking. Ridout notes that the beating is ‘unusually intense and difficult to endure’, and Causey mentions that the audience, its numbers depleted after the scene, ‘remained in what seemed a rather stunned silence’.62 As an audience member, I was struck by the tendency of fellow spectators to leave the theatre not during the beating, but after it. At this point, the victim is put into a black plastic bag, and, as a microphone is placed near to where his mouth would be, he begins to speak. It seems that the decision of audience members to leave at this moment could have something to do with the theatricality of this image’s construction, its very staging and paradoxical unwatchability. Ridout, in an examination of the theatricality of this long beating scene, suggests that ‘the sustained shock of the simulated violence demands a particular attention for the action itself … [a] shorter scene could, perhaps, have sustained its fabric of theatrical illusion intact’.63 In a way, a less prolonged scene might have utilized its Grand-Guignol-esque bloodshed along relatively naturalistic lines, but something else happens here instead. Thinking Ridout’s point in another direction, the audience’s attention, ‘demanded’ of them by the long beating scene as he indicates, is only released to them at its end, and so a decision to leave the theatre can only be taken at that point. If the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol presented us with an image of stage blood representing real blood, and performed violence representing criminal violence, there is something else at play in BR.#04. We are overwhelmed by the representation on offer. Bryoni Trezise notes a simultaneous ‘affective spectatorial response and  …  refusal to watch … despite the fact that the meta-theatrical markers positioning it within the “faux” world of representation were clearly laid plain’.64 Firstly, we imagine and conjure images, as the preparations for the staged beating are made. As the performed violence continues, these prior imaginings collide with our inability to see anything other than the unspeakable violence being performed amidst the multiple markers of pretence. One kind of impossibility (the representation of blood on

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stage) smashes unstoppably into another (we cannot unsee the thing which has simultaneously been staged and not been staged). What appears to be happening during this scene builds on the kinds of paradox established by the Grand-Guignol. The Grand-Guignol theatre building itself was a clear signal that the spectators were entering a space of representation of violence, of graphic horror, graphically realistic horror theatre – the aim of which was to look as ‘real’ as possible, to the point of making people faint and vomit. However, here, in a theatre (the Samuel Beckett Theatre) that houses any number of genres of production, we are told repeatedly and clearly that this blood and beating are not real, and yet they become unbearable to watch. Audronė Žukauskaitė suggests that ‘[e]ven if we know that violence on the stage is not real – the blood is artificial, the blows don’t actually hurt – the suffering it produces is more than real’.65 The kind of violence to and through which BR.#04 speaks is impossible, unspeakable and has simultaneously already happened, millions of times. This staging of the beating by the policemen reveals an unspeakable pain through the absolute clarity and possibility contained in the staging. The actors pour stage blood on the floor; they use stage combat techniques to heavily mime the beating and its reception on the body. Scott Gibbons (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s composer and sound designer) creates a range of heightened sound effects in synchronization with the actors’ movements. The scope of the gaps we are required to fill between visuality, expectation and imagination alters at dizzying speed, which collapses and extends the mimesis at work and arouses affect and empathy in the ambiguous staging of pain and blood. In his discussion of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and its literal unrepresentability on the French stage of Corneille’s time because ‘[t]oo much is shown to the spectator’, Jacques Rancière uncovers a similar paradox.66 Far from referring to the incest storyline of the play, or to the gouged-out eyes with which Oedipus appears at its end, for Rancière the unrepresentability of Oedipus Rex in the mid-seventeenth century lies in the relationship between what is seen by or said to the audience and what is understood by them, a relationship that he describes

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as defective. It is not precisely that the audience members’ sensibilities are affected, but that the ‘order of the representative system that gives dramatic creation its rule’ is disrupted.67 Returning to the audience in BR.#04, it seems that the arrangement is similarly troubled, particularly as any sense of linear narrative time vanishes in our understanding of the relationship between this beating scene and the opening mopping of the floor. This organized order of representation, much like ‘the act of our witnessing these actions, or images of actions’, is purposeful.68 Furthermore, while the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol emerges as a possible consequence of the rise of naturalism and realism, the work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio operates within a postdramatic and metatheatrical framework. In this context, the two examples, respectively, show us what Hans-Thies Lehmann refers to as ‘represented pain’ and ‘pain experienced in representation’.69 Nevertheless, the audience response is shared in a way. The work of the spectator is always historically contingent, but this contingency can also be a mode of connection. The Grand-Guignol audience desired the thrill of shock and enjoyed the submission and abandon of fainting and losing control. The Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio audiences are likely to be engaging with their work as part of international experimental theatre festivals, away from the West End, Broadway or their equivalents around the world. The company’s work demonstrates a visceral relationship between the body of the performer and the audience’s gaze, showing us bodies and voices that we do not often see on stage (without making these bodies the source of or rationale for the spectacle), from the body with anorexia and the body with cerebral palsy to the post-tracheotomy voice.70 While the two examples share an extremity of image and reaction, audiences at BR.#04 may also be shocked by how swiftly they are convinced to sink into the representation of the beating. Chiara Guidi discusses this image in terms of a ‘fall’ into representation and suggests that the audience is ‘taken in’ by the spectacle. In a group discussion of this particular scene, the makers of BR.#04, Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci and Guidi, suggest that it is precisely because the workings of the theatrical machine

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are revealed that we, the audience, are somehow duped, infusing the moment with a kind of naturalism that was never apparent on the stage. Each of them in turn declares that this moment embodies a moving away from spectacle, though paradoxically using the very nature of spectacle in order to do so. Romeo Castellucci observes that exposing the device of representation in this way is an inherent criticism of its fundamental role on the stage. As he puts it, ‘if you make it clear that the bottle [of fake blood] is evidently a piece of reality, that shows that you renounce the mechanism of the spectacle’.71 Claudia Castellucci, noting the classical function of representation in the theatre as a mirror-image for the audience of various aspects of their own lives, recalls the shift that takes place, not only between what we have been told and what we begin to feel, but between what we are used to seeing on stage and what has been presented in BR.#04. She explains how ‘the theatre, which was the spectacle of reality, now, in a certain sense, is the reality of the spectacle, shows the spectacle, becomes the reality of the spectacle’.72 Finally, Guidi tries to suggest some reasons as to the emotional audience response to such logical staging. She discusses the moment in terms of a communication of information to the audience, a deliberate leading of the spectator down a path of meaning, without warning them that feelings could take over. She recognizes that [t]he idea is not in the original communication which was the opening of the bottle [of fake blood], but neither is it in the literal representation of a beating, so where is the idea? It is in the fact that the public, at the end of all this, says, have mercy, the theatre has taken me in.73

So, we have been ‘taken in’, but the reason for this is still puzzling. There is a slippage between what we know and have been told and shown, and what we feel. As Guidi continues, my mind has not been able to react to this image with the same cool and lucidity with which I said look, let us open the bottle, let’s empty it on the floor. I am sliding, I’ve fallen into representation, but not by a logical route which was the logic of opening the bottle. I have crashed emotionally into a representation that has neither narrative nor logical context.74

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Romeo Castellucci, in a comparison between their work and conventional mainstream films, mentions that ‘Mel Gibson hides the bottle’.75 As we have seen above, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol certainly hides the bottle. However, instead of concealing it, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio offer the bottle to the spectator in order to ‘communicate information to the audience’.76 Nevertheless, as Guidi mentions, the spectators let the representation take them over, in spite of themselves, in spite of each of the many reminders that this is not a naturalistic representation. Joe Kelleher notes that, in breaking through the mimetic barrier, the work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio might be articulating ‘some sort of pressure at work in the image itself ’.77 The building of this pressure within the image, as it strains between what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘mimesis of pain’ and ‘played pain’, is perhaps a pressure of its stageability ‘while we demand of [it] that [it] makes a case for [itself]’.78 The pressure manifests itself for Kelleher in the Bergen episode of the Tragedia Endogonidia cycle (BN#.05) in a trickle of blood down the back of a woman sitting on a table on the stage, ‘as if … her body were answering back, throwing out a signal’.79 If stage blood in the work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is an indicator of a rupture in mimesis, or a rent in the theatrical fabric revealing the unstageability of blood, it also works here as a release valve for the image, or a communication to the spectator. And if Lehmann writes of the postdramatic theatre that its representation of pain, ‘in its moral and aesthetic ambiguity … has become the indicator for the question of representation’, perhaps this formalized postdramatic representation of blood (without the deterioration of the body that Lehmann discusses elsewhere) allows us to consider the question not just of representation but of the ambiguity of the spectator’s task.80 As stage blood disappears entirely in what follows, the relationship between visuality, expectation and imagination shifts further, and the reporting of violence creates a new way of thinking about unstageability in the theatre of the mind.

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Imagining blood Samuel Beckett’s 1973 short play Not I features a faintly spotlit mouth, positioned ‘upstage audience right, about  8  feet above stage level’, which speaks an unstoppable stream of monologue at breakneck speed, ideally well past the point of full comprehensibility by an audience.81 The rest of the stage and auditorium remain in total darkness, save for the silent Auditor who stands, dimly lit, witnessing Mouth’s gush of words and responding with small and diminishing movements at four prescribed points.82 The voice has no body that we can see, and Mouth’s height from the stage floor does not suggest a connection to a human form. This height, combined with the light focused on a particular point, creates an optical illusion in the watching audience member’s view. The mouth, which we logically know must be still because the light is still, begins to move and float gently at eight feet above the ground. I am reminded of looking out the window of a car or train, unaware that my eyes are speedily and constantly darting from tree to tree or building to building until the vehicle stops and space seems to contract.83 Enoch Brater writes about the ‘swoop and hover’ as this ‘autokinetic phenomenon’ takes us over, and Xerxes Mehta describes the mouth as ‘swimming out of the darkness’, while Antoni Libera speaks of a ‘glimmering mouth … [moving] in space – upwards, downwards, sideways; it seems to move in circles, stop for a while, and then move again’.84 Beckett’s That Time creates a similar effect – here, the Listener’s face appears ‘10 feet above stage’, with the rest of the stage in darkness.85 The Listener hears his own voice played back to him, coming from three distinct times in his life. As his eyes close to listen, and as we focus on the too-high face lit up in the darkness, the head gently drifts away from its fixed point. These illusions are the result of the brain ‘trying to make sense of it’, logically attempting to reconcile what is seen with what the rest of the image could be.86 In both plays, the uncontrollable nature of these perceptions of movement mirrors the involuntary gush of language from Mouth and the inexorable voices from the past for Listener.

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In Not I, an image is shown to us, and the brain processes it by inventing an optical illusion – in other words, we see (or ‘see’) something that is not there. In what follows, the seeing in the mind’s eye of that which is not there (yet ‘not not there’, to use Andrew Sofer’s phrase about the ‘dark matter’ of theatre) creates a further distillation of the concerns of this chapter: how the staging of unspeakable violence, specifically bloodshed, uncovers a key relationship between visuality and imagination.87 If, at the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol or in the work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, audience members have been covering their faces or peeping through their fingers at the image on stage, here there is no visual blood to recoil from, thrusting us forward into a different relationship between what we see and what we imagine. The fixity of the image goes through a similar process: the Grand-Guignol decided for us how much blood was to be shown and concealed its trickery from us to maximum effect; Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio measured its blood out by the millilitre and showed us all its workings; for Tim Crouch’s The Author and Forced Entertainment’s Dirty Work, when everything visceral and every drop of blood is staged through speaking, and visually left to our imaginations, the image cannot be contained, and we cannot look away because there is nothing to look away from.

Dirty Work Cathy Naden and Robin Arthur sit on either side of a small stage. They sit downstage on simple wooden chairs which have been placed on a battered wooden floor. The space is framed by some dusty, faded, maroon velvet curtains. Upstage left sits Terry O’Connor at a table with a lamp and a record player. The stage is lit by footlights as well as overhead lights. Naden wears a full-length halterneck dress in purple satin. O’Connor wears a knee-length dress in dark velvet. Arthur wears an open-necked blue shirt and dark trousers. These costumes give the impression of some sort of previous social dressing-up – the cocktail party was earlier but they’ve escaped; Dirty Work was originally set at a dinner-dance but they’ve changed everything about the show except for

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the costumes. Perhaps they’re ready for a night at the theatre. Either way, it seems clear that they haven’t dressed up for us (except, of course, they have). I am setting down these visual images in order to emphasize the fact that even when we think there is nothing to watch, there is always an image to see. Dirty Work consists of Naden and Arthur describing a play, creating a performance of what appears to be minimal vocal and physical work, as if the descriptive process is tedious and requires very little of their energy or attention. The mounting images we hear slide over each other, dissolve and disintegrate. The actors do not speak to each other. We are asked to imagine lifts diving downwards through buildings, veins being prised out of skin and flesh, a hundred different ways to die. The images are always impossible, unstageable and yet staged by the speaking. At no point do Naden and Arthur suggest that we’re not seeing these things, although there is no sense that we are being specifically tasked with imagining anything. We are simply told the play: Robin: Act One begins with 5 great Atomic explosions. A big crash on an important motorway. A train plunges off a bridge into an icy torrent. An elevator plummets from the 90th floor and then stops just above the ground.88

Dirty Work premiered in  1998 in Leicester and was updated and reperformed almost twenty years later, in 2017–18. In the original script’s introduction, ‘A Note on Dirty Work’, Tim Etchells writes that the piece is ‘an absent show. A performance that never really takes place’.89 Conversely, the 2017–18 programme note is much more interested in what does take place: the ‘careful words’ of the ‘fragile act’ that constitutes the work of the audience, ‘imaginative editors, stage-hands and detailsuppliers for the acts and events that are only briefly suggested in description’.90 Etchells’s shifting emphasis from disappearance, failure and the ontology of performance, to the spectatorial labour required to attend to the stage being filled up with images and actions, maps a

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trend in performance-making and criticism over the two decades that thinks increasingly deeply about practices of theatre and performance watching and participating.91 Similarly, the title itself gives us pause. Colloquially, to do someone’s ‘dirty work’ for them means to do something that the person does not want to do themselves, usually because it is unpleasant, dishonest or illegal or because it involves foul play in some way. The playful use of this phrase by Forced Entertainment suggests that the work done by theatre-makers towards presenting theatre audiences with visual images or actions (to suffer these images, as Joe Kelleher would have it92) is a dishonest practice or something that the company does not want to do. Terry O’Connor writes that the dishonesty arises in onstage dialogue that ignores the audience and that Forced Entertainment’s ‘suspicious rejection’ of this stands at the centre of the group’s practice: From the start we couldn’t stomach the notion that people might simply talk to one another on stage, as though they didn’t know they were performing, being watched … [i]t seemed as well to undersell the potential of the stage.93

Thus, to put it another way, Naden and Arthur are refusing to do our dirty work for us; they are gifting the audience the ‘potential of the stage’, of picturing and staging the unstageable images they feed to us through descriptions, revealing as they do so that this is always part of the work of the audience, regardless of how much we are shown, or in what level of detail. As the images in Dirty Work begin to evoke violence and bloodshed, Naden tells us that ‘[a] fork is used to prise out a vein which is then bitten through’.94 The vocal shudder that ripples through the audience as these words are said activates a ‘fall into representation’ which is similar to the examples we have seen so far, despite the non-visual, reported action to which we are bearing witness. The reaction to unspeakable violence, its affect, remains one of physicality and empathy, although this time we cannot avert our eyes. The knowing impossibility of Forced Entertainment’s unstageable images shimmers past irony and towards

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a very present, embodied audience response. As the beating in BR.#04 flowed from aesthetic image of violence to violent representation of pain, here a similar flight is seen from distanced description to immediate awareness of feeling. At the performance I attended in November  2018, Naden had a coughing fit during one of her long monologues, which did not appear to be part of her performance, as its excess was at odds with the lack of effort performed so far.95 Adrian Kear has written about Forced Entertainment’s relationship with practices of ‘failed’ acting (corpsing, stage fright, twitching, lapses in concentration, incompetence) and their resultant highlighting of the fact that theatre ‘can in the end only ever have recourse to the truth of its fakery; the dissimulation of acting is therefore merely the sign of the pretence of not pretending’.96 However, this drive seems to align much more snugly with Dirty Work’s general performative style, similar to the shuffling, staring, grinning and freezing of works such as First Night (2002) while Naden’s unexpected coughing on this night stands as the indivisible remainder of theatre’s true illusion, to be glimpsed, perhaps, in the moment of its interruption by the surprise accident, disaster or fiasco, or made visible through the through the remorseless exposure of the performer’s limitations and vulnerability.97

In other words, in performatively revealing the pretence at the heart of acting (and theatre) through the construction and performance of Dirty Work, Naden might inadvertently be revealing an extremely human body coughing, with no attempt to close the gap widening between intention and action. Naden continued attempting to speak; Arthur picked up some of her story; she drank water and carried on with a croak, relieving it with coughs that made her voice rasp and wane before returning, another contrast to the purposely flat delivery of the performance more generally. Perhaps, the unscripted(?) cough rendered fragments of what Naden was saying literally unstageable – as if her body couldn’t manage to speak the impossible images, a violent and involuntary flicker of literal unperformability amongst all the

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imagined impossibility. However, it is impossible to be certain about this. Nicholas Ridout writes about Naden’s performance in Disco Relax (1999) and a sustained laughing at her own joke that caused the same confusion as I encountered at the coughing fit – Ridout refers to the ‘strange undecidability … the fact that there is no way of knowing’ at the heart of such moments.98 As we turn to Tim Crouch’s The Author, and another version of violence through reported action on stage, the impossibility of knowing is shared between performer and audience, underlining the ethical consequences of seeing or imagining what is being described and the potential of resistant action in relation to what we hear.

The Author We sit in traverse, but with a very small stage space between the two seating banks. Although I see The Author for the first time in Project Arts Centre in Dublin, the play is set in the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. We are addressed by four people who sit amongst us – Adrian, Vic, Esther and Tim. The Author explores the damaging effect that the process of making a (fictional) Royal Court play had upon its makers (actors Vic and Esther, writer-director Tim) and audiences (one audience member in particular, Adrian). While we do not hear much about the story or plot of the play, we understand that it appeared to be about violence and sexual abuse within a family, between a father and daughter. As in Dirty Work, we follow what the actors tell us, this time as they sit amongst us. However, instead of listening to a reported observation of a play, told in a relatively passive form, in The Author we are directly addressed, individually and as a collective. As Crouch writes of his own practice, ‘I minimalize what’s happening on stage so I can maximise what’s happening in the audience.’99 The descriptions of the fictional play explore the relationship between a production process and its ethics, and between the aims of a production and care for its participants.

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Returning, perhaps unexpectedly, to the images from the GrandGuignol earlier in this chapter, The Author also explains the technical demands of the play-within-a-play the company performed, particularly the special effects needed in order to stage blood. Recalling the descriptions of Paul Ratineau’s work with actors in Paris in the early twentieth century, Esther’s memories of performing bloodshed for the production are remarkably similar: I had pouches of stage blood strapped to bits of my body. One famous moment when Vic would hit me in the face and blood would spray from my eye. I had a sponge in my hand, so when I brought my hand up like this – like this, can you see? – I could make the blood spray out. Nobody knew how it was done! It was really shocking and real. The stage was a mess at the end of the show. Poor old stage management spent hours clearing it up at the end. I had to shower for ages to get it all off me!… And a bag strapped to my inner thigh – here – with raw liver in it. So when Vic reached his hand up inside me and tears away at my womb – he just reached into that bag. My god, people would gasp at that moment, groan, faint!100

These descriptions from Esther about stage blood and raw liver invoke the Grand-Guignol’s passion for the technical details of stabbing, blinding and decapitating. Even if Tim’s play is supposed to function allegorically (‘[i]t’s not meant to be taken literally’101), the performers in it are clearly searching for verisimilitude and audience trickery in their staging of blood, although this quest rebounds upon them when the onslaught of violent images, videos and actions they engage with for research and theatre-making affects them physically and psychologically. Esther, Vic and Tim seem invested in making the experience of unstageable violence ‘real’ in their play, while ignoring the lives, thoughts and memories of the people they encounter through their research in person and online, which is The Author’s central provocation. Esther describes being asked by Tim to interview people who connect with the themes of the play as part of the rehearsal process:

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I was really lucky. I met a woman who had been raped as a teenager by her father. That’s just like my character, I said!102

The naivety and incongruity in this statement (feeling lucky that someone else was raped by their father in order to use their story for character material) has an uncomfortably comic effect on the audience, but a wider question arises. What is the hidden cost of performing unstageable violence? Whose stories and experience are drawn upon, and what is the relationship between these experiences and the cultural products that result? In The Author, the body count rises sharply as Esther and Vic describe ‘real’ beheadings and shootings they’ve watched online in order to contribute to their creative process. As an audience member who saw Tim’s play, Adrian excitedly describes all the other extreme images, the ‘[b]ombings and bummings!!’ he has watched on the stage of the Royal Court: ‘I’ve seen a dead baby get eaten! That was great!’103 Crucially, for the audience at The Author, the researched violence (in the real world of the fictional play) ends up being brought along on the wave of description of the images in the fictional play – if we’re visualizing or imagining everything we’re hearing, it is surely impossible to differentiate between the play’s images and the research images, and to distinguish how we feel about each in turn. The construction of a research-process-within-a-playwithin-a-play allows Crouch to bring an additional dimension to The Author and its performance of unstageable violence: the conflation of images. In conversation with Helen Iball about this idea in relation to a later moment in the play – a description by Tim of the aftermath of a dinner party at his house after the play’s run has finished, with Tim masturbating to child pornography while a baby sleeps in the same room – Crouch remarked: I am excited by the conflation that some audience members make, in the moment, between the baby on the screen and ‘Finn’ asleep in the travel cot. I’m excited by that conflation, which I set up intentionally, because by law anyone who watches child porn is criminally culpable, almost as criminally culpable as those who do it. So that’s where the

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play began, with an act of seeing: with someone watching something being done, and a kind of ambiguity in that speech. I worked backwards to explore the grey areas between seeing and doing, and used the Royal Court as a model for that. If you watch an act of violence, where is the line between seeing and doing an act of violence?104

This analysis encourages us to further consider the interaction between the unstageable and the visual. Crouch works past the complicity or collusion implied in the work of the audience in much of the rest of the play, as we allow descriptions of impossibly violent images and actions to be served up for our cultural consumption regardless of those actions’ effects on the victims (of the actions in the research material) or the actors performing and re-performing them each night in the play. As he rightly points out, what Tim is seeing on his screen in the scene is illegal. The precise nature of what audience members at The Author are seeing in this moment is unclear, and arguably its legality is similarly indistinct as a result. As Helen Freshwater observes, ‘[i]t would be easy to imagine that it is the content that upsets audiences. But no one can be offended by what they are actually required to watch. There’s no spectacle here: the piece is all tell and (almost) no show’.105 The ambiguity Crouch describes above is key to how the theatre performs The Author’s myriad unstageabilities and how what we see, visualize and imagine cannot be contained by the theatrical frame.

Can you see? Furthermore, we are asked repeatedly (nine times in the script) if we can see, or if we can imagine. As images of the play-within-the-play and the actions of its rehearsal process, production run and aftermath intensify, this motif of ‘Can you see?’ begins to mean much more than the relatively literal process of being able to observe the performance through our eyes. We are being asked if we can visualize or imagine (as Rebellato reminded us above, these are different things) what we

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are being told, or if we can continue to do so.106 In a way, we’re being asked what we can see, or how we are seeing what is being offered, or whether we could see more clearly if things were different. Crucially, this encourages consideration of the ethics of what we’re being asked to imagine, and whether imagining something is different to seeing it visually. The question also demonstrates awareness that a theatre audience consists of people who will be seeing or experiencing The Author in different ways. To see in this context could also mean to understand (as in the expression ‘I can see what you mean’). Finally, the question suggests care for us as we find our way through the production, and perhaps implies that help might be available if we reply that we cannot see, or reminds us that this sort of help is generally not available, and we are expected to perform the work of the audience regardless.107 Crouch’s construction of the theatre space as the Royal Court Theatre stage reminds us of this theatre’s continuing role in providing opportunities for us to imagine and play out different kinds of unspeakable and unstageable violence, and perhaps ponders the need for serious care for makers and spectators as they navigate these images and actions. The refrain of ‘Can you see?’ thus speaks to our role as audience members trying to physically see a performance, but also reminds us to keep picturing, imagining, seeing what is being said and questioning how and why we are being tasked with this. In both The Author and Dirty Work, we are also being asked to consider where theatre happens, and where the performance of unstageable violence and blood occurs. As I have shown in this chapter, the staging of blood is not solely connected to the visual. The theatre’s position as a space for the cultural imagination of violence is in both of these cases not just an aesthetic or visual one – although there is clearly an aesthetic at play in the scenography of both The Author and Dirty Work. The Author is restaging the empty theatre space itself as the space of enactment of violence and almost calls for the nostalgia of re-enactment in its performance note, which suggests that ‘[t]here should be plenty of warm, open space in the play. The audience should be beautifully lit and cared for’.108 In Dirty Work, we see a ramshackle,

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faded theatre, perhaps formerly glorious. These different aesthetic choices both present us with very recognizable theatre spaces, one in the tradition of the flexible black box space and the other in the longer tradition of the proscenium arch space. There is an almost psychogeographic suggestion at play in both of these spaces, implying that the theatre holds on to its histories of unstageable violence (in the same way that the fictional play takes hold of Esther, Vic, Tim and the rest of their team, who do not appear, but are mentioned according to their roles: the sound designer, the stage manager). In presenting ostensibly blank theatre spaces (though these are anything but), we consider that even if what the actors are saying seems impossible to stage, even when the violence itself is unimaginable, we still fill these empty spaces up with images and pictures from the stories we are being told. This chapter has examined the performance of stage blood as a particular locus of impossibility. Across its examples, as the visuality of blood shifted from the graphic naturalism of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, to the self-referential representation of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, to the reported and described bloodshed of Forced Entertainment and Tim Crouch, the impossibility of staging blood has wound its way around each performance in a loop of expectation and imagination. The work of the audience in response to blood on stage points to a history of the kind of unspeakable violence on stage that does not correspond neatly to the visibility or otherwise of blood but reveals the theatre of the mind to be an active space of showing, and of negotiating, impossible images. Another classically challenging stage image in Chapter 4, the ghost, continues the book’s articulation of the performance of unstageability as reliant upon historical and social contexts as well as theatrical conventions in those contexts. In two twenty-first-century representations of one very famous stage ghost, I will investigate the ghost’s power to destabilize staging practices and create aporia between the theatre and unstageability, establishing its representation in the liminal space concerning the visible and the invisible.

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Ghosts

How to see a ghost I am watching a cheese grater talking to a bottle of balsamic vinegar. Terry O’Connor is sitting behind a table telling us the story of Hamlet, using a range of domestic objects as representations of the play’s characters. She gently leads us through the story of the tragedy: Hamlet’s deep grief and existential fears; the relationship between Gertrude (pepper-grinder) and Claudius (flea powder), the murder of Polonius (antique flatiron), the death of Ophelia (two roses in an empty dark glass bottle) and Laertes’s (glass juice bottle) return with his supporters (a rustling net of onions). The empty, stubby, clear glass tumblers playing the Players are given acting advice by Hamlet (‘don’t do too many hand gestures’). O’Connor plays with Shakespeare’s words, without fully quoting them: ‘the play’s … the way’. The characters are tenderly laid down on the table as they die. All of the objects on the stage in Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare (2016) are playfully readable. In their Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, is played by a cheese grater. As we will see in more detail below, the ghost’s appearances, particularly in Act One, are traditionally in armour, and the shiny stainless steel of the grater provides an apt representation of this. Thinking further, this four-sided grater suggests that the character could be or become many different things, as ghosts in our stories and myths take on the shape and personality of the dead person to whom they have adhered, walk through walls, deal with ‘unfinished business’, watch over their loved ones and wander the world existing in deferred, between, limbo states. A grater also has a defined function in the kitchen: it grates. It cannot be used as a spoon or a fork or a pot or a

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cup. The other items on stage have additional potential, alongside their immediate use. The bottles of juice or vinegar could be filled with other liquids; the tumblers could be filled and toasted and drunk from. The flat-iron could be heated to smooth out wrinkles in a shirt; the onions could be sliced and cooked. The cheese grater cannot do anything else. Its specificity of purpose coheres with the Ghost’s particular drive in Hamlet: to tell his son precisely how he died, to have his death avenged by Hamlet and to be remembered. The Ghost cannot do anything else, nor appear to anyone else. Strange as it may seem, Forced Entertainment’s representation of a ghost as a cheese grater speaks to the central concern of this chapter, in which I argue that the ghost is a classic locus for investigations of the unstageable. For a ghost to function as any sort of convincing spectre, it needs to bring on stage something of the unstageable about it, as the ghost is a problem of – and for – nature that can only be represented according to the conventions of the day. The conventions of various days have seen acting techniques and scenographic tricks invoked as they have rendered staging the ghost increasingly perceptible to and readable by an audience, but we are still left with a residue of impossibility clinging to each representation, and this is what is of interest to us here. As Alice Rayner observes, ‘theatre, in all of its aspects, uniquely insists on the reality of ghosts. On the other hand, something is fundamentally unassimilable about ghosts’.1 In the world beyond the theatre, we don’t know if ghosts exist, and we cannot perceive them if they do. We don’t know what they look or sound like. However, on the stage, we have multiple examples of and models for ghostly figures returning after death for various purposes, of which the appearance of King Hamlet is only one. The ghost has a long history in theatre, via many of Shakespeare’s plays including Macbeth and Julius Caesar; eighteenth-century Gothic drama; and a range of plays from the nineteenth century onwards, including W. B. Yeats, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Marina Carr and Conor McPherson. At time of writing, an adaptation by Stephen Mallatratt of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black has been running

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in London’s West End since 1989, the second-longest non-musical run of a production in the West End’s history, after Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Ghosts in plays by these and other writers have various functions, from shock in Hill/Mallatratt, to ideological calls-to-arms in Yeats, to apologetically premature announcements of death in Carr. However, despite theatre’s ongoing and endlessly creative narrative of representing ghosts, something unstageable still remains in the very attempt, and this chapter will look in detail at two examples that work with and through this unstageability, using hi- and lo-fi technologies to bring their ghosts into our view. These two productions, Hamlet by the Wooster Group and Hamnet by Dead Centre, are of course connected by their source material (Hamlet and the biography of its writer), but also in their need to stage the ghost and its liminalities through engagement with a range of postdramatic and metatheatrical framings, rendering tangible our association with the spectral. As an image, metaphor or action, ghosts and haunting are also fertile grounds for scholars of theatre and performance. The relationship between the ghostly encounter and the ephemeral nature of performance provides possibilities for analysis across a range of genres and styles. The recent ‘spectral turn’ in our field was initiated partially by analyses of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and its investigation of hauntology and Hamlet, and partially through the theatre’s long interest in ghosts, spirits, death, trauma and memory. An ongoing drive for innovative illusion and stage magic (at all levels of integration with technology, from the cardboard box to the one-to-one digital game) creates a network of associations across theatre practice and its study. Many of these scholars explore the ghost’s liminal, uncanny position between visibility and invisibility, representation and unrepresentability, and its paradoxical existence on the stage as something there and yet not there, or what Peggy Phelan describes as ‘part of both an interiority and an exteriority which escaped proof … always subject to doubt’.2 Herbert Blau suggests that this troubled and opaque status of the ghost should even be a cause for concern, and ‘should frighten us out of our wits, for the fact is we have no wit for the Ghost. The Ghost is a meta-fact of an

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apprehension, an invisible event, at which we can only make mouths’.3 Additionally, the ghost’s state as something that has returned to us (or been returned to us) creates a parallel with theatre’s ongoing attempt at production and re-production of something that has existed before and will exist again. Of course, it is equally and paradoxically the case, as Marvin Carlson reminds us, via Derrida, that theatre is something that can never be precisely repeated: in the midst of our endless retellings, theatre’s contexts shift and change, altering meaning and purpose.4 Thus, the ghost on stage exists as a paradox within a paradox – something that is simultaneously staged and unstageable within a structure that is the same and yet different in all occasions and memories of its staging. Many of our recognizable components of theatre production and practice occupy common ground with the ghost. For example, as Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin point out, acting shares a range of connections to the uncanny, the spiritual, the unearthly embodied and the paranormal: consider actors explaining their process as ‘channelling’ their character, or being a conduit between the character and the audience, or accessing a permeable boundary between themselves and their character.5 Although this might suggest the actor as a medium through which ghosts can flow and appear, I will discuss below in relation to acting in the Wooster Group’s Hamlet how thinking about acting in this way instead suggests the emergence of the actor as the ghost, rather than the character (who is arguably fixed irrevocably in the past of the play’s writing). Turning to the theatre space, as Catherine Hindson and others have explored, the relationship between theatre buildings and their hauntedness remains a topic of fascination. Hindson’s dissection of the Bristol Old Vic’s resident ghost, Sarah, and her multifaceted function as anecdotal tool, historical artefact and key connection between the Old Vic’s rich heritage and its redevelopment in 2011, shows how stories of theatre ghosts can be harnessed for commercial and marketing purposes, as well as imbuing their chosen spaces with legitimacy and a sense of theatrical history.6 This line of scholarship coincides productively with discussions of other theatrical encounters with the past: the production history of

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a play, theatre company or theatre building, all the actors who have inhabited the same role and all the directors who have previously staged a particular work. Ghosts of productions past haunt theatres of the present. This hauntology is nowhere more present than when we consider Hamlet. Any production of this play, or performance of this title role, draws inevitable comparisons with those who have played it before, across centuries and oceans. The Wooster Group Hamlet taps into this historical catalogue and pressure self-referentially, creating what Jennifer Parker-Starbuck describes as the Wooster Group performing a Hamlet about the film version of a Hamlet that was about Burton’s stage version of a Hamlet which was directed by another famous Hamlet, that echoes and ghosts the many Hamlets before it, creating a cascading mirror effect of Hamlets as far back as our historically trained minds can remember.7

The materiality and scenography of the ghost are also consistently of interest. If we’re trying to stage a ghost, how can we make it visible? What does a ghost’s material form consist of? Writing specifically of the ghost story, Elaine Scarry reminds us of the quirk between our familiarity with ghosts and our skilled ability and capacity to imagine them, what she calls ‘the imagination’s special expertise in twodimensional, fading objects’.8 As Scarry writes, ‘[s]ince most of us have no experience of ghosts in the material world, this should be the tale least easily believed … but [i]t is not hard to successfully imagine a ghost’.9 Even though we have nothing evidential to compare it to, we tend to know, fairly definitively, what a representation of a ghost looks like. Spencer Golub writes about the tradition of the ghost light at the theatre, a single lamp left on stage through the night, which simultaneously appeases the theatre’s ghosts and permits them to take to the stage when the theatre is closed after the show.10 Samuel Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue uses this quality of light for the monologue of a lone man, Speaker, barely visible through ‘faint light from standard lamp’. Beckett’s specification of a ‘skull-sized white globe’ for the lamp on the stage generates duality between Speaker and the lamp. Perhaps

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the lamp allows the Speaker to be picked up by our world’s perception, or the lamp itself appears as an indistinct ghostly presence to comfort a lonely man as he goes about his nightly rituals: ‘Up. Socks. Nightgown. Window. Lamp’.11 The lamp also might stand in for the theatre itself, giving space and illumination to that which we cannot see, or can only dimly make out. The visual representations of ghosts on show in Hamnet and the Wooster Group Hamlet may be more vigorous, as we will see below, but both retain something of this delicacy – using theatre as a privileged space ideal for catching the residual impossibility of staging the ghost from an unexpected angle and holding it up to the (ghost) light for a momentarily clearer view. The theatre designer, actor, director and writer Edward Gordon Craig, in an essay for The Mask theatre magazine in 1910 (which Craig also edited between  1908 and  1929), writes vividly and polemically about the early twentieth century’s representation of ghosts on stage in Shakespeare’s tragedies.12 For Craig, the writing of a ghost into any play sets up an impossible dialogue with realistic depiction, and necessitates a thorough consideration of the entire dramaturgical (he does not use this word) and aesthetic approach to that play in production. In other words, the mere existence of ghosts in the pages of a play deeply affects any approach to representation or production, ‘[f]or when Shakespeare wrote “enter the ghost of Banquo” he did not have in his mind merely a player clothed in a piece of gauze’.13 In terms of the materiality of the theatre ghost as a way of understanding how to treat or construct them, one wonders what gauze-based abominations Craig had recently sat through at (or been asked to create for) the theatre, as he returns, disparagingly, to the diaphanous fabric a number of times in his article. It seems as though Craig’s awareness of the impossibility of representing ghosts on stage is initially funnelled through an analysis of what should not be done (he also refers disapprovingly to ‘sepulchral-voiced gentlemen with whitened faces’).14 Nevertheless, Craig notes that the inherent impossibility at hand, the unstageability of the ghost, is not purely technical. Returning to the favoured fabric, he acknowledges that the challenge of representing the ghost is ‘not because of the difficulty of

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purchasing gauze which should be sufficiently transparent, not because of the difficulty of finding machinery capable of raising the ghosts or any such reason’.15 Indeed, the very material of the theatrical machine of his time, or perhaps even the material world in general, seems to Craig completely inappropriate for ‘so subtle a thing as imagination to work with’,16 reminiscent of Joanna Baillie’s declaration a century earlier that the actors or theatre spaces of her time could not adequately perform her plays, which I mentioned in this book’s introduction.17 While slating the tools of his trade (scenery, costumes, light), Craig turns to the actor and places the entire burden of responsibility upon them for the only effective (and affective) way to truly represent the ghost. Although referring here to actors playing ghosts, he is alert to the responsibility of the other actors on stage in this endeavour. In his illustration of his argument, he turns to the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, suggesting that their responses to Banquo’s ghost and the Witches are what allow the spectral figures to truly live on the stage, ‘more terrible, more beautiful than we can conceive’.18 Craig’s frustration can easily be read as a general frustration with realism and naturalism. As a pioneer of modern and modernist staging techniques, including unconventional and radical approaches to scenography and acting, his distaste at realistic depictions is clear. Given that Craig had been planning his Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet (in collaboration with Isadora Duncan and Constantin Stanislavski) since  1908, it also seems possible that this article articulates Craig’s well-documented irritation at Stanislavski’s approach to theatre practice.19 However, his essay is also a serious meditation on the paradox of the ghost, the impossibility of its representation on stage and an understanding that this impossibility is not a technical matter. Craig writes about panicky lights and music (as well as actors and audiences), indicating that the material of the theatre trembles under the weight of the impossibility of representation of the ghost, ‘the mighty question’.20 Even if the theatre itself seems anxious about this representation, as we have seen a number of times in this book already, the impossibility Craig intuits leads to a creative impulse and

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response – and the realization that, for him, only the actor can traverse the gaps between imagination, scenography and the stage. Drawing together some aspects of the materiality of the ghost, and as part of the wider question that ghosts and their staging pose for the theatre as a medium, this chapter is arranged in two parts. One explores an aspect of the ghost’s history as costume, and the other investigates some of the slippages between staging and unstageability in a project consumed with the impossible. The two productions I’ll be looking at, The Wooster Group’s Hamlet and Dead Centre’s Hamnet, have the same playtext at their core. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet is, both productions are fascinated by fathers and sons, by legacies, by the possibility of life after death. Both sets of theatre-makers are in thrall to the potential our familiar twenty-first-century intermedial theatre practices have to destabilize what we think we know about staging. In Hamnet, a projection screen is not what it seems, and that most cartoonish trope of the ghost on stage, the bedsheet ghost, is given a contemporary makeover. In Hamlet, a 1964 print of a filmed production of a play is controlled by and controls the actors, releasing and containing ghosts beyond the actor or the character. As we will see, even Shakespeare, with his varying quartos for Hamlet, has an eye on the staging of ghosts that reaches beyond Elizabethan norms and pushes audiences and readers to consider not whether ghosts exist, but what happens when we represent them.

Bedsheet ghosts As we have established, on stage or off it, ghosts are slippery. They resist easy readings or representations and are tricky to grasp or pin down for analysis They resist easy readings or representations and are tricky to grasp or pin down for analysis. Bearing that in mind, and following one aspect of the ghost’s trajectory of representation through time, I turn my attention to the tradition of the bedsheet ghost, or the trope of dressing up as a ghost by swathing a person in a sheet. From the simple Halloween costumes and rituals of my childhood, to the hastily

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assembled disguise for the central character of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., to a choir of sheetclad performers in Brokentalkers’ It Folds in  2016, the contemporary bedsheet ghost in performance retains an ambiguous resonance – egalitarian in material terms but not always readable in metaphorical terms, unsettling but not really scary. The bedsheet ghost on stage is the ultimate liminal figure – a dead person is represented as between themselves and something else, the performer becomes a visible/invisible entity, a vehicle or mannequin for a sheet, and the audience member traverses the gaps between living/dead, real/ imaginary, material/invisible. The bedsheet ghost also connects to the history of staging Hamlet in relation to scenography, style and content, and opens up a consideration of how Dead Centre’s Hamnet addresses the bedsheet ghost in the twenty-first century, bringing fresh eyes to this most cliché of representations and obliging the audience to see it anew as a result. Rather than provide an exhaustive history of the sheet-clad ghost on- and offstage, I want to draw out a few aspects of this lineage on the English stage, particularly in relation to the production history of Hamlet, and thus explore how Dead Centre’s Hamnet takes up the contemporary bedsheet ghost from a new perspective. Historically, the bedsheet ghost has represented a range of meanings, stereotypes and behaviours, corresponding to its continuing liminality in culture and society. For example, in England, the bedsheet ghost’s original referent was the winding sheet or shroud, a long white sheet wrapped around bodies after death and before burial. This was a widespread practice if a coffin could not be afforded, which was the case for all but society’s wealthiest until the nineteenth century. The corpse was enveloped in the sheet, which was fastened at the head and feet to avoid the body sliding out of its shroud during its interment in the grave. Owen Davies notes that these winding sheets were originally made of linen, following the Bible’s description of Jesus’s shroud, and indeed were sometimes the bedsheet upon which the deceased had last rested.21 However, the Burying in Woollen Acts of Parliament of 1666 enforced the purchase of a woollen shroud, to support the English wool trade instead of the linen

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import market, and a fine was payable to any relatives of the deceased who buried their dead in other materials, ensuring the continuation of a fabric-based entombment until the mass production of coffins in the nineteenth century ushered in a new burial norm. Nevertheless, the ghostly image of a dead body appearing to the living while wrapped in its pale-coloured winding sheet remained and remains a touchstone of both horror and mischief. This image of the sheeted ghost in society was particularly prevalent during the nineteenth century in England, and emerged most fully at All Hallow’s Eve (or Halloween). The tradition of playfully scaring others by dressing up as frightening characters (witches, banshees, ghosts) spread throughout England and America from its origins in the Celtic Samhain rituals in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, in tandem with increased emigration from these countries. Furthermore, in the 1800s, a relatively porous relationship between the natural and the supernatural, alongside widespread religious faith and a significant rise in spiritualism, engendered belief in ghosts and other paranormal entities and spiritual worlds. Victorian spiritualism, which spread from the Fox sisters in New England across the United States and to the UK from the middle of the century, relied on communication with spirits, whether through rapping (of a spirit on a wall, floor, table or other furniture), séances or the spontaneous writing of text on blank cards by spirits apparently speaking through human hands. The ascent of spiritualism arrived at a time when science and technology were advancing apace; mass production and train travel were opening up previously sheltered communities; and many basic assumptions about biology, creation and physics were being challenged. The celebrity status and wealth available to those who could perform their activities for a paying audience was unstoppable, and even the discrediting of the Fox sisters’ claims to be communicating with the spirit of a former occupant of their house through rapping or knocking (including a confession by Maggie Fox in  1888 that they had performed a trick) made no difference to belief in magic, ghosts and a world beyond the material one.22 With this context in mind, any appearance of the supernatural to

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the public at this time could be at once utterly believable and potentially frightening. Thus, dressing up as a ghost by swathing oneself in a sheet or shroud could have a seriously unsettling effect even when the ghost was unmasked, which is almost impossible to imagine today. Indeed, Davies relates how the ludic quality of dressing up took a more sinister turn at times in nineteenth-century England. Thieves capitalized on the fear of ghosts by dressing in white sheets in order to rob houses or rape women while the house’s occupants were immobilized with terror.23 There are reports of more than one instance of people dying of fright (or terror-related fevers or attacks) in the nineteenth century when friends or family members donned a white sheet and dressed up as a ghost in order to scare them, believing not just in the costume, but that a ghost or spirit had taken over the performer.24 Moving from dressing up as a ghost in the wider world to its representation on the English stage, the history of the sheet-clad ghost at the theatre is always-already imbued with a sense of unstageability. Jean MacIntyre observes that ‘death is not, apparently, shown through costume until the 1580s’, with any ghosts or dead characters appearing in the same clothes they would have worn in life.25 On the Elizabethan stage, John Jowett notes that ‘[t]here seems to have been no standard ghost costume … ghosts would probably have been whited with flour’.26 Perhaps this lack of differentiation became confusing to audiences at a certain point, as the shift to dressing ghosts as bedsheet ghosts began to emerge on stage, though not with enforced rules, as Jowett suggests. For example, while the dressing of ghost characters in a winding sheet became a popular costuming choice in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was at times a question of practicality as much as dramaturgy. For example, in Act Five, Scene Five of Shakespeare’s Richard III, eleven ghosts appear to Richard and Richmond as they dream. All of the actors playing these ghosts would have been playing other characters immediately before and after this scene, especially the actors playing the ghosts of Vaughan, Rivers and Grey. It would have been impossible for them to appear in their other characters’ costumes (probably Herbert, Oxford and Blunt) and too difficult for

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them to quickly change. In this case, a winding-sheet thrown over another costume seemed the most sensible costuming choice in early productions of the play.27 As Anthony Hammond puts it, ‘all that is required is a shroud draped over the costume, and a ghostly voice’.28 Crucially, such characters needed to be demarcated as ghosts by looking differently in death than in life, which continued to be the unifying feature of the use of the bedsheet ghost on stage.

Hamlet’s ghosts The ghost’s representative history on stage is further complicated when we look specifically at Hamlet. The ghost of King Hamlet in Hamlet has three entrances in the play, appearing to Marcellus and Horatio in Act One, Scene One; appearing to Marcellus, Horatio and Prince Hamlet in Act One, Scene Four; and then speaking to Hamlet alone in Act One, Scene Five; and finally appearing to Hamlet and Gertrude (though invisible to the latter) in Gertrude’s bedchamber/closet in Act Three, Scene Four. In the Hamlet texts we tend to study and use for productions, the ghost appears ‘in complete steel’ (i.e. his former battle armour) in Act One, Scene Four, and there is no sense from the text that this is a different look to the Act One, Scene One or the later Act Three, Scene Four appearances. However, the  1823 discovery of the first quarto of Hamlet, or Q1 (the texts of Hamlet most often used are edited composites of the second quarto and the first folio), had the potential to alter this history substantially, due to the quarto’s addition of a stage direction to the Act Three, Scene Four appearance. In Q1, for the scene in Gertrude’s bedchamber, we read ‘Enter the ghost in his night gowne’. While Shakespeare studies since 1823 remains variously excited, cautious or dubious about the veracity of Q1 and its place in the literature and production history of Hamlet (it is frequently dubbed the ‘bad’ quarto, as distinct from Q2’s ‘good’ quarto moniker), it suggests an alternative, production-focused way of thinking about the ghost

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and its costuming, focusing on the performance of the play. Indeed, the addition of the stage direction could suggest insight into an early production of the play, in which a nightgown was used as a costume. Zachary Lesser presents an extensive study of Hamlet Q1 and the implications of its changes for the text and its performance, using the lens of ‘uncanny historicity’ to demonstrate the impossible quandary in which scholars and practitioners find themselves regarding this quarto, unable ‘to explain precisely how (or even that) they are “the same” play’.29 He notes that, during what was a very conservative period for staging Shakespeare, all the major stage productions of Hamlet for fifty years after the discovery of Q1 in 1823 continued to costume the ghost in armour in Act Three, Scene Four, despite the new stage direction. The direction was considered ‘ludicrous’ by critics and theatre-managers, and there were concerns about decorum, and about connections to the pantalone figure in commedia dell’arte, frequently seen in a long robe.30 Indeed, writing in 1736, George Stubbes shares similar concerns about the ghost in Hamlet long before the Q1 was discovered: The Regal Habit has nothing uncommon in it, nor surprising … The Habit of Interment was something too horrible; for Terror, not Horror, is to be raised in the Spectators … as to the Armour, it was very suitable to a King, who is described as a great Warrior, and is very particular, and consequently affects the Spectators, without being phantastick.31

Despite the discovery of the new stage direction, staging the ghost in a nightgown was avoided but ‘could not be completely ignored’, especially by editors and critics.32 The emergence of Freudian thinking, however, led discussion of this stage direction towards ideas that the Act Three ghost could be considered a figment of Hamlet’s imagination (Jonathan Pryce’s performance in  1980, directed by Richard Eyre, explored this interpretation in detail, with Hamlet appearing to be possessed by the ghost). As mentioned earlier, there were also links to nineteenth-century spiritualism and ‘the rise of the subjective Ghost’.33 Indeed, Lesser quotes a number of mid-nineteenthcentury writers, who wondered whether the Act Three ghost should

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not be stageable for the audience’s view at all. For example, a piece from  1868 suggests a key difference between the representations of the Act One and Act Three ghost, the latter perhaps being ‘an optical illusion brought before Hamlet by his excited imagination, and … not the real [Act One] ghost who is visible to all eyes’.34 Thus, when a ghost appears in armour, or other recognizable clothing denoting a previous life or career, the ghost is stageable and stable. It becomes slippery when we introduce more ambiguous dress, and the ghost becomes more unstageable as a result. Of course, dressing a ghost character in a nightgown is not precisely the same as a sheet over the head, but reactions to the Q1 stage direction seem to suggest that the connotations of a king’s ghost wearing a nightgown were equally troubling, and there is a reluctance to bring this representation of the ghost to the stage. Around  1825, Goethe contributed to the conversation. Having initially dismissed the new stage direction, he considered the vulnerability and domesticity of the image of the king’s ghost in his nightgown in the queen’s private closet and found it a powerful one, contrasting with the armoured authority of the earlier ghost appearance.35 As the value of this image for theatre production was realized and practised across the nineteenth century, the ghost’s costume(s) in Hamlet shifted from the closed representation of pre-Q1 productions towards a more ambiguous and unresolved approach, explored production by production. Representing the ghost of King Hamlet has shifted and changed again in the twenty-first century. Looking at some of the high-profile Hamlets of this decade in the UK, the staging of the ghost has relied much more heavily on staging, lighting and makeup choices than on costume, and on a consistent outfit for the ghost rather than separate changes for Acts One and Three. Sarah Frankcom’s  2014 production featured a nightgown for John Shrapnel as the ghost in Act Three, while Nicholas Hytner’s in  2010 and Lyndsey Turner’s in  2015 both used pale makeup, cold lighting (with sudden state shifts) and clothing that would presumably have been familiar to Prince Hamlet from his father’s wardrobe. Robert Icke’s 2017 Hamlet dispensed with the body

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of the ghost on stage entirely and showed glimpses of a figure on a CCTV screen, who appeared to be dressed in contemporary clothing to the other characters. Simon Godwin for the RSC in 2016 used a ‘blast of light’ to announce the ghost’s entrance, while Ewart James Walters played the ghost in West African kente robes, a costume connected more to a king’s regal garments than to a nightgown or robe. In the twenty-first century, then, a bedsheet ghost (or even a nightgowned one) is largely unstageable for Hamlet. More broadly, dressing a ghost in this way represents a decidedly unscary attempt to scare, and the sheet-over-the-head ghost appears as a much more benign figure as a result. David Lowery’s  2017 film A Ghost Story engages with some of the bedsheet ghost’s history, while showing the ghost to be harmless, melancholy and steeped in despair at the seeming eternity of its ghosthood. Rooney Mara plays M, a woman whose partner, C, played by Casey Affleck, has been killed in a car accident outside their house in Dallas, Texas. After identifying C’s body at the local hospital, M covers his body with a sheet and then leaves. C gets up from the hospital trolley, still draped in the sheet, and arrives back at the house they had shared, as a ghost.36 M can’t see C, but he can see her, and can also see other ghosts. As the film’s audience, we can see C seeing M, M not seeing C, and C knowing that M can’t see him. M cannot see C’s ghost as he stands in the house or moves from room to room. C can see M in the house and is then tied to it even after she leaves it. We realize that he cannot haunt M, but can only haunt the space. At times, C has the ability to act as poltergeist in the house, hurling books when M comes back to the house with a date. As the film continues, C witnesses generations of the house’s occupants come and go. It becomes derelict and abandoned before finally being demolished and built over, which sends him into the future and then spinning back to the past. A Ghost Story uses the cliché of performing ghost most associated with children’s stories or Halloween (draping a sheet over the head) but troubles that same tradition’s most secure trope – the sheeted figure appearing to and scaring others. This disruption of the bedsheet

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ghost appears across film and television, traversing genre and style. For example, in The Sixth Sense, The Haunting, Halloween and Doctor Who, the bedsheet ghost engenders fear and terror, while its gentle lampooning can be seen in stories as diverse as Father Ted, E.T, Scrubs and Beetlejuice. A Ghost Story does something quite different, inscribing C as a liminal figure, uncertain and unstable. In doing this, C’s bedsheet ghost also enables the film to slide around and through genre, creating moments of lightness and humour in a bleak, stark portrait of loss. For example, C (as ghost) looks out of a window at one point, only to see another ghost in the next house staring back. This ghost’s sheet is floral instead of standard issue white, recalling the Maitlands’ efforts to become visible to the Deetzes in Beetlejuice. Despite Daniel Hart’s lurching, tense musical score at this point, and the framing of the scene to emphasize the ghosts’ isolation, even from each other, the vision of the flower-spattered bedsheet raises a smile. This brief lightness is immediately shattered, as C realizes that the other ghost has been in their house so long that they cannot remember who they are haunting or for how long they have been there, causing him to wonder how his own eternity might unfold. This moment further establishes the film’s interest in time and its relativity, which will increasingly unspool as C stays at the house through generations and centuries, before a nonlinear leap to the nineteenth century and a violent struggle in Texas between Native Americans and white settlers of the land. Another oft-cited representation of the ghost in culture (especially in book illustrations and screen media) is an invisible figure, looking exactly as they did in life, through whom live characters can pass without noticing.37 The ghost in this context is trapped in their invisibility. A Ghost Story combines these two tropes (the sheeted figure, and the invisible figure) to poignant effect. C’s sheet-clad ghost is invisible to the living humans with whom he house-shares. The mute, unhappy ghost is not scary and does not try to frighten anyone. The bedsheet ghost appears, in the twenty-first century, to signal sadness or ridicule, rather than fear. It is failing at being scary, and fearing the bedsheet

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ghost as ghost seems increasingly impossible. Dead Centre’s Hamnet explores this idea by imbuing the bedsheet ghost with a huge emotional charge (reminiscent of Goethe’s Romantic and astute analysis of the Q1 stage direction), but giving it spontaneous voice in the form of an audience participant.

Dead Centre’s Hamnet Towards the beginning of Dead Centre’s 2017 production of Hamnet, we see a young boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, taking a small ball out of his backpack. He aims the ball at the wall. He throws the ball at the wall while counting ‘93 million, 2 hundred and ninety four thousand  6 hundred and  75’. The ball bounces off the wall and back into his hand. He puts it back in the backpack. A few moments later, after explaining who he is (wearily clarifying that people normally hear an ‘L’ where there’s actually an ‘N’ when he introduces himself), Hamnet, played by Ollie West, retrieves his ball and throws it at the wall again. ‘93 million, 2 hundred and ninety four thousand 6 hundred and 76’. And again. ‘93 million, 2 hundred and ninety four thousand 6 hundred and 77’. The ball keeps bouncing off the wall and back to him. He explains to us that if you throw a ball against a wall infinity number of times, then, one time, it’ll go through. It’s called ‘quantum tunnelling’. Infinity means forever.38

Mathematically, the infinite set of all real numbers is an uncountable set. However, when Hamnet asks Google to explain quantum tunnelling to him aloud, his phone’s Wikipedia response tells us, ‘In quantum mechanics these particles can, with a very small probability, tunnel to the other side, thus crossing a barrier that it classically could not surmount.’39 In other words, quantum tunnelling relies on that which is very unlikely, but possible, or at least, not impossible. From the start, then, Hamnet interweaves the possible and the impossible, the visible and the invisible. While the boy Hamnet tells us immediately after

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Google’s contribution that he has ‘no idea what that means’, the play Hamnet knows exactly what this means, and the rest of the production suggests the doubtful, the implausible and the improbable by bringing us into various liminal spaces between the past and the future, between life and death, between regret and atonement, and between Newtonian and quantum mechanics. A repository for this liminality is the ghost, which is represented in three key ways. The production appears to be set in our time, but in a pale, isolating space, where Hamnet seems to have been on his own for an unclear amount of time. He is a ghost. He is the son of William Shakespeare, upset at his father’s abandonment of him for a theatrical career in London, and apparently unclear that he’s dead, though he notes that he’s been eleven years old ‘for years’, that he doesn’t seem to be growing at all, nor does his voice appear to be breaking. In this way, Hamnet begins to appear as what Andrew Sofer would call an ‘anti-matter play’, in which a play illuminates dark matter (matter of an unknown nature, whose existence we can only deduce) from a previous one, making it visible to the audience.40 The dark matter in this case emerges from Shakespeare’s biography and the little we know about his son Hamnet, who died in 1596 at the age of eleven. As we observe Hamnet’s ghost-world, we also observe ourselves – there is a large screen filling the upstage wall with a hole in its centre for a camera, streaming a live feed of the audience as we sit facing Hamnet, and showing him in duplicate, on the stage and on the screen. Hamnet throws his ball, sings Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue (he shares Sue’s frustration with a maddening first name), ponders why he is where he is and speaks some of Hamlet’s Act Two Scene Two monologue (Googling ‘malefactions’ along the way). He then invites an audience member up on stage to help him, because ‘it’s hard to rehearse when you’re on your own’.41 As the audience member joins him, Hamnet instructs the newcomer to ‘stand anywhere as long as it’s right there’, gives him a script and a costume (a bedsheet), and they embark on the beginning of Act One, Scene Five of Hamlet, with Hamnet playing Hamlet and the audience member playing his father’s ghost.42 In the

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first part of this scene in Shakespeare’s play, the ghost of Hamlet’s father (Old Hamlet) confirms Hamlet’s suspicions that he was murdered, not bitten by a poisonous snake whilst asleep. He specifies that his murderer was his brother Claudius, whose motivation was desire for Old Hamlet’s wife, Gertrude. He begs Hamlet to avenge his death (but not to harm Gertrude) and vanishes. A keen director, young Hamnet gives his actor clear stipulations about blocking: ‘The key to playing dead is not to move’; insight into what the audience might be thinking: ‘If you move, people can tell you’re not really dead’; and unfiltered notes at the end: ‘You’re a terrible actor, I can see you breathing. I should’ve known you weren’t the right casting. The ghost is supposed to be a great man … Don’t worry about the scene going badly.’43 This marks a turning point in the play. After his analysis of their performance, and his dismissal of the audience member back to their seat from his prone position on the floor, Hamnet tells us, twice, that he’s dead. He gets up, but his reflection on the screen doesn’t immediately follow. Then Shakespeare appears, on the screen but not on the stage. The ghost has been joined by another ghost; the father has been reunited with his son, but, of course, it is not as simple as that. When reviews of Hamnet have mentioned the bedsheet ghost, ‘[r]eplete with sheet’, this has often been specifically in relation to its audience participation and transformative power.44 Both Andrew Haydon for Postcards from the Gods and Sean Finnan for The Sentient Review explore this moment as a thrill of hope for Hamnet, that ‘his absent father can be conjured through his script’, while reminding us that the audience ‘laughs at the comical ghost hidden under a white sheet’.45 This is further testament to the ghost’s power to traverse narrative and genre, deftly blending the impossibility of Hamnet’s father materializing in front of him with the material humour of the bedsheet. These reviews also discuss the characters of Hamnet and Shakespeare as ghosts, in terms not dissimilar to Lowery’s central character in A Ghost Story. Maxine Puorro, writing for DRAFF, calls Hamnet a ‘living ghost haunted by phantoms of the real world’. Haydon dissects the view we have of the screen as being from the point of view of ‘the dead son … our ghost’.46 The endlessness that Hamnet faces,

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and the impossibility that father and son can fully reunite in the same world (even if they can engage with each other through the screen), is precisely C’s dilemma in Lowery’s film. Thus, in Hamnet, the bedsheet ghost thrown over the audience member offers an alternative way of seeing. As in the company’s Chekhov’s First Play, the use of an audience member punctures any sense we might have that the production is taking place at a distance, within a frame at which we can peer undisturbed. However, in Chekhov’s First Play, what we saw in the entire first section of the piece was played with the fourth wall firmly intact, even if we could hear The Director, played by Bush Moukarzel, metatheatrically glossing the stage action for us through headphones. In Hamnet, Hamnet speaks to the audience (or at the audience) throughout the production up until this point, but his questions are rhetorical on the whole, and our imperative to respond seems to stay within the boundaries of listening and chuckling. The introduction of the audience member draws us further into the frame, using the ghost as a conduit from auditorium to stage. In Hamnet, then, the bedsheet ghost works as a linchpin between one part of the production and the next, or as a key, unlocking its frame and techniques, and its freight. Like the shift from the first to the second sections of Chekhov’s First Play, things in Hamnet are immediately different from this point. The screen is not a reflection or a chronicler, and it is revealed to be much more sophisticated than we thought. The bedsheet ghost also shifts the genre focus slightly, as it’s funny and charming, a bit silly, even as it is laden with the kinds of history and nostalgia mentioned above. Furthermore, this is the only part of the play with a sustained playing of a dialogue scene with two performers standing together in the same space. Crucially, the ghost opens a portal for another ghost, Shakespeare, to join Hamnet (if only on the screen). At this point, we realize that the screen is not all that it seems to be and does not simply operate as a mirror. However, Hamnet behaves as if Shakespeare is in the same space as he is, even if we in the audience can only see one body on the stage. During the father – son reunion, which involves enormous questions

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like ‘Why did you go away?’ and ‘Things can come back to life, can’t they?’ and slightly smaller ones like ‘What’s a wanker?’, Hamnet vomits on the stage.47 Shakespeare holds out a handkerchief in the screen, and one appears in Hamnet’s hand on the stage. Later on, Shakespeare vomits on screen, and the vomit appears, as if by itself, on the stage. There is similarly clever play with a ball, and, beautifully, with a hug, during which Hamnet leans impossibly far forwards into his father’s arms – the mediatized and live ghost bodies are united on the screen in the action of the hug, while Hamnet remains alone on the stage. Attempting to draw all this together, we return to the contingency of visuality as explored in Chapter 3, and indeed the contingency of invisibility. In Hamnet, the use of the screen plays further with our already attuned sense that we can ever trust what we see. This screen is initially set up to show us our reflection and to reflect Hamnet back to himself – he even uses it as a mirror when he’s putting on his makeup to play Hamlet. However, after the encounter with the bedsheet ghost and the entrance of Shakespeare, the mirror becomes an unreliable witness. Faulty as our own eyes so often are, the mirror becomes another ghost, creating warps and alterations in the fabric of the stage space. On screen, Shakespeare kicks Hamnet’s ball, lying on the floor of the stage and the screen. It moves across the stage by itself and rolls towards Hamnet. What we see in Dead Centre’s Hamnet hovers between presentation and representation, articulating gaps between the two, as we will also encounter in the Wooster Group Hamlet. When Hamnet tells us that he doesn’t ever seem to be growing taller and that his voice doesn’t ever seem to be breaking, we see an eleven-year-old boy, in this case Ollie West, telling us these things.48 But the actor Ollie West will grow up, his voice will break. Indeed, the late 2018 tour of Hamnet saw West passing the role to eleven-year-old Aran Murphy, as the show continued to tour nationally and internationally. Of course, this could have been a case of young boys with school commitments sharing out the workload of touring, but the production’s insistence that Hamnet seems stuck in this time and place also suggests that seeing the role being played by an eleven-year-old is significant.

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Returning to Hamnet’s ball, it seems that quantum mechanics presents a further set of dramaturgical images for thinking about the visibility of the ghost on stage in Hamnet. For example, quantum tunnelling refers to the ability of quantum particles to travel through a solid barrier, thus making something that is usually impossible, not impossible, even if it is very unlikely.49 In Hamnet, Shakespeare manages to find Hamnet in his ghostworld, possibly because he has become a ghost himself. He travels through a barrier of some kind and becomes visible to Hamnet in his space and to us on the screen. Additionally, in quantum mechanics, two particles can remain linked to each other regardless of how far apart they travel in the universe. Whatever happens to one particle affects the other one instantaneously. We don’t know how this relationship, quantum entanglement, occurs.50 Albert Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance’, and it presents another helpful image for thinking about these two ghost characters and for the narratives of loss and grief threaded through the play. In Hamnet, both characters vomit, use the handkerchief and play with the ball. The ball kicked by Shakespeare on screen rolls across the stage of its own accord. Even though they don’t share the same space to our eyes, Hamnet and Shakespeare share the same space as each other and have clearly continued to influence and affect each other before the reunion. For example, Shakespeare mentions that he has been writing plays ‘for’ Hamnet, and tells him how much he misses him because he can’t see him: The cupboards are full of food these days. The fridge is stuffed. The freezer is packed. For you. In case. You might want a midnight snack. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and check. I get out of bed. I go to the cupboards and look, hoping they’ll be empty. Hoping that you’ve come in the night, somehow, to eat your fill. But you haven’t. The cupboards are always full.51

The relationship between the possible-impossibility of quantum entanglement and that of putting ghosts on stage returns to us through the screen and Hamnet’s ball. However, as Shakespeare reminds Hamnet,

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it is not always a good idea to apply quantum physics to the macro world. As he says, ‘there’s a problem when you try to understand big things by looking at small things. You get lost’.52 Perhaps the production disagrees with Shakespeare. The last images in Hamnet show the ball finally disappearing through the wall as Hamnet throws it and follows it in his turn. Using a stage trick, a clever illusion of light and dust, the quantum tunnel seems to open up momentarily, and the very unlikely returns as the not impossible. Finally, the screen shows the empty stage and us in our seats, and then we disappear too, and, unsettlingly, our empty seats stare back at us. The two ghosts (and the ball) have moved beyond the observable, and we no longer seem to be visible either. As we will see with the Wooster Group Hamlet, the theatre’s capacities and apparatuses operate as a particular portal for the emergence of ghosts and other visual impossibilities, and the negotiation of the gaps between what we can see and what we cannot.

The Wooster Group’s Hamlet In 1964, to commemorate 400 years since the birth of Shakespeare, John Gielgud directed Hamlet for the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway, with Richard Burton in the title role. Gielgud (himself a former Hamlet of both stage and screen) had reportedly asked Burton whether he would play Hamlet, and Burton had retorted that he was resistant to seventeenth-century dress or stagings that aimed to replicate historical conditions.53 Given that Elizabethan actors would have performed on a minimal set in their contemporary dress, Burton’s assertion (and the resulting production) in fact begins to suggests a historical staging of a kind, reminiscent of Linda Charnes’s exciting analysis of wormholes as a way of thinking and experiencing periodicity and reconciling the temporal shifts frequently required as we engage with Shakespeare.54 The commercial success of the production (a contributing factor to the ticket sales was the possibility of spotting Burton’s then-wife Elizabeth

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Taylor in the audience) was such that producers attempted a brandnew approach to sharing the Broadway production with audiences across the country. Across three sold-out performances, and using at least seven Theatrofilm cameras, the Gielgud-Burton production was filmed. Using Electronovision processing, the camera film could be swiftly printed to  35mm film, and a speedy edit saw  1,000 copies of the film delivered across the United States for cinema screenings on 23 and 24 September 1964.55 The technology of Electronovision at the time was such that its output was a grainy black-and-white image. With this in mind, the audiovisual cinematic experience for an audience who were ‘conditioned to expect the glamour of Cinemascope, Technicolor and stereophonic sound’ would have been quite disappointing.56 As Andrew Uroskie observes, ‘Electronovision effectively combined the worst of both worlds’ – the quality would have been comparable to television at the time, without any of the advantages of watching at home without paying for a cinema ticket.57 With this in mind, the excitement of the technology’s ability to capture the extremely sold-out theatre production ‘live’ had to be the main driving force, combined with the fact that the cinema screenings of Hamlet ran for two nights only before the film prints were withdrawn and destroyed, creating the buzz of a unique event. While Theatrofilm with Electronovision did not last beyond this single production credit, the ‘non-live dissemination of live theatre’ provoked an interesting set of questions about what a recording of theatre is, how it can be disseminated, how it survives and what it might mean.58 Although all prints were to be destroyed after the screenings, some inevitably survived. Ignoring the directive from Electronovision Inc., Burton donated one to the British Film Institute, and his widow Sally Burton found a second in his garage after his death. Edward Rocklin suggests that other copies were placed in the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division.59 From these remaining prints, a VHS tape was made for universal release in 1995. The film of the production is now available on DVD, and the entire production is also freely available

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via YouTube at the time of writing this book.60 As the source material for their production of Hamlet, the Wooster Group were thus immediately working with an almost impossible, almost evaporated document, one which would have eluded the archive altogether if not for Burton’s forethought (or vanity). In a way, in their impulse for destruction of the tapes and the disruption of any future profit they might have made from other screenings, Electronovision Inc. anticipate the debates around liveness, documentation and what remains when live performance is over that would rage productively through theatre and performance studies scholarly communities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,61 and Peggy Phelan’s 1993 assertion that Performance’s only life is in the present  …  it cannot be saved, recorded or documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance.62

Although a screening of a recorded performance is by definition not a live performance, the singular and finite nature of the national screening events suggests an attention to a kind of present-ness, and to something that, once shown, cannot be re-shown. Considering Phelan, and in examination of the Wooster Group’s staging of the attempt to ‘save, record and document’, and to ‘participate in a circulation of representations of representations’, the ‘something other than performance’ of her description is precisely the kind of hinterland where the company’s Hamlet appears to settle. The production blends the above concerns with detailed intermedial performance and spectacular approaches to staging, causing us to think anew about the freight of production histories, the complexities of actorly legacies and how we can effect intervention into the documents we hold up as relics of the past. In the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, a projection of the  1964 filmed production of the play provides a frame (in structural, textual and scenographic terms) for a repurposed live performance of, to and

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around the film. The techniques of film (editing, close-up, panning, zooming) are transplanted to the theatre, creating a productive friction between Shakespeare’s text, Gielgud’s film and the Wooster Group’s devised piece. Investigating what remains of the unstageability of the ghost through the character’s (Hamlet’s father’s ghost) unusual performance on stage and screen in this piece, and exploring the demands made upon each other between the two media out of which the Wooster Group’s Hamlet arises, this emphasizes the ghost as both figure and theme, body and voice, stageable and yet unstageable.

Staging reverse Theatrofilm As with Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, which we encountered in Chapter 2 (and which shares its lead actor, Scott Shepherd, with Hamlet), the Wooster Group also start with a document, in this case, the VHS of the Electronovision print. They also begin with an interest and previous experience in seemingly unstageable performance tasks. As the company’s director Elizabeth LeCompte asserted in a  2012 interview, ‘after 35 years, I look for things that seem impossible’.63 Over these thirty-five years, the things for which LeCompte has looked have seen the company’s work delve into biography and autobiography, films, plays, interviews and documentary, weaving multi-referential, densely layered, intermedial performances that engage with impossibility as a dramaturgical methodology. For example, the Wooster Group’s  1987 piece, Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St Anthony, explored Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine, published in  1874. Flaubert’s book, described as an ‘early modernist’ text, is written in the form of a playtext, though as Markus Wessendorf observes, it ‘was not intended for theatrical presentation. The staging of the text was supposed to take place within the text itself, in the act of reading the text’.64 Arguably, the unstageability of this quasi-closet drama was not confined to authorial intent, as the stage technology needed to evoke Flaubert’s hallucinatory images would not emerge until around the time of the Wooster Group’s

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inception. However, the company’s work on and with concepts of impossibility does not just reside in the texts they explore, but in the actorly, dramaturgical, scenographic and technological approaches with which they engage. At the beginning of Hamlet, Scott Shepherd explains that the company see the production’s aim in opposition to the producers of the 1964 film print of the Burton-Gielgud play. According to Shepherd, we are watching reverse Theatrofilm … reconstructing a hypothetical theatre piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film, and intentionally replacing our own spirit with the spirit of another, as we channel the ghosts of the 1964 production.65

Described thus, the Wooster Group’s project is unstageable. It is impossible to fully reconstruct Richard Burton’s 1964 performance of Hamlet in 2006 using only a filmed copy of a performance as evidence, and this detective or archaeological practice is not the company’s interest or objective. As William Worthen observes, ‘the Wooster Group Hamlet finally refuses to locate dramatic performance as the recovery of lost “information”: the originals can be found, but they cannot be played, or at least they cannot be played as themselves’.66 Although it stands as a record of the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet, the film also captures so little, and the limited amount it reveals provokes exponential speculation about what it doesn’t.67 However, I argue that acknowledging this impossibility allows for a discussion beyond ontology and towards an exploration of the production from the perspective of resistance between the screen and the stage, between the document and how it is being asked to perform, and between the 1964 and 2006 casts. It also provokes consideration of the ways in which aspects of the Wooster Group’s scenography and theatre design present a useful channel of communication across time, theatrical convention and changing interpretations of Shakespeare. Hamlet opens with an audio-only explanation of ‘Theatrofilm with Electronovision’ by Richard Burton, which was edited into the

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beginning of the original screening tapes. Scott Shepherd, sitting on a stool listening to Burton, explains and frames what we are about to see. As he speaks, the large projection screen behind him (which displays a blue grid) shows a computer mouse cursor dragging a small screen of the  1964 film onto the full-size projection screen. Shepherd asks whoever is operating the mouse, ‘Can we make it bigger?’ From the very beginning, the relationship between the document and the performer is one in which the latter has control, while the former provides constraint. Shepherd tells us about film editing using the software Final Cut. He drags the Final Cut screen over the film print and shows what is done in order to take out frames, or add breaks. In particular, he explains that the company have cut out run-on lines in Hamlet (alerting us to the fact that the verse was ‘spoken freely in the 1964 production’) and so have frequently ‘moved’ pauses from the middle to the end of a line in order to preserve the iambic pentameter of the verse. Shepherd wonders aloud about the impact of reverse Theatrofilm, and whether it will take off as a methodology of theatre-making. Consequently, what we see is the company performing with and to this film print, with live actors revitalizing the screen actors’ performances of decades before. On the surface, it might appear that this is a mirroring of the 1964 document, an attempt to get it right or to precisely reconstruct. If this is the task, the company are of course emulating a strikingly imperfect ‘original’, and the astonishment this provokes in the audience frequently resolves itself through laughter. For example, the material quality of film deteriorates over time, and building on the Wooster Group’s digital altering of the metre, we also see the visible degradation as the print momentarily skips or stops. The actors work in detail to echo the film print, and the audience giggle as Gertrude (Kate Valk) suddenly freezes to a halt on her graceful, sweeping descent of the palace staircase, only to resume her former pace a half-second later as she closes the gap between the possible and the impossible. Bringing the techniques of film and theatre representation together, the zooming-in capability of the camera lens is re-created on stage using furniture on wheels and extremely fast movement

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(usually completely at odds with the pace of the dialogue or action in a scene). A camera pan across the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne in 1964 involves Wooster actors and stagehands scrambling to reassemble a scene halfway across the room. The sound editing ensures that both live and screen performers are consistently in the sound mix, but the emphasis bounces from Shepherd to Burton and back again, fashioning and re-fashioning our attention. Throughout, there are pauses and breaks from the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet, sometimes filled by fragments from other filmic representations of the play, further signifiers of the ‘rabidly kleptomaniacal’ style for which the Wooster Group have been internationally renowned since the company’s establishment in 1975.68 At Polonius’s first entrance, the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet is replaced by Bill Murray’s performance of Polonius from the Michael Almereyda film of 2000 (which featured Keanu Reeves as Hamlet). Later on when the Player King is speaking, the Wooster Group replace the 1964 tape with Charlton Heston’s 1996 turn in Kenneth Branagh’s film.

Wooster ghosts The appearance of the Ghost in the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet, which Gielgud confusingly described as ‘[his] only contribution to this production that had any merit’, shows the shadow of a man’s head and shoulders, magnified to fill most of the upstage wall.69 The outline of a military helmet and a dress jacket on the Ghost’s head invokes a specific silhouette, with a peak on either side, updating Shakespeare’s directive about the armoured Ghost for a new century. In Act One, Scene Four, the Ghost’s entrance is announced by a loud metal gong sound. The shadow hovers over the stage before waving at Hamlet, ‘beckon[ing him] to go away with it’ as Horatio puts it. The soundscape swirls windily around them. In the Wooster Group performance of this scene, the Ghost crackles and sputters onto the projection screen, with static sounds and glitching images. One of these is a flicker of a title card reading ‘List Z Opola’, which is the Polish title of a short documentary film by

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Michael Elster from 1965 featuring Jerzy Grotowski’s work with Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole towards their production of Doctor Faustus. The attempted intrusion of the 1965 film into the 1964 film adds another layer to the Wooster Group’s exploration of their unstageable staging of the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet: in referencing the Woosters’ own previous work on and roots in Grotowski’s performer training methodologies, we might consider that these couldn’t be farther from the approach to acting taken in the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet.70 As Hamlet follows his father’s ghost offstage (and into Act One, Scene Five), we see Ari Fliakos (who variously plays Claudius, Osric, Marcellus, Gravedigger and the Ghost) in a helmet of the same shape as the silhouette. He sits on a centre-stage chair for a moment before leaving the stage again as the scene starts. His live-streamed image, cropped to head and shoulders, remains on a small screen behind the empty chair and speaks the Ghost’s lines throughout the scene (in collaboration with John Gielgud), with the camera angle suggesting that Fliakos is lying on the ground offstage (in the grave) staring up at a camera. There is a further screen on the left of the stage image featuring a disembodied hand clasping and unclasping a vertical pole (which could be Hamlet’s hand on his sword, or indeed the Ghost’s on his own weapon). The hand has been colourized to scroll slowly through rainbow-bright colours, appearing now blue, now red, the only spot of colour in the washed-out greygreen colour palette of the scene. Shepherd remains downstage of all of this, staring out at us, at the Ghost (as Burton does) as he speaks. The images constructed in this scene – the oversized shadow, the disembodied limb (and Gielgud’s disembodied voice) and the appearance of a character who can be seen in one way (Fliakos is visible on the screen) but not in another (on the chair) – are archetypal signifiers of the representation of ghosts on stage or screen. A traditional bedsheet ghost would complete the collection. Here, these signifiers are layered on top of each other, fragmented, crushed and stitched back together using the postdramatic, metatheatrical frame. In this moment, LeCompte’s drive to find ‘impossible things’ to stage leads straight to this locus of impossible representation and artfully saturates

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it. However, the ghosts in this production of Hamlet are not restricted to the appearance of the Ghost. The remainder of this section hunts for ghosts elsewhere in the Wooster Group’s production, finding them tucked into corners of scenography, the materiality of the film print and the movement of the actor-character-ghosts. As we have seen so far, the bodily pauses, the furniture on wheels, the sound- and filmediting processes and the insertion of other screen texts create multiple slippages between possibility and impossibility, and gaps from which ghosts emerge.

The host and the ghost In order to consider in more detail Shepherd’s opening offer that the Wooster Group’s Hamlet ‘channel[s] the ghosts of the 1964 production’ in relation to the staging of ghosts and the impossibilities contained or navigated therein, I am borrowing from terminology most frequently applied to site-specific or site-responsive performance. When a performance is made in, for and with a particular site (usually an extra-theatrical site, as distinct from a place specifically designated to be a theatre or performance space), the agency of the site and its role in performance-making are productively complicated by the site’s previously existing stories and resonances. In 2000, Clifford McLucas of Brith Gof noted that he began to use the term ‘the host and the ghost’ to describe the relationship between place and event. The host site is haunted for a time by the ghost that the theatre-makers create. Like all ghosts it is transparent and the host can be seen through the ghost. Add into this a third term – the witness, i.e., the audience – and we have a kind of trinity that constitutes the work.71

In an interview conducted around the same time, McLucas reaffirmed the ghost as ‘this strange transient thing that we all make when we’re making theatre … like all ghosts you can see through it, you see the

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previous place and its existence and you see this activated thing that you’ve placed inside it’.72 The host-ghost-witness model has been taken up enthusiastically by performers and scholars of site-based work, allowing as it does a negotiation and re-negotiation of each member of the trio. In placing host, ghost and witness in critical relation to each other, we can complicate assumed binaries about them and share the responsibility of being active in the creation of meaning. While the Wooster Group Hamlet is not exactly a site-based or site-responsive performance (it was performed in sixteen different theatre spaces from 2006–13, though was devised and rehearsed in the group’s home space, The Performing Garage, which suggests a certain responsivity to that site at least), the relationship between host and ghost is applicable to the specificity of the interdependence between the film print and the performance, which becomes the site for the Wooster Group’s performance. Contemplating Hamlet in relation to McLucas’s trinity, the Electronovision print of Burton’s Hamlet aligns with the host, while the Wooster Group production appears as the ghost, briefly possessing or haunting the film print, returning it to our view in a live formulation. W. B. Worthen reminds us that even the print shown in the production is ‘a restoration and remediation of that nearly-lost original, made from two known surviving copies, recalling the two remaining, unidentical copies of that other Hamlet, the 1603 first quarto’.73 Thus, the host, ‘the place where the thing is taking place’, is itself also an unreliable and shaky site for performance, as the Wooster Group make clear in their use of live editing.74 The ghost is transparent: we can clearly see the host. While the Wooster Group (amongst many other things) reanimate and reconstruct the Burton Hamlet, they also place it in dialogue with their own performance-making practices, and with its audiences. However, the relationship between ghost and host is perhaps less reciprocal and generative than McLucas’s original analysis for sitebased performance, and an assumption that the unstageable ghosts are Burton et  al. in  1964  may be misleading. In a discussion of the Wooster Group Hamlet, Peter Holland calls for a re-investigation of who the ghosts really are in this production, suggesting that the ‘tape

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becomes the ghost for the current performance while the live actors are also now the present ghosts for the dead bodies, the fixed past of the  1964 performance’.75 Rebecca Schneider goes further, describing the Wooster actors as ‘surrogates of other actors’. She writes that ‘the dangerous game of mimesis … [t]he problem, and the promise, is that the surrogate lives, blinking and sweating beneath the ghost’s visor … the performers … seem to whisper an ancient game of gestic telephone played with artworks’.76 Thinking back to the relationship between acting and the spectral, if a ghost is something that comes back or appears again, it becomes clear that the live Wooster Group actors are the ones who stage ghosts for us, embodying them and performing the past into being. The ghost then might seem to be in thrall to the host, if we thought that the Wooster Group ensemble was dependent upon Burton and his fellow players for every scrap and nuance of performance. However, the uses of a range of techniques of command (including pausing the tape, fast-forwarding when the live performers seem bored or in need of a change of pace, and the palimpsestic over-writing of the word ‘unrendered’ on a blue screen to show a scene missing) suggest an unequal relationship between host and ghost. As in much site-based practice, here the host site cannot control what happens in performance. Even if the contours and details of the host fundamentally define and shape the performance (the ghost), here we see the powerlessness of a static, finite, unsteady film print and the power of the dynamic, live, adaptable cast and crew. Some aspects of the film (particularly pause, fast-forward and play) are edited live in performance, further suggesting the film’s role as a host. That said, as in much of the Wooster Group’s work, Hamlet is not as straightforward as this, and neither is the relationship between the Burton film print and the production around which it revolves. Worthen suggests that the production is a ‘dialogic Hamlet’, in much the same way that McLucas suggests that host and ghost should negotiate with each other throughout the performance-making process.77 Furthermore, stageability and unstageability are in a similarly dialogic

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process here, creating an ongoing subversion of what it is impossible to see by what it is possible to stage. Returning to the example of Act One, Scenes Four and Five, the Burton-Gielgud ghost is an enormous shadow and a disembodied voice. As we have seen, it is impossible to stage a ghost, even in the midst of staging a ghost. Multiple layers of ghosts emerge from the Wooster Group Hamlet, suggesting that the theatre leans right into the paradox with which it has been presented. Equally, as this book has suggested through a range of different examples of theatre and performance practice, Hamlet troubles binaries between what is stageable and what is unstageable, and between the ontology and epistemology of what is being staged. Further border lines become porous in this production. Boundaries between past and present, theatre and film, acting and spectating blur, as the digitized, remastered, edited and live-mixed film print and sound score seep into the performance space, in order to possess the bodies of the actors. However, this happens in both directions, and gives rise to a consideration of how the (live) ghosts assert themselves to be seen alongside and in the midst of the (film print) hosts.

Impossible ghosts: Bodies, costumes and cameras Costume design begins to operate as a conduit for this relationship, becoming another site for the performance of the connection between ghost and host. For example, the colour of Casey Spooner’s (playing variously Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) costume, a red jacket, is colourized by the Wooster Group in the black-and-white film print. Seeing this jacket as red was previously impossible, as the 1964 film was made in black and white, and so its emergence begins to create what we could think of as a scenography of the possible. The flash of the red jacket (and its identical reappearance on Charlton Heston as the Player King when the 1996 Branagh production is shown) causes us to wonder what other ghosts the film print is harbouring  and conversely shows the Wooster Group re-authoring the Burton-Gielgud

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production as part of their practice of re-animating it. Later on, towards the beginning of the play’s long final scene, one of Claudius’s courtiers, Osric, explains to Hamlet and Horatio the terms of the duel with Laertes (over which Osric will preside). Dillon Evans’s performance of Osric in the 1964 film was revived and revisioned by the Wooster Group’s Ari Fliakos (who, as mentioned, also played Claudius, Marcellus, Ghost and Gravedigger), reinforcing the direct connections between Claudius and the duel and recalling Hamlet’s conversations with the Ghost as explored above. In a reversal of the red jacket’s incorporation into the film print, Fliakos’s Osric appears in striking gold leather trousers (their shape is consistent with Evans’s Osric, as with the comparison between the live and screen Ghosts’ helmets), signalling another moment of scenographic dialogue between screen and stage. As observed above, Electronovision’s powers of capturing the image did not extend to colour, though we know that Gielgud’s aim was to create ‘a Hamlet acted in rehearsal clothes, stripped of all extraneous trappings’.78 When interviewed about her costume design for Gielgud’s production, Jane Greenwood noted that she chose ‘muslin rehearsal skirts and sweaters for the women. The men were in trousers and tops … [o]nly the Players wore … bright colours’.79 This description indicates that Osric (amongst others) was not wearing bright colours, nor does it seem likely that an actor’s standard rehearsal wardrobe in the  1960s would have included gold leather trousers. If the Wooster Group Hamlet costume designer, Claudia Hill, made the scenographic choice, this suggests the porosity of the quasi-archaeological task of reconstructing Hamlet from the 1964 film print, articulating the company’s alertness to the impossibility of the task they have set themselves and the generative creativity found in this. In this moment, Hill’s costume design departs from what appears to have been its main function so far: to provide shapes and colour palettes (broadly greyscale) in complementarity with the Burton film print. For example, Kate Valk’s pale rehearsal skirt (slightly adapted to accommodate her dual roles as Gertrude and Ophelia) appears to  drape and fold on the stage in precisely the same way as Eileen

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Herlie and Linda Marsh’s skirts do on the screen. However, the gold trousers (and a post-interval yellow-and-pink shirt for Valk, to replace the dark shirt she wore in the production’s first half) remind us of the limitations of the film print, which does not provide evidence of the colour of costume. We can thus consider that costume design in the Wooster Group’s production is not merely contributing to the construction of the environment within which Hamlet takes place; it is also subtly suggesting ways in which the production’s aims reach beyond what Shepherd states in his prologue. As well as reconstructing the  1964 production through ‘the paradoxical task of copying live but mediated performances’, it is clear from some aspects of design that the Wooster Group allow the impossibility of the mission they have set themselves to bleed through the screen and onto the stage.80 This also operates backwards (or upstage) from the stage onto the screen, as we have seen. If the company’s project is to channel the former life of a  1964 Electronovision film print, it is also the project of acknowledging and celebrating the gaps between the film and the stage, between then and now, between the mediated and the live. The Wooster Group Hamlet thus invokes all of the things that can’t be known, details that have already disappeared even in the process of filming the 1964 production, despite the film print’s unlikely survival and resurrection. With this in mind, dressing Osric in his incongruous gold leather trousers begins to perform a playful acknowledgement of what has been lost. In a consideration of the use of costume as a mechanism for this relational work and following Kathleen Irwin’s writing on scenography, Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’ is helpful. Irwin draws on Barad’s intra-action in order to discuss scenography as a complex creative network of processes and objects, suggesting that ‘agency arises from the relationships between things, rather than being inherently given to individual things’.81 In her own work in physics and philosophy, Barad differentiates intra-action from interaction in so far as the latter assumes that there are discrete objects which interact with each other (but exist individually and prior to the interaction), while intra-action

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conversely takes the position that the interactions are what bring the individual entities into existence (and thus that the entities do not necessarily pre-exist the relation).82 Thinking Barad with the costumes in Hamlet suggests that neither Evans’s trousers in the 1964 black-andwhite film nor Fliakos’s gold trousers in the 2006 production is ‘correct’ or ‘stageable’ or ‘unstageable’ or ‘impossible’ or ‘the right trousers’ or ‘the wrong trousers’, but that the relationship between the two is the most significant element at play, and even that this relationship is what enables the ghost to assert itself to be seen as well as the host (to return to McLucas). To an extent, Barad’s concept could be extrapolated to discuss the entire production, which itself could be said to be a vivid happening of intra-action, articulating the relationship itself rather than the two entities comprising the interaction. Moving from costume to the bodies inhabiting them, in enacting the film print, the Wooster Group also provoke us to realize that standard camera-filming processes are impossible for humans to perform. Our screen-savvy eyes are accustomed to the camera movements of zoom, pan and shot-reverse-shot when we see them on a screen. However, when live bodies attempt to reproduce these techniques on a stage, they jar and stutter; they inevitably and constantly fail. The Wooster Group’s Hamlet brims with examples of actors pausing to catch up with or wait for the edit or urgently moving wheeled furniture into place to accommodate a zoom-in. The multiple live-streaming screens on the stage permit Shepherd’s face to appear in close-up (mirroring Burton’s when required) as we simultaneously see his whole body on stage (the equivalent of a long-shot). As with the examples of costume colours seeping from stage to screen and back again, the use of the flare and the explosion as part of the editing technique invokes a further approach to understanding this production’s relationship between impossibility and possibility. At times, characters fade or flare in and out of the screen, disappearing completely, or leaving a body part, a sword or a fan behind, disappearing in the midst of the theatricality their live ghosts create. For example, before the Ghost appears in Act One Scene Four, as Hamlet and Horatio dispute whether it has struck

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midnight or is about to, Horatio declares, ‘I heard it not’, and Burton/ Hamlet disappears from the screen. Explosions occur at other points on the screen to move the action forward. These sound like a lightbulb bursting and look like a flare of light. In the same scene, as the Ghost appears, an explosion accompanies its entrance. If the dissolve and the explosion were dramaturgical techniques of the impossible adaptation, as we saw in Chapter 2, they appear again here. The production judders or buckles under the weight of its impossible task, and the dissolve or explosion functions as a theatrical bridge between the host and the ghost. In the first case, Horatio doubts Hamlet’s telling of the time, causing Hamlet to disappear. In the second, the portal between the human and ghost worlds opens up to accommodate the conversation between Hamlet and his father. Finally, at the end of each act, a white horizontal bar sweeps upwards across the screen, like an Etch-a-Sketch toy being wiped clean, providing a momentary digital curtain-drop before the next set of impossible images unfurl. Finally, for something to be ‘rendered’ in film editing means that the frames of the film have been created as a series of composited twodimensional images, each one of which is built ‘from all of the layers, settings, and other information … that makes up the model for that image’.83 Thus, if an image or scene is ‘unrendered’, a visual effect cannot be presented onscreen because it has not been adequately rendered (or processed). This is almost the digital equivalent of ‘scene missing’, an intertitle used for previews of films that have not reached a final-cut stage at the point of screening, but also humorously shown or even said to signify explicit content or time that cannot be accounted for.84 In Hamlet, when Polonius (Greg Mehrten) enters in Act One, Scene Three, interrupting Laertes and Ophelia’s farewell conversation, a blue banner reading ‘Unrendered’ appears across the screen, accompanied by a constant beeping noise. Shepherd enters briefly and explains to us that they ‘did use some other films’. There is a brief flash of Bill Murray as Polonius before the ‘Unrendered’ screen returns, and Mehrten reperforms Murray/Polonius’s monologue to Laertes from the Almereyda film, but without the full clip playing on the screen.

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Again, a gap is stretched out between the Burton-Gielgud Hamlet and the Wooster Group production, which this time is negotiated using intertextual material. Crucially, the use of the ‘Unrendered’ screen underlines and reinforces the editing work done to the 1964 film, and communicates that what is happening on stage is a more sophisticated process than repetition. The Almereyda clip has not been edited or refashioned by the Wooster Group at all, so it would be simple duplication to play it while Mehrten performs. Throughout, the impossibility of the Wooster Group’s task generates a creative spark, revealing itself in a tussle between the hosts and the ghosts, and between the screens and the stage. If staging a ghost always conveys something unstageable by its very presence, this is discovered in the gaps and fissures we encounter in Hamlet. In taking on the impossible task of re-animating the film print, the Wooster Group articulate how a resistance appears between the document and its performers, making ghosts of the contemporary actors as they negotiate the unstageable. As with bloodshed, precise reconstruction or re-performance is an intrinsic impossibility, and the (im)perfect performance of this impossibility, including saturating the unstageable ghost with all of its own tropes in an effort to will it into being, reveals spectral gaps throughout the production. This chapter has discussed the ghost as a nexus of unstageability. Approaches to staging the ghost in Hamlet, as explored by Dead Centre and the Wooster Group, subvert the invisible and the impossible in their makings-visible of its different aspects. Applying techniques borrowed from quantum mechanics, Dead Centre invoke the invisibility of dark matter to explore relationships between particles and worlds, and thus between characters and the stage space. Furthermore, in their playful use of the cliché of the bedsheet ghost in Hamnet, the figure of the audience member as ghost is seen to be a signifier of a shift in the performance’s abilities to show us what we cannot see and to measuring the invisible’s effect on the visible. In both Hamnet and the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, the roles of scenography and intermedial performance suggest new techniques of the unstageable, building on those collected

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in the previous studies of stage directions, adaptation and stage blood. Here, we see the screen flare used in both productions as a signalling of the ghost’s movements between stageability and unstageability. The deliberately disordered association of screen and stage in Hamlet reveals ghosts to us, not in the failure of either medium, but in their generative contradictions. Similarly, the invocation of magic in Hamnet, playing between the projection screen and the stage floor and culminating in the ball’s disappearance through the wall, shows us what we know we cannot see, further bolstering the theatre’s role as a space for the staging of things we know to be impossible.

Conclusion: Success, Imagination, Failure

This book has engaged with an elusive and inescapable theme, in a contemporary global moment that strives to execute impossible acts while denying that anything is impossible. As I write this conclusion in the winter of  2018–19, the longest federal government shutdown in US history is underway, due to an impasse between the president and Congress over the latter’s demand for funding ($5.7 billion) for a border wall stretching the  1933  miles between the United States and Mexico. Where I live, in the United Kingdom, the country’s attempt to leave the European Union (following a referendum in favour of this move in June  2016) continues to involve the negotiation of complex arrangements for trade, labour and movement of people in the form of ‘deals’ presented by the prime minister to the British parliament for scrutiny and approval. The country waits to find out what will happen if the current deal is rejected: Britain could be forced to leave the EU with no deal in place, a new deal with the EU could be negotiated or the country could hold a second referendum on the issue. If the work of the theatre reflects, refracts and responds to the work of the world, identifiable moments of performing unstageability at the theatre suggest implicit (and explicit) performative reactions to the impossibility of global politics and an awareness of the acutely inhospitable context the twenty-first-century world presents for most of its citizens. Any book with ‘success, imagination, failure’ as its subtitle is surely suggesting a reckoning in its conclusion, or at least a value judgement of some kind. But what is the success measure of performing the unstageable? As these chapters have shown, success, imagination and failure are not markers on a scale of volume of unstageability or indicators of how ‘well’ unstageability has been negotiated, but

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rather they suggest a range of techniques or approaches to the process of negotiating and rethinking the unstageable. As we have seen, to simply dismiss a text, image, play or story as unstageable suggests an essentialist approach to theatre as medium or as event. Similarly, to assume uncomplicatedly that the theatre can stage anything is equally difficult. Advances in theatre’s technical and technological capacities constantly deepen and broaden the scope of what can be achieved on stage and beyond it. Censorship has been eradicated in most European countries. As the modern theatre has developed, and despite the anti-theatrical suspicion of the theatre in the high modernism of the twentieth century, the term ‘unstageable’ has begun to shed its essentialist tendencies. In the twenty-first century, theatre-makers and critics refer to theatrical impossibility in the same breath as its possibility. We ‘stage the unstageable’, ‘perform the unperformable’ and ‘dance the undanceable’. Unstageability is couched in quotation marks, and preceded by conditioning terms, such as ‘seemingly’, ‘previously’, ‘deliberately’, ‘more or less’, ‘ostensibly’. We can stage, endlessly. And yet, a recognition of the impossible thing that is being achieved continues to form a crucial part of its achievement. Indeed, as Alice Folco and Sevérine Ruset indicate, the risk-taking implied in the statement that a production is staging the unstageable has emerged as a vital condition for funding certain companies or strands of experimental practice in the contemporary French theatre, a concept that could be interpreted as ‘subsidising the unstageable’.1 There is an implicit suggestion here that French artists are purposely extending and developing theatre’s limits, in order to create the unstageability they then try to thwart. This invokes not just Heiner Müller’s relationship of resistance between literature and theatre but a more internal process of a company or artist identifying something theatrically impossible and trying to do it. If the avant-garde creates an appetite for what seems impossible, or what has never been done before, this is arguably its logical conclusion, where safe is less exciting and provocative than risky, chiming with Lehmann’s assertion that postdramatic theatre is ‘the difficult and risky freedom of perpetual

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experimentation’.2 Thinking into another corner of this paradox, the unstageable, or staging it, begins to become part of a neoliberal structure and agenda, if the subversive is being used for commercial gain. As Performing the Unstageable has discussed, if dismissing something as unstageable is essentialist, but staging the unstageable is commercially viable, then it seems that there is a need to first identify and acknowledge impossibility in order to defy it. The significance of this book can be understood in four main ways. Firstly, it has drawn together a range of examples from twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre practice, all of which engage with ideas of impossibility and the unstageable. These divergent texts and productions have allowed me to articulate the contingency of the unstageable as it emerges in different cultural, historical and political contexts. The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol became unstageable over time. Chekhov’s Platonov became stageable through adaptation after a long period of unstageability. The idea of unstageability means different things to different audiences and practitioners through centuries of theatre practice. A final image of this contingency of the unstageable steps beyond the theatre and into nature. As we have seen, a text or an image might appear to be unstageable from one angle or one point in time, but looked at through different eyes or at a different moment, a creative spark or a possible articulation is found. Observing the movements of huge flocks of knot birds in the UK, whose winter plumage reveals silver backs and white undersides, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane describes the visual effect of their flocking: when the light hits them on one side, they ping brightly like little flecks of snow or ice, then they turn as a group and they vanish. It’s almost as though they’ve slipped out of our dimension into another. And then they turn again and they’re back into our world, visible again. It’s absolutely mesmerising to watch. This other-worldliness, this feeling of creatures moving in and out of our dimension and our perception … These portal moments or border moments when you glimpse through into another world that isn’t quite ours, but that runs alongside ours, almost in parallel with it.3

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The slippery, changeable nature of the unstageable sees plays, stage directions and images operating as this flock of knots, moving in and out of the theatre’s grasp according to context. Furthermore, the theatre may be in the business of staging, but I have found that it constantly hints at another world that it cannot seem to bring to the stage. By turns, this is the world beyond the theatre (as in the staging of unspeakable violence), a world beyond our perception (as in the staging of ghosts), the world of the past (as in the staging of adaptations of impossible plays) and in the articulation or testing of its own physical and aesthetic limits (as in the staging of unstageable stage directions). Secondly, the acknowledgement of unstageability has emerged as an ally of creative freedom. Far from a stifling of interest in or desire for staging, the drive to engage with difficult dramaturgies, unstageable stage directions, impossible adaptations and unspeakable images underpins the relationship between text and performance throughout this book. The embrace of porosity and aporia around such categories also speaks to the recent decoupling of long-held binaries of text-based performance versus non-text-based performance in British theatre, borne out in recent work by writers including Duška Radosavljević, Liz Tomlin and Catherine Love.4 Of course, in a theatre-making climate that combines texts of various kinds with devising, performance art, intermedial and documentary practices, the idea of a text being unstageable or impossible for theatre comes under fire anew. However, what this book has tried to show is that, regardless of whether a singleauthor published work (e.g. The Author, An Octoroon, Cleansed) or a process of construction and creation led by a series of directed images or an ensemble practice (e.g. Gatz, BR.#04, Dirty Work) represents the origins of a piece of theatre or performance, the unstageable remains an exciting provocation to be teased out, emphasized within the frame of performance and deployed as a strategy of generative resistance between the component parts of the theatrical machine. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, an analysis of a variety of differently unstageable stage directions revealed a resistance between text and performance that became a generative creative challenge for theatre-makers. The space

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between a stage direction and its performance in this context invokes dialogue rather than silence, and encourages thought beyond specific and discrete ontologies of a text and a performance through stagings of impossible stage directions that use obfuscation, misdirection and failure as strategies of resistance. Such strategies appear in the refusal of the actors to comply with the audible stage directions in Look Back in Anger or the projection of written stage directions onto a scrim in front of a scene in which completely different acts were happening in Purgatorio. These examples see the status of the text become disrupted, and the unstageable emerges in performance as a result. Thirdly, the performance of the unstageable has revealed itself as a way of making sense of theatre, in text and performance terms. In this sense, it becomes a dramaturgical and sometimes scenographic aide. Using two of theatre’s most frequently staged unstageables, ghosts and blood, I have argued that the staging of these impossibilities beyond literal mimesis (we do not know what ghosts look like; actors do not shed each other’s blood on stage) necessarily retains something of the unstageable in the approaches taken to their staging, again revealing the unstageable in the midst of what is staged. I have identified a number of dramaturgical techniques of the unstageable, including the explosion, flare, dissolve and flicker, and explored the figure of the (potentially unreliable) gatekeeper of the unstageable. All of these techniques indicate the performance of the unstageable as something liminal, operating in a paradoxical hinterland between stage possibility and impossibility. Fourthly, techniques of the unstageable reveal a traversing of genre, ideology, time, aesthetic, space, identity, form and content. As we have seen, adaptation and translation at the theatre are particularly good at such crossings of former representational boundaries. Margherita Laera outlines a taxonomy of at least fifteen theatre adaptation practices, articulating the fluidity with which texts and performances can mediate and negotiate from the past into the present (or vice versa), from one set of cultural practices to another, or from a dominant or normative position to a subversive one.5 Similarly, the well-established

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notion of untranslatability in translation studies expresses a fluidity and multiplicity of movement between sources and targets that acknowledges the impossibility of the task but embarks on the task regardless. Applying this logic to the mutable process of staging, the unstageable becomes an expansive concept, inviting an opening out of practice, rather than a turning away in despair or anger because something seems impossible to do on stage, or a rash dismissal of a text or an image as unstageable. Such thinking also halts the assumption that much critical thinking on impossibility at the theatre provokes – that nothing is impossible for the theatre. The acknowledgement of impossibility within a particular sphere of thinking or practice, and the turning towards another approach or technique in the effort to perform what was previously unstageable, re-establishes the invisible labour of acknowledging the unstageable and finding ways to negotiate it. In a final example, I look at a production in which the performers continue to perform even though their medium has completely vanished. In Dancing Brick’s piece,  6.0 How Heap and Pebble Took on the World and Won (2009), we follow the story of the eponymous Heap Krusiak and Pebble Adverati, the greatest ice dancers in the world. However, their sport has encountered a problem. There is no more ice. In a world five years after the last ice has melted forever, Heap and Pebble valiantly struggle on with ice-dancing. The (hilarious) inability of ice-dancing skates to yield to the friction of a wooden floor instead of the lubrication of ice combines with the devastation of Heap and Pebble as they tell us stories of their meteoric rise to fame, the gradual disappearance of the medium they rely on and their uncertain future. We meet the celebrated pair as they prepare for the ice-dancing World Championships, in which they will be the only competitors. We catch fragments of their story so far, as they relate past successes. For example, Heap earnestly describes the narrative arc of an ambitious routine choreographed to commemorate an anniversary of the 1969 moon-landing, ‘with Pebble as Neil Armstrong and me as the Apollo-11 lunar landing-module’. The couple continually rehearse their new choreography for the competition, to the strains of Barry

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Manilow’s ‘Mandy’, and the veneered smiles begin to crack when it becomes clear that they cannot master one of the lifts in the routine, as Pebble is not able to create enough momentum on the wooden floor for Heap to sweep her up into his arms. Without ice, without the stage that they need and so with a very literal unstageability revealed, this lift may eternally be unperformable. The absence of ice creates an aperture into which Heap and Pebble pour all of their skill and experience, but in a similar fashion, this gap appears to be unfillable. Significantly, Heap and Pebble refuse to acknowledge that what they need to perform is not available to them any longer. They dismiss any thoughts of retiring from their sport and continue to pursue it. The compulsion to stage what is no longer stageable, to perform when the performance context no longer exists, brings the unstageable into spectral view. Their work is literally unstageable because the stage they need does not exist any more. They continue to perform nevertheless, invoking what we could call an environmental unstageable in their analogy with climate change. As the natural world disappears, through extinction of non-human animals, destruction of ecosystems and resources, what are the consequences? Heap and Pebble’s confrontation with the impossibility of ice-skating without ice asks us to consider the long-term unsustainability of daily human life at the current rate of planetary consumption. Connecting to more recent performances like Ontroerend Goed’s 2016 World without Us, which wonders what the planet would begin to look, feel and sound like over the coming centuries and millennia if all human life suddenly disappeared, Heap and Pebble’s failure to perform their unperformable routine invokes an impossibility beyond the theatre’s limits and into the global ecology. Finally, I hope that an engagement with unstageability at the theatre might contribute to our fluidity of thinking about what is possible and impossible for the theatre, particularly in relation to possible as positive and impossible as negative. The patience and foresight required to understand when something is unstageable blends with an exciting drive to work with impossibility in dramaturgical and scenographic terms. In other words, theatre and performance have faith in the

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impossible. Theatre-makers are dreamers, architects and practitioners of the unstageable. Whether we consider Joanna Baillie realizing that the theatre cannot stage her plays yet while anticipating a theatre that will be able to do so, Rory Mullarkey writing a play consisting entirely of stage directions as dialogue, Forced Entertainment describing endless unstageable images and actions from a ramshackle proscenium arch stage, the Wooster Group actors sprinting across the stage to catch up with their re-edited video counterparts from fifty years before, the stage blood enfolding the body of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio performer as his fake beating becomes too real or Dead Centre defying the laws of physics to send a ball through a wall, the unstageable persists as a passionate idea. In the audience, impossibility at the theatre takes us in again and again. We ‘cannot believe’ what we are seeing even as it unfolds before us. The unstageable is a connective force traversing place and history, and its performance continues to support theatre’s ongoing paradoxes of imagination, pretence, visuality, mimesis and escape.

Notes Introduction 1

The comprehensive project website can be found at https://www.aslsp. org/de/das-projekt.html. 2 Alain Badiou, ‘Alain Badiou on Theater and Philosophy’, Lana Turner Journal, 19 January 2015, https://archive.li/NoHon (accessed 12 January 2019), p. 3. 3 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 4 I saw Secret Theatre’s A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts at the Barber Studio, West Yorkshire Playhouse, 23 September 2014. 5 ‘Behind the Scenes – A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts’, Kiln Theatre YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0xGGOjnFoUc (accessed 24 October 2018). 6 Gareth White writes about this uncertainty in Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 7 OED online (accessed 10 October 2018). 8 OED online (accessed 10 October 2018). 9 OED online (accessed 10 October 2018). 10 OED online (accessed 10 October 2018). 11 Colbert Searles, ‘The Stageability of Garnier’s Tragedies’, Modern Language Notes, 22:7 (1907), pp. 225–9. 12 Searles, p. 226. 13 Longinus, On the Sublime, translated H. L. Havell, London and New York: Macmillan, 1890, p. 2. Project Gutenberg ebook. 14 Longinus, p. 13. 15 Longinus, p. 36. 16 Longinus, p. 12. 17 Longinus, p. 11. 18 Longinus, p. 32.

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19 Indeed, Karl Axelson notes that Hall’s translation ‘was barely read at the time’. Karl Axelson, The Sublime: Precursors and British Eighteenth Century Conceptions, Bern: Peter Lang, 2007, p. 22. Similarly, Charles Martindale states that Hall’s translation ‘had little currency’. Charles Martindale, ‘Milton’s Classicism’, in The Oxford of Classical Reception in English Literature, edited by David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 89 n. 93. 20 Contemporary critics such as Peter de Bolla, Anne Janowitz and Janet Todd have suggested that this emphasis on the sublime during the Enlightenment was directly related to the need to replace religious terror with a secular equivalent. The terrifying sense that, post-Galileo, there was a range of unknowns relating to the universe allowed an underside of the sublime to be exposed, and for some writers of the time, this led to an acknowledgement that there were things we don’t know. Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; Anne Janowitz, ‘Sublime’, in A Handbook of Romanticism Studies, edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell, 2012, pp. 55–68; Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, London: Methuen, 1986. 21 Quoted in David Sandner, Critical Discourses of the Fantastic: 1712–1831, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011, p. 33. 22 For a fuller discussion of nerves and nervous disease in the eighteenth century, and their connection to the Burkean sublime, see Aris Sarafianos, ‘The Contractility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69:1 (2008), pp. 23–48. 23 Longinus, p. 130. 24 Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds, The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 53. 25 Edmund Burke, ‘On the Effects of Tragedy’, The Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford, 1796, p. 43 (accessed through Eighteenth Century Collections Online). 26 Burke, ‘On the Effects of Tragedy’, p. 44. 27 Burke, ‘On the Effects of Tragedy’, p. 44. 28 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2007, pp. 109–10.

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29 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, p. 106. 30 Quoted in Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 33. 31 This is a very brief overview of the Kantian sublime, but Abaci, Clewis and Crowther, for example, articulate this specifically in relation to art. Uygar Abaci, ‘Artistic Sublime Revisited: Reply to Robert Clewis’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68:2 (2010), pp. 170–3; Robert Clewis, ‘A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity: A Response to Abaci’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68:2 (2010), pp. 167–70; Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Additionally, Bjorn Myskja’s The Sublime in Kant and Beckett (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2002) looks at Molloy as a case study example of how Kant’s sublime can be explored in relation to a particular work (cf. pp. 12–59). 32 Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 92. 33 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 126. 34 Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 126. 35 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 5. 36 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, p. 26. 37 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, p. 26. 38 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, p. xiii. 39 Theodor Adorno, ‘Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, translated by Samuel Weber and Sherry Weber, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967, pp. 17–34, p. 34. 40 Adorno’s declaration is also supported by Hayden White’s description of the Holocaust as ‘virtually unrepresentable in language’. Hayden White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth’, in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, edited by Saul Friedlander, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 43.

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41 Robert Faurisson, ‘Shoah: Review’, The Journal of Historical Review, 8:1 (1988), pp. 82–91, p. 84. 42 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, translated by Shane B. Lilis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 180. 43 Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 3. 44 Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 3. 45 Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 80. Didi-Huberman, in this work, is also taking on Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the Muselmann. The photographer in this case was a member of the Sonderkommando, squads of inmates of the camps who, from July 1942, were forced to work at the gas chambers, clearing and cremating bodies after the mass executions and maintaining the chambers themselves. This horrific task culminated in their own deaths, and their replacement by the next Sonderkommando. These men are described by Agamben as Muselmanner, and for him, they are the only ‘complete’ witnesses of the Holocaust (though Agamben uses only the term ‘Auschwitz’), because their testimony is ‘untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness’. Agamben goes on to compare the impossibility of Muselmann’s unbearable experience with the victim of the stare of the ancient Greek mythological Gorgon: ‘That at the “bottom” of the human being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing – this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a non-human … The Gorgon and he who has seen her and the Muselmann and he who bears witness to him are one gaze; they are a single impossibility of seeing’. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999, p. 54. Didi-Huberman acknowledges Agamben’s argument, but notes that ‘we cannot … learn anything from a paralyzed and petrified gaze’ (p. 179). For Didi-Huberman, what can be gained from an engagement with the myth of the Gorgon is the lesson of Perseus’s defeat of Medusa (the mortal part of the Gorgon) in spite of the perceived impossibility of doing so. He notes that, in this case, ‘[t]he initial impotent fatalism (“one cannot look at the Medusa”) is replaced by the ethical response (“well, I will confront the Medusa all the same, by looking at her differently”)’ (p. 179, author’s emphasis). 46 A full account of Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ can be found in his The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

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47 Rancière, The Future of the Image, pp. 110–11. 48 Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 111. 49 Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 118. 50 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 1. 51 Andrew Sofer, Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theatre and Performance, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2013, p. 4. 52 Lucy Munro, ‘Shakespeare’s Tragedies in Performance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Claire McEachern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 262–88. 53 Jonathan Bate, Introduction to Titus Andronicus, London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995, p. 58. 54 Michelle O’Callaghan, Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp. 15–16. 55 The Observer, 9 October 1966, quoted in O’Callaghan, Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist, p. 124. 56 Brander Matthews, A Study of the Drama, Boston, New York, and Chicago: Houghton Mifflin, 1910, p. 250. 57 Puchner, ‘The Theater in Modernist Thought’, New Literary History, 33 (2002), pp. 521–32, p. 523. 58 For more on this debate, see Puchner, Stage Fright; Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, California and London: University of California Press, 1981. 59 This context also created a space for the performance of plays by women whose work had not been professionally produced, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Marta Straznicky has pointed out. Marta Straznicky Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550– 1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 68. Her book looks at the work of Jane Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish and Anne Finch. 60 Wiebe Hogendoorn, ‘Reading on a Booke: Closet Drama and the Study of Theatre Arts’, in Essays on Drama and Theatre: Liber Amicorum Benjamin Hunningher, edited by Erica Hunningher, Baarn: Moussault, 1973, pp. 50–66, p. 51. 61 Kimberly Jannarone, ‘Jarry’s Caesar Antichrist and the Theatre of the Book’, New Theatre Quarterly, 25:2 (2009), pp. 121–36, p. 51, p. 124.

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62 Catherine Burroughs, ‘Closet Drama Studies’, in Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form, edited by Burroughs, Oxon: Routledge, 2018 (ebook, no page numbers). 63 Burroughs, Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form. 64 Joanna Baillie, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, London: Longmans, 1851, p. 231, my emphasis. 65 Baillie, ‘To the Reader’, p. 235. 66 Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 30. 67 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 10. 68 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 120. 69 Clare Warden, Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, p. 28. 70 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 120. 71 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 2. 72 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, London: Simon & Schuster, 1990, p. 625. 73 Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, London: Nick Hern Books, 2017, p. 14. 74 Matthew Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume One: Neglected Authors, London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 75 Charles Jasper Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936/2009. 76 Examples include Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (p. 149 in Robert A. Logan and Sara Munson Deats, eds, Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Aphra Behn’s The Roundheads (p. 45 in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses, edited by Michael Cordner and Peter Holland, New York: Palgrave, 2007); Lucy Munro mentions John Lyly and Richard Brome as writers ‘whose extant plays … have largely been neglected’ in Munro, ‘The Early Modern Repertory and the Performance of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries Today’, in Performing Early Modern Drama Today, edited by Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 25. 77 Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew, edited by Tiffany Stern, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. x.

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78 Jacquelyn Bessell, ‘The Actors’ Renaissance Season at the Blackfriars Playhouse’, in Performing Early Modern Drama Today, edited by Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 86. 79 Amelia Howe Kritzer, ed., Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 1. 80 Naomi Paxton, ed., The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays, London: Methuen, 2013, p. vii, p. ix. 81 Yvette Nolan and Ric Knowles, eds, Performing Indigeneity: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016; Lynette Goddard, Contemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Kate Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Melissa Sihra, ed., Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, London: Palgrave, 2007. 82 Translating Theatre, http://www.translatingtheatre.com/the-project/ (accessed 15 December 2018). 83 Robin Mackay, ‘Introduction: Three Figures of Contingency’, in The Medium of Contingency, edited by Robin Mackay, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, Urbanomic and Ridinghouse, 2011, n.p. 84 Reza Negarestani, ‘Contingency and Complicity’, in The Medium of Contingency, edited by Robin Mackay, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, Urbanomic and Ridinghouse, 2011, n.p. 85 Mackay, ‘Introduction’, n.p. 86 ‘Là où le français rassemble tout ce qui résiste à la scène sous un vocable unique’/‘en musique, on l’applique à des morceaux qui défient l’interprétation’; Alice Folco and Severine Ruset, L’injouable au théâtre, special edition of Revue d’histoire du théâtre, 267:3 (July-September 2015), p. 347 (my translation). 87 ‘L’œuvre dramatique est une énigme que le théâtre doit résoudre … c’est d’avoir à jouer l’impossible qui transforme la scène et le jeu de l’acteur’, Antoine Vitez quoted in Folco and Ruset, p. 353 (my translation). 88 ‘offert une résistance particulière aux praticiens’, Alice Folco and Séverine Ruset, ‘Introduction’, European Drama and Performance Studies, horssérie 2017, p. 10. 89 ‘Nothing is untranslatable … [b]ut the “untranslatable” remains – should remain’. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 56.

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90 Daniel Sack, ed., Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, Oxon: Routledge, 2017, p. 2. 91 Yvette Nolan, ‘Passenger Pigeons’, in Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, edited by Daniel Sack, Oxon: Routledge, 2017, p. 166. 92 Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Alan Read, Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1995; Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011; Simon Bayly, A Pathognomy of Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 93 Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, pp. 4, 31. 94 Alan Read, Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 54. 95 Read, Theatre & Everyday Life, p. 54. 96 Bayly, A Pathognomy of Performance, p. 35. 97 Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, p. xv. 98 Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, eds, Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance, Oxon: Routledge, 2018, p. 3. 99 Margaret Werry and Roisin O’Gorman, ‘On Failure (On Pedagogy): Editorial Introduction’, Performance Research, 17:1 (2012), pp. 1–8, p. 1. 100 Sofer, Dark Matter, p. 4. 101 Emily Apter, ‘Preface’ to Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, translated by Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. xiv. 102 Apter, ‘Preface’ to Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables, p. viii. 103 Barbara Cassin, ‘Introduction’, to Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, translated by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. xvii. 104 Camille Bloomfield and Lily Robert-Foley, ‘Tweetranslating Trump: Outranspo’s “Bad Translations” of Trump’s Tweets’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 21:5 (2017), pp. 469–76, p. 470. 105 Nina Raine, Tribes, London: Nick Hern Books, 2010, p. 22.

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Chapter 1 1 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 30. 2 Osborne, Look Back in Anger, p. 30. 3 Grace Dyas, ‘I’ve been thinking about Michael Colgan a lot lately’, https:// gracedyas.tumblr.com/page/3 (accessed 5 January 2019). 4 Statements from Ciara Elizabeth Smyth, Ruth Gordon, Ella Clarke and Annette Clancy appear on Dyas’s tumblr blog, https://gracedyas.tumblr.com (accessed 5 January 2019). 5 The report, written by Gaye Cunningham, can be found here: https:// www.gatetheatre.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Independent-ReviewReport-into-Gate-Theatre-by-Gaye-Cunningham-1.pdf (accessed 5 January 2019). 6 Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, p. 9. 7 Deana S. Stein, ‘Every Move That She Makes: Copyright Protection for Stage Directions and the Fictional Character Standard’, Cardozo Law Review, 34:1571 (2013). 8 Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 28–9. 9 Ella Hickson, The Writer, London: Nick Hern Books, 2018 (ebook). 10 Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, p. 25. 11 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound and Other Plays, London: Penguin, 1961, p. 134. 12 Quoted in Gary Chancellor, ‘Implicit Stage Directions in Ancient Greek Drama: Critical Assumptions and the Reading Public’, Arethusa, 12:2 (Fall 1979), p. 136. 13 Denis Diderot, De la poesie dramatique/Discours sur la poésie dramatique, 1758, p. 409, pp. 417–18 (my translation). 14 Primoz Vitez, ‘L’Invention du texte didascalique’, Linguistica, 48:1 (2008), pp. 83–95, p. 85 (my translation). 15 William Shakespeare, The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale, 3.3.58, p. 158. 16 Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, ‘Introduction’, in The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale, edited by Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 31.

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17 Louise G. Clubb, ‘The Tragicomic Bear’, Comparative Literature Studies, 9:1, Special Issue in Honor of Maurice J. Valency (March, 1972), pp. 17–30, pp. 23–4. 18 Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 19 Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama, New York, NY: Burt Franklin, 1961, p. 223. 20 P. A. Skantze, Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century, London: Routledge, 2002. 21 Cited in Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama, p. 226. 22 Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama, p. 223. 23 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 15. 24 Hogendoorn, ‘Reading on a Booke’, p. 51. 25 Jannarone, ‘Jarry’s Caesar Antichrist and the Theatre of the Book’, p. 124. 26 Marta Straznicky, ‘Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama’, Criticism, 37:3 (1995), pp. 355–90, 367. 27 Straznicky, ‘Reading the Stage’, p. 367. 28 Anne Finch, Aristomenes, in Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions Written by a Lady, London: J.B., 1713, p. 370 (accessed through Eighteenth Century Collections Online). 29 Finch, Aristomenes, p. 382. 30 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 21. 31 Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber, 1986, p. 399. 32 Enoch Brater, ‘A Footnote to Footfalls: Footsteps of Infinity on Beckett’s Narrow Space’, Comparative Drama, 12:1 (Spring 1978), pp. 35–41, p. 40. 33 Katherine Weiss, The Plays of Samuel Beckett, London: Methuen Drama, 2013, p. 233. 34 Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London: Routledge, 1991, p. 71. 35 Aston and Savona, Theatre as Sign-System, p. 146. 36 Aston and Savona, Theatre as Sign-System, pp. 82–90. 37 Michael Issacharoff, Discourse as Performance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 5. 38 Issacharoff, Discourse as Performance, p. 17.

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39 Ubersfeld pushes this idea further, wondering whether the author is in fact the subject of the didascalia. Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, p. 9. 40 Very briefly, Issacharoff ’s classification system works as follows. Extratextual stage directions refer to authorial prefaces or notes on the play’s subject matter and are dismissed by Issacharoff as ‘not really didascalia’ (p. 20). Autonomous stage directions appear within the body of the playtext but are specifically addressed to the reader. A classic example of this kind of direction noted by Marvin Carlson is the end of Shaw’s Candida, which reads ‘They embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet’s heart’ (quoted in Marvin Carlson, ‘The Status of Stage Directions’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 24:2 (1991), pp. 37–48, p. 40). Normal stage directions refer to those that can be translated into action or image for an audience: locative directions for performers, hints about delivery or blocking and so on. Issacharoff does not delve into the details of this rich and fertile category of the ‘normal’ stage direction (Issacharoff, Discourse as Performance, pp. 18–22). 41 Issacharoff, Discourse as Performance, p. 22. 42 Carlson’s taxonomy; Carlson, ‘The Status of Stage Directions’, p. 38. 43 Carlson, ‘The Status of Stage Directions’, p. 39. 44 Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, p. 25. 45 This analogy is drawn from John Searles’s ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’, New Literary History, 6:2 (Winter, 1975), pp. 319–32. 46 A representative sample of such work might include: Alan C. Dessen, ‘The Body of Stage Directions’, Shakespeare Studies (1 January 2001); Ellen Karoline Gjervan, ‘Ibsen’s Two verions of The Burial Mound: A Comparison and Discussion of the Stage Directions of the Two Versions of the Play’, Nordlit, 34 (2015); Sissel Lie, ‘To Go Down Singing: Stage Directions and Presence in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 9:1 (2010), pp. 17–35; Nita M. Moghaddam, ‘From Page to Virtual Stage: A Socio-Semiotic Reading of Stage Directions’, Social Semiotics, 26:4 (2016), pp. 351–65; Christopher Shirley, ‘Sodomy and Stage Directions in Christopher Marlowe's Edward(s) II’, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 54:2 (Spring, 2014), pp. 279–96. 47 Dessen, ‘The Body of Stage Directions’. 48 Carl Weber, ed., The Battle: Plays, Prose, Poems by Heiner Müller, New York: PAJ Publications, 1989, p. 160. 49 Weber, The Battle: Plays, Prose, Poems by Heiner Müller, p. 160.

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50 Weber, The Battle: Plays, Prose, Poems by Heiner Müller, p. 160. 51 Bert States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1985, p. 31. 52 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2.4, pre-scene stage direction (pre-Line 1). 53 David Palmer, ‘The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus’, The Critical Quarterly, 14:4 (1972), pp. 320–9, pp. 321–2. 54 Eugene Waith, Patterns and Perspectives in English Renaissance Drama, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988, p. 41. 55 Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 3.2. 56 J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 117. 57 Sarah Kane, ‘Brief Encounter’, public interview with Dan Rebellato, Royal Holloway College, London, 3 November 1998. Available at: http://www. danrebellato.co.uk/sarah-kane-interview/ (accessed 11 November 2018). 58 Kane, ‘Brief Encounter’. 59 David Greig, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Kane, Complete Works, London: Methuen, 2001, p. xiii. 60 Simon Hattenstone, ‘A Sad Hurrah’, Guardian, 1 July 2000. 61 Quoted in Graham Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002, p. 87. 62 Kane, Complete Works, p. 136. 63 Kane, Complete Works, p. 133. 64 Ken Urban, ‘An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane’, Performing Arts Journal, 23:3 (2001), pp. 36–46, p. 43. 65 Kane, Complete Works, p. 129. 66 Dan Rebellato’s blog review of the production explores in some detail the ways in which Mitchell’s production foregrounds the preparation for and anticipation of violence as much as the violence itself. http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/spilledink/2016/2/24/cleansed (accessed 26 March 2016). 67 Kane, Complete Works, p. 129. 68 Rebellato, quoted in Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’, p. 89. 69 Martin McDonagh, Plays: 1, London: Bloomsbury, 1999, p. 53. 70 McDonagh, Plays: 1, p. 54.

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71 McDonagh, Plays: 1, p. 55. 72 Mike Bartlett, Wild, London: Nick Hern Books, 2016, p. 72. 73 Bartlett, Wild, p. 73. 74 Alistair McDowall and Vicky Featherstone, post-show discussion at Royal Court, 26 April 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD7-MSuC8jE (accessed 8 September 2018). 75 Alistair McDowall, X, London: Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 141. 76 Translation: ‘A throw of the dice which accomplishes a prediction, on which depended the life of a race. “Don’t hiss” to the winds, to the shadows – if I plan, as an actor, to play the trick – the 12 – no chance in any sense.’ 77 David Barnett, Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine, Oxon: Routledge, 2016, p. 14. 78 Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine, translated by Dennis Redmond, 2001, p. 4. Available at: http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/Hamletmachine. PDF (accessed 4 December 2017). 79 Müller, Hamletmachine, p. 4. 80 Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 141. 81 Jonathan Kalb, The Theatre of Heiner Müller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 122. 82 The impossibility of representation in ‘Scherzo’ in Hamletmachine could also be a commentary on the gender politics of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which effectively silences Ophelia by consigning her to madness and death, meaning that we find out very little about her. As Case reminds us, ‘Ophelia’s [world] has never been representable; therefore she provides the possibility for dramatic action’ (Case, The Domain-Matrix, p. 141). 83 Barnett, Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine, p. 49. 84 Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House and Other Plays, New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group, 2006, p. 71. 85 Interview with Samuel French, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JbcMDDN47XU, 2015 (accessed 28 February 2018). 86 Ruhl, The Clean House, pp. 51–2. 87 Stacey Gregg, Scorch, London: Nick Hern Books, 2016, pp. 19, 26. 88 Ruhl, The Clean House, p. 30. 89 Paul Castagno, New Playwriting Strategies: Language and Media in the 21st Century, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2011, p. 136.

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90 Eugene O’Neill, ‘The Web’, Ten ‘Lost’ Plays, London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1995, p. 69. 91 Ruhl, The Clean House, p. 111. 92 Ruhl, The Clean House, p. 111. 93 Mullarkey, Each Slow Dusk, London and New York: Methuen Drama, 2014, p. 3. 94 Rory Mullarkey, Panel discussion entitled ‘Possibilities of text, narrative and performance’ chaired by Caitlin Gowans, featuring Vicky Angelaki, Rory Mullarkey, Deborah Pearson and Cathy Turner. Symposium, ‘Are We On The Same Page? Approaches to Text and Performance’, Royal Holloway University of London, 26 September 2015. Transcribed from the recording, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iHHYtlhIO0Q (last accessed September 2017, panel starts at 3:26:05). 95 Mullarkey, September 2015.

Chapter 2 1

2

3

I am tracing Hutcheon’s argument in Chapter 1: Beginning to Theorise Adaptation, particularly pp. 3–6. Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition, Oxon: Routledge, 2013. Kara Reilly, Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018, p. 93; Frances Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 165; Katja Krebs, Translation and Adaptation in Film, Oxon: Routledge, 2014, p. 4. When asked about his adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at a workshop with students in 2017, Simon Stephens observed that it was almost unadaptable and that that was why he refused to take a commission for it, but thought of it as an ongoing project between himself and Haddon. Stephens noted that he felt a need to be able to speak to Haddon ‘and say, right that’s it, your novel is unadaptable’ if necessary, and that that was the creative impulse – the acknowledgement of the impossibility of the act made it increasingly possible. 8 May 2017, University of York.

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4 Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, p. 165. 5 Roman Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edition, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 138–43. 6 Margherita Laera, ‘Introduction: Return, Rewrite, Repeat: The Theatricality of Adaptation’, in Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat, edited by Laera, London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014, p. 7. 7 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation. Oxon: Routledge, 2006, pp. 97–8. 8 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 99. 9 Following Lawrence Venuti, ‘Adaptation, Translation, Critique’, Journal of Visual Culture, 6:1 (2007), pp. 25–43. 10 Katja Krebs in ‘Chapter 2: Translation and Adaptation – Two Sides of an Ideological Coin’, in Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, edited by Laurence Raw, London: Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 44. 11 Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, pp. 165–6. 12 Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, p. 27. 13 Edward Braun in ‘4 – From Platonov to Piano’, in Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 41. 14 This discussion will use the title Platonov throughout. 15 Upton does not specify a translator but does note the existence of a ‘literal translation’ in the Sydney Theatre Company education pack accompanying the production run. https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/ education/resources/past-education-resources (accessed 30 July 2018). 16 Of course, any discussion of Chekhov in English is already beginning from a place of translation. Following from Krebs and Babbage above, and in relation to the inherent impossibility at the heart of translation and adaptation processes, Senelick writes in the preface to his complete translated works that ‘Chekhov had his doubts about the efficacy of translation and … concluded that transmission of Russian literature into another language was pointless’ (p. xxxv, Preface to Complete Works). As he continues, ‘Chekhov … approached the theatre and playwriting with a deep distrust, a fear that the demands of the stage would coarsen or distort his carefully wrought perceptions … Chekhov’s early plays,

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written with an eye to stage production, clearly display his sense of the conflict between the pedestrian demands of the theatre and the need to express his own concerns dramatically.’ Laurence Senelick, ‘Preface’, in Anton Chekhov, The Complete Plays, translated, edited and annotated by Laurence Senelick, London: W. W. Norton, 2006, p. xxxv. 17 Anton Chekhov quoted in ‘Preface’, Michael Frayn, Wild Honey, London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 18 See Stuart Young, ‘Making the “Unstageable” Stageable: English Rewritings of Chekhov’s First Play’, Modern Drama, 52:3 (Fall 2009), pp. 325–50; Donald Rayfield, Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and Drama, London: Bloomsbury, 1999; Helena KautHowson, ‘Introduction’, in Anton Chekhov, Sons without Fathers: The Untitled Play, Known as ‘Platonov’, London: Oberon Books, 2013, p. 4; Nicholas Grene, Home on the Stage: Domestic Spaces in Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 19 Michael Frayn, Wild Honey, London: Methuen Drama, 1984, p. ix. 20 David Hare, ‘Introduction’, in Platonov, London: Faber and Faber, 2015, p. ix. 21 Young, ‘Making the “Unstageable” Stageable’, p. 326. 22 Frayn, Wild Honey, p. ix. 23 Kaut-Howson, Sons without Fathers, p. 3. 24 Laurence Senelick, ‘Introduction to Untitled Play’, in Anton Chekhov, The Complete Plays, London: W. W. Norton, 2006, p. 5. 25 Hare, Platonov, p. ix. 26 Hare, Platonov, p. x. 27 Trevor Griffiths, Piano, London: Faber & Faber, 1990. 28 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play. London: Oberon Books, 2016, p. 7. 29 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 32. 30 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 35. 31 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 91. 32 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 12. 33 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 15. 34 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 16. 35 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 49. 36 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 48. 37 See http://brechtinpractice.org/theory/the-brechtian-method/. 38 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 33.

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39 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, pp. 53–4. 40 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 5. 41 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, p. 34. 42 Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon’s archival work on The Octoroon’s premiere in relation to contemporaneous thinking on and attitude to slavery, including reviews of the US, Australian and UK premieres, can be found in their article ‘Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon’, Theatre Journal, 69:2 (2017). 43 ‘The Octoroon’, New York Times, 15 December 1859, p. 4. 44 Richard Watts, ‘The Basic Appeal of The Octoroon’, New York Post, 12 February 1961. 45 The Octoroon. Theatre program. Phoenix Theatre, New York, January 1961. Playbill. 27 October 2015, http://www.playbill.com/ production/the-octoroon-phoenix-theatre-vault-0000013106 (accessed 20 September 2019). 46 Howard Thompson, ‘The Octoroon’, New York Times, 10 February 1961. 47 Peter Thomson, ‘Introduction’, in Dion Boucicault, Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 9. 48 Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography, London: Quartet Books, 1979, p. 129. 49 Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture, London: Duke University Press, 1998, p. 51. 50 See University of Kent, Dion Boucicault Collections, https://www.kent. ac.uk/library/specialcollections/theatre/boucicault/plays/streets.html (accessed 8 March 2018). 51 Verna A. Foster, ‘Meta-Melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon’, Modern Drama, 59:3 (2016), pp. 285– 305, p. 286. 52 A culturally contingent view of this adds a further layer of meaning. Confusingly, ‘an’ (pronounced ‘on’) in the Irish language means ‘the’. As I had originally studied Boucicault as a student in Dublin, I automatically thought of the title of Jacobs-Jenkins play as ‘An Octoroon’ (thus ‘The Octoroon’) in Irish translation, before I knew anything about the play. 53 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 11. 54 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 22. 55 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 62.

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56 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 67. 57 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 12. 58 See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/theater/18artsTHEOCTOROOND_BRF.html. 59 One of these actors left the show under a cloud of controversy, having sent an e-mail to his friends about the ‘trainwreck’ show which was leaked to Village Voice. https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/06/18/disgruntled-cast-memberissues-invite-to-p-s-122s-troubled-octoroon/ (accessed 9 March 2018). 60 http://www.playbill.com/article/jacobs-jenkins-assumes-directorialduties-of-his-play-the-octoroon-at-ps-122-com-169306; https://www. villagevoice.com/2010/06/15/branden-jacobs-jenkins-tries-to-revive-theoctoroon/. 61 Foster, ‘Meta-Melodrama’, p. 293. 62 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 8. 63 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 11. 64 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 13. 65 Although it is interesting to note that this fluidity of identity is only permitted for the male characters in An Octoroon, no female characters appear in whiteface, blackface or redface. 66 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 12. 67 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 17. 68 Matt Trueman, WhatsOnStage, 26 May 2017, https://www.whatsonstage. com/london-theatre/reviews/an-octoroon-national-theatre-brandenjacobs_46866.html (accessed 29 March 2018); Fergus Morgan, The Stage, 25 May 2017, https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2017/octoroonreview-orange-tree-theatre/ (accessed 29 March 2018); Aliya Al-Hassan, Broadway World, 25 May 2017, https://www. broadwayworld.com/westend/article/BWW-Review-AN-OCTOROONOrange-Tree-Theatre-20170525 (accessed 29 March 2018). 69 Connor Campbell, The Up Coming, 26 May 2017, http://www. theupcoming.co.uk/2017/05/26/an-octoroon-at-the-orange-tree-theatretheatre-review/ (accessed 29 March 2018). 70 Holly Williams, TimeOut, 25 May 2017, https://www.timeout.com/ london/theatre/an-octoroon. 71 Tom Birchenough, Arts Desk, 27 May 2017, http://www.theartsdesk. com/theatre/octoroon-review-slavery-reprised-melodrama-vibrantlytheatrical-show (accessed 29 March 2018) and Fergus Morgan, The

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Stage, 25 May 2017, https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2017/octoroonreview-orange-tree-theatre/ (accessed 29 March 2018). 72 Al-Hassan, Broadway World. 73 See http://newyorktheatrereview.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/teddy-nicholastalks-with-chris-myers.html. 74 Salome Wagaine, Exeunt, 3 July 2017, http://exeuntmagazine.com/ features/an-octoroon/ (accessed 29 March 2018). 75 Dan Rebellato, ‘Theatre and Brexit’, Stage Directions podcast, July 2017, http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/stage-directions/2017/7/16/stagedirections-july-2017 (accessed 29 March 2018). 76 See https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/05/surveillance-filmcctv-camera. 77 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 45. 78 Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, p. 45. 79 See Hayley Bradley, ‘Stagecraft, Spectacle and Sensation’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 126–45. 80 Aoife Monks, ‘The Novel as “Obstacle”: John Collins of Elevator Repair Service in Conversation with Aoife Monks’, in Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat, edited by Margherita Laera, London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014, pp. 199–212, p. 206. 81 John Collins, transcript of interview with Josephine Reed for Art Works Podcast, National Endowment for the Arts, https://www.arts.gov/audio/ john-collins (accessed 18 March 2018). 82 John Collins interview with Philip Bither, Walker Arts Centre, 8 June 2006, https://www.elevator.org/press_items/elevatorrepair-services-gatz/ (accessed 18 March 2018). 83 Catherine Love, ‘By the Book: Adaptation, Work, and Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 26:2 (2016), pp. 183–95, p. 186. 84 Jason Zinoman, ‘The Unadapted Theatrical Adaptation’, New York Times Magazine, 9 December 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/ magazine/09unadapted.html (accessed 4 March 2018). 85 Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, p. 151; Alyssa Alpine, ‘An Irresistible Problem: John Collins on Adapting The Sun Also Rises’, CultureBot, 20 September 2011, https://www.culturebot. org/2011/09/11280/an-irresistible-problem-john-collins-on-adaptingthe-sun-also-rises/ (accessed 4 March 2018).

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86 Julia Jarcho, Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 117. 87 Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, p. 62. 88 This is raised in Aoife Monks, ‘The Novel as “Obstacle”: John Collins of Elevator Repair Service in Conversation with Aoife Monks’, in Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat, edited by Margherita Laera, London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014, pp. 199– 212, and in Frances Babbage, ‘Resisting Adaptation’, in Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 165–212. 89 John Collins, transcript of interview with Josephine Reed for Art Works Podcast, National Endowment for the Arts, https://www.arts.gov/audio/ john-collins (accessed 18 March 2018). 90 See Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre. 91 Steve Bottoms has written about some practitioners’ tendencies to make invisible the labour of this editing process, in order to disingenuously suggest a work of ‘the truth’ or ‘the real’. Stephen Bottoms, ‘Putting the Document into Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective?’, The Drama Review, 50:3 (Fall 2006), pp. 56–68. 92 Laera, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6–7. 93 Jonathan Kalb, ‘Marathon Theater as Anti-Monument: the Curious Case of Gatz’, Anglia, 131:2–3 (2013), pp. 236–47. 94 Love, ‘By the Book’, pp. 183–95, p. 192. 95 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Penguin Popular Classics, p. 33. 96 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 34. 97 Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, p. 61. 98 Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, p. 166, original emphasis.

Chapter 3 1

In this chapter, I am aware that I am specifically taking an ocularcentric perspective. Our tendency to privilege the visual in theatre and performance has been productively challenged and complicated by Adam Alston and Martin Welton’s recent edited collection, Theatre in the Dark, London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

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Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 3 Ulla Kallenbach, The Theatre of Imagining, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 8. 4 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso, 2009; Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, Marco de Marinis, ‘Dramaturgy of the Spectator’, translated by Paul Dwyer, The Drama Review: TDR, 31:2 (Summer 1987), pp. 100–14; Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences, Oxon: Routledge, 1997; Kirsty Sedgman, The Reasonable Audience, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 5 Susan Kattwinkel, Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance, Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003, p. ix. 6 Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London: Phaidon, 2002, p. 174. 7 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 148. 8 Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art: Volume II, The Salon of 1767, translated by John Goodman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 202. 9 Diderot, Diderot on Art, p. 202. 10 Dan Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses: Or, What Do We See When We See a Play?’, Performance Research 14:1 (2009), pp. 17–28, p. 24, p. 18. 11 Rebellato ‘When We Talk of Horses’, p. 27. 12 Quoted in William Gruber, Offstage Space, Narration and the Theatre of the Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 29. 13 Lucy Nevitt, Theatre & Violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 21. 14 For excellent studies of these, see Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Patrick Duggan, Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012; Patrick Duggan and Lisa Peschel, eds, Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, Crisis, Extremity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Lisa Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018; Anna Harpin, ‘Intolerable Acts’, Performance Research, 16:1 (2011): 102–11; Miriam Haughton, Staging 2

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Trauma: Bodies in Shadow, London: Palgrave, 2018; Nevitt, Theatre & Violence; Nancy Taylor Porter, Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres: Staging Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 15 Nevitt, Theatre & Violence, p. 12. 16 Elin Diamond, ‘Bloody Aprons: Susan Lori-Parks, Deborah Warner and Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation’, in Staging International Feminisms, edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 20. 17 Christine Woodworth, ‘“Summon up the blood”: The Stylized (or Sticky) Stuff of Violence in Three Plays by Sarah Kane’, Theatre Symposium, 18 (2010), pp. 11–22, p. 12. 18 Diamond, ‘Bloody Aprons’, p. 20. 19 Patrick Healy, ‘Audiences Gasp at Violence; Actors Must Survive It’, New York Times, 6 November 2008. 20 Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York: Amok Press, 1988), p. 44; Unknown author, ‘Theater Abroad: Outdone by Reality’, TIME Magazine, 16 January 1962. 21 Woodworth, ‘Summon up the blood’, pp. 18–19. 22 Andrea Stevens, Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, p. 52. 23 Sophocles, Oedipus, translated by Frank McGuinness, London: Faber & Faber, 2008, p. 58. 24 Euripides, Medea, translated by Ben Power London: Faber & Faber, 2008, p. 60, p. 58. 25 Clifford Davidson, ‘Sacred Blood and the Late Medieval Stage’, Comparative Drama, 31:3 (Fall 1997), pp. 436–58. 26 See the Proceedings from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre History Seminar, ‘Stage Blood: A Roundtable’, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Ryan Nelson, available online: https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/ files/2015/02/seminar_stage_blood_roundtable_2006.pdf (accessed 4 February 2018). 27 Lara Shalson, Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 28 Nevitt, Theatre & Violence, p. 26. 29 Christopher Innes, A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 4.

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30 Claude Schumacher, Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre 1850–1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 193. 31 Innes, A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, p. 13. 32 Richard Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002, p. 3. 33 Richard Hand, ‘Labyrinths of the Taboo: Theatrical Journeys of Eroticism’, in Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, edited by Karoline Gritzner, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010, pp. 64–79. 34 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, p. 6. 35 Indeed, in John Callahan’s discussion of the form, he notes the primary function of these effects, specifically that ‘terror [was] incited through the tricks of stage violence’. Hand and Wilson dedicate a chapter to the technical aspects of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, and Gordon does likewise, emphasizing the trickery of these stage techniques in his discussion. Similarly, Frantisek Deák examines the details of some of the Grand-Guignol’s most used effects. John Callahan, ‘Ultimate in Theatre Violence’, in Violence in Drama, edited by J. Redmond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 165; Frantisek Deák, ‘Théâtre du Grand Guignol’, TDR: The Drama Review, 18:1 (1974), pp. 34–43, pp. 40–1. 36 Deák continues, ‘[t]he tricks used in the Grand-Guignol productions were traditional secrets of the theatre’ and the simplicity of designs such as a dagger with a retractable blade and stage blood in the handle were complemented with far more intricate and elaborate compositions, Deák, ‘Théâtre du Grand Guignol’, p. 40. 37 Callahan, ‘Ultimate in Theatre Violence’, pp. 172–3. 38 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, p. 55. 39 Deák, ‘Théâtre du Grand Guignol’, p. 42. 40 Deák, ‘Théâtre du Grand Guignol’. 41 P. E. Schneider, ‘Fading Horrors of the Grand-Guignol’, New York Times Magazine, 17 March 1957. 42 As I have written about elsewhere, there is evidence to suggest that certain of the fainting spectators were operating on a dual agenda: using the thrilling spectacles of the Grand-Guignol and the bodily reactions they provoked in order to support clandestine or extra-marital affairs, for example. Karen Quigley, ‘Theatre on Call: Participatory Fainting and Grand-Guignol Theatre’, Performance Research, 16:3 (2011), pp. 105–7.

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43 Gordon, The Grand Guignol, p. 27; Deák, ‘Théâtre du Grand Guignol’, p. 43. 44 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, p. 13; P. E. Schneider, ‘Fading Horrors of the Grand Guignol’, New York Times Magazine, 17 March 1957. 45 Gordon, The Grand Guignol, p. 27. 46 Agnès Pierron, Le Grand-Guignol: le theatre des peurs de la belle époque, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995, p. xiv. 47 Gordon, The Grand Guignol, p. 24. 48 Deák, ‘Théâtre du Grand Guignol’. 49 TIME Magazine, 16 January 1962. 50 Unknown author, ‘The Theater: Paris Writhes Again’, TIME Magazine, 16 January 1950. 51 TIME Magazine, January 1950. 52 TIME Magazine, January 1950. 53 TIME Magazine, January 1950. 54 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, p. 13. 55 This moment comes from Andre de Lorde’s Le laboratoire des hallucinations. 56 Andre de Lorde, L’horrible passion; and de Lorde, Un crime dans une maison de fous. 57 Claudia Castellucci et al., eds, The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 31. 58 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 31. 59 This image, which in Dublin included nights in which the baby crawled out into the auditorium, or unbalanced and cried, led to a flood of walkouts by spectators concerned about the ethics of the image, and a very literal labelling of the production as unstageable in the press. See Fintan O’Toole, ‘Dazed and confused’, Irish Times, 7 October 2004; Belinda McKeon, ‘Theatre Makes a Spectacle of Itself ’, Irish Times, 13 December 2004. 60 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 100. 61 Matthew Causey, Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 173; Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, pp. 104, 100. 62 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 104; Causey, Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture, p. 175. 63 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 106.

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64 Bryoni Trezise, Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 65 Audronė Žukauskaitė, ‘The Post-Subjective Body, or Deleuze and Guattari Meet Romeo Castellucci’, in Performance, Identity and the Neo-Liberal Subject, edited by Fintan Walsh and Matthew Causey Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013, p. 114. 66 Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, translated by Debra Keates and James Swenson Cambridge: Polity, 2009, p. 16. 67 Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, p. 18. 68 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 105. 69 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen JürsMunby, London and New York: Routledge: 2006, p. 166. 70 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Giulio Cesare (1997); Purgatorio (2008). 71 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 218. 72 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 218. 73 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 218. 74 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 219. 75 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 218. 76 Castellucci et al., The Theatre of Socìetas, p. 218. 77 Joe Kelleher, ‘The Suffering of Images’, in Live: Art and Performance, edited by Adrian Heathfield, London: Tate Publishing, 2004. 78 Lehman, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 166; Kelleher, ‘The Suffering of Images’, p. 192. 79 Kelleher, ‘The Suffering of Images’, p. 192. 80 Lehman, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 166. 81 Samuel Beckett, Not I, The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber & Faber, 1986, p. 376. 82 Beckett, Not I, p. 376. 83 Performances: Lisa Dwan, The Lowry, Salford, September 2014; Deirdre Roycroft, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, May 2006. 84 Enoch Brater, ‘The “I” in Beckett’s Not I’, Twentieth Century Literature, 20:3 (July 1974), pp. 189–200, p. 190; Xerxes Mehta, ‘Ghosts: Chaos and Freedom in Beckett’s Spectral Theatre’, in The Plays of Samuel Beckett, edited by Katherine Weiss, London: Bloomsbury 2012, pp. 135–6; Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 111. 85 Samuel Beckett, That Time, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 388.

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86 Samuel Beckett, Not I, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 380. 87 Sofer, Dark Matter. 88 Forced Entertainment, Dirty Work [performance text], 1998, p. 2. 89 Tim Etchells, ‘A Note on Dirty Work’, Dirty Work [performance text], 1998, p. ix. 90 Tim Etchells, programme note for Dirty Work, 2017. 91 Adam Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Andy Lavender, Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016; Kirsty Sedgman, The Reasonable Theatre, New York: Palgrave, 2018. 92 Joe Kelleher, The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015. 93 Terry O’ Connor, ‘Virtuous Errors and the Fortune of Mistakes: A Personal Account of Making and Performing Text with Forced Entertainment’, Performance Research, 14:1 (2009), pp. 88–94, p. 89. 94 Forced Entertainment, Dirty Work [performance text], 1998, p. 7. 95 Additionally, this coughing fit does not appear on the DVD of the 1998 production of Dirty Work. 96 Adrian Kear, ‘Troublesome Amateurs’, Performance Research, 10:1 (2005), pp. 26–46, p. 38. 97 Adrian Kear, ‘Troublesome Amateurs’, p. 38. 98 Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 131. 99 Crouch quoted in Stephen Bottoms, ‘Authorizing the Audience: The Conceptual Drama of Tim Crouch’, Performance Research, 14:1 (2009), pp. 65–76, p. 69. 100 Tim Crouch, The Author, Plays One, London: Oberon Books, 2011, p. 191. 101 Crouch, The Author, p. 192. 102 Crouch, The Author, p. 185. 103 Crouch, The Author, p. 192. 104 Helen Iball in conversation with Tim Crouch, Newcastle, 7 October 2010, http://theatrepersonal.co.uk/conversations/crouch/ (accessed 16 February 2018). 105 Helen Freshwater, ‘You Say Something: Audience Participation and The Author’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21:4 (2011), pp. 405–7, p. 407. 106 Rebellato, ‘When We Talk of Horses’, pp. 17–28, p. 17.

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107 Another example of this is Veronica Dyas’ repeated asking the audience if we’re ‘okay’ in In My Bed (Dublin Fringe Festival, 2011). 108 Crouch, The Author, p. 164.

Chapter 4 Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. xii. 2 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge,1993, p. 114. 3 Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982, p. 213, original emphasis. 4 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 4. 5 Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, eds, Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014, p. 2. Also see Jane Montgomery Griffiths, ‘Acting Perspectives: The Phenomenology of Performance as a Route to Reception’, in Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, edited by Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, pp. 219–31, p. 228. 6 Catherine Hindson, ‘Heritage, Capital and Culture: The Ghost of “Sarah” at the Bristol Old Vic’, in Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Emily Morin, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014, pp. 82–95. 7 Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, ‘The Play-within-the-Film-within-the-Play’s the Thing: Re-transmitting Analogue Bodies in the Wooster Group’s Hamlet’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 5:1 (2009), pp. 23–34, p. 25. 8 Elaine Scarry, ‘On Vivacity: The Difference between Daydreaming and Imagining-under-Authorial-Instruction’, Representations, 52 (1995), pp. 1–26, p. 13. 9 Scarry, ‘On Vivacity’, p. 13. 10 Spencer Golub, Infinity (Stage), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, pp. 143–69. 11 Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue. 1

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12 The entire back catalogue of The Mask has been digitized by the Blue Mountain Project at Princeton University. http://bluemountain.princeton. edu/exist/apps/bluemountain/index.html (accessed 7 January 2019). Additionally, Olga Taxidou’s excellent book The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013) analyses the publication in terms of Craig’s career and the context of the time in relation to publishing, stage aesthetics and authorship. 13 Gordon Craig, ‘The Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, The Mask, 3:4–6 (October 1910), p. 61. 14 Craig, ‘The Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, p. 62. 15 Craig, ‘The Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, p. 63. 16 Craig, ‘The Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, p. 65. 17 Joanna Baillie, ‘To the Reader: Preface to Third Volume of Passion Plays, 1812’, in The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, 2nd edition, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851, pp. 228– 35. Available from Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust. org/Record/006607598 (accessed 8 September 2019). 18 Craig, ‘The Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, p. 64. 19 Claire Warden, Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels through Russia, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 124. 20 Craig, ‘The Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, p. 62. 21 Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 22 For more on spiritualism: Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016; Edward White, ‘From the Joints of Their Toes’, The Paris Review, 4 November 2016; Rosario Arias, ‘Women and Victorian Spiritualism’, Taylor & Francis, 2016, https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com/feminism/essays/ women-and-victorian-spiritualism. Routledge Historical Resources (accessed 17 January 2019); Marlene Tromp, Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism, Albany: State of New York Press, 2006. 23 Davies, The Haunted, p. 181. 24 Davies, The Haunted, p. 185. 25 Jean McIntyre, Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1992, p. 22.

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26 Shakespeare, Richard III, edited by John Jowett, Oxford World Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 340. 27 McIntyre, Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres, p. 22. 28 Shakespeare, Richard III, edited by Anthony Hammond, Arden Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury, 2006, pp. 64–5. 29 Zachary Lesser, Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, p. 211. 30 Lesser, Hamlet after Q1, pp. 123–5. 31 George Stubbes quoted in Lesser, Hamlet after Q1, pp. 125–6. 32 Lesser, Hamlet after Q1, p. 129. 33 Lesser, Hamlet after Q1, p. 130. 34 Lesser, Hamlet after Q1, p. 130. Almost 150 years later and in another Shakespeare play, Rupert Goold’s 2007 production of Macbeth would explore a version of this idea by playing Act Three, Scene Four twice, either side of the interval. In this scene, the ghost of Banquo, whose murder Macbeth has ordered, appears to Macbeth at a banquet. Goold played the scene firstly from Macbeth’s perspective, with Banquo’s ghost visible to the audience. The second time, the scene was played from the point of view of Macbeth’s guests, encouraging us to focus on Macbeth’s reactions to something we could not see. 35 Quoted in Lesser, Hamlet after Q1, p. 132. 36 In 2017, Casey Affleck assenting to spend eighty-two minutes of a ninety-two-minute film under a sheet was also tempting to read in light of his repeated denial of allegations of sexual harassment of his female co-workers on the set of his 2010 directorial feature debut, I’m Not Here, which were settled out of court in the same year. The backlash to Affleck’s winning the 2017 Best Actor Oscar for Manchester by the Sea caused the details of the 2010 incident to resurface in the press and online. 37 Famous examples of this in film are Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990), Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995), The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, 1996). 38 Dead Centre, Hamnet, London: Oberon Books, 2017, p. 12. 39 Dead Centre, Hamnet, p. 17. 40 Examples Sofer gives are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Clybourne Park. Sofer, Dark Matter, p. 201. 41 Dead Centre, Hamnet, p. 17.

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42 Dead Centre, Hamnet, p. 18. 43 Dead Centre, Hamnet, pp. 20–1. As audience members, much like when watching any adaptation of something we might know well, we might pleasurably oscillate between this, what we know from previous theatrical experiences of or stories about Hamlet, or our awareness of Hamlet as a canonical play. See Chapter 2 of this book. 44 Andrew Haydon, ‘Hamnet’, Postcards from the Gods blog. http:// postcardsgods.blogspot.com/2017/04/hamnet-schaubuhne-berlin. html, 7 April 2017 (accessed 13 January 2019). 45 Sean Finnan, ‘Dead Centre’s Hamnet at the Peacock’, The Sentient Review, 24 October 2017, https://thesentientreview.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/ dead-centres-hamnet-at-the-peacock/ (accessed 13 January 2019). 46 Haydon, ‘Hamnet’; Maxine Puorro, ‘Hamnet’ DRAFF, https://www.draff. net/hamnet.html, 7 April 2017. 47 Dead Centre, Hamnet, pp. 24, 26, 34. 48 Dead Centre, Hamnet, pp. 14–15. 49 Hazel Muir, ‘Electrons Caught Tunneling Out of an Atom’, New Scientist, 4 April 2007, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11536electrons-caught-tunnelling-out-of-atoms/ (accessed 21 January 2019). 50 Jeffrey Bub, ‘Quantum Entanglement and Information’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 edition), https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2017/entries/qt-entangle/ (accessed 21 January 2019). 51 Dead Centre, Hamnet, p. 27. 52 Dead Centre, Hamnet, p. 31. 53 Patricia Lennox and Bella Mirabella, eds, Shakespeare and Costume, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 212. 54 See Linda Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, New York: Routledge, 2006; Linda Charnes, ‘Reading for the Wormholes: Micro-Periods from the Future’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, Special Issue 6, ‘Timely Meditations’, http://emc. eserver.org/1-6/issue6.html, 2007 (accessed 18 April 2018); Amy Cook, ‘Wrinkles, Wormholes and Hamlet: The Wooster Group’s Hamlet as a Challenge to Periodicity’, TDR: The Drama Review, 53:4 (Winter 2009), pp. 104–19. 55 Douglas Brode, Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 125–6.

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56 Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 183. 57 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, p. 184. 58 Matthew Reason, Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 94. 59 Edward L. Rocklin, ‘“That His Heels May Kick at Heaven”: Exploring Hamlet through the Prompt-Script, Film and Audio Recordings of the Gielgud-Burton Production’, in Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin and Miranda JohnsonHaddad, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007, p. 136. 60 ‘Richard Burton’s Hamlet’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IQiRxLqYrns (accessed 24 January 2019). 61 The most famous touchstones in this discussion of liveness remain Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, and Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1999. 62 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146. 63 Matt Trueman, ‘Wooster Group and the RSC: Strange Bedfellows’, Independent, 1 August 2012 (accessed 1 October 2018). https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/woostergroup-and-the-rsc-strange-bedfellows-7994784.html. 64 Markus Wessendorf, ‘Theatre as an Allegory of Unreadability’, in The Wooster Group and Its Traditions, edited by Johan Callens, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004, p. 133. 65 Wooster Group, Hamlet. I saw the production in October 2012 at the Dublin Theatre Festival and have watched the company’s DVD of the production, which was recorded in August 2013 at the Edinburgh International Festival. 66 William Worthen, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2010, p. 136. 67 This conversation continues in recent debate about live theatre broadcasts and how they appear. See Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie E. Osborne, eds, Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience, London and New York: The Arden Shakespeare, 2018.

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68 Rebecca Schneider writes about the Wooster Group’s history, methodologies and their work’s relationship to Grotowski’s sense of Poor Theatre (and Rich Theatre) in Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 111–37. 69 John Gielgud, Shakespeare – Hit or Miss?, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991, p. 41. 70 The Wooster Group was formed by a number of former members of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, which used Grotowski’s exercises as a key part of training and rehearsal. The Wooster Group’s own links to Grotowski were explored in particular detail in their 2004 production Poor Theater and ‘conversations across time’ between the Group in the 2000s and Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre in the late 1960s, again using a filmed version of a production of a play (in this case Stanislaw Wyspianski’s Akropolis) as a re-enactment or replay stimulus. 71 Clifford McLucas quoted in Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, Oxon: Routledge, 2000, p. 128. 72 Fiona Wilkie interview with Clifford McLucas, 6 October 2001, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Surrey, June 2004, p. 234. 73 Worthen, Drama, p. 136. 74 Fiona Wilkie interview with Clifford McLucas, 6 October 2001, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Surrey, June 2004, p. 234. 75 Peter Holland, ‘Haunting Shakespeare, or King Lear Meets Alice’, in Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Emily Morin, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014, p. 210. 76 Schneider, Performing Remains, p. 137, original emphasis. 77 Worthen, Drama, p. 125. 78 John Gielgud, programme note to the Broadway production. 79 Patricia Lennox and Bella Mirabella, eds, Shakespeare and Costume, London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 80 John Russell Brown and Kevin Ewert, eds, The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2012. 81 Kathleen Irwin, ‘Scenographic Agency: A Showing-Doing and a Responsibility for Showing-Doing’, in Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, edited by Joslin

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McKinney and Scott Palmer, London: Bloomsbury, p. 116. My thanks to Dr Katherine Graham for this suggestion. 82 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 83 ‘Basics of rendering and exporting’, Adobe After Effects User Guide, https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/after-effects/using/basics-renderingexporting.html (accessed 25 January 2019). 84 This is used to comedic effect in The Simpsons (1:10), ‘Homer’s Night Out’. In silent film style (with intertitle cards) Homer Simpson recalls a night of drinking (‘Hmmm, perhaps I’ll wet my whistle’) and forgetting what happened when he was drunk (‘Scene Missing’).

Conclusion 1 ‘sinon à déjouer l’injouable, du moins à le compenser financièrement’. Folco and Ruset, ‘Introduction’, p. 19. 2 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 50. 3 Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Wild Places of Essex’, Natural World episode first broadcast 10 February 2010 BBC. 4 Duška Radosavljević, Theatre-Making: Interplay between Text and Performance in the 21st Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990–2010, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; Catherine Love, ‘Are We On The Same Page: A Critical Analysis of the “Text-Based”/”Non-Text-Based” Approach in Contemporary English Theatre’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway University of London, March 2018. 5 Laera lists intralingual, interlingual, intersemiotic, intramedial, intermedial, intrageneric, intergeneric, intercultural, intracultural, intratemporal, intertemporal intraideological, interideological, domestication and foreignization as strategies of theatrical adaptation. Laera, Theatre and Adaptation, pp. 5–10.

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Index A Ghost Story (David Lowery) 177–8, 181–2 adaptation and the canon 85–7, 97 intramedial adaptation 35, 84–6, 93, 96, 104, 118, 122, and oscillation 96–7, 99, 101, 112, 120–1, 240 n.43 Adorno, Theodor 15–16 Albina, Nadia 1, 4, 6, 30 anti-theatricality 8, 17, 19, 21–3, 41, 73, 120, 204 anxiety (about impossibility, unstageability, sublime) 11, 13, 71, 112, 169 Aristomenes (Anne Finch) 50–1 Artaud 17, 62, 73 The Spurt of Blood 62, 73 audience and imagination 4, 12–13, 28–9, 31, 59, 60, 63, 101, 117, 127–9, 130, 151–3, 156, 158–9, 160–1, 171 authorial intent 84, 188, Babbage, Frances 35, 84, 87, 117, 122 Badiou, Alain 5 Bailes, Sara Jane 29, 30, 117 Bailey, Lucy 60 Baillie, Joanna 19–21, 24, 27, 169, 210 Barad, Karen 198–9 Barish, Jonas 20, 215 n.58 Barnett, David 74, 76 Bartlett, Mike 69 Wild 68–70, 73 Bayly, Simon 29 Beckett, Samuel 17, 22, 30, 52–3, 151, 167 A Piece of Monologue 167–8 Footfalls 52–3

Not I 22, 151–2 That Time 151 bedsheet ghost 170–83 black hole 125 Blau, Herbert 165 Bleeker, Maaike 127 blood on stage in ancient Greek theatre 18, 60, 132 blood work in live art 133 in contemporary theatre 133–4 in early modern theatre 61, 131–2 imaginary blood 151–3, 159–61 and logistics 130–4 recipes 131, 137 Blythe, Alecky 118–19 Boucicault, Dion 35, 103–9, 111, 113–15 The Octoroon 103–7 rewriting The Octoroon 104–6 Brater, Enoch 53, 151 Braun, Edward 90 Breach Theatre 118–19 Brook, Peter 60, 133 Buether, Miriam 69–70 Burke, Edmund 12–13, 16, 212 n.22 Burton, Richard 167, 185–9, 190–2, 200 Cage, John 3, 31 As Slow As Possible 3–5, 31 Carlson, Marvin 55–6, 166 Carr, Marina 164–5 Cartmell, Selina 41 Case, Sue-Ellen 75 Castellucci, Claudia 148–9 Castellucci, Romeo 123, 143, 148–50 censorship 17, 20, 26, 204 Chekhov, Anton 19, 35, 83, 85–102, 114, 120–2, 134, 182, 205 Platonov 86–7, 90–4

Index Churchill, Caryl 53, 164 closet drama 8, 17, 19, 20–2, 46–50, 73, 91 Colgan, Michael 41 Collins, John 117–8 conditional stage directions 77–8 contemporary theatre marathon 120 coughing 155–6, 236 n.95 Craig, Edward Gordon 20, 42, 114, 168–9 Crouch, Tim 35, 129, 134, 152, 156, 158–9, 160–1 The Author 156–61 Dancing Brick 208 Dead Centre 93–6, 98, 100–2, 117, 134, 165, 170–1, 179–80, 183, 201, 210 Chekhov’s First Play 85, 88–90, 93–102, 114, 121–2, 134, 182 Hamnet 36, 165, 168, 170–1, 179–85, 201–2 Derrida, Jacques 28, 165–6 Dessen, Alan 56 Diamond, Elin 130 Diderot, Denis 45–6, 128–9 Didi-Huberman, Georges 15–16 Dolan, Jill 5, 101–2 Druid Theatre 66–7, 120 Dunne, Colin 1–2, 4, 31 Concert 2 Dyas, Grace 41 dying laughing 76 Elevator Repair Service 35, 84, 87, 116, 118–19, 121–2, 188 Gatz 35, 83–5, 87–8, 116–23, 188, 206 emancipated spectator 127 failure in theatre and performance 8, 26, 29–32, 153, 202 Father Ted 67, 178 Featherstone, Vicky 72

259

fidelity and equivalence in adaptation 83–4, 89, 118 in translation 26, 28, 32, 83–4, 87 Fliakos, Ari 192, 197, 199 Folco, Alice 26–7, 204, 217 n.86–8 Forced Entertainment 27–30, 152, 154–5, 161–4, 210 Complete Works 163–4 Dirty Work 152–6 Frayn, Michael 86, 90–4 Wild Honey 90, 92, 94 Gate Theatre, Dublin 39–40, 81 gatekeeper of unstageability 36, 98–9, 101, 122, 207 ghost light 167–8 ghosts and acting 163–4, 166–9, 170, 181, 192, 195–6, 199 and film 177–8 and scenography 167, 169–71, 189, 193, 196, 201 Gielgud, John 185–6, 191–2 Glass, Philip 73 Golub, Spencer 167 Gombrich, Ernst 127–9, 131, 142 Gordon, Mel 131 Gregg, Stacey (see Scorch) Guidi, Chiara 148–50 Hamlet (see also Wooster Group) and ghosts 174–7 Hamlet Q1 174–6, 179 Hampstead Theatre 69–70 Hare, David 86, 90, 92 Hensel, Merle 72 host ghost witness 194–6 Hutcheon, Linda 83, 85, 96, 122 Hynes, Garry 66, 70 Ibsen, Henrik Ghosts 52, 125 unstageability of Peer Gynt 21

260

Index

Icke, Robert 126 immersive theatre 7, 95, 99, 127 Interregnum and theatre closures 48–9 invisibility 8, 18, 26, 31, 125, 132, 161, 165–6, 171, 178, 183, 201 Jackson, Peter 2–4, 31 Jacob, Hildebrand 12 Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden 23, 35, 83, 105–12, 116–17 An Octoroon 23, 35, 83, 85, 88–9, 103, 105–7, 109–12, 115, 121–2 and audience 111–13 and camera 108, 113 and casting 109–10 and fourth act 108, 115–16 and makeup 107, 110, 115 Jannarone, Kimberly 19, 49 Kallenbach, Ulla 127 Kane, Sarah 27, 55, 61–4, 67, 70, 80, 130, 133 Blasted 61, 130, 133 Cleansed 55, 60–4, 70, 80, 123, 133, 206 Kant, Immanuel 13–14, 16 Kaut-Howson, Helena 92–3 Kelleher, Joe 146, 150, 154 Krebs, Katja 87, 122 l’injouable 26–7 Laera, Margherita 24, 85, 207 LeCompte, Elizabeth 188, 192 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 148, 150, 204 liminal space 42, 47, 82, 161, 165, 171, 178, 180, 207 literal unstageable 7, 18, 31, 35, 49, 109, 147, 155, 209 and blood 134, 149 and stage directions 60, 70, 76, 82 Longinus 10–11 Look Back in Anger 39–41, 79, 81 Love, Catherine 117, 120, 206

Luckhurst, Mary 166 Lyotard, Jean-François 14–17, 23 Macdonald, James 63, 69 Macfarlane, Robert 205 Mackay, Robin 25–6 Mallarmé, Stéphane 73 Mallatratt, Stephen 164–5 Maurey, Max 136, 139 McDonagh, Martin 61, 65, 67, 133 The Beauty Queen of Leenane 61, 65–7, 70 McDowall, Alistair 70–2 X 70–3 McLucas, Clifford 193–5, 199 Medea 60, 132 melodrama 66, 92, 103, 105, 108, 111, 114–5, 135, 142 Méténier, Oscar 136, Mitchell, Katie 60, 63–4, 70, 107, 133 Cleansed 60, 63–4, 133, 222 n.66 Miss Julie 107 modernism 16–17, 21–2, 73, 169 204 Monks, Aoife 113, 117 Morin, Emilie 166 Moukarzel, Bush 94–5, 100, 182 Mullarkey, Rory 79–81, 210 Each Slow Dusk 79–81 Müller, Heiner 27, 57–8, 62, 72, 74–6, 80, 121, 204 Hamletmachine 58, 74–6 National Theatre 63, 120, 133 Naturalism 19, 52, 135, 138, 148, 169 neglected plays 17, 23–4 Nevitt, Lucy 129–30, 134 Norton-Taylor, Richard 118–19 O’Neill, Eugene 51–2, 78–9, 164 Strange Interlude 51 Oedipus Rex 60, 125, 132 and Corneille adaptation 147

Index offstage 17–18, 31, 34, 39, 47, 82, 97, 101, 171 offstage violence 18, 34, 59–60, 132 Ontroerend Goed 209 optical illusions 69, 151–2, 176 Orange Tree Theatre 111–12, 115 Osborne, John (see Look Back In Anger) Outranspo 32–3 pamphletheatre 48–9 Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer 167 Pavis, Patrice 42, 55–6, 89 Phelan, Peggy 165, 187 post-Holocaust ethics 14–16 postdramatic 17, 29, 97, 101, 114–15, 148, 150, 165, 192, 204 poststructuralism 86, 88 Potts, Tommy 1–2, 4, 31 Project Arts Centre, Dublin 126, 156 Prometheus Bound 44 Puchner, Martin 17, 19, 21–3, 49, 52 quantum mechanics 31, 201 and Hamnet 179–80, 184–5 Raine, Nina (see Tribes) Rancière, Jacques 13, 16–17, 21, 127, 147 Rayner, Alice 164 Read, Alan 29 Read, Michelle 126 Realism 102, 135, 148, 169 Rebellato, Dan 61, 113, 128–9, 159 Ridout, Nick 29, 145–6, 156 Royal Court Theatre 63, 72, 133, 156, 158–9, 160 Ruhl, Sarah 76–80 The Clean House 76–9 Ruset, Sevérine 26–7, 204, 217 n.86–8 Sack, Daniel 28–9 Samuel Beckett Theatre 99, 147

261

Sanders, Julie 86, 122 Scarry, Elaine 167 Scorch (Stacey Gregg) 77–8 Secret Theatre 1, 4, 6, 30 Sedgman, Kirsty 127 Senelick, Laurence 90, 92, 225 n.16 Shaffer, Peter 73 Shakespeare, William (see also Hamlet) Richard III 173–4 Titus Andronicus 18, 59–60, 123, 133 The Winter’s Tale 47 Shaw, George Bernard 51, 78–9 Shepherd, Scott 116–17, 119, 188–93, 198–200 site-specific performance 99, 193–4 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 34–5, 79, 81, 129, 134, 152, 161, 210, Purgatorio 34, 79, 81–2 Tragedia Endogonidia (BR#04) 129, 143–50 Sofer, Andrew 18, 31, 152, 180 stage directions and closet drama 46–50, 57 and semiotics 53–57 Stanislavski, Constantin 20, 169 States, Bert 59 Straznicky, Marta 49 sublime 10–14, 16, 115 subsidizing the unstageable 204 subtitles and surtitles 33, 34, 79, 82 Tate, Nahum, King Lear 18 The Great Gatsby 35, 84, 88, 116–17, 119, 122 The Liffey Banks 1–2 The Truman Show 68 Théâtre du Grand-Guignol 131–2, 134, 136–8, 140–1, 146–52, 161 Théâtre Libre 135–6, 138 They Shall Not Grow Old 3 Tribes 36

262

Index

unperformable 27, 30, 93–4, 96, 103, 204, 209 unpresentable 11, 13–15 unrepresentable 11–17, 21, 147, 165, 213 n.40 unseeable 125 unstageable and comedy 47, 61, 64, 66–7, 73, 143 and contingency 17, 20, 24–6, 127, 132, 142, 148, 183, 205 and creativity 17, 26, 28, 42–3, 70, 82, 96, 201, 205–6 environmental unstageable 209 and ethics 16, 24, 68, 102, 116, 156, 160 and etymology 8–10 and paradox 4, 6, 44, 59–60, 99, 140, 146–7, 165–6, 205

untranslatable 26, 28, 32–4, 81, 208 Upton, Andrew 90 Valk, Kate 190, 197–8 van Hove, Ivo 133–4 verbatim theatre 118–19 Vitez, Primož 46 Wagner, Richard 52, 120 West, Ollie 179, 183 Wilson, Robert 75, 120 Wooster Group Hamlet 36, 165–8, 170, 183, 185, 187–99, 201, 210 Yeats, W.B. 22, 164–5 Young, Stuart 92