Writing and Re-Writing National Theatre Histories (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories Patricia Ybarra Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories. Edited by S. E. Wilmer. Studies in Theatre History & Culture Series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004; pp. xi + 277. $42.95 cloth. S. E. Wilmer's anthology takes on the theoretical and practical challenges of writing national theatre histories in various sites around the globe. Emerging at a moment of renewed interest in "nations, nationalisms and the construction of national identities and the processes of nationalism" (x), this volume is an important addition to contemporary theatre historiography. Writing and Rewriting begins with three general historiographical essays (Fischer-Lichte, Wilmer, and Sauter), followed by ten case studies from Russia, Slovenia, Belgium, Canada, the US, Mexico, Israel, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, which explore more specific methodological problems. Erika Fischer-Lichte's opening piece asks the most basic question: what is theatre history? She addresses the difficulty of defining the object of study, as conceptions of what constitute theatre are historically and culturally determined and in constant flux. Going on, she unpacks the term history, offering a succinct genealogy of historiographical movements as they have impacted the field, ultimately arguing that the partial perspective "is the condition of possibility of writing theatre history" (6). Wilmer's essay follows, discussing more fully how particular categories of analysis—namely, geography, language, ethnicity, and aesthetics—can affect what makes its way into national theatre histories. Willmar Sauter advocates framing theatre as "playing culture" so as to analyze the theatre event as event, rather than simply reproducing exclusionary director- and author-driven narratives. Together, these essays eloquently summarize [End Page 550] the theoretical issues most relevant to the subsequent national case studies. Many of the essays concentrate on analyzing how and why national theatre histories have performed exclusions in their various sites. Barbara Pusic analyzes not only how past cultural nationalist movements in Slovenia removed non-Slovene language theatre and ideologically suspect works from view, but also how more contemporary national movements have worked to erase the less purely Slovene recent past. She closes with a meditation on the struggle to write theatre history in an emerging nation state marginalized within Europe. Frank Peeter's essay on Belgium focuses on that country's language politics, examining how the rejection of French culture that was part and parcel of national identity construction led theatre historians to mythologize theatres related to Flemish Solidarity, de-emphasize popular forms with links to French culture, and marginalize French-language theatre, effectively making "[a]ll existing theater histories in Belgium . . . half-told stories" (99). Stuart Day also writes about cultural nationalism, exploring how past Mexican theatre histories have supported the country's revolutionary rhetoric and reproduced its centrist spatial ideology by concentrating almost exclusively on Mexico City theatre. Hopeful, he champions both the Mexican playwrights working outside of the capital who critique NAFTA and governmental violence against indigenous people, and the historians who are writing them into Mexican theatre history. Rakesh Solomon and Alan Filewod address the problems inherent in organizing theatre histories into discrete movements and/or forms instead of tracing "performance genealogies." Solomon surveys the spectrum of Indian theatre histories to show how both colonial and postcolonial histories have ignored the relationship between divergent popular theatre forms and between popular and "elite" professional ones. Filewod, meanwhile, discusses how Canadian theatre history's organization into discrete "waves" and "movements" often excludes First Nations performances that do not follow mainline Canadian teleological narratives, arguing that this omission is a form of cultural genocide. Loren Kruger's essay on South Africa also implicitly argues for a more genealogical approach to South African theatre history given the syncretic nature of performance there. Along the way, she critiques histories that have compartmentalized "apartheid theatre" such that South African theatre narratives often start with Athol Fugard rather than the African National Theater of the 1930s. Laurence Senelick's contribution problematizes a different "re-imagining": the one brought on by the trauma caused when a sudden rush of theatrical documentation uncovered in the post-Soviet period led historians to try to cure the amnesia of the Russian theatre's past with a recovered memory, a project rife with possibilities...