The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (review)

The thesis driving The Haunted Stage is that theatre, from its earliest manifestations to the present, is constitutively "haunted." Although all art forms reuse their materials, Marvin Carlson insists on a close correspondence between the memories of individual spectators and the apparently universal tendency of playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and managers to "recycle," respectively, narrative elements, gestures, concepts, sets, and building designs. After an overview chapter, the book divides into chapters that parse theatrical recycling: "The Haunted Text"; "The Haunted Body"; "The Haunted Production"; and "The Haunted House." Ghosting Carlson's own text are epigraphs by Herbert Blau and Joseph Roach that address theatre's memorial tendencies. For Blau, who may have coined the term in Take Up the Bodies (1982), "ghosting" names the memory trace that precipitates theatre's illusory effects, including the desire to banish illusion. For Roach, ghosting is part of a theoretical story in which a culture's "orature" and "surrogations" performatively resist history's official texts and monuments. Carlson weighs in as the historian who will document the ubiquity of ghosting in word, body, and performance site. It's a fine idea and there are important virtues in the study, especially when it transcends the limitations of its premise.

This clearly written book takes us on a scholarly and personal journey, linking Carlson's expertise in ancient and early modern theatre history to his enthusiastic theatre-going in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years. The opening chapter juxtaposes the foundational texts of three theatrical traditions—Aristotle's Poetics, Bharata's Natyasastra, and Zeami's writings on Noh drama—but the study frequently recurs to panhistorical juxtapositions (TheFantasticks with Kabuki katas and Andrei Serban's Hamlet, for example). This rapid movement across time enables a valuable subtheme—the tendency of the romantic and realist theatres not to contradict one another, as is usually taught, but to echo each other's individualist temper in favoring "exact and specific settings, unique to each situation and free of the memories of the theatrical tradition" (12). Equally exciting are Carlson's discussions of the recycling of proverbs, folktales and fabliaux; of opera plots; and of concepts in the postmodern stagings of Daniel Mesguich, Tadeusz Kantor, and others.

Such sections compensate for the conceptual problem of basing a book on a characteristic so ubiquitous that pointing it out again and again narrows rather than deepens our appreciation of its value. As Carlson says, "The theatre's reuse of already familiar narrative material is a phenomenon seeming as old as the theatre itself and developing along with the theatre, from the enactment of sacred texts to the contemporary Broadway musical" (44). While amassing examples of recycling is Carlson's project, the result of such a vast sweep is that scholarly truisms are themselves recycled in the midst of dubious analogies. Commedia dell'arte features predictable pairings, as does Greek New Comedy, and one finds this feature, a few paragraphs later, in Gilligan's Island and Seinfeld (45-47). Wonderfully subtle examples suffer from this slippery analogizing. Carlson cites the late eighteenth-century memoirs of Tate Wilkinson, who recalled seeing the same painted flat "of Spanish figures at full length and two folding doors in the middle," in Covent Garden productions from 1747 through the 1780s. Wilkinson writes, "I never see those wings slide on, but I feel as if seeing my very old acquaintance unexpectedly" (122). Carlson compares this comment to Mark Twain's account in Innocents Abroad, in which Parisian sites, known only in books and pictures, suddenly come alive—"like meeting an old friend"—for Twain's characters. Wilkinson's unexpected"old acquaintance" is a perfect example of the haunting Carlson aims to describe. Apart from similar diction in the two citations, what has Wilkinson's involuntaryexperience to do with the touristic revelry Twain celebrates and satirizes? The heuristic power of the examples is...