Stage Fright: Modernism Anti-Theatricality and Drama (review)

In this superb examination of theatricality and its detractors, Martin Puchner takes a close look at the theories of Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Butler Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett. According to Puchner, modernist anti-theatricalism was a reaction to a rise in theatrics, especially to anything indebted to Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. The subjects of his study decidedly rejected Wagnerian illusion as theatre's "greatest liability" and believed that a modernist theatre in general "can arise only out of an attack" on theatricality (6). Wagner had polarized the cultural debate by foregrounding theatricality as a value; artists lined up either for or against it. The anti-theatricalists, Puchner says, thus created a unique theatre "at odds with the value of theatricality" (7); they wanted to remove the theatre from the control of star actors, greedy producers, and bourgeois audiences. As Puchner sees it, Mallarmé, Joyce, Stein, Yeats, Brecht, and Beckett critique theatricality's susceptibility to error and misjudgment; its seductiveness obscures the goals these authors seek to convey. In order to circumvent theatricality, Puchner observes, these authors shared common strategies: the superimposition of stage directions, choral figures, narratives, and commentators on the action, and characters who observe their own actions—all designed to disrupt mimesis, illusion, and theatrical virtuosity.

Puchner first describes the distinction between modernist avant-garde and anti-theatrical modernism and then examines closet dramas (or book dramas) intended for reading, not staging. While the avant-garde celebrates theatricality's energy, physicality, and spectacle, anti-theatrical modernism disdains the unpredictability of theatrical performance. According to Puchner, Mallarmé's operator, Joyce's dramatic narrator, Stein's descriptive narratives, Yeats's choral counterpoints, Brecht's epic estrangement, and Beckett's elaborate stage directions are related anti-theatrical devices intended to suppress the director's theatricality and the actor's spontaneity. Modern anti-theatricalists, for example, use the closet drama to block mimetic impersonation through "literariness, écriture, and writerliness" (18, italics in original) as well as by imposing elaborate and nearly impossible-to-perform stage directions. Techniques such as Yeats's symbolism, Brecht's political theatre, and Beckett's staging instructions fundamentally constitute "three manifestations of a shared modernist resistance to the theater" (19). By contrast, Wagner's "relentless illusionism" is a precursor to stage impresarios Max Reinhardt and Robert Wilson, whose spectacular successes "raise questions about the price extracted by an art that overwhelms the audience's rationality by unleashing a theatricality that collapses critical distances and disables analytic responses" (45). Modern anti-theatrical distrust of mimetic acting creates what Puchner astutely terms Plato's diegesis (25), a narrative overlay embedded in the text that disrupts actorial representations and directing pyrotechnics that typify theatricality.

The book divides primarily into two sections: the "modernist closet drama," exemplified by Mallarmé, Joyce and Stein, and the "diegetic theatre" of Yeats, Brecht and Beckett. Mallarmé's Hérodiade projected its anti-theatricality "in such a way that it forecloses whatever mimetic acts real actors might engage in" (60). The play's protagonist resisted embodiment through abrupt physical transformations and narrative disjointedness. Mallarmé's contentious relationship to theatricalization consumed his artistic life, culminating in his Le Livre, or "book-theater," which was, Puchner states, "extraordinary in its scope and ambition but disappointing in its unfinished and fragmentary nature" (67-68). Joyce's anti-theatricality, like Mallarmé's, showed itself in its the use of extensive plot configurations, mixed genres (novel and drama), plays within plays, and sudden transformations of character, contributing to the "phantasmagoric or exuberant closet drama" (84). Stein differed from the others in that she utilized the theatrical form and has achieved moderate success onstage; however, her radical anti-theatricalism was closely aligned with closet drama's "preference of reading text over viewing theater," which yields "a program devoted to preserving the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere." These solitary artists, says Puchner, were "utterly detached from the social reality" that earmarked popular culture (103...