This collection of essays seeks to argue for the Gothic as a vital current in contemporary theatre culture. Most obviously, the figure of the monster, and the vampire especially, has found new expression in Jack Thorne’s 2013 adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqviste’s Let the Right One In , and Conor McPherson ’s St Nicholas (1997). At the same time, the old Gothic monsters continue to offer dramatic possibilities, as made evident by the recent stage adaptations of Frankenstein (Nick Dear [2011], Lisa Evans [2008]) and Dracula (Bryony Lavery [2005]) and Jekyll and Hyde (Nick Lane [2017], Evan Placey [2017]), whilst John Pielmeier brought William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist to the stage of London’s Phoenix Theatre in the autumn of 2017. Staged ghosts and ghost stories, too, continue to thrive, as the plays of Conor McPherson, Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Punter demonstrate; Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories has thrilled West End audiences since 2010, and Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1987) has, of course, enjoyed commercial success for the last twenty-nine years. Companies like Punchdrunk , the Jakob Ahlbom Company, Slung Low and Les Enfants Terribles offer site-specific, site-responsive or immersive performances that exploit experiential terror, the uncanny and the Gothic grotesque, using new technologies, spaces, and the aesthetics of the theatre to unsettle audiences. Even Hammer, a company more widely associated with the legacy of British horror film, has sought to explore the potential of bringing its eccentric version of the macabre to the stage with the immersive experience of Hammer House of Horror Live: The Soulless Ones at Hoxton Hall in London in 2017. In the twenty-first century, the Gothic pervades high, low, and (perhaps especially) middlebrow culture. We see the properties and aesthetics of the Gothic embraced by popular forms of drama such as the stage musical (The Phantom of the Opera [1986], Sweeney Todd [1979] and Carrie: The Musical [1988]), even as the Gothic-infused plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries continue to draw audiences to the major subsidised theatres. This collection of essays makes the claim that Gothic, as it appears on the contemporary British stage, is alive and in rude health.
However, the Gothic drama, and particularly Gothic drama as it appears on the post-Victorian stage, has received surprisingly scant critical attention, particularly in comparison with the proliferation of critical studies of the Gothic in contemporary literature and on screen. Up until now, the field has lacked a single, dedicated book-length collection that brings together writings on the significance and impact of the Gothic in contemporary dramatic performance. This collection seeks to address this dearth, building upon the work of the very few essays that have appeared over the past twenty years. Jeffrey N. Cox’s work on the Gothic drama has been seminal in unearthing long-forgotten Gothic play-texts in his edited anthology, Seven Gothic Dramas (1992), and his special issue of the Gothic Studies journal (2001) with its focus on ‘Re-animating Gothic Drama’. In the latter, Cox highlights the need for contemporary scholarship to examine the impact of Gothic drama from the past, whilst the final essay in the issue, from Anne-Kathrin Braun, engages with the ongoing impact of the Gothic in twentieth century theatre as she explores the challenges of bringing Stoker ’s vampire to the stage in Liz Lochhead’s 1985 adaptation of Dracula . More recently, Diego Saglia ’s chapter, ‘Gothic theatre, 1765-Present’ in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend’s The Gothic World (2013), quite rightly resists telling a narrative of the history of the Gothic on the stage. Instead, Saglia notes important cross-fertilisations and common themes that emerge in Gothic drama from its inception to the present day. Saglia’s chapter, breath-taking in its scope and necessarily entirely confined to an exploration of stage drama, presents an invaluable examination of the ‘intersections’, ‘bodies’, and ‘machines, spaces and silences’ that have continued to characterise Gothic drama. Emma McEvoy ’s chapter, ‘Contemporary Gothic Theatre’, which appeared a few years earlier, in Catherine Spooner and McEvoy’s (2007) edited collection The Routledge Companion to Gothic, focuses more exclusively upon the Gothic as it appears on the modern stage, but also in site-specific and non-conventional theatrical contexts. McEvoy’s later essay, ‘West End Ghosts and Southwark Horrors’ (2010), and her recent monograph, Gothic Tourism (2016), both explore Gothic theatricality beyond the footlights. Finally, Frances Babbage ’s (2009) essay on Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2007), though not expressly a study of contemporary Gothic drama, offers not only a perspective on the notion of fidelity in the adaptation process of Poe’s work, but also a suggestion as to how we might read the experience of the spectating body in relation to theatrical adaptations of Gothic texts. Babbage’s essay is distinctive in its analysis of the necessarily subjective account of the performance that she experienced and in doing so, illustrates our heightened phenomenological awareness during Gothic performances.
The Gothic in theatrical performance can be characterised by its endeavours to appeal to the sensual rather than the rational. As with Gothic film and literature, theatrical Gothic seeks to unsettle through its effect and affect upon its audiences , evoking and invoking fear, shock, horror, claustrophobia and disorientation. Saglia explicitly builds upon Cox’s thinking when he offers a ‘tentative definition’ of stage Gothic as ‘a theatrical language of “the extreme” combined with sensationalism of a supernatural , psychological and political nature’ (Cox 1992, 7; Saglia 2013, 355). So, whilst all theatre can be, in differing ways, immersive and affective, the sensory appeal of the Gothic can trigger extreme reactions in its audiences: prickles on the skin, screams, and, at its most extreme, fainting and physical revulsion. However, the impact of the affective Gothic drama brings with it the problem of the ephemerality of its liveness. The fleeting emotions of fear and horror that the Gothic drama seeks to evoke are tied to a liveness of presentation which itself is necessarily transient. Scholars such as Alice Rayner (2006) and Marvin Carlson (2003) have written of this ephemerality as part of the ghostliness of the medium of theatre. For this reason, an analysis of the Gothic drama, contemporary or otherwise, presents challenges for the scholar that are distinct from an analysis of Gothic literature, film or television. Saglia points to this when he suggests that one of the reasons for the neglect of the Gothic drama: ‘may be because, relying on sensationalism and aimed at quick consumption, plays constituted a quickly obsolescing theatrical fare that soon vanished from cultural memory’ (2013, 355).
To take this idea of ephemerality a stage further, the received wisdom today on the original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic dramas is that they were resolutely ‘of their time’. Their original popularity has had the unfortunate effect of provoking a cultural snobbery which dismisses the plays’ brazen melodrama and contrived, formulaic plotting. Cox suggests that this denigration has led to a critical marginalisation of the achievements of the Gothic theatre and that ‘histories of the drama and the theater [sic] see the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a particular low point, barely worthy a mention as one leaps from the playwrights of the seventeenth century to Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw ’ (2001, 108). Thus, whilst all Gothic texts can be seen as a lens for contemporary anxieties of the historical moment in which they are produced, the Gothic drama seems more necessarily incarcerated within its historical moment.
Moreover, if there is a designated period of theatre history in which Gothic drama ‘belongs’, might this, too, contribute to the critical reticence in exploring the continuing appeal of the Gothic on the modern stage? In his chapter, ‘English Gothic Theatre’ in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cox confines his focus to an appointed zenith of Gothic stage fare, from approximately 1768 to 1830, which coincided with the emergence of the Gothic novel. He notes that, ‘while scholars have identified Gothic elements throughout the dramatic tradition from Euripides and Seneca to Tennessee Williams and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is important to locate the Gothic drama proper in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (that is, during the period we call “Romantic”), when it rose and fell as a major force on the London stage’ (2006, 125). This delineation of a specific apex of Gothic stage drama in the eighteenth century is not a point of contention here. Certainly, and according to Cox, the Gothic drama of the eighteenth century, as with the novels of the period, was ‘clearly a form of fantasy…[and]…a major form for representing on stage the ideological struggles of the day’ (2006, 129). It seemed to capture the public mood in an age of ideological upheaval, political upset and scientific and technological advancement. If the Gothic drama of the eighteenth century demonstrates a response to the contemporary trauma of a Europe under the threat of revolution, it seems inevitable that the proliferation of Gothic tropes, aesthetics and monsters on the contemporary stage might be read as similarly symptomatic of modern-day moments of political, cultural or scientific crisis.
This reading of Gothic as indicative of cultural crisis has been underway for some time. Kelly Hurley writes of the tendency of the Gothic to re-emerge ‘cyclically, at periods of cultural stress, to negotiate the anxieties that accompany social and epistemological transformations and crises’ (2004, 5), whilst Catherine Spooner notes that there has been a pattern, of late, of conflating Gothic nightmare with the emerging critical trend of trauma theory, that ‘trauma theory has provided a more theoretically sophisticated means of talking about cultural anxiety, one in which psychic disturbance is imbricated with social problems’ (2017, 14). The work of Linnie Blake (2008) is seminal in seeking to understand how horror film can be used to explore and rehearse reactions to moments of historical turbulence, and Patrick Duggan, in Trauma-Tragedy (2015) and Miriam Haughton’s (2018) Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow, investigate what performance more distinctly can offer as a medium through which we confront and comprehend personal, political, local and international trauma. Perhaps, in this vein, we can argue that the work of playwrights such as Philip Ridley, Alistair McDowall and Martin McDonagh offers nightmarish contemporary dystopias and claustrophobic worlds, presenting explorations of terror in an age of Terrorism so that we might put our modern-day fears under the microscope.
However...