Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality by Adrian Curtin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality by Adrian Curtin Julia A. Walker DEATH IN MODERN THEATRE: STAGES OF MORTALITY. By Adrian Curtin. Theatre: Theory, Practice, Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019; pp. 268. As Adrian Curtin observes in the introduction to his new book Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality, the topic of "liveness" has long defined contemporary theories of theatre and performance. Discussions about the so-called ontology of performance typically concern the paired ideas of presence and disappearance, recording technologies and documentation, trace and memory—all of which posit in some way the living, breathing body of an actor often co-present with those in the audience. Focusing on the work of Herbert Blau, Marvin Carlson, Alice Rayner, and Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Curtin briefly surveys theories of theatrical embodiment as a way of framing his study of how death and dying have been represented on the modern stage, proposing that "[t]heatrical deathliness may be thought to shadow theatrical liveliness" (12). Shifting his focus from theory to practice, Curtin surveys the history of such representations in the modern theatre, analyzing various aesthetic strategies used in five distinct periods to assess changing cultural attitudes toward death in the Western hemisphere. His temporal scope of "modernity" and his geographical parameter of the "West" are best explained with reference to French social historian Philippe Ariès's seminal study Western Attitudes Toward Death (1976), which Curtin uses to anchor his discussion. Just as Ariès analyzed culturally specific rituals of death to assess how social attitudes toward this universal existential experience have changed over time, so does Curtin use a comparative method in his study of theatrical representations of death in the modern period. But where Ariès's expansive study typified "modern" attitudes in the "West" according to a single logic, Curtin explores variability within Ariès's dominant narrative of the period, using the history of the stage to chart changes in secular rituals for understanding death. The book's subtitle alludes to the "stages" of grief outlined by psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her landmark study On Death and Dying (1970), providing Curtin with a model of progressive but overlapping temporalities by which the book's five chapters unfold. The first chapter begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the symbolists, who innovated a multisensory, proto-immersive experience for their audiences in order to invite them to imaginatively inhabit a metaphysical realm beyond the material world. To do that, they cultivated a charged atmosphere of heightened sensory stimulation, using color, light, sound, and even scent to suffuse the space of the audience and blur its distinction from the fictional world of the stage. Curtin offers a fascinating history of symbolist theatre practice that is most compelling when he brings affect theory to bear on his analysis of these largely neglected because misunderstood plays. As he suggests, the charged energy that creates the shared atmosphere of a performance is nebulous, paradoxically manifesting as something both perceptible and unknowable that, in its effects, erases the felt distinction between subject and object. Examining Rachilde's Madame La Mort, Charles van Lerberghe's The Night-Comers, Maurice Maeterlinck's The Intruder, Leonid Andreyev's Requiem, and W. B. Yeats's Purgatory, Curtin demonstrates a range of techniques these playwrights used to conjure the experience of death for their audiences, along with the different conclusions each presented about this state of existence and its ultimate knowability. Chapter 2 looks at fantastical allegories of death that appeared on stage after the Great War. These include Satan the Waster by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), The Transfiguration by Ernst Toller, and The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Krauss, allowing Curtin to explore different kinds of modernist abstraction that set theatrical elements of music, movement, light, and sound in expressionistic counterpoint to capture the shock of death by war. Chapter 3 examines the phenomenon of "death denial" in plays appearing after World War II by way of existentialist concerns expressed in Dino Buzzati's A Clinical Case, the Open Theater's Terminal (text by Susan Yankowitz), and Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King and Amédée...