The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine by Marvin Carlson, and: Infinity (Stage) by Spencer Golub (review)

324 REVIEWS MARVIN CARLSON. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 200. $50.00 (Hb); $22.95 (Pb). SPENCER GOLUB. Infinity (Stage). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. 276. $55·00 (Hb); $24.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Rebecca Schneider, Brown University Between these two books - an impossible space - is the lUTe of theatTe, the dTaw that keeps us going, and going again. Marvin CaTlson's The Haunted Stage holds out the promise that with enough attending, enough remembering, enough accounting, the massive hauntings that pTovoke the nightly cTeak in the treaded boaTds will Teveal themselves to reason. Spencer Golub's Infinity (Stage) is also an account of ghosting, but it promises quite the opposite: just when we might gTasp the Tevenant, the shadow will slip offstage, ob-scene, aT fall Uump?) into the abyss between stage and house, between stage and screen, between stage and book, between public and private - taking us with it. What is borne out across both books, or what becomes airborne, is that (again) theatTe is the stuff of Tepetition, but what Tepeats, and how best to account faT repetition, is approached quite differently in these two texts. Through theatTe we can, CaTlson suggests, grasp the "dynamics of cultuTal memory itselF' (166--67). The spate of recent books on cultuTal memory and theatrical performance makes this claim a kind of tum-of-the-century mantra for theatre and performance studies: think of Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead, Peggy Phelan's Mourning Sex, Freddie Rokem's Pe!jorming History, and Jeanette Malkin's Memory - Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Carlson's book makes a contribution in the form of a rigorous charting of the mechanisms of what he calls "recycling" across specific theatre pTactices. He usefully divides the book into an exploration of the haunting of (and by) text, body, production, and house. Theatre texts are haunted by precedent narratives , pTevious pToductions, and by the citational basis of language itself. Bodies of actors are haunted by characters, by parts previously played by an actor, by previous actors playing those characters, and by actors' real lives. Productions are ghosted by the stamp of a diTectoT's style, by the interrelation of actors, by past lives of props, and by expectations. And theatre architectures are haunted by habits of attendance and their own resonant walls. Interestingly, Carlson does not account for the ways in which theatre is haunted by scholaTship on theatre, though he cites otheT scholars profusely (Bert States, Joseph' Roach, Gay McAuley), Thus, scholarship floats disembodied through these pages -the most Tesilient poitergeist of all. This is curious , as there is no question that my own theatre reception is haunted by CaTlson's many books, and yet leaving this ghost at peace in these pages allows Carlson to avoid the dizzying trap such ghosts often lay: the bottomless Reviews grave that can be reflexivity. At moments, this ghost makes an appearance, however. One third of the way into his account, Carlson reminds us that ghosting is a web-work that exceeds individual spectators, but to do so, he locates himself firmly in the mix. Writing on rival German productions of Chekhov in the [990S (by Peter Stein and Andrea Breth), Carlson notes that truly to grasp the ghosting put into play in these productions, an audience member should ~~Ui~nM~~th~~_~~S~~B~~~th the history of Chekhovian production both in Germany and Russia. (Of course, such a spectator might have gained that familiarity by reading Carlson or Golub.) He writes, delighting us with a parenthetical: Obviously, in the case of the specific Russian productions we arc oot dealing with memories of audience members in the 1990S (though ghosting from specific · memory may be longer than is generally supposed, the author of this book having a fairly clear memory of aproduction ofChekhov's The Three Sisters presented by the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1950S with a cast including several actors who had performed the play under Staoislavsky's direction), but the institutional and theatrical heritage of those productions is so strong, especially in Europe, that they still are readily accessible for psychic...