Editorial Comment

I was struck by an aspect of April Sizemore-Barber’s essay in this issue, “A Queer Transition: Whiteness in the Prismatic, Post-Apartheid Drag Performances of Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen.” In her discussion of two examples of drag performance in South Africa, she explains that “[w]hereas a prism deconstructs light into its many-hued parts, creating a flattened conception of a rainbow (nation), a prismatic performance reflects and refracts the emotional investments projected onto it by varied audiences.” This general issue is itself prismatic, drawing together essays and approaches from a range of genres, nations, and reading perspectives. Each refracts perspectives and approaches (as well as responses) in multiple directions in its specific discussion, but together the essays provide a kaleidoscopic perspective that builds on numerous types of emotional investments (from creators, audiences, and critics) and deftly draws out what we might consider to be different colors and patterns of theatre and performance.

The first essay in this issue offers an excellent example of prismatic performance. In “Casting Clara Fisher: Phrenology, Protean Farce, and the ‘Astonishing’ Career of a Child Actress,” Marlis Schweitzer brings to light the fascinating story of Clara Fisher, a prodigy who was famous on the English stage for several decades in the early nineteenth century. Her career is in itself worth elucidating, given her commanding portrayal of Richard III while she was still less than 10 years old. But Schweitzer’s argument extends well beyond Fisher’s biography to the then-scientific method of phrenology by entwining with her story the work of the well-known phrenologist George Combe. The essay engages with Combe’s creation of a plaster cast of Fisher’s head, one of his many attempts to reveal the secret workings of the human brain. Combe’s analysis of Fisher’s ability to act was influenced by his own interest in performance—specifically, his connections with the Siddons family. Combe used Fisher’s cast not just to develop his theories, but also to assist him in his lecture tours, which were performances in their own right. The specifics are themselves productive accounts of archival research, well-situated in their historical moments, but Schweitzer expands on her examples to address the relationships between theatre and science. She moves on to skillfully address the ways in which the cast, which is both a human representation and nonhuman, exemplifies a trace of Fisher, or what Rebecca Schneider, whose work she cites, refers to as “affective stains.” The essay makes a major contribution to the understanding of the significance of the relationship between science and theatre during the nineteenth century.

Sizemore-Barber’s essay is next, in which she compares South African performer Pieter-Dirk Uys’s most famous persona, Evita Bezuidenhout, with that of his compatriot, the performance artist Steven Cohen. She traces the development of these performers’ careers against the politics of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa: one used comedy and satire while the other performed what he terms “monster drag” to play with gender boundaries against racial borders. If Uys’s Evita deployed comedy to challenge the politics of the apartheid regime, Cohen’s performances took advantage of what Sizemore-Barber calls “shocking guerilla interventions” that were “alien in whatever landscape he inhabited” to draw attention to “the values given to post-apartheid bodies and the darker shadows that haunted the narrative of the rainbow nation.” She investigates the incongruity of drag in South Africa, where both performers operated among and against the politics of the day, before and after the end of apartheid, and especially at the time of the first democratic elections in 1994. Using selected moments in the careers of each performer between 1990 and 2001, Sizemore-Barber draws together a powerful argument about “prismatic performance,” the nature of which I have described at the top of this editorial comment. This prismatic performance reveals a queering of whiteness, a further ambiguous legacy of both whiteness and the rainbow narrative in what she calls the “post-rainbow era.” She concludes with a brief account of the legacy of these performers by drawing attention to examples of the work of young...