Stage Fright: Modernism Anti-Theatricality and Drama (review)

Abstract

In this superb examination of theatricality and its detractors, Martin Puchner takes a close look at the theories of Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Butler Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett. According to Puchner, modernist anti-theatricalism was a reaction to a rise in theatrics, especially to anything indebted to Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. The subjects of his study decidedly rejected Wagnerian illusion as theatre's "greatest liability" and believed that a modernist theatre in general "can arise only out of an attack" on theatricality (6). Wagner had polarized the cultural debate by foregrounding theatricality as a value; artists lined up either for or against it. The anti-theatricalists, Puchner says, thus created a unique theatre "at odds with the value of theatricality" (7); they wanted to remove the theatre from the control of star actors, greedy producers, and bourgeois audiences. As Puchner sees it, Mallarmé, Joyce, Stein, Yeats, Brecht, and Beckett critique theatricality's susceptibility to error and misjudgment; its seductiveness obscures the goals these authors seek to convey. In order to circumvent theatricality, Puchner observes, these authors shared common strategies: the superimposition of stage directions, choral figures, narratives, and commentators on the action, and characters who observe their own actions—all designed to disrupt mimesis, illusion, and theatrical virtuosity.