Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past by Susan Bennett (review)

Book Reviews ognilion scenes, it is possible, as Eisen opines, that he may be borrowing from turn-ofthe -cemury pOl-boilers, but it is just as likely that he is borrowing from Euripides. This is a fine book in many respects. Eisen writes well, has a flair for conceptualization and a light touch with theory, is meticulous in his scholarship, and is perceptive and engaging as a critic. Yel, by skirting reference to the tragic tradition in drama, The Inner Life ofOppositES remains incomplete in its account of O'Neill's development as a playwright. Perhaps a more balanced view would conclude that O'Neill saw in classical tragedy the possibility of overcoming melodramatic form and in modem novelistic techniques the means <;If bringing his vision to the stage. MICHAEL HINDE, THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON SUSAN BENNETT. Pelforming Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Pas'_ London and New York: Routledge 1996-Pp_ viii, 199- $16-99 (PB)_ If the past ten years has seen a craze for restaging and rewriting canonical drama, Susan Bennett attributes the phenomeno'1 to a deep - and deeply troubling - postmodem yearning for a mythical utopian past. Bennett diagnoses the root cause of this unhealthy nostalgia in the fallacy of "continuous historical circumstances," the belief that somehow the present is just like the past, only worse, and that a.return to old ways and old va,lues will restore equilibrium and harmony to the chaotic present. (I imagine her cringing at Bob Dole's campaign rhetoric!) To alleviate the "turbulent experience of the presenl," she contends, we flock to that most reassuring (and bankable) monument of traditional western culture - Shakespeare. Both Shakespeare's plays and his imprimatur-by-association on everything from new plays to the Globe restoration to souv~nir place mats claim a hefty share of the global culture market, but, complains the author, their uncritical repetition reinforces a traditional (read conservative, colonial, right-wing, etc.) social and political agenda. As long.as we are compelled to define ourselves by retelling and reworking Shakespeare's tales, Bennett insists we take responsib.ility to expose the omissions, biases, and blind spots that undergird the oeuvre. Her new book explicates the aesthetic and political impact of recent Shakespeare-based plays and films from four continents that either succumb to or somehow overcome the urge to reiterate a perverse history. She Slates her goal as "a more self-conscious realization of our own acts of disseminating that past in the present." The book is arranged in five chapters: The first is a dense theoretical overview, the second a roundup of recent variations of King Lear. Chapter 3 strays into the realm of what Bennett calls "not-Shakespeare" - Jacobean revenge tragedies and city comedies and their contemporary theatrical and cinematic progeny - in whose company she includes such films as Derek Jarman 's remake of Marlowe'S Edward lI, David Lynch's Wild at Heart, and Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thie!, His Wife and Her Lover. She traces a series of anti-, post-, pre-, and neo-colonial renderings of Shakes- Book Reviews peare's The Tempest in Chapter 4, and sums up in the fifth chapter with a series of afterthoughts that she calls "Asides." By lumping together revivals, prequels, and spinoffs of Shakespearean and 000Shakespearean materials, Bennett implies that even when we're not dOing Shakespeare 's plays or those of his Jacobean conte~poraries. we often create new works in their approximate likeness. I ended up enjoying her side-by-side discussions of these disparate genres, although the mix contradicts the subtitle and gives the volume a quirky and disjointed rhythm. For Bennett, even experimental revivals are often theoretically moribund. She is less persuaded by artistic "intention" than by the implicit messages of staged works and so is disappointed by productions that modernize or otherwise adapt the trappings of racial, ethnic, national, gender, or sexual oppression, but in effect, merely reiterate their dynamics in the present tense. Among the many production examples she cites are several such seemingly daring deconstructions as a 1992 Kathakali King Lear, Barrie Keefe's A Mad. Mad World, My Masters (whose humor Bennett finds homophobic), and Peter Greenaway's film Prospera's Books, whose innovations she declares ultimately to be no more than the British Empire's New Clothes. Bennett clearly prefers new plays that refer or react to Shakespearean works - "iterations" or "proliferations," as she calls them, that provide overt social and political critique. The Tragedy of King Real/King Real and the Hoodlums, by a radical British troupe called Welfare State, is one of her favorites. Using the Shakespearean "Ur-text" as a base, the company recruited local nuclear munitions workers from Barrow-inFurness to create a kind of medieval pageant play featuring local artisans, a preview parade, and a grassroots critique of their employer's "economy of death." "Of course," admits Bennett, "all this adds up to a leftist nostalgia: the attainment of socially responsible criticism through the production of site-specific community-relevant art. ... what I . record here is a wistful hope that art can indeed inspire social change." I sympathize with the author's political leanings yet find her optimism about the theatrical mirror's ability to illuminate the way toward a more equitable future a kind of reverse nostalgia, perhaps as na"ive as the backward leanings of those who persist in acclaiming the "universal " values in Shakespearean originals. Given the author's theoretical bent and admirable impulse to examine dramatic presentations in a full range of cultural contexts, it is not surprising that Performing Nostalgia is not for the faint-of-jargon. Invoking the outlook and tenninology of New Historicist and Cultural Materialist criticism, Bennett's cogent thinking sometimes gets bogged down in the lingo: "transgressive" and "spectacular" "bodies" defy "hegemonic" "desire"; audiences become "reception economies"; a critic struggles to distinguish the "authentic" from the "inauthentic gaze." Self-conscious hyphens and parentheses pop up in such coinages as "re-member" and H{dis)articulation." I appreciate that Bennett writes this way because she is trying to invent language to reinvent outmoded social relationships and political systems, but her overuse of this vocabulary elides meaning by sticking labels on complex ideas that would be more persuasive to a wider readership if subjected to the rough-and-tumble process of being Book Reviews wrestled into clearer descriptive lenns. Unfortunately, it also lends her writing a dangerous degree of abstraction and a chiding tone, Plain language might even appeal to those theory-intolerant non-academic artists and audience members whose conversion to her perspective offers the best hope that her thoughtful work will have real-world impact. AMY S. GREEN, JOHN JAY COLLEGE, CUNY AMY KORITZ. Genderillg Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature ;n EarlyTwentieth -Century British Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995. Pp. 218. illustrated. $37.50. Amy Koritz's Gendering Bodies/Performing Art is an expanded version of her 1988 dissertation on the same subject. In the introduction she notes that literature has historically been privileged over dance and that feminist and materiali.st examinations of dance history, from 1890 to 1920, could help us to see literature and dance differently. Primarily, Koritz seeks to show that the aesthetic and literary theories that separated the author or creator from the art work further devalued the social and artistic status of the dancer until Diaghilev's Ballets Russes achieved a "prestigious" art status for its dance. At a glance, this stated intention is promising. Dance, perhaps the most ephemeral of the arts, has been Significantly neglected in the study of culture, so any book that champions an interdisciplinary investigation of dance and literature in Edwardian England should be a welcome addition to contemporary scholarship. But Koritz's study is flawed by several internal difficulties and creates more ambiguity t~an understanding . The first problem is the tacit assumption that theories devised by the literary intelligentsia actually mediated the public perception of dance as art. Koritz's argument that aesthetic theory changed the perception of the dancer from artist to "instrument" is based on a notion that the dancers in this period had to suppress their personality in favor of the autonomy and integrity of the art work, the ballet or modem dance piece. To make her case she contrasts the reception of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with that of modem dancers Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan. Taking a narrow view, Koritz maintains that only Diaghilev's company succeeded in achieving a place among the elite arts, because the impresario improved the standard of technique for the whole company , redefined dance as masculine by giving male choreographers a high profLIe, and subsumed the ballerina into an immutable art work by suppressing her "personality." But, the reviews she cites do attribute personal characteristics to the performers, and as to the integrity of the company and the ballets that Diaghilev first introduced to London, many of the corps members were untrained and the choreography and music were altered to the stars' specifications in order to attract an audience. Koritz has either missed or ignored these facts. ...