Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories

writing & rewriting writing & rewriting national theatre histories

edited by S.E.WILMER

s t u d i e s i n t h e at r e h i s to r y & c u lt u r e

Writing&Rewriting National Theatre Histories

studies in theatre history and culture Edited by Thomas Postlewait

Writing&Rewriting National Theatre Histories edited by s. e. wilmer University of Iowa Press

iowa city

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2004 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Writing and rewriting national theatre histories / edited by S. E. Wilmer. p. cm.—(Studies in theatre history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-87745-906-1 (cloth) 1. Theatre—History. 2. Theatre—Historiography. 3. History—Methodology. 4. National characteristics. I. Wilmer, S. E. II. Series. pn2101.w75 2004 792'.09—dc22 2004048018

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contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix S. E. Wilmer 1

Some Critical Remarks on Theatre Historiography 1 Erika Fischer-Lichte

2 On Writing National Theatre Histories 17 S. E. Wilmer 3 Theatre Historiography: General Problems, Swedish Perspectives 29 Willmar Sauter 4 Recovering Repressed Memories: Writing Russian Theatre History 47 Laurence Senelick 5 Nationalism, Tradition, and Transition in Theatre Historiography in Slovenia 65 Barbara Pus˙ic´ 6 Rewriting a National Theatre History in a Bilingual Country: The Case of Belgium 88 Frank Peeters 7 Named in Passing: Deregimenting Canadian Theatre History 106 Alan Filewod 8 Narrative Possibilities for U.S. Theatre Histories 127 Bruce McConachie 9 Performing Mexico 153 Stuart A. Day 10 The Creation of a Canon: Re/Evaluating the National Identity of Israeli Drama 174 Yael Zarhy-Levo and Freddie Rokem 11 When Did Brahma Create Theatre? and Other Questions of Indian Theatre Historiography 201 Rakesh H. Solomon

12 Shadow and Method: Meditations on Indonesian Theatre Historiography 224 Evan Darwin Winet 13 Reassembling South African Theatre History 244 Loren Kruger Contributors 265 Index 269

acknowledgments I want to express my immense gratitude to Frank Peeters for helping me to arrange a conference on “Re/writing National Theatre Histories” in Tuusula, Finland, in 1997 and for helping to develop the conception of this book. I am also greatly indebted to Pirkko Koski of Helsinki University for hosting the conference in Tuusula with the assistance of the faculty and students of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies in Finland under the auspices of the historiography working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Thomas Postlewait, as editor of the University of Iowa Press’s Studies in Theatre History and Culture Series, has been a major source of encouragement and has overseen this project with insight, persistence, and great attention to detail. I am also grateful to the Academic Development Fund and the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund at Trinity College for the financial assistance to enable me to complete this project. Lastly I want to thank my former students Fiontan Walsh and Alice Coghlan for their help in preparing the manuscript.

Introduction s. e. wilmer

O

ne of my Irish students recently asked my advice about writing an essay on the performance rituals of the Irish Celts in 200 BC. While admitting that it sounded like a fascinating topic, I confessed that I knew nothing about these rituals and naively asked whether the early Celts had even come to Ireland. At first she looked at me as though I was trying to challenge something fundamental in her personal identity. But after doing more research and reading Simon James’s The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? she concluded that the ancient Irish Celts, who had been a distinct factor in her sense of self, were a myth fabricated by nationalists such as W. B. Yeats. So, changing her plans, she decided to write about Yeats’s involvement with the occult. The leap from studying about national origins to matters involving the occult is not as surprising as it might at first seem. Both areas involve a combination of scientific research and blind faith. Whether the early Irish Celts existed or whether Irish writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invented them in order to create a coherent picture of a timeless and homogeneous national identity (to overcome the demeaning British depictions of them as wild and uncivilized) is hotly debated at the moment. This dispute has even resulted in skeptics such as Simon James being accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing.1 In any case Irish historians, folklorists, and creative artists are far from unique in fabricating notions of national origin and national character. Zealous nationalists in many countries have constructed national histories and notions of national character to suit their perspectives, grounding them in a prehistoric past and shaping the evidence to advance their ideologies. As Ernest Renan remarked, “To forget and — I will venture to say — to get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation; and thus the advance of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.”2 This book addresses the problems and challenges of writing national theatre histories. National theatre historians often have to ix

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negotiate assumptions (their own and those of others) about national identity and national character. In addition, they have to decide what types of theatrical events to record, which artists to feature, and what method to use in telling the story. The personal interests of the historians in particular theatrical styles or in types of artists inevitably influence the choices that they make. Similarly, the social context, such as the redrawing of national boundaries and the ideological changes in the country, affect their choices. New scholarly developments such as ethnic, gender, and postcolonial studies also influence them. As a consequence, theatre histories, like other histories, are often revised to reflect the various interests of historians as well as the changing social circumstances and new methodologies. Today, as a result of the changes in political ideologies and borders in Europe since 1989, the expansion of the European Union, and the process of globalization, scholars have taken a renewed interest in nations and nationalism and the construction of national identity. Despite greater transnational communication, the nation-state remains an important frame for organizing knowledge. National histories continue to be written and rewritten, and they continue to help construct, challenge, or reaffirm notions of identity. The authors of this book are leading theatre scholars from many parts of the world. The first three articles (Fischer-Lichte, Wilmer, and Sauter) provide an international context for writing national theatre histories as well as making particular reference to the countries where the authors live (Germany, Ireland, and Sweden). The succeeding articles examine the theatre histories of individual nations. While it is impossible to represent very many countries in such a book, there has been an attempt to cover a wide geographical area (Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North and Central America) and to contrast large (e.g., India and Indonesia) with small countries (Ireland), newly independent (Slovenia) with old nation-states (United States), developed (Canada) with developing nations (Mexico and South Africa), capitalist (United States) with former-communist governments (Russia), monolingual (Sweden) with multilingual states (Belgium and Canada), and countries with stable historical boundaries (Sweden) with those of frequently shifting borders (Germany). The book also examines a variety of social and political issues, such as the polarization of language groups in Belgium (Peeters) and Canada (Filewod), the importance of

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religion in Israel (Rokem and Zarhy-Levo), the invisibility of ethnic minorities in Mexico (Day), the redrawing of geographical borders in Germany (Fischer-Lichte) and Slovenia (Pus˙ica), the change in ideological orientation in Russia (Senelick) and Indonesia (Winet), and the dismantling of colonial legacies in India (Solomon) and South Africa (Kruger). Moreover, common problems of writing histories are addressed, such as types of evidence (particularly Sauter, Fischer-Lichte, Solomon, and Wilmer), periodization (Pus˙ica), canonization (Rokem and Zarhy-Levo, Filewod, and Day), styles of narrative (McConachie), and definitions of key terms such as theatre, history, and nation (FischerLichte and Kruger). Most of the articles have been written specifically for this book. While asked to focus on the ways in which theatre histories have been written and need to be rewritten and to examine the assumptions and biases in existing works, the contributors have approached the topic in their own individual ways, with different emphases depending on their own interests and the idiosyncracies of the countries about which they are writing. In their articles, the authors discuss general and specific historiographical problems, critique earlier histories, and propose new strategies for the future. notes 1. Simon James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? (London: British Museum Press, 1999), p. 16. James points out that Celtic origins have been used by different peoples for different purposes. In the Venetian exhibition I Celti in 1991, for example, the Celts were shown to be a people who spread all over Europe and therefore constituted the ancestors of the European Union. “This creates an interesting paradox in that while, in Britain and Ireland, notions of Celticness are about cultural boundaries and distinctiveness (especially difference from the English), on the continent they may be about European solidarity and integration” (p. 19). 2. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in The Nationalism Reader, Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, eds. (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), p. 145.

Writing&Rewriting National Theatre Histories

1 Some Critical Remarks on Theatre Historiography erika fischer-lichte

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hen Friedrich von Schiller appeared before his students on May 26, 1789, to hold his inaugural lecture at the University of Jena as the newly appointed professor for general history, he had taken as the title for his talk the question “What is the meaning of universal history, and what is the purpose of studying it?” Using this as a theme, he developed an enthusiastic program, which was to help the student fulfill the “aim of his studies”: to receive an insight into the purposeful path of history, which transforms “unnoticed, the individual into the species”: The human being is transformed and flees the stage; his opinions flee and are transformed with him. Only history remains, uninterrupted, on the scene. . . . What she keeps hidden from the punishing conscience of a Gregor or a Cromwell, she hurries to publish to humanity: that the selfish person can naturally pursue unworthy ends, but unknowingly furthers excellent ones.1 Is world history, then, a kind of theatre history, the philosophical study of which must inevitably lead to enlightenment about the infinite perfectibility of the human race? When we have recourse to Schiller’s question today in writing a theatre history, this appropriation rapidly reveals itself as a futile attempt at finding in the storeroom of history — to remain with Schiller’s image — a costume that would make it possible to hide our own helplessness and at the same time act it out. For in order to write a history of theatre, one would presumably have to answer the question “What is the meaning of theatre history, and what is the purpose of studying it?” However, this meets a deeply rooted skepticism as to whether it is now possible to answer this question at all. The difficulties begin as soon as we want to determine the object whose history is to be written: What is theatre? What are we talking about when we employ the term theatre? Since the historic avant-garde 1

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movements in the first decades of the twentieth century made the claim to transcend the rift between art and life, to transport art into life, the concept of theatre has been constantly broadened. Its usage was extended to cover the most varied events of exhibition, demonstration, and spectacle. It was employed for the performances of circus artists, clowns, and entertainers; for the “happenings” of the dadaists and surrealists on the streets and in cafés, in church and in parliament; for the May Day celebrations, rallies, and sports festivals of trade unions and parties. The rediscovery of “ritual theatre,” and the performance culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, resulted in an even greater extension of the concept: wherever someone put him- or herself, someone else, or something on show, consciously presenting a person or object to the gaze of others, people spoke of theatre.2 This “enormous activation of the semantic field ‘theatre’”3 blurred the transitions to the metaphorical use of the concept. Thus Michel Foucault could speak of his “theatrum philosophicum,” Jean-François Lyotard of the “philosophical and political stage,” and Jean Baudrillard of the “stage of the body.”4 The concept of theatre seems currently to be booming — and to have widened to the concept of theatricality; various cultural studies take it as a model for explaining utterly heterogeneous — and quite often historical — phenomena.5 On the other hand, historians are well aware of the fact that the concept of theatre is culturally and historically determined and that, within Western culture since the sixteenth century, it has constantly changed. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the term theatrum meant a raised place where something that was regarded as worthwhile was shown, so that it could be applied to an execution, a theatrum anatomicum, a Kunst- und Wunderkammer, or a theatre performance. While in the eighteenth century, the concept narrowed down, so that the term could be applied only to theatre performances and the building in which they took place (and in some European languages, such as French, also to the dramatic work of an author, as in le théâtre de Racine). If these findings are taken seriously, it will have far-reaching consequences for the project of a theatre history. One will have to abandon the fiction that a certain consensus exists as to an object that is always meant by the term theatre, which would enable one to undertake a geographical (a regional or a European theatre history, or a history of world theatre) or genre-specific delimitation (history of dramatic theatre,

some critical remarks on theatre historiography 3

musical theatre, dance theatre, puppet theatre). Instead, it will be impossible to avoid an initial delimitation of the object of one’s own examination by defining a particular area within the semantic field “theatre.” Many of the relevant theatre histories which have appeared in European languages over the last thirty years (or which came out in new editions) seem to take account of this insight to the extent that they — usually implicitly, in some cases however quite explicitly — base their respective examinations on a specific concept of theatre.6 They proceed from theatre as a basic anthropological category (Gregor, Kernodle), as a cultural phenomenon (Berthold, Kuritz, Schöne), as a social institution (Allen, Brockett, Frenzel, Jomaron, Kindermann, Nicoll, Pandolfi, Raszewski, Vince), an interaction between actors and audience (Southern) or from the performance as a work of art (Brauneck, Knudsen, Michael and Daiber, Stamm). These conceptual definitions, however, often remain remarkably devoid of consequences for the course of the investigation. In each case, independently of the breadth of the underlying concept, the more or less well-documented theatrical events of the institutionalized (literary) spoken theatre in the large cities is generally what is presented. Such an approach nourishes the suspicion that the conceptual definition is intended to satisfy the demand to be exhaustive — and hence potentially consensual — a demand that the subsequent investigation will only fail to live up to, because it must, for pragmatic reasons, remain partial. The indication — which appears as a genuine topos — that one is not aiming for completeness also seems to point in this direction. It is probably to be understood as an insurance clause against the embarrassing possibility that one might miss an event which is then mentioned by another author.7 Here a virtue is made of necessity — even if the presentation lasts for five, seven, eight, or even ten volumes. In my view, however, a partial perspective is a condition of the possibility of a history of theatre. Everyone must delimit the subject area of their theatre history in accordance with their specific epistemological interests and competence, select the events that are likely to be productive in terms of the questions they are asking, and construct their history from their examination of the documents related to these events.8 Having formulated this procedural rule, one could proceed to the immediate agenda — that is, to the delimitation of the subject area — if it was not that we had overlooked another difficulty, which

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becomes critical at this point, if not before. The concept “theatre history” consists of two terms: theatre and history; and the second term appears to be hardly less problematic than the first. Today the statement that we no longer have a universalist concept of history available is practically a truism. We neither see Hegel’s world spirit realizing itself in history, nor recognize in its course the law-governed regularity of a development from the original community via class society to classless society. We are also no longer adherents of the modernization theory of the Enlightenment, according to which — as Schiller was still firmly convinced — the course of history leads to the perfection of humanity. The totalizing and teleologically oriented constructions of history have long since become obsolete. The discipline of history has drawn its consequences from this. On the one hand, it reacts against attempts to revive traditional strategies for making sense of history and, for example, return to the epic procedures of a narrative historiography.9 On the other hand, quite a number of new, cultureoriented directions have been established in historical research, among them history of daily life,10 gender history,11 historical anthropology,12 history of mentalities,13 and history of emotions,14 as well as discourse analytic approaches of the so-called linguistic turn.15 Common is the concentration on microhistory and individual processes of meaning formation: The issue no longer has anything to do with developments as temporal transformations, whose direction can enter into the current orientations of praxis as quantities which open up the future, but rather it is about a reabsorption of unilinear images of development into the relativity of different possibilities of human life-forms. In the place of macrohistory — the single, comprehensive history of the modern world — appears the microhistory of the many small histories, each of which has its own importance.16 This “resubjectivization” of the discipline of history,17 the turn to emotions, mentalities, and perceptions, has now, interestingly, led to the formulation of questions that were traditionally dealt with in the historical approaches of history’s neighboring disciplines — in philology, theatre studies, and art history. They relate to human thought, its “forms of consciousness, habits of thought, worldviews, ideologies, and so on,”18 which form the subject of intellectual history,

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the history of ideas or history of concepts, pursued above all in Germany. This new orientation in the discipline of history has led less to a conflict between different schools than to the profession of faith in a fundamental pluralism of theories and methods. The partial nature of the perspective was made into a condition of the possibility of historiography: every theory explains a different form of microhistory; every method relates to a different level. These developments in the discipline of history have also had farreaching consequences for the historiography of theatre. The early theatre histories of the eighteenth (e.g., Löwen, Schütze19) and nineteenth centuries (e.g., Devrient, Mentzel20) — to an extent even in the twentieth century (e.g., Gregor) — were derived from a totalizing concept of progress. The history of the German theatre, for example — or the theatre of Hamburg or Frankfurt — was presented as a continual progression upward from primitive and rough origins toward an ever more civilized and perfected state. The yardstick by which the level of development of the theatre at any given time was measured was its ability to produce the illusion of real, “natural” life on the stage. More recent theatre histories, however, proceed from different concepts of history and different methodological approaches. These determine theatre history as cultural history (Kernodle), social history (Craik, Kindermann), history of ideas (Knudsen, Nicoll, Stamm) or as moral and political history (Raszewski). Despite such proclamations, most theatre histories then proceed in a largely historicist fashion (e.g., Allen, Berthold, Brockett, d’Amico, Jomaron, Kindermann, Michael and Daiber, Nicoll, Pandolfi, Schöne, Vince, Xolodov); in other words, they pile source on source, description on description, anecdote on anecdote, names, dates, and facts, without formulating a problem for whose resolution the material presented was selected and examined. Of course, it is recognized in principle that theatre history can be carried out as cultural history, history of mentalités or social history, as psychohistory, intellectual history or history of ideas, the history of knowledge or art history, and much else. But the methodological consequences of this recognition are not drawn; no specific problematic is developed that might explain or justify the choice of documents as well as the method of their analysis and evaluation. One often gets the impression that the only criterion for the choice and breadth of material used was that it was available. This means that the partial nature of

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the perspective is not really accepted as the condition for the possibility of theatre historiography — the historicist ideal of completion comes through at every point. The deceptive hope that it could be possible to completely reconstruct the theatre of a period “as it really was,” if one only has sufficient material at hand, still seems to provide the objective here.21 Against this, it is necessary to insist on the partial nature of the approach as the condition for the possibility of writing theatre history. That means that not only does the area of study require delimitation, but the relevant problematic, in relation to which the investigation is to be undertaken, must be specified. Here both procedures have to be seen as directly related to each other: a given material can make a specific problematic possible or suggest it, while, in reverse, a specific problematic can lead to the selection of particular materials. In any case, theatre history can be carried out only with a problem-oriented approach. There is currently widespread consensus about this approach. There are also already a number of theatre history monographs which proceed accordingly and in which different theoretical and methodological perspectives are applied, depending on the problematic that is identified.22 General theatre histories, however (and this holds without distinction for theatre histories of a regional, national, continental, intercontinental, or global scope), have rarely used this approach. This is certainly lamentable, but thoroughly understandable, for here problems come to the fore that in monographs in theatre history are generally only of more peripheral significance. In the monographs the subject chosen is usually studied within a limited stretch of time. The emphasis is then placed on its synchronic structure (within this stretch of time), and the results of the investigation into structure then determine whether the stretch of time chosen can be seen as a period in relation to the problematic or not. In theatre histories, by contrast, the process — in other words, the diachronic change that the object of study goes through over a long space of time — has to be examined. To present theatre history as a process, it does not, however, suffice, as Luhmann has rightly commented, “to narrow everything down to a before-and-after difference — such as ‘Europe before the potato’ and ‘Europe after the potato’ — since this difference itself, which separates the periods, could only describe the event, but not history as a

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process.”23 Theatre histories, then, cannot avoid facing the problem of the formation of periods and the question of the transition between periods and of possibilities of delimiting periods. The problem can only be ignored — or, better, disguised — if one draws up a factography with a purely chronological approach, listing or presenting, in sequence, what happened after what. Only by presenting material about events that happened one after another in a chronological order can one avoid the problem of delineating periods, but one thus denies — or at least ignores — the processual nature of theatre history. Even here it is clearly not possible to do without the old classificatory categories related to periods of intellectual history, such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, and so on, or at least resorting to the centuries. Within a chronologically developing presentation, the vocabulary is thus one of baroque theatre or seventeenth-century theatre, of Enlightenment theatre or eighteenth-century theatre, and so forth, as if a period were meant by this. If one takes a problem-oriented approach, however, and hence sets specific questions for theatre history, it will not be possible to avoid undertaking periodizations and constructing periods according to the alignments that the course of the investigation indicates in each case. One will thus have to select differing criteria according to the problematic. Hence, for example, a change in the social responsibility for the institutional theatre could act as a criterion, or a change in its social function; an alteration of the norms, values, and attitudes propagated by the theatre would be just as thinkable a criterion as an alteration in its aesthetic principles; a shift in the hierarchical structure of the individual theatrical systems could be a criterion, as much as a fundamental change within one of these systems (in acting methods, in drama, in music, in scenery, in theatre architecture, etc.). Here it has to be borne in mind that the criteria can only contribute to answering the question of whether a change of periods has occurred, but not of why it has occurred. However, one will not be able to do without such explanations if theatre history is to be written as a history of process, that is, as a history of diachronic changes. Regarding this problem, it is rather common — even if not too widespread and, by no means, common practice — to relate theatre to other art forms such as architecture, painting, music, literature. A change within one of the other arts, to a certain extent, may result in a change in theatrical practice. Thus, the new theatre buildings in northern Italy

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as well as those in Elizabethan England demanded other modes of perception than the performances of mystery plays on the markets and in the streets of medieval towns. The invention of central perspective and its transfer to the newly erected Italian theatre buildings after the invention of the wings also greatly contributed to a change in the perceptual modes and habits of the spectators. A new kind of music led to the invention of a new theatrical genre, namely, the opera; and a new genre of literature, the domestic play, had as its consequence the development of a new acting style: a realistic-psychological acting style came into being. When relating theatre to other art forms that contribute to a theatre performance, however, one has to keep in mind that, regarding the problems of historiography, there is a great divide between theatre and the other arts; for theatre history cannot refer to works of art, because artifacts that can be defined and hence handed down do not exist. Instead of a history of the work of art in the sense used in the other disciplines of art history, which produce this history via analyzing and interpreting the artifacts that are handed down, we are given a history of events. This does not mean, however, that theatre history cannot be carried out as a history of performances. It implies simply that the statements that can be made about performances are not arrived at through the analysis and interpretation of the “artifact,” and can thus not be evaluated by having recourse to it. Rather, they derive from the analysis and interpretation of documents about the performance. In other disciplines of art history, these sorts of documents are of course also used as a source, but are seen as somewhat secondary by comparison with the handeddown works; for theatre history they are the primary, and only, sources. If, however, theatre history takes the works of other arts into consideration — play texts, scores, sketches for sets, character portraits, and so on — these lose their character as works of art and take the status of documents, which are evaluated in relation to the performance — which is not available. The same holds for film and video recordings of performances from recent theatre history. Their status is also that of documents about the performances. Theatre history has in general only documents, no monuments. The works of art, the performances, are irretrievably lost.24 This premise does not imply that theatre history cannot be conducted as art history. It means only that the analysis and interpretation of works of art is excluded as a procedure, as is, just as naturally, the possibility of reconstructing the work or performance, as

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is regularly attempted by researchers with a historicist orientation. The breadth of potential self-definitions of theatre history is, however, not restricted by this limitation. Since this is so, quite another approach might seem promising, namely, to relate theatre performances to other genres of cultural performance. In medieval times (when the term theatre was not yet used, but instead mystery plays, geistliche Spiele, les mystères, sacre rappresentazione), mystery plays were performed mainly on the occasion of Christian holidays, such as Easter, Corpus Christi Day, Christmas, and others, sometimes in churches, mostly on the square before the church or on the marketplace and in the streets. In the German-speaking countries, it was said that spectators and players were gathered “in the service of God,” and the performance began with communal prayers and hymns and also ended with a communal parting hymn. Participating in the performance — as player or as spectator — was considered a “good work,” which was automatically tied to the granting of divine mercy. So what was the relationship between the performances of mystery plays, the celebration of Christian holidays through the towns and cities, and the rituals of the church? Were there processes of exchange going on between them and what did they effect? When did such exchange processes come to an end and what was the result of that? Thus, a change regarding the relationship between different genres of cultural performance could maybe serve as a criterion when trying to define an epoch. To investigate the relationship between theatre performances and other genres of cultural performance, it might prove fruitful to examine “epochs” that have a “wide” theatre concept — like the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — as well as “epochs” that tried to narrow down the concept to performances that were shown in particular buildings, separating actors from spectators — like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What happened so that such a change could take place? Why was it no longer possible to conceive of a public execution, a court festival, a public demonstration of experiments, the performance of a game, and many other kinds of performances as theatre? Why did it seem necessary to make strong differentiations and to delimit performances of plays, operas, or ballet from all the other genres of performance? This is not the place to deal with such questions. However, it seems to me that it would be most fruitful to write theatre history as a kind of cultural history that

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embraces all kinds of cultural performances and tries to find out what kind of exchange processes went on between different genres of cultural performance, how changes within the relationships were brought about, and what the results were. After the upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe around 1990, an upsurge of nationalism sprang up. This resulted also in plans to rewrite the national theatre history or to write a national theatre history for the first time. Thus, the question of how to write a national theatre history became urgent, in many European countries but not in Germany. This was for good reasons. For, regarding our history, from a German point of view, even an attempt to write a national theatre history proves futile. Such an enterprise, inevitably, would raise questions about geography and nationality that can hardly be answered. Geopolitical borders have changed over time; ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups have not remained static but have been constantly in flux. Therefore, the conception of German (like theatre) continues to evolve. The Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation (which literally translates as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) existed from the early Middle Ages until 1806, when Napoleon dissolved it. It consisted of more than three hundred different German states (dukedoms, kingdoms, principalities, and the like), including Austria (continuously from the fifteenth century, the Habsburg princes served as emperors of the Holy Roman Empire who were elected in Frankfurt upon Main by the princes of the other states) and until 1499 even Switzerland. A German national state was not founded until 1872; after World War II, two German states were created, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Since 1990, we live again in a united Germany, which, concerning its borders, is not identical with the national state of 1872. Since the sixteenth century, Italian, English, and Dutch troupes toured through the German-speaking countries. Until the eighteenth century, German theatre was a truly European theatre to an extent that hardly can be matched by any other European country. At the courts, Italian opera companies and French comedians prevailed. Although German troupes also played at courts, they were in a much less favorable position than their Italian and French colleagues. Quite a few princes — like Frederick the Great from Prussia — openly despised the German troupes (not because of a lack of skills, because there were a number of troupes that were praised for their high standards of act-

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ing). The reason was that they performed in German, a language that many German princes held to be barbaric. At both Protestant and Catholic schools, Latin plays were performed. And the German troupes performed translations from French, Italian, Spanish, and English plays. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the repertoire comprised very few German plays. Thus, when in the course and wake of the eighteenth century, the rising middle classes developed a new selfunderstanding and self-confidence, they demanded that in the cities theatre buildings had to be erected in which the German troupes would perform plays written in German that would be able to convey and confirm the new bourgeois values, namely, family values, to a middle-class audience. Such theatre was called a national theatre because it should be founded on plays written in the national language, which the Frenchspeaking nobility despised and which nevertheless was the only factor uniting the people of the different German-speaking countries. The first entreprise of a national theatre took place in Hamburg in 1766 and ended in a financial disaster one year later. In 1766 also the first History of German Theatre was written by J. F. Loewen, who participated in the entreprise and also persuaded Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to take part as a dramaturg. (In this way, the famous Hamburg Dramaturgy was written in 1766–1767). In his history Loewen used historical material collected by one of the best German actors of his time, Conrad Ekhof, to prove that there had been German plays even before the advent of the English comedians, namely, the Fastnachtspiele. At the end of the eighteenth century, the movement toward such a national theatre degenerated into provincial “court and national theatre,” which meant a theatre for a specific dukedom or kingdom like the Pfalz (the Mannheim court and national theatre) or Bavaria (the Munich court and national theatre). These court and national theatres were founded by the princes, who could no longer afford the expensive Italian and French companies and so decided to make do with the much less expensive German troupes. These theatres were directed by noblemen and open to the general public. Opposing such a development, Goethe proclaimed a German theatre that would perform the most important plays of all cultures and nations. So, on his small, provincial Weimar stage, he developed a repertoire that comprised plays by Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus and Terence, Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Racine, Goldoni and Gozzi, Voltaire and Lessing, together with

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Schiller’s and his own plays and Mozart’s operas. However, he did not dare to present to his audience one of his favorite plays, Sakontala by the Indian poet Kalidasa. He was afraid that the customs, habits, and ways of thinking of his audience were much too different from those in which the Indian play was imbued, and so he doubted that it could be received adequately. On the other hand, from the eighteenth century onward, German troupes expanded their sphere of activity into regions where even the princes would appreciate and support them. They toured to Poland, to the Baltic states, and to Russia. Catherine the Great of Russia, a former German princess, invited German troupes to the court in St. Petersburg; she also wrote plays that were performed by these troupes. Later on, the Germans who emigrated to the United States put up their own theatres, so that there were still German theatres in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other places by the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the foundation of a German state in 1872, there has been an ongoing exchange of actors, stage directors, designers, plays, and so forth between the theatres of Germany or the German states respectively, and Austria and Switzerland. Thus, there are many reasons why it makes no sense to write a German national theatre history. A German theatre history, quite necessarily, would therefore have to remain partial even in this respect. notes This essay has been translated by Laurence Cox and adapted from the introduction to my Kurze Geschichte des Deutschen Theaters (Tübingen: Francke, 1993). 1. Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–1993), vol. 17, p. 375. 2. See inter alia Bernard Beckerman, Dynamics of Drama (New York: Knopf, 1970), pp. 6–17; as well as Joachim Fiebach, “Zur Geschichtlichkeit der Dinge und der Perspektiven: Bewegungen des historisch materialistischen Blicks,” in Renate Möhrmann, ed., Theaterwissenschaft heute. Eine Einleitung (Berlin: Reimer, 1990), pp. 371–88. 3. Helmar Schramm, “Theatralität und Öffentlichkeit: Vorstudien zur Begriffsgeschichte von ‘Theater,’” in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Studien zu einem historischen Wörterbuch (Berlin: Akad.-Verlag, 1990), p. 206. 4. Ibid.

some critical remarks on theatre historiography 13

5. See the series “Theatricality” edited by the author at Francke Publishing House, Tübingen: Inszenierung von Authentizität (2000), Verkörperung (2001), Medialität und Wahrnehmung (2001), Performativität und Ereignis (2003), Ritualitaet und Grenze (2003); in addition, Erika Fischer-Lichte, ed., Theatralität und die Krisen der Repräsentation (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001). 6. The following theatre histories were evaluated in this respect: John Allen, A History of the Theatre in Europe (Totowa, NJ: Heinemann Educational, 1983); Margot Berthold, Weltgeschichte des Theaters (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1968); Manfred Brauneck, Die Welt als Bühne, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993–1996); Oscar G. Brockett, History of the Theatre (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1982); Thomas Wallace Craik, ed., The Revels History of Drama in English, 8 vols. (London: Methuen, 1975–1980); Maria José Díez Borque, ed., Historia de teatro en España, 2 vols. (Madrid: Taurus, 1983); Herbert Frenzel, Geschichte des Theaters: Daten und Dokumente 1470–1890 (Munich: DTV Wissenschaft, 1984); Joseph Gregor, Weltgeschichte des Theaters, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1939); Jacqueline de Jomaron, ed., Le Théâtre en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1988); George Riley Kernodle, The Theatre in History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989); Heinz Kindermann, Theatergeschichte Europas, 10 vols. (Salzburg: Müller, 1957–1974); Hans Knudsen, Deutsche Theatergeschichte (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1989); Paul Kuritz, The Making of Theatre History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988); Friedrich Michael and Hans Daiber, Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (Frankfurt am Main, 1990; up to p. 92 this edition follows Friedrich Michael’s volume Geschichte des Theaters [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969]); Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923–1959); Vito Pandolfi, Histoire du théâtre, 3 vols. (Verviers: Gérard, 1968; the original is Storia universale del teatro drammatico [Torino: Unione Tipogr., 1964]); Zbigniew Raszewski, Krótka historia teatru polskiego (Warsaw: Panstw. Inst. Wydawn, 1977); Günter Schöne, Tausend Jahre deutsches Theater 914–1914 (Munich: Prestel, 1962); Richard Southern, The Seven Ages of the Theatre (London: Faber, 1962); Rudolf Stamm, Geschichte des englischen Theaters (Bern: Francke, 1951); Ronald W. Vince, Ancient and Mediaeval Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984); Ronald W. Vince, Renaissance Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984); Edwin Wilson and Alvin Goldfarb, Living Theatre: An Introduction to Theatre History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983); E. G. Xolodov, ed., Istorija russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra (History of the Russian Theatre), 7 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977–1987). 7. Heinz Kindermann, for example, writes this in the epilogue to his tenvolume Theatergeschichte Europas: “This can neither involve attempting to attain the goal of exhaustiveness, nor the serial mechanisms of chronicle, but only

14 erika fischer-lichte

causal interrelations of meaning in the selection of what is symptomatic and necessary.” I could comment on this quote, but will be satisfied with the threat of doing so. 8. The debate in historiography on the issue of history as a narrative construction or even as a fiction was set in motion by Hayden White. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); “The Historical Text As Literary Artifact,” Clio 3, no. 3 (June 1974): 277–303. Also see Jaques Rancière, Die Namen der Geschichte: Versuch einer Poetik des Wissens (Paris: Seuil 1992; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994); Dominick LaCapra, “Geistesgeschichte und Interpretation,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven Kaplan, eds., Geschichte denken: Neubestimmung und Perspektiven moderner europäischer Geistesgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), pp. 45–86. An explicit reference to theatre historiography as a subjective construction corresponding to this can also be found in Paul Kuritz: “This book is a story of the theatre, not the story of the theatre. . . . As ancient story-tellers chanted the same epic saga with different emphases, so different authors narrate different histories of the theatre” (Making of Theatre History, p. xii). 9. See Jörn Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), p. 71. 10. An overview and discussion of these directions in research is given in Alf Lüdtke, ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1989); and in Franz Josef Brüggemeier and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Geschichte von unten — Geschichte von innen: Kontroversen um die Alltagsgeschichte (Hagen: Fernuniv., 1985). Theatre history has also already discovered this approach to historiography for itself. Thus, Inge Buck writes, in the foreword to her (1988) new edition of the Lebenserinnerungen der Komödiantin Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld 1745–1815, that this autobiography represents “a theatre history from below” (Karolina Schulze-Kummerfeld, Ein fahrendes Frauenzimmer: Die Lebenserinnerungen der Komödiantin Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld 1745– 1815, ed. Inge Buck [Berlin, 1988]). The starting point of her writing was, for Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld, “her individual perspective on the everyday life of the traveling companies, on the theatre of her time, on people, places, and events that she literally experienced.” 11. See Gisela Bock, “Geschichte, Frauengeschichte, Geschlechtergeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 14 (1988): 364–91; Karin Hausen and Heide Wunder, eds., Frauengeschichte — Geschlechtergeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992); Ute Frevert, “Frauengeschichte — Männergeschichte — Geschlechtergeschichte,” in Lynn Blattmann et al., eds., Feministische Perspektiven

some critical remarks on theatre historiography 15

in der Wissenschaft (Zurich: Verl. der Fachvereine, 1993), pp. 23–40; Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19 (1994): 368–404. 12. See Hans Süssmuth, ed., Historische Anthropologie. Der Mensch in der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1984); Thomas Sokoll, “Kulturanthropologie und Historische Sozialwissenschaft,” in Thomas Mergel and Thomas Welskopp, eds., Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997), pp. 233–72. 13. The most important approaches are discussed in Ulrich Raulff, ed., Mentalitäten-Geschichte: Zur historischen Rekonstruktion geistiger Prozesse (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1987); see also Volker Sellin, “Mentalitaet und Mentalitätsgeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 241 (1985): 555–98. 14. See, for example, Peter Gay, The Tender Passion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988); Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 15. See Philipp Sarazin, “Subjekte, Diskurse, Körper. Überlegungen zu einer diskursanalytischen Kulturgeschichte,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig and HansUlrich Wehler, eds., Kulturgeschichte Heute (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1996), pp. 131–64; Joan Wallach Scott, “On Language, Gender, and WorkingClass History,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 53–67. 16. Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn, p. 70. 17. See ibid., p. 72; as well as Dieter Groh, “Postinstrumentelle Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Jörn Rüsen, Eberhard Lämmert, and Peter Glotz, eds., Die Zukunft der Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 115–21. 18. Peter Schöttler, “Mentalitäten, Ideologien Diskurse: Zur sozialgeschichtlichen Thematisierung der ‘dritten Ebene.’” in Alf Lüdtke, ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1989), pp. 85–136, 85. 19. Johann Friedrich Löwen, Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (1766; edited by Heinrich Stümcke, Berlin: Frensdorff, 1905); Johann Friedrich Schütze, Hamburger Theatergeschichte (Hamburg, 1794; facsimile edition by the East German Zentralantiquariat, Leipzig, 1975). 20. Eduard Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Weber, 1848); Elisabeth Mentzel, Geschichte der Schauspielkunst in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main: Völcker, 1882). 21. This charge naturally excludes those theatre histories that are explicitly designed as collections of facts or documents.

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22. See, above all, Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A McConachie, eds., Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989); Erika Fischer-Lichte, ed., TheaterAvantgarde: Wahrnehmung — Körper — Sprache (Tübingen: Francke, 1995); Erika FischerLichte, ed., Theater seit den sechziger Jahren: Grenzgänge der Neo-Avantgarde (Tübingen: Francke, 1998); Stefan Hulfeld, “Montaigne als Chronist kulturgenerierender Widersprueche,” in Theaterwissenschaftliche Beiträge 2002, Theater der Zeit, pp. 27–31; Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, eds., Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo (Torino: G. Einaudi, 2000–). 23. Niklas Luhmann, “Das Problem der Epochenbildung und der Evolutionstheorie,” in Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and Ursula Link-Heer, eds., Epochenschwelle und Epochenstrukturen im Diskurs der Literatur- und Sprachhistorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 11–33. On the problem of distinguishing epochs see also my Kurze Geschichte des Deutschen Theaters, as well as vol. 12 of Reinhart Herzog and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Poetik und Hermeneutik: Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewußtsein (Munich: W. Fink, 1987). 24. In this context, see, above all, Dietrich Steinbeck, Einleitung in die Theorie und Systematik der Theaterwissenschaft (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970); as well as Erika Fischer-Lichte, Semiotics of Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), and “Theatre Historiography and Performance Analysis: Different Fields — Common Approaches?” Assaph 10 (1994): 99–112.

2 On Writing National Theatre Histories s. e. wilmer

T

he writing of history always involves decisions about what to include and what to exclude. In considering how to write national theatre histories, it is useful to examine the process of selection and assess the impact of such decisions on past theatre histories. In order to do this, I will investigate problems of selection according to four important categories — geography, language, ethnicity, and aesthetics — and provide illustrations from Ireland and a few other countries (mainly in Europe and North America) to exemplify the problems.

Geography What constitutes the geographical boundaries of the nation often poses a problem for the theatre historian. This problem is particularly applicable to theatre histories about nation-states whose borders have frequently changed, such as Slovenia, Germany, and Poland. For example, Heinz Kindermann divided his volumes on European theatre history into national sections, but he treated Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia as separate nations rather than as part of the nation-state of Yugoslavia that was created after the First World War.1 In the case of Germany, the concept of what constitutes Germany has changed many times over the centuries. A historian would need to decide whether to use today’s borders retrospectively or some other fixed borders (or changing borders over time) as the relevant territory for a national theatre history and, for example, whether to include Austria. Likewise, Poland, because of its numerous partitions and frequently shifting boundaries (with important theatre cities such as Wroclaw [Breslau], Kraków, and Poznan oscillating between Polish and German-speaking governments), creates unusual geographical difficulties for the national historian. Such difficulties can be resolved either by using the borders at the time of writing 17

18 on writing national theatre histories

or by imagining some ideal geographical borders of the nation2 and perhaps regarding such borders as predetermined (the nation’s destiny). Alternatively the theatre historian can ignore geographical borders by using the linguistic criterion of the dominant language of a nation, but as I will show presently, this approach equally has its difficulties. The historian also has to decide how much to emphasize theatrical activities within the theatre capital as opposed to the regions. (In most countries the theatre capital is also the political capital — Helsinki, Paris, Dublin, London, etc. — but in some countries, the theatre capital lies elsewhere, e.g., New York and Amsterdam. However, in some countries, such as Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany, for historical or political reasons, the theatre infrastructure in the state is more decentralized and there is arguably no theatre capital.)3 National theatre historians generally emphasize the main theatre city (in nations with a centralized theatre system) and regard the activities outside the theatre capital as of minor interest or of no interest at all. Similarly, national theatre historians usually privilege the work of the National Theatre (in countries with such an institution) as the main exponent of theatrical expression within the nation, especially for nationstates emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irish theatre histories, for example, virtually ignore the work of popular theatres in Dublin at the turn of the century, such as the Gaiety, the Olympia, the Queens, and the Theatre Royal, and concentrate almost exclusively on the work of the National Theatre. Normally situated in a major edifice with an impressive façade in a prominent position in the capital city,4 the National Theatre has taken on the role of representing the national culture, even when in many cases the nation was not yet an independent nation-state (e.g., Ireland, Bohemia, Finland, and Norway). Thus, regardless of whether they were producing the most innovative or popular or professional work, the National Theatres, such as the National Theatres in Dublin, Prague, Helsinki, and Bergen, have been part of the national(ist) apparatus to establish a hegemonic interpretation and appreciation of the nation. The work of these theatres is related ideologically to the project of cultural nationalism, and, by emphasizing their productions, national theatre histories have tended to reinforce the dominant ideology of the nationalist movement or the state.5 Another geographical problem is whether to try to fix the theatre personnel within the country as national figures or regard the territorial borders as porous and the personnel as transnational. Cross-border traffic

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confuses the sense of national identity and national sovereignty. National theatre histories have helped strengthen national borders by simulating a national fortress of artistic activity despite the fact that writers, directors, designers, and performers have frequently crossed those borders.6 Because artists do not stay in one place, national theatre histories can seem somewhat arbitrary in what they include or exclude. This is an especially pertinent issue for an Irish theatre historian. Most of the significant dramatists mentioned in Christopher FitzSimon’s Irish Theatre, for instance, spent more time outside the geographical borders of present-day Ireland than within them. Thus, William Congreve, George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Dion Bouciault, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, and Samuel Beckett lived much, if not most, of their life abroad. But for the purposes of this national theatre history, they are considered Irish. More recently, Martin McDonagh (author of The Beauty Queen of Leenane) created similar problems for theatre historians and critics in that he grew up in London and only visited Ireland occasionally. But because his parents are Irish and his plays are about Ireland and are regularly produced in Ireland, McDonagh is included in the recent A History of Irish Theatre: 1601–2000 by Christopher Morash.7 Similarly, theatre historians have to decide whether to feature work that has been imported from abroad, such as touring theatre, or concentrate on domestically produced theatre. Generally, national theatre historians look for the connections between different generations of national artists (rather than their transnational links) to show the continuity in national themes and discourse and the links with other national artistic work. As an extreme case, Greek national theatre history, following the strategy of nineteenth-century national historians who wished to assert a distinct Greek national identity for the new nation-state despite centuries of subjection to the Ottoman empire, has jumped over two thousand years of Byzantine and Ottoman history to emphasize the links between ancient and modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) Greek theatre.8

Language Some national theatre historians have privileged linguistic over geographical borders. For example, Robert Erenstein’s Theatre History of the Low Countries is a history of theatre in the Netherlands and Belgium in

20 on writing national theatre histories

the Dutch/Flemish language, thereby ignoring the Belgian-Dutch national boundary.9 This makes sense because of the tradition of drama being language-bound and therefore operating within a linguistically common area. However, one could also infer that Erenstein, who has referred to his study as a national theatre history, was presenting the nation as a linguistic entity and that the borders between the nation-states that were created in the early nineteenth century (when Belgium became a separate state from the Netherlands) do not coincide with the borders of the nation. In the late eighteenth century, Johann von Herder developed a theory of the organic growth of the nation, its language, and its volksgeist (national spirit), as something distinct and unique as the result of its environment and history and in need of cultivation and development by the people of the nation.10 His emphasis on a single language as being a prime characteristic of nationality — a “national language in every nation”11 — promoted the idea that a nation, and hence a nation-state, should speak in one language, and this idea helps justify Erenstein’s approach. However, in virtually every country with a theatrical tradition, theatre has been performed in more than one language. The historian has to choose which language or languages to include in creating a record of performances or an inventory of play texts and whether to give exclusive or partisan attention to the dominant or official national language or whether to document performances in minority (or nonhegemonic) languages. The theatrical events that are performed in the dominant language have been given greater importance in national theatre histories. For example, Slovenian theatre historians have written only about theatre in the Slovenian language and ignored German-speaking theatre in Slovenia, which was the majority form when Slovenia was part of the Austrian empire.12 Of course, some theatrical forms are not language based, such as dance and mime, and others are regularly performed in foreign languages, such as opera. Also, though we tend to think of drama as monolingual (with notable exceptions such as Sanskrit, South African, and Chicano plays), European Union (EU) funding bodies have recently encouraged European integration by subsidizing multilingual theatrical works. The language issue is particularly pertinent in the United States, which in the nineteenth century projected the image of a united and

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monolingual culture into which immigrants should assimilate.13 The American theatre historian has to decide whether to include the long tradition of immigrant theatre in languages as diverse as Chinese, Japanese, German, Yiddish, Finnish, Spanish, and Polish, not to mention Native American performances. Many American theatre histories have concentrated on English-language productions and have conveyed the impression that most, if not all, theatre expression occurred in that language, but some have deliberately addressed the vast array of such non-English-speaking work (e.g., Maxine Seller’s Ethnic Theatre in the United States14). In countries with more than one official language (such as Belgium, Finland, Switzerland, and Canada), theatre historians are faced with a different problem: the contradiction between conventional notions of a monolingual national identity and the reality of a multilingual governmental policy. In these countries, theatre historians have written about the theatrical activities of one language group, with only occasional acknowledgment of the existence of a quite separate theatrical tradition within the country in one or more other national languages. In Belgium, this occurred because of a de facto policy of cultural apartheid that made it appropriate to deal with language groups and their theatre traditions separately because the artists and the audience tended to be confined to one language group or the other. In Finland the problem is different from the one in Belgium in that the audience (and to some extent the artists, especially the directors and designers) cross language barriers. Nevertheless, Finnish theatre historians wrote separate theatre histories for each official language — Swedish and Finnish. In Switzerland, however, with four official languages — French, German, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romanic — a new national theatre history project is being developed by Andreas Kotte, which is covering work in all these languages. In Canada separate theatre histories have been written of the French-speaking and the English-speaking theatres, but immigrant (such as Ukrainian) theatre and Native American theatre have largely been ignored until very recently.15 An interesting anomaly is that national theatres in countries with more than one official language normally use only one language. The Abbey Theatre in Ireland was exceptional in that actors, according to their contracts, had to speak both Irish and English on the same stage (until permanent contracts were phased out in the 1980s). The Belgian National

22 on writing national theatre histories

Theatre, which was established in Brussels after the Second World War, was also unusual, with two separate companies, one French-speaking and the other Flemish-speaking, and with very little communication between the personnel of the two companies. In a sense, the Belgian National Theatre provided a microcosm of a divided nation (or two separate nations) rather than a unified nation.16 The decision to focus on a single language in writing theatre histories of countries with more than one official language may have been part of a conscious or unconscious project to assert the greater importance of one linguistic tradition over another, or to assert or defend the importance of a national language that was endangered or that had been suppressed in the past. In any case it helped solidify linguistic borders between the linguistic groups within the nation by creating the impression of “our” as opposed to “their” history, conveying the history in the language of the linguistic group that was being represented (especially when that language might not be understood by potential readers from a different linguistic group within the same nation-state). An interesting recent departure from a national to a transnational approach to U.S. theatre history is The History of North American Theatre by Felicia Londré and Daniel Wattermeier that begins with the preColumbian Native American tradition of theatrical performance, followed by an examination of the theatre in the Spanish, French, and English colonies of North America.17 One of its virtues is that it covers theatre in three languages: Spanish, French, and English. Unfortunately, after the first couple of chapters, this study develops into three separate national theatre histories: Mexico, Canada, and the United States, rather than attempting to investigate the overlapping theatre and performance cultures between the nation-states, especially the Spanish-speaking theatre on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States and the Native American theatre in all three countries.

Ethnicity In addition to geography and language, historians are faced with the choice of which ethnic groups to feature in a national theatre history. As mentioned earlier, the United States has a rich history of theatre productions by a variety of ethnic groups in English and other languages.

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For the American theatre historian, the choice of which of these groups to include or exclude has political implications. For example, it is unlikely that a theatre historian today would exclude African American theatre from the history of United States theatre (though it was quite often done before the civil rights movement). Similarly, Native American theatre and performance is of increased interest. As in many other countries, autochthonous performance traditions have been studied by anthropologists and ethnologists, but largely as a result of the development of performance studies and ethnic studies as well as the increased visibility and political clout of such groups as Native Americans, more theatre historians have included the song and dance traditions of indigenous peoples. In Europe the notion of a nation as a group of people with a common ethnicity and language is still pervasive. In Ireland, nineteenthcentury nationalists fostered the belief that the Irish were a distinct and homogeneous Celtic people, and this has informed much of the writing about the nation since then. Irish theatre historians have to decide how visible to make the British or to what extent to frame their histories as records of the contributions of Irish artists. Because of the importance of the distinction that is drawn between the Irish and the British, the role of the Anglo-Irish or Protestant ascendancy is problematic. W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Annie Horniman, and J. M. Synge belonged to a separate religious and social group from that of the actors in the Fay brothers’ acting company, which later made up the core group of performers in the Abbey Theatre. An argument could be made that the National Theatre was originated and initially run by people who were as much part of British society as Irish society. Another problem is that theatre was not an indigenous art form in Ireland but was imported by the British, and drama was apparently not performed in the Irish language before 1890. Thus, a theatre historian dealing with the period before this time has the difficulty of explaining the relationship between British and Irish theatre. Equally, the historian has to decide whether to stress the nationally generated rather than the colonial elements in theatre, especially as Ireland was part of Britain at the time. In other words, the historian needs to determine what is important and unique in Ireland’s cultural past and to assess the extent to which Ireland has been separate culturally, politically, and ethnically from Britain and the rest of Europe.

24 on writing national theatre histories

Aesthetics Theatre historians also need to make aesthetic choices about what kinds of works and performance events to include and exclude in any national history of theatre. For example, should they (1) concentrate on dramatic literature or theatre performance; (2) feature opera; (3) consider dance, from classical ballet to folk dance; (4) survey various kinds of musical genres and performance modes; (5) discuss puppetry; (6) focus on professional as opposed to amateur work; (7) privilege serious rather than comic or melodramatic forms; (8) emphasize domestically originated rather than imported work; (9) apply a narrow or a broad definition of theatre performance; and (10) set the theatre history within a narrow disciplinary framework or within wider parameters such as social history, cultural history, or a history of the arts. Some theatre historians choose to emphasize dramatic literature rather than performance. National theatre histories written in the emergent nations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries highlighted and helped canonize historical and folk drama, as it was considered more worthy of discussion and examination. Early Irish theatre histories ignored, for example, more popular (“low culture”) genres such as farce and melodrama (other than those by Dion Boucicault). Similarly, the work of female playwrights was neglected. However, since the 1960s, scholars have shown greater interest in popular culture and women’s writing. Generally, national theatre histories (e.g., in Ireland, Finland, and Slovenia) have privileged professional rather than amateur performance. The danger of such a selection is that it further marginalizes the already marginal cultures in society that cannot afford to produce their work professionally. It also minimizes certain kinds of work that are important indicators of social and political history. Such work has often been unearthed with great difficulty (because it has been ignored by theatre historians), especially plays that have been written for specific groups in society (e.g., suffragist, religious, working-class, and minority ethnic theatre). Furthermore, the importation of plays from other countries (in the form of adaptations or translations or in the original language) is often excluded from theatre histories even though foreign plays may have outnumbered domestic plays. In Irish theatre histories, productions of

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foreign plays have been given far less importance than indigenous writing, although during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries British and American plays have been a major part of the repertory in Irish theatres. Irish theatre histories helped to affirm and reinforce a canon of national dramatic literature, which was written in the idiom of the home country about local (particularly rural) characters and situations. In the early days, the canon of dramatic literature in Ireland (as in other emergent European nations) included plays about mythological, legendary, and historical characters. Along with novels, short stories, and poetry, the dramatic canon enhanced the sense of a distinct national cultural heritage and national spirit (or volksgeist). In the theatre histories of emergent nations in Europe, the tendency has been for the theatre historian to show the theatre as playing a vital role in the context of the national awakening process associated with the nationalist movement. Just as the Slovene, Czech, or Finnish theatre historian focused on the work of their National Theatres, the Irish theatre historian concentrated on the Abbey Theatre as an organization creating national images and national characters as opposed to performing translations of foreign plays (such as those by Lady Gregory). Similarly, the Polish theatre historian Kazimierz Braun has argued that theatre helped keep the Polish nation together after it had been divided between Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg empire in the eighteenth century, partly through the network of public theatres using Polish that were founded during this period (in Warsaw, 1765; Kraków, 1772; Lwów, 1774; Vilnius, 1782; and Pozna´ n, 1783).18 The National Romantic movement, which developed in Germany in the early nineteenth century and spread throughout much of Europe, emphasized a particular aesthetic approach, and its influence can still be felt today. Bruce King has observed that Nationalism is an urban movement which identifies with the rural areas as a source of authenticity, finding in the “folk” the attitudes, beliefs, customs and language to create a sense of national unity among people who have other loyalties. . . . Nationalist movements attempt to define a “little tradition” of the folk or the past which will serve as a basis for a mass culture. Images of a noble past will be used to overcome a modern sense of fragmentation and loss of identity.19

26 on writing national theatre histories

The national canon often included (and may continue to include) early plays about historical or legendary figures engaged in the nationbuilding or national liberation process (such as William Tell in Switzerland, Joan of Arc in France, Libushe in the Czech Republic, and Boris Godunov in Russia.) Likewise, the canon often features mythological and folkloric tales from local cultures (such as the Kalevala in Finland, The Táin in Ireland, and the Norse epics in Scandinavia and Germany). National theatre histories regularly highlight such plays that created national protagonists who represent certain ideological ideals relating to national identity. Ironically, they also feature dramas about antiheroes that sometimes caused controversy when they first appeared in print or on the stage (for example Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt). Often such plays have been sanitized in stage productions. Consequently, the folk characters have often become lovable, endearing national figures, in spite of their roguish or amoral behavior and the author’s implicit attack on prevailing notions of national identity. National theatre historians have had to choose whether to investigate these controversies and the images represented on stage that did not accord with nationalist sensibilities (such as the sexually aggressive female like Pegeen Mike or the Widow Quinn, for example, of Synge’s plays) or simply celebrate the national characteristics of the plays, despite the fact that these plays had often been written in an antinationalistic spirit. In conclusion, the task of writing any national theatre history involves complex choices concerning geography, language, ethnicity, and aesthetics. One of the greatest challenges for national theatre historians is to recognize and understand the ideologies and assumptions that influence their choices and to clarify to their readers the reasons for these choices. notes Parts of this chapter originally appeared in “Reifying Imagined Communities: Nationalism, Post-colonialism and Theatre Historiography,” Nordic Theatre Studies 12 (1999): 94–103. 1. Heinz Kindermann, Theatergeschichte Europas (Salzburg: O. Müller, 1957– 74). 2. For example, one might include both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland for an Irish theatre history.

s. e. wilmer 27

3. See S. E. Wilmer, “Decentralisation and Cultural Democracy,” in H. van Maanen and S. E. Wilmer, eds., Theatre Worlds in Motion: Structures, Politics and Developments in the Countries of Western Europe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 17–36. 4. See Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). I have capitalized National Theatre when referring to the particular building or theatre company that is called a National Theatre. 5. Particularly since the 1970s, national governments in western Europe have promoted the decentralization of their national theatre infrastructures while preserving a privileged position for their National Theatres. See Wilmer, “Decentralisation,” pp. 17–36. 6. In the early part of the nineteenth century, touring theatre groups traveled widely. For example, many German-language theatre companies performed across Europe, while foreign-language (Italian and French) companies performed in Berlin. See Paul Ulrich, “Pankratius Brüller’s Legacy: The Prompter in the 19th Century German Theatre and the Importance of His Journals for the Theatre Historian,” paper presented at FIRT World Congress, Canterbury, 1998. 7. Christopher FitzSimon, The Irish Theatre (London: Thames & Hudson, 1983); Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (London: Methuen Drama in association with the Royal Court Theatre, 1996); Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre: 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8. I am grateful for this observation to Dr. Platon Mavromoustakos, who is currently editing the second volume of the History of the Modern Greek Theatre (1794–1944) [Historia tou neou ellinikou theatrou (1794–1994)] by Yannis Sideris (Athens: Kastaniotis Editions, 1990–). The links between ancient and modern Greek literature have also been highlighted in national literary criticism and in the work of national poets. See, for example, David Ricks, The Shade of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 9–10. 9. Robert Erenstein, Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden: Tien eeuwen drama en theater in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). 10. See, for example, his “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 65–164. Other intellectuals also fostered the notion that nations were homogeneous communities with unifying languages. See Simon James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? (London: British Museum Press, 1999), pp. 51–53.

28 on writing national theatre histories

11. Herder, Philosophical Writings, p. 150. 12. See chapter 5. 13. John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith have referred to the “English and American (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) tendency to reserve the term nation for themselves and ethnic for immigrant peoples” as a subtle way of identifying “us” and “them” (Ethnicity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 5). Though Hutchinson and Smith do not mention this, “them” would also include African Americans and Native Americans (although the former were brought to America as slaves and the latter held a prior claim to the territory of the nation). 14. Maxine Schwartz Seller, Ethnic Theatre in the Unites States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). 15. See chapter 7. 16. See chapter 6. 17. Felicia Londré and Daniel Wattermeier, The History of North American Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico: From Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1998). 18. Kazimierz Braun, A Concise History of Polish Theater from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Centuries (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003). 19. Bruce King, The New English Literatures (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 42.

3 Theatre Historiography General Problems, Swedish Perspectives willmar sauter

W

hen does a national theatre history start? One possible answer would be that it occurs right from the moment when it is written down. As we all know, history does not start from the beginning, since history is always seen retrospectively. When we look forward, we can speak of the future and of the things we want to do or expect to happen. When we think of what we have been doing or what has happened, we call it history. Thus the position from which we regard either the future or history is the same: the present. The crucial question is what we want to look at, be it forward or backward. Our contemporary view decides what we will discover in the past. The metaproblem of writing national theatre histories is, therefore, a concern for how we constitute this history, not simply a matter of when it happened. In this essay I will discuss national historiography from four general perspectives. These perspectives will not offer new theories, but test some possible applications. First, I will consider what makes theatre historians start their accounts from different points of time, although they all attempt to start from the very beginning. What is their concept of theatre and how does it affect their idea of history? This issue is deeply related to the problems of theatre theory and thus involves questions of the nature of not only the theatrical event, but what I call the Playing Culture.1 The second issue concerns the continuity of theatrical history. Does the history of theatre constitute an unbroken line, even when no traces of theatre can be found? Traditionally, historians try to establish the chronology, which shows some kind of direction, some development from point A to point B. But what if there are large gaps in the historical evidence? Then historians either ignore the absences or struggle with the problem of what occurred during the gaps. A third aspect, and one of vital interest in the writing of national 29

30 theatre historiography: swedish perspectives

theatre history, is of course the question of what is a nation. Is it defined by national borders or is it an intellectual concept, promoted during certain periods of time? The definitional and analytical negotiations that we make between and among the concepts of nation, national, and nationalistic, on the one hand, and folklore, preservation, and cultural identity, on the other, are critical aspects of our understanding of human communities, classes, ethnic groups, racial categories, and gender designations. Last but not least, I will discuss a key aspect of the establishment of the tradition in modern Swedish theatre history that privileges the director as the auteur of the theatrical event. What is the genesis of this professional tradition, what is its purpose in the historical event, and what is its significance as regards the ways in which the historian constitutes and understands the performance event? Just as importantly, who disappears from today’s historical records and narratives? What happens to our perspective on the other artists who contribute to theatrical events? Some of these issues might prove to be particularly Swedish, but it is my feeling that most will apply to many other countries or even to the writing of national histories in general. When considering these topics of theatre historiography, it might be noted that the Swedish examples are presented here in chronological order. Such an order is, of course, never accidental, and I am aware of the manipulative character of my presentation. It is part of the metaproblem of writing history.

Playing Culture and Theatrical Events Outside of Skogstorp near the city of Eskilstuna, about 150 miles west of Stockholm, archaeologists have found a number of magnificent clay axes and bronze shields in a cultivated field. They date from about 1300 BCE and belong to elaborately designed and excellently preserved species of bronze materials which have been found in a number of archaeological sites around Sweden. These wonderful art works were buried in a place that was still a lake three thousand years ago.2 Archaeologists know that these axes and shields were not lost during a battle on water, for they were worthless as weapons — thin, soft material that would not have given protection against a wooden stick. Yet they were beautifully decorated with figures and symbols. The bronze material was not manufactured in Scandinavia, but imported

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from the Mediterranean area. Close to the site of these findings, the topography forms a semicircular elevation, three to four meters high, looking very much like a natural amphitheatre for an audience of some hundred people. From this location the entire community could follow the sacrifice of these most precious gifts. Rock carvings from various places around Sweden can be used to complete our imagination of what might have been going on here long ago. Most of these rock carvings consist of a huge number of symbolic figures, and very often they contain human beings. A close analysis informs today’s observer that many of these human figures are in motion. They move in a procession with raised arms, twirling so that their hair is swept from their heads, as they dance with sticks. The movements of the carved figures are often coordinated, and many of them are clearly wearing masks. Archaeologists usually relate these figures to religious practices: funerals, sacrifices, fertility rites, and other ceremonies. However, theatre historians have usually neglected this kind of prehistoric evidence. Although these archaeological findings are more pictorially detailed than most medieval scripts, they were not included in theatre history because they were not defined as representing theatre. The question here is consequently not a problem of evidence, but one of definition. Clearly, the conception of what constitutes theatre depends, in great measure, upon how theatre historians construct the evidence. An examination of the few existing historical overviews of Scandinavian theatre reveals that most scholars depart from a well-defined idea of theatre: they speak of theatre when actors represent given roles, which, first and foremost, require a dramatic dialogue. The earliest written dialogues were put on parchment during the thirteenth century, reason enough for some scholars to fix the beginning of Scandinavian theatre in the High Middle Ages. Whatever happened prior to that period is excluded from the history of legitimate theatre, not because of the lack of documents, but because of a narrow view of what constitutes theatrical activities.3 Theatre has been perceived as part of the Written Culture, which has dominated Scandinavian as well as other European scholarship. The focus is on stage activities only, and these activities are, in turn, seen as an execution of written dramatic dialogues. In contrast to this traditional concept of theatre, an openminded and unorthodox perspective on the theatrical event will broaden our view of theatre history. Such an event-oriented approach

32 theatre historiography: swedish perspectives

places theatre within the framework of Playing Culture, which far exceeds the narrow outlook on theatrical activities that Written Culture necessitates. Playing Culture includes all types of public performances, no matter whether their main purpose has religious, aesthetic, educational, or competitive implications. Playing Culture is characterized by close bonds between performers and spectators, be it in ancient rituals, carnival processions, or today’s football crowds. Both players and audience are aware of the rules that govern the expressions of Playing Culture. These rules are, however, rarely put down in writing, but are usually transferred through tacit knowledge, a learning-by-doing concept that applies to a wide variety of rituals, plays, and games. The same is true of cultural performances,4 which to a large extent express group identities. In addition, Playing Culture is difficult to control. Regardless of the intentions of the originators of a cultural event, it might be experienced as a celebratory occasion or as a subversive activity.5 Theatre scholars have rarely started from Playing Culture as the foundation of theatrical events.6 Even in anthropologically framed introductions to theatre histories, religious rites, masked dances, shamanist appearances, or popular mummeries are described as merely precursors of theatre. They are usually illustrated through practices from Black Africa, American Indians, or Balinese temples, implicitly degrading them as a primitive stage in human development. The same approach is, however, not used to present actual prehistoric evidence, in spite of its status as theatre or pretheatre.7 The consequent application of the concept of Playing Culture to the history of theatre would convert the question of a beginning of history to the problem of how to interpret the available material. For the history of Swedish theatre, the following sketch of its early phase could be suggested. The worshipping processions that decorate the coffins from the early Bronze Age, about two thousand years BCE, are the first signs of theatrical events, although their religious significance is still debated. The rock carvings and the Bronze Age shields have already been described. The shift from celebrating the sun to worshipping the earth in the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age produced new rituals and new forms of entertaining the gods as well as fellow humans. The ancient songs of the Edda are now traced back to the eighth century CE, although they were not documented in written form until five hundred

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years later. In the meantime they were certainly presented orally to please old and young Vikings. The rituals of the blôt celebrations in Uppsala were described by Tietmar von Merseburg and Adam von Bremen during the eleventh century. Both depended probably more on rumors than personal observations, but despite the questionable information in these reports, they confirm a theatrical kind of performative event that the Vikings staged to serve their gods. This all happened long before Christianity was introduced to Scandinavia, and there are good reasons to believe that these practices continued far into the Middle Ages, even though new liturgies and new forms of dancing and playing were established alongside the traditional cults. Despite a palimpsest containing a liturgical drama, chalk paintings in churches depicting the Three Marys, a law text prescribing the treatment of players before court, and Snorri Sturlason’s edition of the poetic Edda — the oldest known version of it — the material pertaining to the medieval theatre in Sweden is scarce. We know of no major mystery plays, nor are there any traces of morality plays. The sources are even fragmentary in relation to profane theatrical activities. There is more evidence about folk dancing and popular games than on extant play texts. Thus, the scholar of medieval theatre practices in Sweden needs a broad knowledge of what had been fashionable in other parts of Europe to be able to draw conclusions from the occasional hints which various registers and artifacts nevertheless provide. Even in a wider perspective on theatre as event, the problem of inadequate and missing evidence continues to trouble researchers who deal with postmedieval periods.

Discontinuity and Development Gustav Vasa, founding monarch of modern Sweden, established a Renaissance court in Stockholm, but he and his sons, who succeeded each other on the throne until 1611, were not overly interested in regular theatre. To discover the taste of these monarchs for spectacle and theatricality, one has to turn to their crowning ceremonies, their festive entrances into cities, and their occasional carnivals. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some English traveling players appeared in Sweden, and after the turn of the century, humanist school comedies were written and produced. Of the humanist teachers who wrote and staged school dramas,

34 theatre historiography: swedish perspectives

the most prolific was Johannes Messenius at Uppsala University, where his students performed his Disa in 1611. Drawing upon what he had seen of humanist theatre during his years in central Europe, Messenius staged lavish outdoor productions for visitors to the yearly winter market in Uppsala. He took pride in letting his students perform in the Swedish language instead of Latin, which usually was employed in school comedies. But after completing a few plays, Messenius lost his academic position because of political intrigues and lawsuits in Stockholm. Neither his colleagues nor his students demonstrated similar dramatic ambitions and talents, so in the following decades few Swedish plays were presented anywhere in the country. Instead, a number of traveling troupes from Germany and Holland visited Sweden, performing whatever had been successful in other parts of Europe. In 1648 the Thirty Years War ended and the young Queen Christina celebrated the Swedish victory with extensive festivities, including a new grand ballet à entré, “The Birth of Peace.” Thus, she showed a fresh appetite for the cultural novelties of the leading countries of Europe. As the major political figure in northern Europe, she consciously imported the newest theatrical fashions to lift her own court to the level of a splendid monarchy. Queen Christina’s successors did not share her passion for court spectacles. Not until the mother of King Charles XII brought Rosidor’s troupe to Stockholm in 1699 did French theatre entertain Swedish aristocracy again. Their stay in Sweden lasted for only seven problematic years, but fifty years later, King Adolf Frederick hired French comedians to please his queen, who came from the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. During these years, however, dance was incorporated into court entertainment in the form of social dancing. This helped to maintain and develop the technical skills, which were of use when Gustav III renewed the interest in theatrical dancing. Besides the elaborate theatrical, musical, and dance activities that entertained people at court during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the country also experienced the development of various kinds of bourgeois theatrical enterprises in this period. For example, in the 1680s the students from Uppsala performed plays and skits in the socalled Lion’s Den theatre, outside the wall of the royal castle in Stockholm. And the Swedish Comedy, a company that performed politically oriented Swedish and newly translated foreign plays, successfully

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maintained a theatre that attracted paying customers between 1737 and 1754. The relationship between theatrical entertainment at court and theatre for the burghers of the Swedish cities was complicated because of a number of laws and privileges. In 1773, two years after his coup d’état, King Gustav III established the Royal Opera and fifteen years later the Royal Dramatic Theatre. These two national theatre companies have played continuously from that time until today. Even this short account of theatrical activities in Sweden during the two hundred years from the English players to the Gustavian opera provokes a number of questions. The most striking feature of this period is the continuous struggle to surmount the discontinuity of theatrical life in Sweden. Throughout all of the nineteenth century, new attempts were made to broaden theatre activities in the capital city and to offer more continuous theatrical entertainment in other cities. These ambitions were not realized satisfactorily until the end of the twentieth century. Despite the fractured picture Swedish theatre history displays, there seems to have been an ideological and stylistic development. But can we reasonably speak of a development? There were certainly major changes from the Renaissance school comedies, the baroque court spectacles, the bourgeois political comedies of the early Enlightenment, to Gustav’s own neoclassical operas. But these phases of stylistic preferences hardly ever interacted with each other. On the contrary, most inspiration came from abroad — plays, technologies, styles, management ideas, and legislation. These influences came in sideways, so to speak, from the continent, whereas the links between one period and the other are broken again and again. In this way, theatre in Sweden often remained fashionable and in vogue with the major European trends. But did it ever become Swedish? Well, in terms of products, much of the theatre in Sweden was foreign. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, productions from Paris — especially operas — were directly copied and transferred to Sweden.8 Swedish audiences were not interested in their own directors’ interpretations, but wanted to see an “original,” just as good as in Paris. But theatrical events do not consist only of the productions on stage. For the audiences were genuinely “Swedish” and the context of the events was certainly regional, whether we look at the capital city of Stockholm or at any of the provincial towns around the country. Some companies did their best to localize foreign comedies, substituting Swedish names

36 theatre historiography: swedish perspectives

for foreign ones and even adapting the plot to local environments. However, this trend did not in the least interfere with the nineteenth century’s great love for exotic milieux, which were exposed in operas and melodramas. Still, as theatrical events — including stage productions, their audiences, and the social and political context — theatre in Sweden was truly Swedish, but not necessary national. This brings me to the third perspective of this essay — the relationship between country, language, and nation.

Nation, National, Nationalist Just like when France, Austria, and Denmark had established their national theatres, the Swedish king founded national theatres and engaged personally in their management. Unlike in Sweden, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing complained at about the same time that the Germans could not build a national theatre since the Germans were not a nation. As part of their struggle for political independence, Sweden’s Nordic neighbors, Finland and Norway, attempted through much of the nineteenth century to establish national stages, including the use of their native languages. In a country like Belgium, the division of languages has long been an obstacle to uniting the nation, whereas Switzerland with its four national languages has refrained from designating a national theatre. In other words, the question of a national history is complex and particular for each individual country. By comparison with many other countries, Sweden has had a privileged position as far as nation and nationality are concerned. The present borders of the country encompass those geographical areas that have been Swedish in the linguistic and political sense since the middle of the seventeenth century. At that point in history, Sweden was larger than today, including Pomerania in Germany, the Baltic states, and Finland; the latter was under Swedish rule for six hundred years, before Russia took over in 1809. So Sweden lost regions, but these regions were “outside” of the mainland, on the other side of the Baltic Sea. Since 1905, when the Swedish king had to relinquish the Norwegian geographical area of his political domain, which then became a separate Norwegian nation, the territory of Sweden has been exclusively Swedish in the sense that all of the inhabitants speak Swedish as their first (and sometimes only) language. At least this is the public picture of Sweden, neglecting

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minorities such as the Sami people in the north, Finns in various regions, as well as a considerable number of Germans in earlier periods. Carl von Linné traveled to the so-called Lapps to study the people, not only their flowers, and sported a Lapp national costume when visiting colleagues in southern Europe. In other words, there was an early awareness of these marginalized groups in Sweden, but it had no real impact on the feeling of national unity. Only in the 1970s was the presence of immigrants recognized in terms of non-Swedish speaking ensembles, predominantly performing in Finnish. The last decades of the twentieth century saw other languages appear on stage, either in the form of foreign language ensembles or through the cooperation of Swedish groups with immigrant actors. Eventually, a national Sami theatre was established, uniting indigenous players from Sweden and Norway. Contrary to its neighboring countries Norway and Finland, the use of the national language was hardly ever a major problem for Swedish theatre. Of course, the foreign troupes visiting Sweden in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries performed in English, Dutch, and German, while the ensembles that various kings and queens brought into the country played in Italian and French. Also Sarah Bernhardt, Ernesto Rossi, and the Meininger Troupe, who came to Sweden in the late nineteenth century, used their native languages. In other words, when guests arrived, Swedes were always prepared to listen to them in foreign languages, but for their own productions they used Swedish — the only exception being Latin and Greek, which were thought to be appropriate in school comedies for educational reasons. Even Swedish theatre scholars have always considered modern Sweden as the geographical area of their studies. When writing about individual artists, it is of course interesting to note their achievements in Helsinki or Christiania — there are quite a number of actors and directors who worked in these cities — but there has never been an ambition to incorporate the Finnish or Norwegian theatre into a Swedish theatre history. Also, in relation to Denmark, Sweden has at most been a province paying taxes to the Danes, but the Danish language never intruded onto the Swedish stage. In other words, Sweden appears to have been a monolithic, monolingual entity in northern Europe. I would like to briefly point out two directions the Swedish stage took to manifest its national heritage. These are the historical drama and the folkloristic view of the past. Johannes Messenius’s play Disa

38 theatre historiography: swedish perspectives

from 1611, mentioned earlier as an example of school comedies, dealt with Swedish history or, more accurately, with the prehistoric queen Disa, who, at the time of the Trojan War, inspired her king to colonize the deserted northern parts of Sweden. Messenius intended to bring all of Swedish history on stage in fifty plays but was brutally interrupted after having written four. Disa became widely popular and was produced in numerous variations — including an opera — until the time of Gustav III. One of the major Swedish operas during Gustav’s own reign was Gustaf Vasa, a highly politicized version of the Swedish liberation from Denmark almost three hundred years prior to the war that Gustav III himself fought with the Danes. Other Swedish kings were also portrayed on the Gustavian stage and during the following century. For example August Strindberg started his career as a dramatist by engaging in Swedish history. His first play, Master Olof (1872), told the story of the Swedish reformation during the time of Gustav Vasa. Eight Strindbergian dramas on Swedish royalties were to follow, including all the monarchs mentioned in this essay. These “histories” are regularly performed on the Swedish stage until today, while only one, Erik XIV, has gained some international reputation. The tradition of writing about Swedish kings and queens continued through the twentieth century, for example, Lars Forsell’s Christina, which has also been produced as a successful opera. Lately, even Strindberg’s life has been subject to dramatization, as in P. O. Enquist’s The Night of the Tribades. How can this continued interest in Swedish history, particularly its series of glorious or pitiable monarchs, be interpreted? The foundation of most people’s understanding of history is probably laid during school years. History books in the schools have traditionally focused on the country’s kings and queens. Likewise, certain anecdotes about royalty, such as key events in the life of Gustav Vasa, are familiar to any Swede over the age of fifty. While such a narrow angle on history as the tale of fatherly monarchs might be true of many countries, Sweden has been lucky not to be involved in any of the great European wars of the last two hundred years. Nor has the country experienced any major political revolutions since the Reformation transformed Sweden in the sixteenth century. Probably this calm and rational course of history has underlined the significance of political leadership. Historical consciousness needs to be fed, and one of the public spaces where new

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impulses could be displayed was the theatre. On the Swedish stage, history was performed again and again, almost as if national identity was equal to the political lives of the country’s leaders. When I claim that no major revolutions took place in Sweden, this is, of course, a statement that can be qualified. As in most Western countries, nineteenth-century industrialization brought about significant changes, not only in the economic structure of the country but also in the lives of most families. The traditional rural patterns of yearly life cycles rapidly disintegrated when large masses of people moved into industrial centers, where working hours, housing, alcohol, and other social difficulties became huge problems. Many intellectuals saw the dissolution of peasant culture as a threatening consequence of the new lifestyles. Scholars, writers, musicians, ethnographers, and wealthy amateurs energetically went about the task of collecting and preserving the material evidence or traces of the “genuine” Swedish culture, which in their mind was located in the countryside. Strongly influenced by the Romantic notion of history and culture, they collected songs, tales, folk dances, manners and customs, and agricultural tools, and they invented local folk costumes and established museums. By wandering around the open-air museum Skansen, which represents historical Sweden en miniature, visitors to Stockholm today can still convince themselves that the Swedish past appears before them in the fruits of these collective efforts. Of course, this ambition to create history has also influenced the Swedish theatre. One of the most striking and popular examples is the musical play Värmlänningarna, set in the province Värmland in northwestern Sweden. Although the romantic plot might seem rather trivial, the gallery of rural figures, created by Fredrik August Dahlgren, provided the popular picture of country life, noteworthy for its large audiences ever since its premiere at the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1846. Andreas Randel used folk tunes and turned them into popular songs, while the ballet master of the Opera, Anders Selinder, who had collected folk dances since the 1830s, choreographed “authentic” pastoral dances. The popularity of this singspiel extended beyond the nineteenth century, and it is still performed every summer in Arvika (since 1927) and Ransäter (since 1953). The nationalist notion of a glorious past and of a lost paradise has come to substitute for political nationalism in a country that has enjoyed a strong national identity for a long time.

40 theatre historiography: swedish perspectives

So, these three aspects of Swedish theatre historiography — Playing Culture, discontinuity, and self-contained, exclusive nationality — must be confronted and understood in any attempt to write a history of Swedish theatre. And, most probably, they are also relevant to most other national theatre histories. Likewise, the fourth issue I want to mention — the privileged position of the director in the modern Swedish theatre — is also significant for any theatre historiography. This emphasis also reveals how a dominating view of contemporary theatre can become a pervasive, even defining, aspect of historical understanding.

Canonizing a Profession In February 1908 the Marble Palace at Nybroplan in Stockholm opened as the new home of the Royal Dramatic Theatre (in Swedish simply referred to as Dramaten). In the weeks before the great day, newspapers informed their readers about the interior of the building, the opening production, which was to be Strindberg’s Master Olof, and the names of the important people who would attend this festive occasion. Strindberg would certainly not be in the auditorium, since he hated crowds of this kind. There was also a little note inserted in one of the papers, in which the theatre’s management asked the audiences to refrain from “scene-applause” and instead restrict themselves to “act-applause.” This instruction, though seemingly insignificant, actually signaled the arrival of a new era in the relationship between stage and auditorium. During the nineteenth century — and probably long before that — the spectators used to honor the high points of a performance with instant applause, which normally was thought of as praising the actors. After any monologue or heightened dialogue, in which the actors were reaching an engaging crescendo, the audience broke out into a roaring response, calling the performers back on stage, bowing to the pit and to the stalls, before the performance could go on. This custom is fully comparable to the reactions of today’s opera audiences, who certainly want and need to applaud a major aria. Indeed, most opera composers, albeit with the exception of Richard Wagner, composed music to accommodate the mandatory applause. Why then did the management of the Dramaten want to get rid of these sceneapplauses?

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Obviously the management felt that the audience’s clapping in the middle of a scene disturbed the unity of the performance. One can wonder why this shift of focus occurred right at that moment and what the reasons were behind the new interest in the undisturbed flow of the performance. Several explanations are possible and necessary. First of all, the opening of the new theatre building offered an opportunity to change traditional behavior. Moreover, the Dramatic Theatre had also changed its leadership. Not only did a new managing director take office, but the entire organization was different. During the preceding decades, Dramaten had been cut off from public subsidies and had functioned as an association of actors. In 1908 the state again accepted responsibility for its “national” theatre and established a state-owned joint-stock company, with the government appointing the artistic director. The former artistic director, the popular actor Gustaf Fredriksson, chosen by his fellow actors, was not even present at the opening of the new house. The political changes seem, however, rather symbolic compared to the shift in professional choice: the new artistic leadership represented the directors, not the actors. Through the following thirty years, no actors were entrusted with the leadership of Dramaten, and when an actress finally took over the chair of the artistic director in 1938, she was harshly criticized for her management of the theatre. This is, however, a different story. At the turn of the century, naturalism — well known in Sweden through Strindberg’s preface to Miss Julie — had extended its grip on mainstream theatre. The unity of performance — the atmosphere and tension of it — must not be disturbed by clapping audiences. Strindberg himself had insisted upon this need for continuous, unbroken action in the preface and did so again when he opened his own Intimate Theatre in Stockholm in November 1907, three months before Dramaten issued its plea for restricted applauses. On a symbolic level, however, the little newspaper note stands for the increasing devaluation of the acting profession because of the rise of a new profession, the director. This change of focus occurred in parallel with the emergence of the powerful conductor of symphony orchestras and the cult of personalities such as Arturo Toscanini. The rise of the director, with its far-reaching consequences, was promoted by at least three groups within the theatrical establishment: the directors themselves, the critics, and the scholars. Looking at the bookshelves of theatre libraries or new catalogues from publishers, I am

42 theatre historiography: swedish perspectives

convinced that this represents a general problem in modern theatre historiography. In some countries some dramatists might dominate — Shakespeare, Ibsen — but modern directors are expanding their domain. I will, however, limit my discussion to the Swedish context. Quite a number of Swedish directors went to Germany, especially to Max Reinhardt’s theatres, to learn how a director held full control of every aspect of the production, including the actors’ interpretation of their parts. This caused a lot of trouble, especially with an older generation of outstanding performers. Yet at least from the 1930s onward, the directors were considered as the auteurs of theatrical “works of art,” and the actors were — as Strindberg had claimed thirty years earlier — the servants of the productions. The critics followed this trend and accepted the director as the theatrical creator and evaluated the productions accordingly. This did not mean that Sweden was lacking exceptional actors — on the contrary, some of them achieved international fame, such as Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, and Max von Sydow, and there were many others who were highly esteemed by their audiences. Nevertheless, performers were increasingly seen as second-rate artists, and theatre scholars added considerably to that perception. In 1946 Gösta M. Bergman published his dissertation on Gustaf Lagerbjelke — the first dissertation in theatre studies in Sweden. He could prove that Lagerbjelke was working in the manner of a modern director as early as the 1820s. Ironically, one of the major sources Bergman used to analyze Lagerbjelke’s directorial skills came from the mise-en-scène of a play that was never produced. Twelve years later, Bergman became the second professor of theatre studies in Stockholm, and in that position he initiated a number of projects on Swedish directors. Writing about directors became equivalent to studies of authors in literature, painters in arts, composers in music. Theatre had gotten its creator, the single artist, who could be studied and analyzed just like other art histories studied their artists. Up to today, there are numerous publications on all the major theatre directors of this country. These books cover not only contemporary directors and those who worked since the 1930s, but also an almost complete genealogy has been established back to the days of Lagerbjelke. To write about actors and other performers has not been fashionable. Actors either wrote their own memoirs, or their biographies were written by journalists, who were more interested in name-dropping

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and anecdotes than in analyses of roles or styles. There are, of course, a few exceptions,9 but by and large the acting profession has been neglected or, even worse, has been considered as less important. Theatre studies as a discipline needs to develop methodological strategies to cope with live performances, in which the actor interacts with the spectator. Although we lack notebooks and sketches of the same kind as the ones directors leave behind, scholars have to search for new ways to describe, analyze, and evaluate the work of the performer.

Privilege and Pleasure In the first part of this essay, I argued for the advantages of a theatrical conception that stresses Playing Culture and looks upon theatre as an event. I am convinced that such an approach would not only open up our perspective on early theatre history but also change our understanding of what qualifies as theatrical activity. Numerous histories of national theatre already concentrate on plays, players, directors, styles, buildings, administration, and various social and political contexts. But what is rather surprising is that most of these standard histories of theatre never get around to focusing upon the sine qua non of theatre: the actual performances and their constitutive features — the dynamic relation between performers and spectators. Every theatrical event must be understood as the interaction between stage actions and their immediate perception by the audience. This interaction occurs on different levels, which I have called the sensory, artistic, and symbolic levels of theatrical communication. It means that every spectator experiences simultaneously the performer as stage personality, as artist, and as a fictional character. The relationship between player and spectator is, however, mutual, which implies that the actors, singers, and dancers are also aware of and react to the audiences, their numbers, their mood, their concentration, and so on. This interplay not only makes every theatrical event unique, but also constitutes the eventness of theatre performances. The theatrical event, as a theoretical category, describes performance as a mutual, simultaneous encounter between stage and auditorium within the framework of playing. The eventness applies equally to contemporary and to historical theatrical events. Writing national theatre histories cannot limit itself to who did what and when. Theatre happens live and only live.10 Although we cannot

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catch the moment as such, the moments of performance are what make theatre and its history. There are a number of cruxes involved in the “excavation” of historical performances, as Thomas Postlewait has indicated,11 but these difficulties must not prevent us from conveying whatever is possible. Theatre history is a history of theatrical events, each one of them happening in a precise context including performers as well as spectators. I have suggested that the theatrical event could be analyzed from the following aspects: playing culture, cultural context, contextual theatricality, and theatrical playing.12 These terms are not proposed as a mere game of playing with words; instead, each represents an important aspect of theatre understood as an event. In the first part of this essay, I attempted to outline what a concept of playing culture might add to our national theatre histories. The cultural context, including cultural politics and economic conditions, is largely dependent on the status and values of playing culture, of which theatrical enterprises are only one part. The power structure of the cultural context, the position of groups distinguished by their ethnic, sexual, religious, or class identities, and the educational and moral values attributed to theatrical activities are all decisive ingredients of the cultural context. Legislation, struggles for public subsidies, as well as public censorship are concrete examples of the cultural context. Contextual theatricality, again, sees theatre from a structural and organizational perspective, which also includes the division into various genres and styles. In addition, contextual theatricality can be described as the place in which economic values are translated into aesthetic values. Those aesthetic values, however, only become manifest through theatrical playing, the performance which brings together players and spectators in a certain place and time. All these aspects of the theatrical event are not only some “background” material to be referred to at the beginning of a chapter, but constantly affect the theatrical universe and transform it throughout the course of history. The rapid expansion of theatre theory during the last decades has inspired new and fruitful approaches to contemporary performance. Now these theoretical advances need to be applied to theatre history. It is my firm conviction that theatre theory and theatre history need to join forces to gain a deeper understanding of the historical changes that any (national) theatre history wants to describe. The traditional histories of productions and their social “background” should be replaced by a

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conception of theatre that takes into account the entire theatrical event, including both stage and auditorium, as well as the aesthetic, structural, political, and cultural frames in which a theatrical event takes place. Theatre and its history are integral parts of a society, manifestations of its values, expressions of its desires, and records of its needs. Theatre history can provide a tightly woven picture of those values, desires, and needs which constitute the public discourse of a given society. While theatre both represents and affects the public sphere, the public also has the privilege and the pleasure to participate in the theatrical event. To grasp the universe of the theatrical event in its broadest sense is the responsibility and the possibility of theatre historians when rewriting national theatre histories. notes 1. Both of these terms, “playing culture” and “theatrical event,” are more thoroughly explored in my book The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). Playing culture as an aspect of the theatrical event derives from Gadamer’s concept of playing, as presented in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1960); English translation: Truth and Method ( London: Sheed & Ward, 1979). 2. Sweden still rises from the sea by half a meter per hundred years — ever since the weight of the ice has disappeared, which pressed down the land about ten thousand years ago. This means that the place where the shields were found was 16.5 meters beneath today’s surface. 3. Gustaf Ljunggren, Svenska dramat till slutet av det sjuttonde Ürhundradet (Lund: Gleerups, 1864), traced Swedish theatre history back to the dialogues of the Edda songs. Authors who wrote their accounts later confined themselves to the post-Gustavian period — Nils Personne, Svensk teater under det Gustavianska tidehvarfvet, jämte en Överblick på dess tidigare öden (Stockholm: Wahlström och Widstrand, 1913); and Georg Nordensvan, Svensk teater och svenska skådespelare från Gustav III till våra dagar (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1918). Frederik M. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, A History of Scandinavian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), mention some shrove tide festivals but place the beginning of Scandinavian theatre firmly in the High Middle Ages. 4. In the sense of the term that was established by Milton Singer, Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959). 5. Bakhtin has clearly demonstrated the subversive elements in popular culture. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais och skattets histora: Francois Rabeleis’ verk och den

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folkliga kulturen under medeltiden och renässansen (Russian original, 1965; Göteborg: Anthropos, 1986). 6. Richard Schechner, “A New Paradigm for ‘Performance’ in the Academy,” TDR 36, no. 4 (1992), has emphasized the necessity to widen the concept of theatre to include all kinds of performances. His concept is similar to what “Playing Culture” would embrace, but Schechner is not concerned with the presence of the audience as part of his concept. 7. An exception is Janne Risum, who writes four pages on “Rituals from the Stone Age to the Vikings” in her contribution to a recent Danish theatre history, Kela Kvam, Janne Risum, and Jytte Wiingaard, eds., Dansk teaterhistorie, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1992). 8. The score, including mise-en-scène, sketches of stage decorations, costumes, and other practical information, could be bought as a package and was extensively used at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm throughout the nineteenth century. Cf. today’s conditions for staging, e.g., The Phantom of the Opera. 9. There are a few attempts to focus on the actor, such as Inga Lewenhaupt, Signe Hebbe (1837–1925): Skådespelerska, operasångerska, pedagog (Stockholm: Theatron, 1988); and Marika V. Lagercrantz, Den andra rollen: Ett fältarbete bland skådespelare, regissörer och roller (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1995). Internationally, I would like to point out two pioneering works (among others): Max Herrmann, Die Entstehung der berufsmässigen Schauspielkunst im Altertum und in der Neuzeit, ed. Ruth Mövius (Berlin: Henschel, 1962); and Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985). 10. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), questions the notion of “liveness” as an ontological characteristic of theatre, while Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetische Erfahrung: Das Semiotische und das Performative (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2001), has shown that Auslander deals with technology rather than with ontology. 11. See Thomas Postlewait, “Historiography and the Theatrical Event: A Primer with Twelve Cruxes,” Theatre Journal 43 (1991): 157–78. 12. These aspects of the theatrical event are further explained in my introduction to Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames, ed. Vicki Cremona et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).

4 Recovering Repressed Memories Writing Russian Theatre History laurence senelick

W

hen glasnost became the official policy of an arteriosclerotic Soviet Union, one of the first manifestations of this new openness bore the evocative name Memorial. A grassroots movement launched in 1987 with the aim of recovering and rehabilitating the names of the millions who perished in Soviet prisons and labor camps, it strove to bring to light suppressed information of past evil, not only to honor the dead, but also to prevent such things occurring in the future. Memorial was permeated by a sense of mission, a moral imperative to exhume the truth and display it to the eyes of its compatriots, whatever feelings of shame, outrage, denial, or shock might ensue. During Gorbachev’s time in office, interest in the past grew, as young and not-so-young activists in the Soviet underground realized, almost instinctively, that only the whole truth about the past would allow for some sort of normal future. Earlier, any acknowledgment by the apparat of the extremes of terror had been a damage-control operation, intended to cover up the truth and prevent disclosure. The population had been deeply traumatized by tortures, show trials, mass deportations, slave labor, countless betrayals; the society lived in fear of the ugly truth about itself, of executioners who became victims and victims who became executioners idolizing their supreme executioner. In trying to establish the truth, Memorial has had to rely heavily on oral testimony. Originally a political movement devoted to uncovering the truth about repression, it went on to establish a Scientific Information Center, which processes recently accumulated data on repression. Even today, however, its numbers remain small, because the bulk of the Russian population prefer not to confront the injustices of a past it increasingly idealizes. An imperative similar to that of Memorial motivates the volumes of documents and essays of twentieth-century theatre history edited by 47

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Vladislav Ivanov: they succeed an earlier series sporadically issued during the Soviet era under the anodyne name Voprosy teatra (Theatrical Questions). Tellingly, Ivanov calls his garners Mnemozina — Mnemosyne — after the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. This is no rhetorical flourish. It proclaims the need to retrieve a neglected or repressed history in order to establish a basis of truth on which to build a future. “A new history of the Russian theatre of this important century is irrelevant without the creation of a new documentary, factological basis,” Ivanov writes. “On this foundation we may be able to build the widest aesthetic conception.”1 The collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant throwing open of the archives (which turned out to be less uninhibited than the Western press once assumed2) has tasked a generation of scholars with recovering and rehabilitating a past that has been systematically concealed and distorted. In his mission statement, Ivanov explicitly states his aim of filling in the “blank spaces” and “black holes” of the bygone Russian theatre. He is not alone. Over the past decades, the leading Russian theatre journals, Teatr, Teatralnaya zhizn, and Moskovsky nablyudatel, have devoted a great many pages to documents and retrospective articles about individuals, plays, and theatres whose names had gone unspoken for nearly fifty years. There was a tremendous amount of catching up to do. Not only was Russia bypassed by major modernist movements in theatre and drama (Theatre of Cruelty, Theatre of the Absurd, Grotowski, and imagistic performance), it had to rediscover its own lost traditions — the symbolist and decadent drama of the Silver Age, the native absurdist movement of the Oberiu, satires of the New Economic Policy period, and the influential work of those who had fled the country. In the first blush of openness, the repertories of Moscow and St. Petersburg became glutted by the long-proscribed plays of Mikhail Bulgakov and Nikolay Erdman, which were in turn replaced by the even more exotic and recherché dramas of Leonid Andreev. With the short-lived enthusiasm for mystical spiritualism, foundations were created to revive the teachings of Michael Chekhov. There was a gorging on forbidden fruits, a necessary phase in the reclamation process. Catching up with the advances of scholarship was trickier. It began with a rejection of the historiography of the recent past, suffused as it was with a relentlessly political agenda. Post-Soviet historians have had to weed out “positivist and orthodox Marxist traditions that regard lit-

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erature as a mimetic reflection of an underlying ‘reality,’ ‘internalist’ histories that isolate the discipline from the surrounding culture, Hegelian, organicist, and teleological generalizations of periods and cultures, reductive national perspectives, and, last but not least, histories dominated by ‘grand narratives.’”3 This, however, created a vacuum, for Russian scholars were relatively ignorant of modern Western approaches, from the micro-macro projections of the Annales school to the wide-ranging speculations of the New Historians. One possible model was provided by the writings of the Estonian scholar Jurij Lotman; now widely available, they provide an indigenous prototype for a kind of sociological history devoid of Tendenz and making sophisticated use of semiotics, structuralism, and philology. Although professional historians in the West had a wider range of tools and methods, it would be presumptuous to claim that this implies greater objectivity, since non-Russian writing about Russian culture in the last century has also served a political end, even when it did so unwittingly. Many early observers of the cultural ferment in the Soviet theatre, such as Oliver Sayler, Huntly Carter, René Fülöp-Müller, and Herbert Marshall, wrote in order to praise the Brave New World and its potential for untrammeled creativity. Others, principally jumped-up journalists in the Cold War period, wrote to demonstrate the deformations visited upon art by a totalitarian regime. Then there were the successive waves of emigrés who had axes of their own to grind: some, like Nina Gourfinkel and Nikolai Evreinov in France, sought to preserve a lost cultural heritage; others, like Jurij Elagin in the United States and Nikolai Gorchakov in Germany, were eager to tell the “free world” of a system at whose hands they and others had suffered. None of this made for even the pretense of objective inquiry.4 Perhaps the most profound effect of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on its historians was the destruction of deep-seated ideas of nationalism, national art, and national theatre. The sudden glut of information was as traumatic as it was liberating. The affront to national pride and establishment scholarship has been immense. The irrefutable revelations of almost global corruption and cruelty have led in some cases to denial, avoidance, or a rejection of all past values. A great many intellectuals have experienced a terrible sense of guilt that they and their predecessors had been unwilling or unable to prevent or ameliorate the abuses in any significant way. Sometimes, the

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exposure of past transgressions has a penitential air about it, an aura of Mea culpa. Much of this results from the special nature of Russian nationalism and the intellectual’s responsibility to it. In countries with problematic and fractured identities, such as Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, and most of Eastern and Central Europe, vernacular literature was often a prelude to state formation and even a precondition for it. As Ernest Gellner puts it, nationalism “invents nations that do not exist.”5 Most national stages that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did so in reaction to a dominant culture imposed from without; they were a means of protest as well as of preserving the salient features of the oppressed group. Theatre was a catalytic factor in the formation of the emerging nation’s identity. Its function was to stimulate the production of plays about the national past, to serve as communal selfcelebrations. Norwegian theatre struggled to divorce itself from Danish influence, Finnish theatre rejected Swedish elements; Estonian and Latvian theatres tried to extirpate their German antecedents. The Austrian hegemony was opposed in Bohemia, Moravia, Slovenia, and Hungary, while Slovakia and Upper Croatia tried to overthrow the yoke of Magyar culture. Russification policies were violently resisted in Poland and Lithuania,6 but when the underlying culture was Slavic (there, as well as in Balkan Macedonia and the Ukraine), competing national projects were incapable of successfully challenging Russian predominance. They could be subsumed by an aggressive Russian empire into a purported pan-Slavic conglomeration. As a result, Russia seems more a cultural aggressor than a typical aspirant to national expression. Yet, as Orlando Figes declares in a recent study of Russia’s cultural history, “the country’s artistic energy was almost wholly given to the quest for the idea of its nationality.”7 Once the Tatars had been expelled, and the notion of Rus, united under a single monarch, had taken shape, the problem was not one of emergence from oppression, but of measuring oneself against Western Europe. Russians held a deep-seated belief that they were the Third Rome, a chosen people marked out by God for His purposes. This concept of an elect Slavic and Orthodox nationhood was deliberately challenged by Peter the Great, who forcibly imposed European modes and institutions on the country. This brought on a kind of cultural schizophrenia, for the lower classes clung to pre-Petrine ways, while the upper

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classes became more or less assimilated to European culture, without either of them losing their intense sense of patriotism. After Peter, with politics blocked as a pathway to expression, literary aestheticism and the ethnic socialism of the intelligentsia, largely divorced from folkways, had to be the surrogates for a deeply rooted national identity. A schizoid element lurks in Russian xenophobia as well: the notion that foreigners are bearers of pollution coexists with an admiration of them as transmitters of a progress which may be useful to Russia, if properly naturalized. The Russian mind was torn between a conviction of God-given mission and a sense of inferiority, fueled by those who believed that pan-Slavic Russia had missed the two defining moments of modern Europe, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.8 The earlier polarization of southern from northern Europe was turned by the French philosophes into a West-East contrast, with Russia and its satellites associated mentally with the Ottoman Empire, the Black Sea, and even “Asian” barbarism.9 Russian intellectuals bought into this idea and, like Trofimov in Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, were prone to beat their breasts over perceived national aziatchina. This mental schism was exemplified in the nineteenth century by the ongoing debates between the Slavophils and the Westerners. The Slavophils insisted on distilling what was unique and distinct in Russian life, in order to set their nation apart and above its counterparts, in particular, the communal and religious values of peasant Russia. The Westerners wanted to turn their backs on what was ugly and regressive in Russian life and looked to Europe and America for a pattern of modern progress. Both schools of thought agreed, however, that the theatre was a prime medium of public enlightenment, a means of propagandizing new ideas, and fought bitterly for control of its soul. The hegemonies to be overthrown there were those of European literary and artistic styles The contribution of the intelligentsia to the development of a Russian theatre became an article of faith among pre-Revolutionary historians. I. E. Zabelin, writing about the early eighteenth century, singled out “the intelligentsia of plebeian origin [raznochinnaya] of Moscow’s mercantile, trading quarters” as “the only preserver, representative and producer of a theatrical, if not art, then craft, which was close enough to art, disseminating the first understanding of it, developing in its audience taste, a demand for this sort of entertainment.”10

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In concert with the court, chancellery clerks, scriveners, and household officers participated in theatrical presentations and spent money on their upkeep. Indeed, a differential factor for the Russian theatre is its secular bias and the cross-fertilization of court and popular theatres. Modern theatre in the West can be shown to have evolved from two distinct strains, the professional (embodied by itinerant troupes of motley entertainers) and the amateur (represented by performances sponsored initially by church, then by school or court). In Russia, the two strains would coexist and commingle: although professional theatre was often hampered by its governmental ties, the amateur was frequently productive of reform and fresh impulses. As in Europe, the literary Romantic movements moved away from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to foster nationalism. They echoed August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s dictum that the foremost business of drama was to preserve and to glorify those great national memories of the dim past.11 Ivan Karamzin’s history of the Russian state, with its 1802 call for a “new nationalism,” was a godsend to writers. Despite Czar Alexander I’s reputed reaction, “All these Izyaslavichs and Olgovichs — who cares?”12 it became the sourcebook for literature of all sorts and drama in particular. Its driving narrative provided them with a storehouse of characters and plots. All a dramatist needed to do was to select a picturesque episode from its pages and corset it within the neoclassical rules of tragedy to create a national drama. Aleksandr Pushkin, in 1830, pointed out the central fallacy of this approach: in his opinion, a narodny (both national and populist) tragedy had to be rooted in the traditions of the people, what he called the “public square” (ploshchad). To prune the unruly outgrowths of Russian history to suit the formal conventions of Racinian drama denatured them and alienated them from their natural audience. Can our tragedy, bred up to the example of Racinian tragedy, break itself of its aristocratic habits? How can it shift from its measured, pompous and decorous dialogue to the vulgar frankness of popular passion, to the public square’s freedom of opinion — how can it suddenly relinquish its servility, how can it do without the rules to which it has grown accustomed and without the forcible adaptation of everything Russian to everything European; where, from whom, is it to learn an idiom the common people can comprehend?13

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Pushkin himself tried to show the way, by constructing his Boris Godunov, its facts drawn from Karamzin, along Shakespearean and Sturm-undDräng lines. His example was rarely followed. Since court taste preferred the European style, a common cry of nationalistic writers was to repeat Pushkin’s appeal in differing keys throughout the century. Lenin perpetuated the schism between Slavic folkways and Western rationality, when, in the radical program set forth in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1902), he rejected a purely economic struggle by the workers, which can “generate only a trade-union consciousness,” for “the profound scientific knowledge . . . born in the heads of Marxists from the ‘bourgeois intelligentsia.’” By substituting an intelligentsia faction for the real proletariat, Lenin protracted Russian cultural schizophrenia into the postrevolutionary period. Even though older “mental polarizations” — East versus West, Rome versus Byzantium, Catholicism versus Orthodoxy — were now subsumed by the newer Capitalism versus Communism, Lenin — or, more precisely, his Commissar for Enlightenment, A. V. Lunacharsky — carried on the traditions of worshipping the monuments of European art and promoting the theatre as an instrument of public education. Russian theatre history, before the Soviets, was pursued as a branch of antiquarianism or of literary studies, relatively unhampered by censorship. It was exemplified by the avid collecting of theatrical materials by the self-made millionaire A. A. Bakhrushin and the eventual housing of his collection in a museum bearing his name. Prerevolutionary historians, such as P. Arapov, N. V. Drizen, P. P. Gnedich, Ivan Nosov, N. O. Pogozhev, S. V. Taneev, and A. I. Volf, tended to play it safe, compiling “chronicles” and “annals,” editing memoirs or publishing documents, but, for the most part, avoiding commentary or analysis. (Volf, in his 1884 chronicle of Petersburg theatres from 1826 to 1881, relegated remarks critical of the administration to his footnotes.) Their studies, primarily of the Imperial theatres, which held a monopoly in the capitals until 1880, implicitly supported, when they did not extol, the Romanov dynasty. Much of the best research was published in the statesubsidized Ezhegodniki Imperatorskikh Teatrov (Yearbooks of the Imperial Theatres) as contributions to the greater glory of the Czarist cultural establishment. The first serious attempt to shape a narrative history of the Russian theatre was made by the critics A. A. Kallash and N. Efros, who brought

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together a team of scholarly specialists; subsidized by Bakhrushin, they were able to issue a lavishly illustrated volume which brought the story down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, it was published in 1914, on the eve of the world war, and no further volumes appeared. Kallash and Efros believed that the rapid growth of theatre in Russia was due to a particular love of Russians for that institution. To indicate the venerability of this tradition, they quoted the anonymous compiler of a Dramatic Lexicon of 1787, who noted that “the children of the nobility and even of literate persons of the lower ranks [raznochintsev] are excited more by the spectacle of a theatrical performance than by shooting pigeons, riding horses, trapping hares, and enter into discussions about plays, which I myself have witnessed in the provinces.”14 This love, the editors insisted, arose from the theatre’s socially beneficial effects. Theatre, for Russians, was not so much a matter of art as of enlightenment. Note, however, that there is no assertion here that the serfs and the working classes shared this devotion. Almost immediately after the Revolution, the creed of theatre as Russia’s university began to be fitted with an ideological straitjacket. Committed to ideas of causality, coherence, and teleology, Soviet historians suppressed whatever failed to fit into their perceptions of a master narrative. In his foreword to the first postrevolutionary history of the Russian theatre, that of V. Vsevolodsky-Gerngross, published in two volumes in 1929, Lunacharsky underlined the work’s value: “it is a most interesting experiment in applying a sociological and Marxist method to the history of the theatre . . . that wholly accurate method realized by Plekhanov.” Vsevolodsky-Gerngross is praised for not indulging in abstruse and debatable connections between art and its industrial or agrarian origins; instead, he “establishes the most unarguable, most obvious bonds between the class characteristics of society in each period and the art created by that period.”15 In other words, a Hegelian approach suffused with Marxist materialism. Vsevolodsky-Gerngross himself, in his foreword, stated aims entirely consonant with those of the Proletkult, the agency of proletarian culture: to provide a history for those workers and peasants, clubs and schools first introduced to the theatre after the Revolution, for the theatre “is the most powerful means of education, as a socioorganizing tool of enlightenment and pedagogy.”16 The old lyrics are sung to a new tune. Commissar Lunacharsky’s dismissal of philo-

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sophic or aesthetic contexts rapidly congealed into cultural policy. For a while, historians could camouflage genuine research by prefacing their work with statements paying lip service to the prevailing ideology and then proceeding with reasonably factual accounts. Thus, a history of Soviet theatre whose first and only volume appeared in 1931 packs its introduction with attacks on “aggressively bourgeois aesthetics” but devotes much of its text to a comparatively untendentious narrative.17 However, following the ukases of party congresses and the imposition of socialist realism in 1934, theatre history became inevitably tendentious, clotted with predictable tributes to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and G. V. Plekhanov, couched in a colorless, impersonal prose cobbled out of political formulas and sociological jargon. No matter what information was shoveled into the hopper, the resulting product was invariably the same. The overarching scheme of Marxist progress lent a sense of inevitability: within its trajectory, there was room for great leaps, reversals, revisiting, clean slates, or new beginnings. Whatever the given circumstances, in the Soviet grand narrative of theatre history, archetypal structures and stock roles could be filled by a new set of heroes and villains. At first, when the party was still preaching universal communism as its goal, the role of collective protagonist, what Paul Ricoeur calls the “logical subject,”18 was the proletariat struggling against bourgeois ideals and capitalist infrastructures. After Stalin in 1925 proclaimed “socialism in a single country,” thus abandoning the Comintern, the “logical subject” became the Russian people, the narod, fighting against foes within and without: kulaks, “internal émigrés,” Trotskyites, saboteurs, Fascists, antiCommunists, cosmopolitans. At the same time, building on nineteenth-century notions of narodny art and the theatre’s educational function, the Communist Party proclaimed the national character of the Russian theatre to be unique and unmistakable, its origins to be found in pagan ceremonials and the agrarian cycles of peasant life. It airbrushed out foreign influences and indignantly repudiated any notion of borrowing. Actually, from its origins, Russian professional performance, as opposed to ritual, was initiated and molded by foreigners. The skomorokhi, or wandering jesters, had Byzantine antecedents; the occasional Orthodox liturgical “mysteries,” as well as the first court dramas, were modeled on Latin plays of the Jesuit academies in Poland and Ukraine. Even the earliest

56 recovering repressed memories

recorded folk dramas can be shown to have been affected by contact with non-Russian models drawn from the touring repertoires of the Englische Komödianten or European puppet shows. Similarly, Soviet historiography ran up against the undeniable importance of the aristocracy in the development of the theatre, and so it built on Pushkin’s dichotomy between theatre generated by and for the court and theatre generated by and for the people. One of the stubbornly awkward facts of Russian theatre history is that there was never a large enough audience to make theatre a going concern without state or patrician subsidy to support it. Consequently, the suppression of imperial influence led to a lot of intellectual contortion in history writing. For example, the serf theatres — which burgeoned on the estates of nobility, when released from their court obligations by Catherine the Great, and which served as an important breeding ground for actors and audiences alike — could not be credited to the landowners who founded and ran them. Instead, a factitious “serf intelligentsia” was devised, to whom these achievements could be attributed. Within the Soviet theatre itself, an effort was made to turn these distortions of history into self-realizing facts in the present. Typical of this were the various leftist theatre groups — Proletkult, RAPP, TRAM, and so on — which sought inspiration exclusively in proletarian life. The periodic attacks on “internal émigrés” and “cosmopolitans” were also attempts to extirpate any trace of the nonethnic Russian from national art. Most of what went on in the theatre was the result of government fiat. Artistic initiative had to be subjugated to all manner of exogenic concerns; the spate of A. N. Ostrovsky productions in 1923, for instance, was not a spontaneous celebration, but a concerted response to Lunacharsky’s call “Back to Ostrovsky,” itself a reaction to what the government saw as experimentation run amok. Even the remarkable individual has to be seen in terms of how artistic integrity was preserved or adapted under the increasing exigencies of his position within the system. Thus, V. Ye. Meyerhold’s staging of The Forest was as much a counterblast to governmentally imposed classicism as a phase in his personal development as an artist. The Soviet historian, however, had to avert his eyes from those pulling the strings and write as if developments in the theatre were organic responses to social evolution. Self-censorship had long been a willing accomplice to the government-imposed variety. If the aftermath to the

laurence senelick 57

Bolshevik Revolution conjures up Goya’s ogreish painting of Saturn devouring his children, we should bear in mind that those children were themselves engaged in parricidic cannibalism. The artistic far left, spearheaded by Meyerhold and V. V. Mayakovsky, called for the extermination of all existing Russian theatres, including the Moscow Art, the Maly, and the Alexandra, as outworn remnants of a disposable past. A generation later, Meyerhold and Mayakovsky were in turn primed for annihilation by journalistic and political denunciations of their own irrelevance, their being “out of step” with progress to the future. Totalitarianism always wants to begin at point zero, to obliterate memories of its precursors and competitors: sow the fields of Carthage with salt or ask the subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to slice out the page about L. Beriya and replace it with a newly supplied entry on the Bering Straits.19 The reading-back of current concerns into Russian theatre history is best seen, perhaps, in the historians’ treatment of acting. Throughout the nineteenth century, liberal reformers had praised realism in art for its value as social criticism. Anything associated with “realism” on stage, therefore, suggested progress. After the Revolution, particularly during the ferment of the 1920s, the most radical artists discarded realism as bourgeois: such movements as Constructivism, Eccentricism, Circusization, and Biomechanics, which elsewhere might have seemed avant-garde or marginal, were, in fact, the mainstream. They proved distasteful, however, to the party leadership, which preferred more traditional styles and thus prescribed the increasingly mummified method of the Moscow Art Theatre as the standard pattern. With the imposition of socialist realism in the 1930s, no deviations were permitted, and the Art Theatre had the onerous task of carrying out governmental policy on its stage, to set an example for others. Historians, therefore, had to interpret the development of acting in Russia as a teleological process: a quest for narrowly defined realism begun in the eighteenth century with Ivan Dmitrevsky, finding a perfect exemplar in the serf actor Mikhail Shchepkin (whose monarchist sympathies were suppressed in monographs about him), and eventuating in the foundation of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. Individuals and movements which could not easily be fitted into this schema, such as the concept of the syncretic actor emergent under Catherine the Great and later promoted by A. Ya. Tairov and the Kamerny Theatre,

58 recovering repressed memories

were played down or passed over entirely. The emphasis on realism was packaged as a particularly Russian one, both more serious and more socially progressive than what went on anywhere else. Promulgated abroad by Soviet cultural missions and fellow travelers, this doctrine was disseminated in foreign-language texts and is still current.20 Rewriting the past was a growth industry in the Soviet Union, and, as Ivanov puts it, “History often seemed a specific application of group, ‘factional’ interests. The facility in manipulating facts, the disrespect for the document at times reached inconceivable heights.”21 Pictures were made to lie even more persuasively than words. Stills from the films of S. M. Eisenstein and V. I. Pudovkin re-creating revolutionary events were reproduced in history books as documentary photos taken on the spot. Retouching became a Soviet proficiency. The obliteration of Meyerhold is the locus classicus of such phenomena. Most books on Anton Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theatre displayed the famous photograph of Chekhov reading The Seagull to the troupe on its visit to Yalta in 1899. When Meyerhold was arrested in 1939, his foregrounded figure disappeared from the group, even though he had created the role of Treplev. Only relatively recently has the picture been reproduced accurately.22 Similarly, Meyerhold’s name disappeared from the programs of his productions, even though they continued to run; he became a nonperson, unmentioned in standard histories. When, to celebrate the M. Yu. Lermontov centenary in 1941, a detailed and lavishly illustrated book on Meyerhold’s 1917 production of Masquerade was published, his name was nowhere to be found in its pages. The production was made to seem spontaneously generated. The intellectuals, who had once considered themselves the conscience of the nation, the bearers of its spiritual heritage, had to submit to these practices and subscribe to these doctrines or perish. Those who survived did so at great cost to their consciences or their integrity. Not until the 1960s did scholars trained and formed under this system begin to find their own voices, although one still had to excavate their nuggets of insight from the dross of protective pieties and wary omissions. For instance, Konstantin Rudnitsky’s history of Russian theatre from 1905 to 1930, a work intended for the English-language reader and published as late as 1988, fails to mention Stalin anywhere in its lengthy text. It would be a mistake to think that the writing of history changed in any substantial way after Khrushchev’s denunciation of the cult of per-

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sonality in 1956 and the short-lived thaw set in. Government policy was abetted by the jealous proprietorship of individual scholars, committed to old habits of suppression and edulcoration. Rehabilitation took place irregularly and without fanfare, to minimize the earlier abuses. The inconsistencies of reconciling a new openness with conventional pieties were overwhelming. The English specialist Nick Worrall recalls studying the rehabilitated Meyerhold in the Moscow archives, totally unaware that a collection of the director’s writings had been published, until he saw a man hawking them on a subway platform. Russian historians could still run afoul of their misreading of changes in the cultural climate. During the thaw, one scholar decided to publish, in an academic journal, eighteen letters from the correspondence between Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, making public a personal and artistic antagonism known to the experts but carefully concealed in the hagiography of the Moscow Art Theatre. The scholar was severely rebuked and his career blighted for years.23 A new six-volume history of the Soviet theatre, published in 1966, began with an editorial statement which, in its vague platitudes and convoluted flummery, could as easily have appeared thirty years earlier: The study and generalization [obobshchenie] of the historical experiment of the development of the multinational Soviet theatre is one of the most pressing and urgently important tasks of Soviet theatre scholarship. For the first time in the history of humanity a multinational artistic culture was created in our country, unique in its fundamental, ideologico-aesthetic principles, absorbing into itself the leading traditions of art of all the peoples of the USSR, enriching and in many ways transforming these traditions, assimilating the new — socialist — content of the era. The art of the theatre is the most important part of this culture, its development in the period from 1917 to our time was especially intensive, its role in the creation of indispensable ideological and cultural conditions for the triumph of communism is extremely serious. The study of the history of the peoples of the USSR allows us to grasp the essential features of the movement toward a culture of communism common to all peoples and all mankind, toward raising the cultural development of mankind to the highest level.24

60 recovering repressed memories

Thus, the centralizing policies of the Soviet government, so destructive to ethnic aspirations and individual talents, are hailed as creating a new universal art. These statements are sweeping: indeed, they are meant to sweep under the rug the prickly question of what constituted a national “Soviet” theatre. The Soviet Union was, of course, an empire thinly disguised as a federation of national republics. Now that those subject nations have gained or regained their independence, they regard the Soviet period (or the earlier Russification policies of the Czarist regimes) as disruptive interludes, not natural developments of their native cultures. In the current climate, they would insist on their ethnic or, indeed, “nationalistic” characteristics and opt out of the Kremlin’s “grand narrative” for one of their own. During the Soviet period, however, a comprehensive history of Soviet theatre had to consider how much, if any, attention to devote to what went on in the republics.25 After the Bolsheviks came to power, programs of indigenization (korenizatsiya) or affirmative action were devised to encourage non-Russians to develop their national identities, as a preliminary to getting beyond an adolescent phase of “bourgeois nationalism,” on the road to mature internationalism. While Russians themselves contemptuously referred to non-Russians as natsmeny, a slur on ethnicity, both entities underwent Sovietization, the imposition of a uniform Soviet model of social and cultural development which happened to be articulated in the Russian language. Although the government and the party paid lip service to the folkloric arts of the diverse peoples within their borders — a policy known as “friendship of the peoples” — monolithic central planning forced theatre throughout the USSR to share the same traits on a sliding scale of talent. A production of Uncle Vanya in Tashkent would be a close facsimile of a production in Tallinn or Vladikavkaz, all of them owing an obvious debt to the Moscow Art Theatre, which Stalin had declared the model for all stages. However, in the 1920s, extraordinary individuals such as Les Kurbas in Ukraine and Kote Mardzhanishvili in Georgia were carrying on innovative and original work fed by ethnic traditions as well as by experimental styles fashionable in the capitals. What kind of distinctions, what amount of coverage was the historian to mete out to these regional phenomena? How could they be acknowledged without exciting nationalistic tendencies on the part of individual republics or ethnicities?

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Another idiosyncratic problem in dealing with Soviet theatre history is that of emigration. Very few of Russia’s best theatre people left for good at the time of the Revolution, although some — like certain members of the Art Theatre Prague Group — lived abroad during the upheavals of the civil war, and others — such as NemirovichDanchenko — spent time working abroad while trying to decide whether or not to emigrate. However, over the next decade, until emigration was made all but impossible in 1929, there was a steady seepage of talent to the West. Some of these individuals — Theodore Komisarjevsky, Richard Boleslavski, Peter Sharoff, Tatiana Pavlowa, and Dolia Ribush — managed to make successful careers as directors in their adopted countries. Others, chiefly actors, carried on in the commercial theatre and film, but were most significant as teachers: Michael Chekhov, Andrius Jilinsky, Tamara Daykarhanova, and Maria Ouspenskaya among them. Still others — Nikolai Evreinov, Porfiry Pavlov, and Maria Germanova, for instance — carried on primarily within the émigré community. Their fates and fortunes were all but unknown back in the Soviet Union. In the cardfile of the Moscow Art Theatre Archive, the dates on which actors defected to the West often stood in as death dates. Later émigrés, fugitives from Stalin’s terror or exploiters of postKhrushchev laxness, were less able to transmit a coherent theatrical culture. To what extent could this emigration, which constituted an alternative Russian theatre, preserving many of the ideas and practices of prerevolutionary acting, be considered part of a history of the Russian theatre? Its influence abroad, particularly in disseminating Chekhov’s plays, variations of Stanislavsky’s system, and the notion of studio work, was enormous, but it was hermetically sealed from developments within the homeland. No real reciprocity can be demonstrated. This constitutes one of the “blank spaces” that Ivanov has resolved to fill in. Historians both in the Russian Federation and in the West must be careful that in attempting to cure the enforced amnesia of the past, one does not fall into the abuses of recovered memory syndrome. It has been pretty well proven that many psychoanalysts and child psychologists trying to elicit repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse have in fact implanted those spurious memories by means of suggestion: this has had devastating effects, dividing families and imprisoning guiltless heads of day care centers. Wallowing in exposés can

62 recovering repressed memories

become an end in itself. Historians of the Russian theatre will have to strike a careful balance between the genuine achievements of the past and its horrors, without becoming either apologists or martyrologists. notes 1. V. Ivanov, “Ot sostavitelya,” Mnemozina: Dokumenty i fakty iz istorii russkogo teatra XX veka (Moscow: “Gitis,” 1996), pp. 4–5; unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Russian are my own. The term factological was popularized in the 1920s by the playwright Sergei Tretyakov; in practice it seems to have been synonymous with “journalistic” or “torn from the headlines.” 2. In some cases, as with the KGB archives, the revelations were becoming too embarrassing, and the files are again restricted. Even the use of “open” archives is problematic under neocapitalism. Many librarians and archivists, poorly paid by the government, either fail to administer their collections (closure for “repairs” is common) or else charge exorbitant fees to provide facsimiles and photographs. In addition, materials for photoduplication are often scarce: one American historian used to time her visits to the archives to coincide with the delivery of their seasonal allotment of photostatic paper and photographic supplies. 3. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Towards a History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Theoretical Reflections (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 2002), p. 1. 4. Elagin even invented a heroic speech allegedly delivered by Meyerhold at his last public appearance at the All-Soviet Directors’ Congress in 1939; Gorchakov reprinted this fabrication verbatim in his history of Soviet theatre. See Laurence Senelick, “The Making of a Martyr: The Legend of Meyerhold’s Last Public Appearance,” Theatre Research International 28, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 157–68. 5. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfels, 1964), p. 169. 6. See Laurence Senelick, ed., National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe 1746–1900 in Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 7. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 2. 8. A belated statement of this attitude is expressed in Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books 7 (April 26, 1984): 35. 9. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 5. 10. Quoted in V. V. Kallash and N. E. Efros, eds., Istoriya russkago teatra, Tom I (Moscow: Obedinenie, 1914), pp. v–vi. Since most theatre historians of the

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Silver Age were themselves raznochintsy (upwardly mobile members of lower ranks of society), it was natural that they would single out these individuals. 11. E.g., “in the drama the national features must be marked in the most prominent manner”; “Let [our drama] be truly historical, drawn from a profound knowledge, and let us transport ourselves wholly back to the great ideas of old. In this glass let the poet enable us to see, though to our deep shame, what the Germans were in former times, and what they must be again.” A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London: J. Templeman, J. R. Smith, 1840), 1:30, 2:403. 12. “Vsyo Izyaslavichi da Olgovichi, komu eto mozhet byt interesno?” Quoted in A. I. Herzen, “Detskaya i universitet (1812–1834),” Byloe i dumy (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1973), 1:124. 13. A. S. Pushkin, “O narodnom drame i o pesoy Marfa Posadnitsa,” Polnoe sobranie socheniniy v desyati tomakh, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1964), 7. An English translation, “On National-Popular Drama and the Play Martha the Seneschal’s Wife,” can be found in Laurence Senelick, ed. and trans., Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 8–15. 14. Quoted in Kallash and Efros, Istoriya russkago teatra p. vi. 15. A. V. Lunacharsky, “Predislovie,” in V. Vsevolodsky (Gerngross), Istoriya russkogo teatra (Leningrad: Tea-Kino-Pechat, 1929), 1:9. 16. Ibid., p. 13 17. V. E. Rafalovich et al., eds., Istoriya sovetskogo teatra, Tom pervy, Petrogradskie teatry na poroge Oktyabrya i v epokhu voennogo kommunizma 1917–1921 (Leningrad: Leningradskoe otdelenie gos. iz. Khudozhestvennoy literatury, 1933). 18. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:197. 19. A Soviet “urban legend” has the publishers of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia resorting to this, when, after Stalin’s death in 1953, his right-hand man, the dreaded head of the secret police, Lavrenty Beriya, was ejected from power and secretly executed. David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 181. 20. See, e.g., The Cambridge History of Russian Theatre, ed. Victor Borovsky and Robert Leach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), whose chapter on the rise of realism in playwriting embraces such fantasists as Gogol and Sukhovo-Kobylin. 21. V. Ivanov, “Ot sostavitelya,” pp. 4–5. 22. The undoctored photograph can be seen in Moskovsky Khudozhestvenny Teatr sto let (Moscow: Moskovsky Khudozhestvenny Teatr, 1998), 1:15. The altered version can be seen in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov v teatre (Moscow: Gos. Izd. Izobrazitelnogo Iskusstva, 1955), p. 26.

64 recovering repressed memories

23. These extracts from the correspondence of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko (1902–1917) were edited by S. Podolsky and published in Istorichesky arkhiv 2 (1962): 3–58. The occasion was the hundredth anniversary of Stanislavsky’s birth. 24. [K. Rudnitsky], “Ot redkollegii,” Istoriya sovetskogo dramaticheskogo teatra v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 1:5. 25. The Soviet history just quoted divides each volume, dedicated to a discrete period, into sections based on nationality: Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Trans-Caucasian, Central Asian and Kazakhstani, Baltic, and Volgan, each section itself subdivided.

5 Nationalism, Tradition, and Transition in Theatre Historiography in Slovenia barbara pus˙ ica

U

p until the collapse of Yugoslavia and the establishment of independent Slovenia in 1991, the Slovenians had lived as a minority in various multinational, multicultural, and multilingual communities — with no independent state, political institutions, rulers, or nobility; in effect lacking everything that would signify by traditional criteria the “real history” of a nation. For several centuries the Slovenian ethnic territories were part of the Habsburg monarchy, as were those of Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, and other nations. After the First World War, in 1918, they entered into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the socialist Yugoslavia, which was formed in 1945, Slovenia was one of the six federal republics, along with Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia (with two autonomous regions: Vojvodina and Kosovo), Montenegro, and Macedonia. Slovenian nationalism is for this reason a typical case of what is called cultural nationalism. It evolved independently from the existing state formations and political borders — or even in opposition to them — and followed the established formula of “cultural = political.” Within the framework of nationalist discourse, language was accorded an exalted role and was established as the “natural,” “selfevident,” and almost “innate” link between individuals and their nation and culture. The thinking that culture is the basis, aim, justification, and main purpose of national existence was predominant in the public from the beginning of the nationalist movement at the end of the eighteenth century right up until the day Slovenia became independent. Within this there was the gradual emergence of the ideological phenomenon that the “nation” is the central, fundamental, exclusive, and key bearer of

65

66 nationalism, tradition, and transition in slovenia

cultural production. The Slovenian theatre critic, essayist, and politician Josip Vidmar wrote in 1932:1 Purpose? What should be the purpose of our national life?. . . The purpose of every nation, particularly small ones, is to produce culture. . . . The time will come when we will become fully aware of our task. Slovenia will be what its beautiful nature predestined it to be — a temple of beauty and soul. The most valuable artistic achievements of our big neighbors will merge in our artistic works and we will imbue them with our inner essence. . . . We shall create a new Athens or new Florence.2 The high social significance accorded to culture and its pronounced pathos can be primarily attributed to past threats that jeopardized and made uncertain the very existence of the Slovenian nation. For small nations, nationalist culture was an important instrument in the struggle against forced assimilation. Or — as the writer Drago Jancar ponders — French, Russian, or English citizens are not accustomed to the very existence of their nations being in question, and they need not involve themselves in the survival of the nation or language — their national anthems sing of greatness and eternity; the citizen of the small nation — in contrast — is aware that it can disappear.3 The shaping of Slovenian national culture was initially closely related to the development of literature and the print media in Slovenian. The first book in Slovenian appeared in 1550, and the first newspaper in 1797–1800. The first secular play in the Slovenian language (Z Hupanova Micka, by Anton Tomaz˙ Linhart) appeared toward the end of the eighteenth century, in 1789. In the nineteenth century, theatre development followed the same pattern seen in other non-German nations in the Habsburg monarchy, for example, Czechs, Hungarians, or Croats. It became an important substitute for political activity, statehood, and educational system. It also served as a space for linguistic, cultural, and national identification and an area of distinction from dominant neighboring cultures, particularly German and Italian. Theatre performances were initially sporadic. In the 1840s, the organization of theatrical activities in urban centers was taken over by the local branches of the Slovenian Society. The idea to establish the Slovenian national theatre as a public institution with professional

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actors, a dedicated building, and a regular program was born in 1848. The Slovenian national theatre in Ljubljana was envisaged — in the fashion of the Czech theatre in Prague and Croatian theatre in Zagreb — as a “nursery for national education” and a “means of the ennoblement of the Slovenian language.”4 The fact that the plan was never realized can be attributed to conservative circles among Slovenians and tense political circumstances. The initiative to establish the national theatre was put forward again in 1867 by the Dramatic ˙no drus˙tvo (Dramatic Society), which introduced public bids for drama works as well as training for actors and regular theatre shows. During the last few decades of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, theatre in the Slovenian language gained wide recognition and represented an important cultural counterbalance to German theatres, which at that time were active in all the bigger towns of presentday Slovenia. In 1892, a new Dez˙elno gledalis˙c˙e building (Regional Theatre) was opened in Ljubljana, and in 1905 Narodni dom (People’s Hall), with a large theatre hall, was built in Trieste.5 After the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918, theatre activity was fundamentally reorganized. The German theatres were closed, and two professional Slovenian theatres started up, gradually acquiring the status of national, subsidized institutions and taking over buildings from the former German theatres (in Ljubljana and Maribor). In cultural circles these events were interpreted as an ultimate resolution of the Slovenian national question. The dreams of our people are coming true. . . . The dream about a national theatre — the temple, the culmination and the focal point of our culture! . . . Our theatre is no longer an amateurish idea, it is no longer the creation of a small circle, or an organizational tool used for agitation purposes, it is not the institution of a political party — our national theatre is the first document in the smelting furnace of the fiery time of an alloyed people; it is our nation’s first trial and the first fruit of its might.6 The founding of a Slovenian national theatre was seen in 1918 as a “fulfillment of dreams” and the ultimate goal of a historical process that was explained as following an upward path and leading from a simple, patriotic amateurism to high, professional culture.

68 nationalism, tradition, and transition in slovenia

In the theatre historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nationalism functioned as a kind of internal and external colonialism. This was reflected on various levels. National theatre enjoyed privileges that were denied to other forms of culture that flourished before the rise of nationalism (religious, aristocratic, traveling theatres, and so forth) and forms which evolved in parallel to it but had a local, regional, or transnational character (amateur, folk, experimental theatre, etc.) When dealing with theatre phenomena in multinational environments, historians frequently ignored intercultural influences and links. The understanding that gained currency was that national culture was “in itself” a closed, self-sufficient whole, while cultures that were external to it or lived alongside it were primarily perceived as a source of trauma and aggression. Mixing of cultures was believed to lead to disintegration or degeneration of national culture; neighbors’ national cultures were believed to threaten one’s own indigenous culture and were perceived as trying to overcome, replace, and assimilate it. The ideology of the nation played an important part in (co)shaping the “territory” of theatre history, establishing the borders of its subject, and influencing the selection, interpretation, and evaluation of theatre phenomena. And theatre historiography played an active role in the process of forming national monocultures, for it was oriented toward homogenization and assimilation of local, regional, and class particularities. The mechanisms of selection and repetition succeeded in establishing the kind of theatre conceptualization that became fixed on the existing maps of meaning for the dominant culture. This is illustrated by Josip Vidmar’s note from 1967: No, the Slovenian theatre is not rooted in medieval passion plays or morality plays. Its emergence and its long, painful awakening have been prompted by a newly awakened social force. Certain aspirations for such a goal appeared among us simultaneously with the awakening of national consciousness. The story of the birth of the Slovenian theatre is a live and vivid illustration of the history of this nation. The painful and long process of its emergence, which began with the recognition that such a temple of the Slovenian word was needed, and the arduous and inexorable struggle of our cultural willpower against external and internal enemies and local backwardness, are wonderful expressions of our life force and flair for

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the superior goals that made our history and finally secured for them their place under the sun.7 The nationalist matrix was fundamental to Slovenian historiography, even though it was continuously blended with other ideological components and, through it, underwent a number of metamorphoses. Slovenian nationalism was always supraidentified with one of the special ideologies which it integrated.8 Two visions of national culture — Catholic and liberal — dominated the period 1918–1941 (the old Yugoslav kingdom), while after 1945 and following the socialist revolution, national culture became linked to class struggle. At first glance this link appears paradoxical, since essentially Communism is (was) a transnational or international concept. But many historical events, for example, national revolutions in Third World countries, the conflict between Tito and Joseph Stalin in 1948, and the establishment of national cultural institutions in socialist Yugoslavia, show that interesting forms of crossbreeding have never been alien to the world of ideology. Class war often transmogrified into national struggle, and national struggle into cultural war.9 Class conflicts within nations were often transposed into the arena of relations between nations. Cultural wars could be interpreted as class wars, and revolutions as struggles for national liberation.10 Both ideologies, while at first glance different, afforded each other mutual legitimization, for they both shared a negative assessment of foreign influences and internal differences. The famous slogan of socialist Yugoslavia — tujega noc ˙emo, svojega ne damo (we don’t want anyone else’s, and we’re not giving up our own) — has, in fact, an expressly nationalist basis. Despite the radical social upheaval brought by the socialist revolution following the Second World War, culture continued to be the principal arena for the expression of nationalistic aspirations in Yugoslavia. As a result, national theatres could readily, and relatively successfully, be incorporated into the new system of socialist culture. They retained their former names (Slovenian National Theatre, Croatian National Theatre, Serb National Theatre, and so forth), principles of organization, and premises. At the same time, to signal a newly created political entity, the Yugoslav National Theatre was established in Belgrade in 1947. Nationalism was likewise the key to the emergence of theatre archives and museums.

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In the same way, nationalist aspirations were maintained in the historiography of the socialist period, although this was based in principle on Marxist theory. The statement by Bogo Grafenauer of 1947 might illustrate how Slovenian historians in the postwar period understood their mission: “The best weapon that a Slovenian historian can and must provide his people with in their struggle today is hidden in the analysis of the great line of Slovenian national history, the consistent fight of a small nation for economic and social progress against external and internal enemies.”11 In line with these kinds of universal guidelines, theatre historians after the revolution oriented themselves especially toward conceptual, ideological, and utilitarian interpretations of drama and theatre, and in their canonization they applied nationalist and class criteria. They interpreted literary works and theatrical and artistic phenomena primarily as the realization of concepts, the product of socioeconomic determinants, or the sensory glimmering of ideas, where the evaluation of these ideas was politically motivated even in cases where it took on the appearance of universal humanism. Owing to “ideological objections,” historians rejected numerous works by the avant-garde, modernists, Catholics, Western European dramatists, political opponents of the Communist regime, and so forth. In this context historical interpretations introduced numerous new concepts and counterconcepts. Time was partitioned into that “before” and “after” the revolution, the world was split into the “capitalist” West and the “socialist” East, and art was divided into “progressive” and “reactionary.” The progressivist system of interpretation reached its zenith in the socialist period from 1945 to 1991, although from the 1960s on there was a gradual emergence of critical response to such an understanding of the theatre and history. The first comprehensive studies of the theatre in the Slovenian lands were produced in the last decades of the nineteenth century and dealt separately with the German and the Slovenian theatres in Ljubljana, capital city of today’s Slovenia.12 After the Second World War, theatre historiography also began to become established as an academic discipline. A review of existing literature shows that in research, two models predominated. The micro level was covered by biographical treatments of dramatists and actors, and the macro level by review studies of national theatre history. The following are some

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key works: Obris gledalis˙ke zgodovine pri Slovencih (Outline of Theatre History among the Slovenians, 1947), Evropeizacija slovenske gledalis˙ke kulture (Europeanization of Slovenian Theatre Culture, 1957), Slovensko gledalis˙c˙e Cankarjeve dobe (Slovenian Theatre of Cankar’s Period, 1974), Slovensko gledalis˙c˙e od vojne do vojne (Slovenian Theatre from One War to Another, 1980), and Slovenska gledalis˙ka pot (Slovenian Theatre Path, 1998).13 The primary boundary which in the past had demarcated the subject of broader theatre history studies in the Slovenian lands was without doubt the nation. But what was specifically meant and covered by the abstract notion of “Slovenian theatre,” which is repeated from title to title? Is this the theatre that emerged historically in the territory of the state of Slovenia, or simply the theatre of the Slovenians, the majority people of today’s Slovenia? Which creative personalities did the historians rank among the Slovenians? Those who were of Slovenian descent? Those who worked in the Slovenian lands, including those of foreign descent, or just those who wrote in Slovenian? And how did they treat those actors who worked in foreign languages or only worked abroad? When trying to answer these questions, a special stress should be placed on the analysis of how the division lines between “us” and “them” and the “local” and “foreign” are being established in the process of theatrical phenomena study. Why, for example, do Slovenians view the (Slovenian-language) work Slovensko gledalis˙c˙e (Slovenian Theatre, 1892) today as “our” theatre history, but the (Germanlanguage) study Die Entwicklung der Deutschen Theatrewesen in Laibach (The Development of German Theatre in Ljubljana, 1912) represents something “alien” for both Slovenian and Austrian theatre history? Why does the story of an actress of Slovenian-German descent, who during the First World War appeared in German theatres in the territory of what is today Poland, represent a kind of terra incognita equally for Slovenian, German, and Polish theatre researchers? The question of what a national culture and national theatre embrace is an arbitrary, political question, which is inextricably linked to the concepts of nation and state. Studies of the Slovenian theatre have thus far generally proceeded from the assumption that an ethnic culture is closed within itself and has nothing to do with other cultures. It should supposedly be relatively homogenized internally and outwardly separated. The national theatre

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is also supposedly like this — defined by language, a recognizable aesthetic, conceptualization, and style, developing from its very own tradition. In their reviews, theatre historians have cultivated evidence of the special cultural identity of the Slovenian nation and the significance of Slovenian culture in the circle of the “great” nations of Europe. For a long time they have regarded their mission as similar to that of the dramatists and organizers of the national theatre in the nineteenth century: Our task is to awaken our people on every occasion, since our nation wants to watch reality and the works of our ancestors, and other such things that can be presented before its eyes to show that it has seen better times, that it was humbled and almost downtrodden by adverse circumstances and that it is again possible to create a better future.14 In historical reviews, the expression “Slovenian theatre” was generally used to denote professional theatre activities within the Slovenian ethnic regions and in the Slovenian language.15 The same goes for the criteria of collecting theatre documentation, although with this an important segment of historical evidence is being overlooked, for example, documents about religious and amateur theatres, theatre performances of other linguistic communities in Slovenia, and theatre activities outside national, subsidized institutions. Archive documents about these areas are less abundant, with a part of the documentation having been destroyed. These conclusions show that the cultural system constructs and legitimizes primarily the questions that can be set to specific documents — those kept by state institutions. So what does this mean in real terms? For historians, the borders of the national theatre coincided with the borders of the ethnic Slovenian lands rather than state borders, with another equally important factor being the language of performance. Accordingly, theatre activities in Trieste (Italy), which is home to a Slovenian ethnic minority, were invariably included in Slovenian theatre history, even though the city is located across the state border. On the other hand the Jugoslovensko Narodno pozoris˙te (Yugoslav National Theatre), which operated in Belgrade and performed in Serbian, was always treated only as a part of Serbian, and not Slovenian, Croatian, or Bosnian theatre history. Researchers also dealt separately with the Slovenian, Italian, and German theatre activities that emerged in the area of present-day Slovenia in previous centuries, although there are numerous pointers

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to indicate a link between the German, Romance, and Slavic traditions.16 An example of how closely they were interwoven can be seen in the trilingual work S Hkofjelos˙ki pasijon (S Hkofja Loka Passion, 1672), in which the dialogue is written in Slovenian, the didascalia in German, and the introductory explanations in Latin. In the period of nationalism such multilingual works were no longer being produced, but the issue of the links and interdependence of national theatres continued to be important. There was a particularly stark contradiction during that time between the purification of domestic originality and the adoption of foreign models.17 The overwhelming tendency to shape “pure” national culture, which became manifest as the fear that relying on foreign models would suppress domestic creativity, had been repeatedly defied by an opposite trend — imitation of “grand” theatre models and adoption of foreign ideas. Studies dealing with the history of the multinational environment by means of parallel national histories represent, therefore, a form of “cultural cleansing.” They blank out the knowledge that the theatre of present-day Slovenia was in the past multiethnic, hybrid, and diverse.18 It was not only stage activity conducted in the area of present-day Slovenia in foreign languages that was excluded from the survey studies of Slovenian theatre history. Historians were also ambivalent in their evaluation of the work of actors and directors who were Slovenian by descent but who worked abroad and in other languages.19 In a similar way, they marginalized actors and directors who came to Slovenian theatres as economic or political migrants, even though in certain periods they were key players in theatre events. In the period 1892–1914 for example, as much as half the entire acting company in Ljubljana was composed of Czech, Croatian, and Serbian actors, although in studies it is normally only the Slovenians that are dealt with and not the “foreigners.” In the canonization of actors, an important role was played by their “conscious dedication to their native land and its culture,” since the predominant thesis was that actors were “out of psychophysical necessity tied to their mother tongue.”20 The weaving of theatre into the system of national culture in its own way also confirms the fact that there were no broader-reaching attempts to write supranational, Yugoslav theatre histories. A significant difference between theatre and film is obvious here. Where easy distribution, technical reproduction, and independence from national languages

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enabled the medium of film to develop as part of a universal and not national culture, the theatre and research thereof were traditionally tied to ethnic and linguistic boundaries.21 Historians produced broader presentations of Yugoslav theatre primarily for international publications or professional meetings (such as the International Federation for Theatre Research), but here too they generally proceeded from the assumption that Yugoslavia was a “multinational country which has formed its theatres in language areas.”22 The principle that the ethnic has primacy over the political was also adopted by Heinz Kindermann in his major work Theatregeschichte Europas. In this book the Slovenian, Croatian, and Serb theatres are dealt with in three separate chapters.23 In the past, the territory of Slovenia’s national theatre was limited chiefly by language. The language of productions served outwardly to distinguish them from theatres of other nationalities (German, Italian, or Croatian), while inwardly it provided the basis for evaluating theatre phenomena. Since it was regarded as the “natural” bearer of national culture and identification, historians ascribed greater importance to literary theatre over other forms of theatre and devoted considerably more attention to playwrights than to directors or actors.24 For a long time the starting point for research was analyzing plays and program literature, which contained many explicit nationalist passages. The development of the written and national culture was to be seen in the context of a single, universal process of modernization. An important criterion in formulating the canon of Slovenian dramatic work was the affirmation of the national concept. Almost all the works that today represent the major milestones in the development of earlier Slovenian drama were at one time rejected by the Austrian or Yugoslav censors because of their controversial ideological or nationalist content. The comedy titled Ta veseli dan ali Maticek se zeni (The Marriage of Matic˙ek) by the first Slovenian playwright, Anton Tomaz˙ Linhart (1790), was banned because it explicitly supported the ideas of the French Revolution. Tugomer by Josip Jurc˙ic˙ and Fran Levstik (1876), the first historical tragedy in Slovenian, was prohibited because of intolerance toward Germans. And the play Hlapci (Slaves) by Ivan Cankar (1911), which in today’s literary history ranks as a supreme work of Slovenian drama, was rejected by the Austrian censors because of its revolutionary national and social slogans.

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Internally, other dividing lines were also drawn in Slovenian theatre historiography. These divisions included secular-church, liberalCatholic, urban-rural, high-low, linguistic-nonlinguistic, professionalamateur, central-peripheral, progressive-reactionary, and institutionalnoninstitutional. In general it could be said that there was an exclusion of theatrical forms that represented local, regional, or transnational identities. The reasons for the marginalization of an individual theatre phenomenon were often complex. Theatre activity generated under the auspices of the Catholic church, for instance, was scorned for at least four reasons. First, national culture emerged as an opponent of church culture. Second, religious theatres manifested an inner heterogeneity of national culture, which presented an obstacle to the project of the nationstate with a single language, tradition, and religion. Third, in the period of socialism, church culture was rejected as reactionary and ideologically unacceptable. Fourth, church theatre activity was in part amateur and widespread, particularly in the countryside, for which reason it occupied a low position in the hierarchy of national culture values, which favored professional and metropolitan activity. In recent decades these divisions have in fact become the subject of numerous research studies, but theatre researchers still tend mainly to deal with the high, professional, elite theatre productions, while popular and amateur theatre remain primarily subjects of sociological study. This maintains the appearance of the boundary between high and low culture being self-evident, although this division became established through the rise of what is called national culture.25 There is also an explicit value differentiation between theatre for adults and theatre for children — the latter is dealt with in Slovenia only by pedagogical experts. The list of cultural divisions limiting the conceptualization of Slovenian national theatre could, of course, be further extended at will. Traditionally, historians have marginalized not only certain phenomena which evolved parallel to the activity in the so-called national theatres, but also some specific historical periods in their entirety. This applies in particular to the period prior to the appearance of nationalism, when theatre productions were not politically suitable and contained elements which in the age of nationalism were excluded, reworked, and standardized. Prenationalist culture was often incorporated into historical presentations according to the principle post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Historians retrospectively ascribed to theatre artifacts

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nation-defending and nation-building dimensions and purposes which in the premodern period they did not have. In the socialist period a similar treatment was given to theatrical works from the time before the Revolution. In this, the periodization of theatre history observed the milestones of political history and proceeded from the assumption that historical upheavals were also upheavals in culture and art. Despite the explicit ethnocentrism of Slovenian theatre historiography, historical books and articles almost create the impression that “Slovenian nationalism was practically nonexistent in Slovenian historiography until recently.”26 In the past, historians usually considered Slovenian national theatre as an institution aimed at gaining recognition for and defending the nation, while nationalism was ascribed to “others” — Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Croats, and Serbs. Historians distinguished between the “healthy” national orientation of the Slovenians and the “nationalist” orientation of other cultures, and in so doing they drew on ambiguous self-explanatory tenets. The concepts of “national” and “nationalist” had entirely different symbolic prefixes, as if they had nothing in common. The term national, when used in reference to Slovenian culture and history, was understood as something positive (linked to defense and liberation), while nationalist was negative (associated with aggression and imperialism). Such a distinction between healthy nationalism — which supposedly ensured the minimum national identity — and exaggerated, fanatical, aggressive nationalism is problematic, since it follows the same pattern as nationalist thinking itself.27 The link between historiography and nationalism is, therefore, complex. In practice we identify it first as the historian’s tendency toward a biased, “nationalist” conditioned opinion and judgment, yet it is already present at the moment when the historical subject is defined as a nation and we adopt the assumption that the history of Slovenian, Italian, Serbian, or German theatre is “our” history — a history to which we belong and that we are perpetuating. As indeed Walter Benn Michaels radically points out, the question is not which past should count as ours but why should any past count as ours: Virtually all the events and actions that we study did not happen to us and were not done by us. In this sense, the history we study is never our own; it is always the history of people who were in some

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respects like us and in other respects different. When, however, we claim it as ours, we commit ourselves . . . to the identity of “we and they” and the primacy of race.28 Michaels’s arguments lead to the conclusion that every historicist or culturalist interpretation of an ethnic identity that functions as performatively binding for a group always involves “something more,” some noncultural “core.” Because of this core, every time someone studies too much about our culture, we think they are stealing it from us, and when someone opts for affiliation to another culture, we are convinced they have betrayed us. This is a radical idea and brings into question the efforts of today’s historians toward “political correctness.” In light of the arguments presented by Walter Benn Michaels, we may regard it as a continuation and reincarnation of the former notion of objectivity, adapted for the political needs of the twenty-first century. Establishing boundaries in historiography is essential and unavoidable. The boundaries selected may be temporal, geographic, linguistic, thematic, and so forth; but however we select them, they insert structures into reality that are not natural and self-evident but socially conditioned. Delimiting the field of observation never ensues directly from a specific worldview or personal interests, but it is closely connected with political practice, the distribution of power in society, the function played by historiography in a cultural or educational system, relations between institutions, and the economic and social system. In the moment we formulate a boundary, perception begins to function socially, politically, and culturally. The boundaries of national theatre histories are, therefore, problematic in terms of principle, as are the boundaries of other fields of observation in historiography. The essential difference is that in the past the “nation” was the predominant concept, which historians used for the delocalization of phenomena — in other words for the transition from the individual and local to the general and universal. Alongside this, the concept of national theatre acquired the ideological appearance of the neutral, integral, and universal, and covered up other particularities. Rewriting national theatre history is an opportunity to demystify and offer a different interpretation of abstract concepts and notions, such

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as “national culture” or “Slovenian theatre.” It is an opportunity to immerse oneself in the fundamental question of how the object of theatre historiography is constituted. National theatre is, after all, not some ready-made object that would await the theatre historian all nicely prepared. Individual historians (at least to some degree) (re)formulate it themselves and set its boundaries. In the same way, they may choose to research other fields of observation or historical subjects. The territory of national theatre research is constituted in the dialogue of the historian with general theatre, historiographic, and cultural theories, and relative to the social experiences and expectations borne by modernity. This means that the concept of national theatre is open and fluid: in time it changes its own boundaries and includes and excludes various particularisms. Over the last two decades, owing to the spread of mass communications and information technology and the flourishing of economic, political, and cultural integration, many researchers have started to look at national cultures as outdated remnants of the past, which are incapable of competing with the new forms of creativity and group affiliation. A dilemma has arisen as to whether belonging to a nation is today still the primary field of cultural identification, the dividing line determining the cultural border between “us” and “them.” “There can be little doubt that the era of the nation-state is nearing an end,” opined Bruce McConachie in his lecture “Theatre History and the Nation-State” in 1994.29 However, the modern world does not bring us face to face merely with the strengthening of transnational connections, but also with the strengthening of various particularisms — new nation-states and new national theatres are emerging (for example in Montenegro), the conflicts between West and East are intensifying, and the word patriotism is coming back into the political vocabulary. National identity and culture are showing extraordinary perseverance, tenacity, and adaptability, so that the idea of rising multiculturalist universalism seems in need of some reappraisal. The last great wave of nationalisms in Europe was linked to the collapse of socialist regimes. At that time, with the disintegration of Yugoslavia (1991) came the emergence of Slovenia, one of the youngest and smallest nation states in Europe. The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the collapse of communism triggered in Slovenia a wave of “settling scores with history.” On the

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one hand this was prompted by historians, who in the past were forced to acquiesce to many norms pertaining to both methodology and topics, and on the other by the new political elite in search of historical justification of political independence and social reforms. If in the emerging Slovenian state, intellectuals and historians collaborated relatively actively in maintaining and supporting national mythologies, then the period after independence brought such activity into question. In this new independent state, Slovenians are no longer a “threatened minority” but the majority.30 During the past decade, politics and culture have been democratized, and the country has made a conspicuous shift away from the Balkans toward Western Europe and its integration processes. These sweeping social changes encourage one to search for new answers to old questions concerning national identity, value systems, and relationships between culture, nation, politics, and the state. The end (or crisis, at the least) of the idea of revolution — the end of a utopian vision of history, based on the belief that it is possible to make the world anew as a project of progress planned by reason — contributed to a new understanding of historical time, continuum, changes, and group identities. Slovenian historiography has thus far justified its nationalism as a resistance against the hegemony of the majority nations — the Germans, Italians, or Serbs. The interpretation of Slovenian national theatre was adapted to the needs of the emerging nation state. In the moment when Slovenian culture became the culture of the majority nation in the state, such a posture began to lose its point and to become anachronistic. There are interesting suggestions for the renewal of the concept of national culture coming today particularly from the field of cultural studies. The linking of theatre historiography to this facilitates critical reflection on the concepts that were formulated in the period of monoculture. If the prevalent idea in the twentieth century was that national culture is a homogeneous whole, today there is an ascendant opinion that we are living in a world of myriad identities and cultures which are not necessarily exclusive. Historians are therefore orienting themselves away from “pure” national histories toward a different construction of historical subjects. Interest is growing in the research of subcultures, diasporas, cultural hybrids, and areas of mixing. Instead of the image of culture structured by class or nation, historians are attempting to

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form a more complex mosaic of cultural divisions, hierarchies, and struggles, and of linking and separating cultural groups. In this they are frequently finding that the criterion of linguistic-spatial proximity is not the most important factor in determining the links between historical phenomena. If we apply such principles to Slovenian theatre historiography, then we must withdraw from the macro level of large historical units (nation, state, class) and begin again by observing relatively small fields of observation: local theatre phenomena and everyday culture. A transition is needed from the treatment of parallel cultures toward analysis of the multinational cultural space, toward research of the shifts, migrations, and mobility of people, ideas, influences, and languages. Indeed, the picture of Slovenian theatre history in such a framework changes significantly. If at the beginning we established that Slovenian national theatre was formed as a nation-defending institution, directed against the rising Germanization, then the new perspective gives rise in particular to the conclusion that the development of Slovenian theatre — paradoxically — was linked precisely to the adoption of a culture from which in the nineteenth century the Slovenians wanted to separate and protect themselves — that is, the German culture.31 Slovenian theatre was formed in a dynamic process of adopting and rejecting foreign influences.32 The founding of the national theatre was directly linked to the “eviction” of the German theatre, but at the same time to the adoption of German patterns, models, repertoire, ideas, and premises. This aspect of Slovenian theatre history was traditionally disregarded by historians, since it was politically controversial that the “historical enemies” of Slovenian culture were at the same time its greatest role models.33 Slovenian theatre history should deal with such cultural currents and the relationships between various, sometimes marginalized, subcultures as one of the more important subjects — not so that it might become more “real” and less ideological, but so that it can become fuller, more complex, and “fairer,” at least in today’s terms. National theatre histories gain if they adjust for their needs the sociological notion of subculture, but it is important here for the subject of theatre history study to become also a question of interaction between individual theatre subcultures (e.g., German and Slovenian, urban and countryside, Catholic and liberal, male and female), since only in this way can we avoid a double danger: the danger of complete

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fragmentation and the danger of having in the future simply a mass of essentialist, ethnocentric — Slovenian, German, British, and so forth — cultural studies.34 Other important tasks are reviewing theatre terminology and reappraising the criteria for canonizing theatre phenomena. These methodological issues are topical, since particularly in the first phase of Slovenia’s transition there was a clear change of course toward an anti(communist)-canon. There was a flourishing of research into cultural and artistic excesses and other injustices which arose in the period of totalitarian monoculture (for example the postwar Communist trials against actors and directors, theatre censorship, and so forth). At the same time the question of how to rehabilitate and render “homage” to people from the arts whom the totalitarian regime had shoved to the margin acquired greater importance. The purpose and aim of such historical reinterpretations differed, but the problem was whether writing national history anew meant simply exchanging the historical roles of the winners and the losers. One special danger posed by the current moment in cultural reevaluation is the tendency to erase the recent past. In the Slovenian case, this means, for example, denying the links with former conations and cocitizens. During the time of Yugoslavia, historians established that the cultural closeness of the Yugoslav nations was something natural and first placed Slovenian theatre in a Yugoslav context, only then placing it in a European context. After 1991 they attempted to run history on a detour past the failed historical project — as if the Slovenians had never had anything in common with the Balkans. Parallel to this, there appeared the tendency for Slovenian theatre and culture to be tied to the traditions that existed prior to the founding of Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the notion of “Central Europe” became fashionable, and this supposedly revived the importance of links with the nations of the former Habsburg monarchy. The question of how to position Slovenian theatre on the theatrical map of Europe and the world is also raised with regard to the process of cultural integration in Europe. It would be unacceptable if talk of the theatre in Europe became talk of the theatre in the EU, but the fact is that the notions of where the theatre map of Europe begins and ends are shaped in close connection with the emergence of the new political borders. In Western Europe today, while certain internal

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borders have become relaxed, a strong external border has been placed between west and east, felt most keenly by those who have been left “outside.” It is typical of the cultures of southeastern Europe that they frequently think of themselves as of a “mistaken history” of Europe. They are struggling with the heritage of “peripheral modernization,” with the feeling of threat and exclusion, which to a certain extent is the consequence of the real political power relations and the fact that in the past Europe was often an arena for competing cultures. For this reason there is an anecdote which still seems topical today. In 1905 the actress Marija Vera was telling the professors at the Vienna Conservatory for Music and Performing Arts where she came from, and she explained that Slovenia was not Slavonia. Alas, in vain; her efforts were without success. For the Vienna professors these were unimportant details. They cut short the actress’s story with the artless conclusion: “Also, das Maedchen aus der Fremde, von dort unten irgendwo!” (So the girl is from abroad, from down there somewhere). This little story is significant in disclosing the typical relationship between the dominant European cultures and the amorphous, often anonymous mass of countries that are frequently shoved to the marginal reserve of so-called small nations. The consequences this has for a broader knowledge of Slovenian theatre history can be at least roughly illustrated by a quotation from Laurence Senelick’s National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe, 1746–1900, in which the author dismisses Slovenia with a brief claim that, prior to 1918, it is impossible to talk about Slovenian national theatre.35 Such an exclusion seems a step backward even in comparison to the Theatregeschichte Europas of Heinz Kindermann and triggers various questions of principle relating to the attitude of historians to the socalled small national cultures. For instance, does a “small culture” require special treatment, historical protection, and attention? Is the effort to preserve some ethnic community, its language and theatre a value in itself ? The third important task for Slovenian theatre historiography is the reappraisal of aspects of historical continuity and discontinuity, where the existing periodization and evaluation of historical changes and upheavals should be verified, and the elements of continuity in theatre production and reception should be defined. Slovenian theatre history

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has indeed thus far been interpreted as a series of breaks, conceptual leaps, and revolutionary gains, for which reason the historical process disintegrated into a sequence of mutually separate time periods. The idea of revolution was linked to the idea of change as progress. The idea of cultural revolution first appeared with the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and the establishment of Yugoslavia in 1918: With the establishment of Yugoslavia the need for cultural revolution and cultural reappraisal of values became tied to the new political image, as if dependence on German culture was responsible for all Slovenia’s mistakes in the past. Therefore, we should pull ourselves away from it [German culture] and establish links with the Yugoslav and French circles.36 It appeared for the second time in 1945, with the socialist revolution: It is not solely war and deaths on the frontlines that make up the essence of the developments in which we participated with much commitment. Neither was it just a matter of repelling aggression and finally scoring victory. There was much more to it. There was a break with the past, a complete break in the spiritual and material sense of the word. What comes now is a new time and with it a new substance of our history.37 The establishment of the independent Slovenian state signifies on the level of historical events a similar moment of upheaval. But the writing of history anew is an opportunity to seek alternatives and complements to the history of “volcanic upheavals” in culture and art, an opportunity to seek a new balance between the aspects of historical continuity and change. Research into longer time periods and continuity in theatre production of the twentieth century may be based, for example, on an analysis of theatre repertoires, which reflect the lengthy processes of selection, reception, and canonization, and at the same time cultural and political changes. The historian who embarks on the writing of a national theatre history in a newly emerged nation state during a period of social transition faces numerous issues and dilemmas. This article illuminates only certain specific aspects, while general methodological issues of theatre history have been set aside. From such dimensions to a presentation of Slovenian theatre history that would be accessible to the reader

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is, of course, a long path, similar to a labyrinth, with numerous parallel roads, shortcuts, side roads, and dead ends.

notes 1. Josip Vidmar (1895–1992): literary and theatre critic, translator and politician. Prior to the Second World War, he worked as a dramaturg in the Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana. During the war he was president of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian Nation and cofounder of the partisan theatre. From 1945 to 1953 he was president of the presidium of the People’s Assembly of Slovenia and from 1956 to 1976 president of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. 2. Josip Vidmar, Kulturni problem slovenstva (The Cultural Problem of the Slovenian National Character) (Ljubljana: Tiskovna zadruga, 1932), pp. 91–92. 3. Cp. Drago Janc˙ar, Konec tisoc˙letja, rac˙un stoletja (End of the Millennium, Account of the Century) (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1999), p. 9. 4. The first to propose the idea of a Slovenian national theatre was Leopold Kordes (1808–1879), an essayist and poet writing in German and an editor and owner of several newspapers published in Ljubljana. His notes on the concept of a Slovenian national theatre include several important articles, including “Slavisches Theatre in Laibach,” Illyrisches Blatt (Ljubljana) July 11, 1848; “Slovenisches National Theatre,” Illyrisches Blatt (Ljubljana) November 28, 1848; and “Vertrauensvoller Aufruf an die biedere slovenische Nation zur Realisierung eines echt nationellen Unternehmens,” Laibacher Zeitung (Ljubljana) January 1, 1850. Kordes’s idea was that a Slovenian national theatre should be structured as a joint-stock company. He even secured start-up capital and drew up the list of shows, but the plan was not realized. See Marko Marin, “Prva zamisel o slovenskem poklicnem gledalis˙c˙u” (The First Conception of a Slovenian Professional Theatre), in Alenka Bogovic˙ and Barbara Pus˙ic˙, eds., O nevzvis˙enem v gledalis c˙ u˙ (On Nonelevated Theatre) (Ljubljana: KUD France Pres˙eren, Center za teatrologijo in filmologijo AGRFT, 1997), pp. 11–30. 5. The Narodni dom building in Trieste was burned down by Italian Fascists in 1920. 6. Ivan Prijatelj, “Narodno gledalis˙c˙e” (National Theatre), Slovenski narod (Ljubljana) September 28, 1918. 7. Josip Vidmar, “Ob jubileju” (On the Anniversary), Delo (Ljubljana) October 7, 1967. 8. See Rastko Moc˙nik, 3 teorije: Ideologija, nacija, institucija (3 Theories: Ideology, Nation, Institution) (Ljubljana: Zaloz˙ba/*cf., 1999), p. 100. 9. The communists often used nationalism as a strategy for gaining public

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support, while the nationalists supported social revolution as a resolution of the national question. 10. See, e.g., Liah Greenfeld, “Nationalism and Class Struggle: Two Forces or One?” Survey 29, no. 3 (1985): 153–73; Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism,” Theory and Society 10, no. 6 (1981): 753–76. 11. Bogo Grafenauer, “Problemi in naloge slovenskega zgodovinopisja v nas˙em c˙asu” (Problems and Tasks of Slovenian Historiography in Our Time), Zgodovinski casopis ˙ 1, nos. 1–4 (1947): 25. 12. See Peter Radics, “Älteste Geschichte des Laibacher Theatres,” Blätter aus Krain, (1863); Peter Radics, Die Entwicklung des deutschen Bühnenwesens in Laibach (Ljubljana, 1912); Anton Trstenjak, Slovensko gledalis˙c˙ (Slovenian Theatre) (Ljubljana: Dramaticno drustvo v Ljubljani, 1892). 13. See Filip Kalan-Kumbatovic˙, “Obris gledalis˙ke zgodovine pri Slovencih” (Outline of Theatre History among the Slovenians), Novi svet (1947); Filip Kalan-Kumbatovic˙, “Evropeizacija slovenske gledalis˙ke kulture” (Europeanization of Slovenian Theatre Culture), in Lojze Filipic˙, ed., Linhartovo izrocilo (Linhart’s Tradition) (Ljubljana: Drama of Slovenian National Theatre, 1957); Dus˙an Moravec, Slovensko gledalis˙c˙e Cankarjeve dobe (Slovenian Theatre of Cankar’s Period) (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zaloz˙ba, 1974); Dus˙an Moravec, Slovensko gledalisce od vojne do vojne (Slovenian Theatre from One War to Another) (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zaloz˙ba, 1980); Stefan Vevar, Slovenska gledalis˙ka pot (Slovenian Theatre Path) (Ljubljana: Drzavna zalozba Slovenije, 1998). 14. Miljutin Zarnik, quoted in France Koblar, “Prva slovenska tragedija” (First Slovenian Tragedy), GL Drama Ljubljana 1 (1947/48): 4. 15. See Filip Kalan-Kumbatovic˙, Z˙ivo gledalis˙ko izroc˙ilo (Living Theatre Tradition) (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zaloz˙ba 1980); Moravec, Slovensko gledalis˙c˙e od vojne do vojne. 16. The history of German and Italian theatre in Ljubljana has been partly researched, but without comparisons and links to contemporary Slovenian theatre. 17. See Laurence Senelick, ed., National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe, 1746–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–15. Cultural nationalism had a strongly internationalist component. The Slovenian theatre in the past often demonstrated its equality with larger theatre cultures, for which reason historians labeled the development of the Slovenian national theatre as a process of “Europeanization of the Slovenian theatre.” Important proof of “theatrical maturity” was the staging of Hamlet. The play was so popular that in the 1920s it was proclaimed “the best piece of folk drama.” 18. To a certain extent this is true of, for example, the book by Dus˙an Moravec Slovensko gledalisc˙ e˙ Cankarjeve dobe. This is a thorough overview of the Slovenian

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theatre in the period 1892–1914, but without any clarification of the multicultural context in which the theatre operated. The author likewise did not problematize the relationship of the Slovenian and German theatres, although these operated alongside each other and even shared the same building. 19. Actors who went abroad were often marked as traitors to Slovenian culture. The domestic environment most frequently accepted them only after visible international success, which could be presented as proof of the international importance of Slovenian culture. 20. Kalan-Kumbatovic˙, “Evropeizacija slovenskega gledalis˙kega izroc˙ila,” pp. 64–65. 21. It would be interesting to link these findings to the results presented by Andrew B. Wachtel in Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). His study analyzes the field of literature and language and school policy, but does not deal with theatre and forms of mass culture (popular music, film, television). 22. The only works in Slovenian which present the history of the theatre in Yugoslavia are the essays published by Kalan-Kumbatovic˙, Z˙ivo gledalis˙ko izroc˙ilo. In this, however, the author looks in detail only at the Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian theatre, and not at Montenegrin, Bosnian, or Albanian theatre. 23. Heinz Kindermann, Theatregeschichte Europas (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1957–1974), 10:213–83. Under Yugoslav theatre, the book does not deal with Macedonian, Montenegrin, or Albanian theatre. 24. This is confirmed by the finding of Erika Fischer-Lichte that existing theatre histories as a rule present “more or less well-documented theatre events of the institutionally (literary) verbal theatre in large cities.” See Erika FischerLichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theatres (Tübingen: Francke, 1993), p. 5. 25. The distinction between high and low culture was defined as early as 1778 by Gottfried von Herder in his essay “Über die Wirkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker.” See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: T. Smith, 1978). 26. Ervin Dolenc, “Slovenski intelektualci, drzava, nacionalizem” (Slovenian Intellectuals, the State, Nationalism), Nova revija 13, no. 147/148 (1994): 179–87. 27. In the opinion of philosopher Slavoj Z˙iz˙ek, the idea of distinguishing between healthy and excessive nationalism typically also follows the ideology of modern multiculturalist universalism. He explains that, in practice, multiculturalism is realized as multiracism, since it abolishes the traumatic core of the Other and reduces it to an aseptic folkloric entity. See Slavoj Z˙iz˙ek, chapter 2 of The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso Books, 1997).

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28. Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 682. 29. Lecture at the twelfth World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research in Moscow. See Bruce McConachie, “Theatre History and the Nation-State,” TRI 20, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 141–48. 30. Present-day Slovenia is ethnically relatively homogeneous, with ethnic Slovenians representing around 87 percent of the population. In AustriaHungary they accounted for only about 4 percent and in Yugoslavia about 8 percent of the population. 31. Up until 1918 the works of German dramatists represented as much as 40 percent of all works produced on Slovenian professional stages. 32. For example, the first secular play in Slovenian was not an authentic work of Slovenian literature. Linhart’s play Z˙upanova Micka (1789) was a rewriting of Die Feldmühle by Josef Richter, while the comedy Matic˙ek se ze˙ ni (1790) was a rewriting of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro. 33. Exchanges with other Yugoslav theatres in the period 1918–1991 were much less intensive. 34. See Peter Burke, “Cultural History and Total History,” in Oto Luthar et al., eds., Historic˙ni seminar = Historisches Seminar = Historical Seminar (Ljubljana: Znanstvenoraziskovalni center SAZU, 1994), pp. 31–43; Ales Debeljak et al., eds. COOLTURA — uvod v kulturne studije ˙ (Introduction to Cultural Studies) (Ljubljana: S˙tudentska z˙alozba, 2002). 35. See Senelick, National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe, pp. 12–13. 36. Vasilij Melik, “Problemi v razvoju slovenske narodne identitete (do 1941)” (Problems in the Development of Slovenian National Identity up to 1941), in Dus˙an Nec˙ak, ed., Avstrija. Jugoslavija. Slovenija: Slovenska narodna identiteta skozi cas (Ljubljana: Oddelek za zgodovino Filozofske fakultete, 1997), p. 51. 37. Ferdo Kozak, “Pred zaveso” (In Front of the Curtain), GL Drama SNG 1 (1945/46): 8.

6 Rewriting a National Theatre History in a Bilingual Country The Case of Belgium frank peeters “Sire, il n’y a pas de Belges” When Belgium was able to tear itself away rather unexpectedly from the Netherlands in 1830, it received support from the European superpowers of the time, each of which had its own opportunistic reasons to welcome the young nation’s independence. What hardly anyone, however, had expected was that this independence would be of such a long-lasting nature. Even in Belgium itself, and especially in Flanders, many remained convinced during the first decade of independence that reunification with the Netherlands was a good thing, not least because of the Dutch king’s economic policy, from which some had been able to profit. As a result, Belgium tried hard to establish itself as a nation as quickly as possible. In addition to creating a national history, designed to prove the existence of the Belgian state as an immanent and two-thousand-year-old union, Belgian leaders assigned theatre a vital role in realizing a Belgian, nationalist society with a liberal, middle-class foundation by means of a national, Belgian theatre. To achieve this goal, the government decided to take several important and stimulating initiatives. The use of two official national languages, French in the south (Wallonia) and Flemish or Dutch1 in the north of the country (Flanders), prompted the supporters of a national theatre to make interesting analyses and to look for surprisingly creative constructions to achieve their goals. One particular problem was the paradoxical position of French: clearly indispensable as a (national) language, it was also the official language of France, the powerful southerly neighbor, from which Belgium had to distinguish itself at all costs. When in the 1880s the survival of Belgium was no longer considered problematic, the discourse started to become less explicitly patriotic, but the middle-class cultural ethos was to dominate all observations about a national theatre until well after the Second World War. The Belgian National Theatre, which was founded in 1945, 88

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still bore the marks of a well-intentioned but actually paternalistic project to uplift the common people. In the 1970s a new generation of theatre makers set to work. These were theatre makers for whom research on theatrical language occupied center stage, creating an audience that was interested in this search: once and for all, theatre was able to dispose of its middleclass pedantic mission of civilization. After fundamental changes to the state structure, which began in 1970 and changed Belgium from a unitary state to a federal one in which both the French-speaking and Flemish communities were able to develop their cultural policies in complete autonomy, Belgium as a nation was set free, not only de facto but also de jure, in the world of theatre. Because this cultural regime of apartheid functioned as a breeding ground for the audience members’ and policy makers’ ignorance of and consequently lack of understanding for the culture production of both communities, some — especially in the capital, Brussels, where the French-speaking community and the Flemish community live together geographically — argued for mauerschauen, in other words, the over-the-wall observation of the other region. This, however, was no longer related to the nineteenth-century pursuit of nationality: 170 years after Belgian independence, the need for a national theatre in Belgium had become a nonissue. This essay deals with the above-mentioned phases of development in more detail. It is a story of how a small country (barely four million inhabitants in 1830 and ten million in 2000) situated quite literally on the border of Germanic and Romance culture, its capital city less than 300 kilometers from Paris, Amsterdam, London, and the German border, used theatre to manifest itself as a nation. At the same time, it is also a story of how the chroniclers of this theatre handled the dynamics.

The Creation of a National Theatre: The Nineteenth Century On July 21, 1831, Leopold von Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, uncle of the future Queen Victoria, was sworn in as the first king of Belgium. Married to Louise-Marie, the daughter of the French king, he hoped that Belgium would not be faced with the threat of French annexation. By proclaiming independence, the Belgians emphatically claimed their right to their own nationality. As Jean Stengers, the renowned Belgian

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historian and critical observer of the Belgian monarchy, states in a book that demystifies Belgium’s national history, To them, there existed only one nationality: the Belgian one. We know, however, that the Belgians don’t speak the same language. There are the “Flemish provinces” and the “Wallonian provinces.” But never, at the time of the revolution, had there existed the slightest trace of solidarity among either the Flemish or the Walloons. No one said “We the Flemish” or “We the Walloons.” The term Flanders, to designate the Flemish part of the country, didn’t yet exist, no more than Wallonia.2 In an attempt to explain the “natural” solidarity of Flemish people and Walloons in the Belgian nation, Charles Potvin (1818–1902) in his L’Europe et la nationalité belge (1860) interestingly and casuistically argued in favor of a mixing of the races, when in fact one would have expected (in this period) racial purity to be put forward as a nation-promoting element. As he saw it, the “mixing” of Romanic and Germanic blood and of two distinct cultures would lead to a much richer civilization. Civilization, he argues, is more than a unicultural, selfish development, which isolates a race and will eventually lead to a state of cultural anemia. Once the Belgian state had become a fact, it was imperative to write a national history as quickly as possible, with which the independence and existence of the Belgian state could be legitimized.3 However, the national history had not only to be examined and drawn up, it also needed to be propagated in order to penetrate all layers of society. This was a tall order for historians and archivists to manage single-handedly, and that is why the government called on as many (culture) producers as possible to develop national historical culture and advance historical self-awareness. In addition to the gigantic history paintings with scenes from Belgium’s national history and the quite popular historical pageants, the theatre was regarded as one of the most effective ways to instill patriotism in the Belgians, partly because of the relatively high rate of illiteracy among ordinary people. The aforementioned Charles Potvin, a Walloon but before anything else a devout patriot much in favor of the ideas of the Enlightenment, argued: “The theatre is the only literary form accessible for the masses, for the illiterate public, and the prestige of the stage, the emotion that art itself produces, makes the theatre more powerful than any other tribune.”4 These thoughts were shared

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by the people in Flanders. What is more, patriotism was ingeniously linked to the middle-class ethos at the basis of all social acts in the nineteenth century. In the theatre, foreigners and especially the French were systematically portrayed as people of questionable character: these gentlemen (they were almost always men) were bluffers, bankrupts on the run, immoral dowry hunters, or seducers.5 The Flemish authors especially noticed that, as a result of the French, a way of life was rearing its head that was dangerous not only to individual socioethical behavior, but also to the nation as a whole. The willingness to tolerate or even embrace a foreign (French) way of life threatened not only Flemish but also Belgian national character. This is very striking in the jury report of the triennial prize for drama (see further discussion of the prize later in this essay) in which the Flemish theatre is referred to as “the only truly national theatre in Belgium.”6 Similarly Joris Vlasselaers, the Louvain specialist on the nineteenthcentury literary system, has recently argued that “the Belgian state coincides with the Belgian nation, in which the Flemish people use Flemish as their language. Flemish authors consider the Walloons as gallicized Belgians, whose sole chance of acquiring Belgian identity rests in undoing the gallicization as soon as possible.”7 This is important to know when one wants to evaluate and interpret correctly the epithet “national” in the numerous so-called national theatres that were founded in Flanders from 1853 onward: 1853, Province of Antwerp; 1863, Province of West Flanders; 1865, Province of East Flanders. A national theatre was first and foremost a theatre that produced original plays (in other words, no translations) that, in addition, were morally justifiable and educational. Both contemporary plays, which criticized the mistakes of “modern” times, and historical dramas, which exemplified the forefathers’ and nation’s grandness, made for good “national theatre.” The terms “patriotic theatre,” “national theatre,” and “educational theatre” were more or less synonyms in the 1850s.8 In Flemish cities, according to Serafijn Willems (1818–1883), a Flemish clerk, translator, and essayist living in Brussels and a strong promoter of Flemish theatre in the Frenchified capital, theatres had to be built like “temples of education . . . where every good family man, after he has finished his daily work, will be able to partake, and where we all are grateful to contribute to the enlightenment of the people, to the glorification of our

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mother tongue, to the honor and exaltation of our dear fatherland.”9 The actual problem with which the Belgian nationalists were confronted, however, was the longing for one nation. They were fully conscious of the fact that there were two language communities which were hardly aware of each other’s cultures (apart from a small circle of Flemish and French-speaking intellectuals). The task at hand, then, was to develop a coordinating, nationalist, Belgian society and in doing so also a national, in other words, “Belgian” theatre. The fact that the majority of Belgians were completely monolingual and thus unable to understand the cultural expressions of the other language community made the task of creating a national, Belgian theatre extremely difficult. Surprisingly though, there were many proposals for creating such a Belgian theatre. One of the most fascinating can be found in Th. Van Hecke’s essay Considérations sur le Théâtre en Belgique et sur les Difficultés et les Moyens d’y créer une Scène Nationale, published in 1839. On the one hand, Van Hecke, a medical doctor, was convinced that French was destined to become Belgium’s only cultural language, but on the other, he was also aware that more than half of the Belgian population still spoke Flemish and was unable to express itself in French. This problem received Van Hecke’s full attention, and he summarized it as follows: “How to create a national theatre in Belgium, using a language that is not the common idiom of the country?”10 The essay comprised three parts: an introduction in which Van Hecke listed the elements of a national theatre, followed by a chapter “major obstacles that hinder its foundation,”11 and a conclusion with an extensive discussion of the measures that had to be taken.12 His analysis was strong, consistent, and at the same time extremely typical of and enlightening regarding nineteenthcentury Belgian theatre. His starting point was his conviction that there was an authentic, Belgian, prerevolutionary theatre tradition, which had to be continued. The problem, though, was that this theatre was Flemish, which meant it was part of the idiom that would have no future in Belgium. The future Belgian theatre was designed to be French, and if this could not be achieved, then it would not exist at all. In keeping with the romantic belief about the compelling relationship between the national character (nationality) and the national language,13 the problem arose as to how the authors could write in French without betraying the Belgian issue. Van Hecke was able to find a way out of this

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paradox in the topics which this theatre would address:14 the authors were expected to introduce Belgian couleur locale in their work and only then would they succeed in becoming known in European literature, only then would they be able to show the audiences and the world that these plays were an expression of Belgian identity although they had been written in French. And what better source of inspiration than the military and artistic chronicles? It was imperative that the Belgians remember their forefathers, and the most effective and pedagogic form of theatre was that in which the highlights of national history were given anecdotal form in a dramatic narrative structure. This, by the way, was also what the most popular historians were doing at the time. In a perfect example of invented tradition, the extremely popular Théodor Juste (1818–1888) described Belgian history, starting in ancient times and continuing right up to Belgian independence, as a long historical novel, as a sequence of historical moments with high dramatic content. This dramatic character is underlined by the typically theatrical poses adopted by the characters in the plays, which were always richly illustrated for pedagogic and populist reasons.15 As an interesting example of cross-coding between the pictorial and histrionic (an example of the opposite can be found in the popular tableaux vivants in the theatre), Tom Verschaffel observes, “Many of the monumental historical paintings are very theatrical and seem to depict a production of a historical event rather than the historical event itself. In addition, there are historical theatre plays which were based on existing visualizations of the stories already discussed.”16 The iconography was sometimes the source of the dramatic action or was clearly present in the form of copied history paintings integrated into the scenography.

Measures Taken The first measure taken was the creation of structures that would enable authors to write the texts that Belgium needed. As an act of autoaffirmation, the young Belgian state instituted by royal decree on December 1, 1845, a quinquennial prize for a work contributing to its national history. In 1858 a triennial prize was instituted for Flemish drama, followed in 1859 by a parallel one for drama written in French.17 Article one of the regulations defined that the prize would be awarded

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to a work “the subject of which must be related to national history or national manners and customs.”18 In 1875 this article would be slightly changed, allowing also for other subjects: “but, when both plays have equal merits, the prize will be awarded to the play whose subject either deals with [national] history or with national morals.”19 The prize consisted of a gold medal worth 150 francs and a sum between 500 and 1,500 francs.20 Further regulation stipulated that the prize-winning play should be performed during the September festivities (celebrating the 1830 revolution) following the competition. The anonymous author of the introduction of Les Prix quinquennaux et triennaux en Belgique: Rapports officiels 1850–1870 evaluated the different state prizes that were awarded in the beginning as definite symbols of Belgium’s “national renaissance and its political independence.”21 The report by the Flemish jury of the first period, strongly stressed the national function of dramatic literature as requested in article one of the regulations. National here still belonged to a mental framework that was predominantly patriotic, in other words, that aimed to demonstrate and glorify the characteristics of the nation state. It is true that the fear of French annexation, which was tangible during the first decades after Belgian independence, had abated somewhat. Still, literature and perhaps even more markedly the theatre were considered the preeminent devices for averting the foreign threat by making linguistic and cultural identification with the French neighbor impossible. A second important measure taken by the young Belgian state to encourage the production of endogenous theatre texts, and in doing so to stem the massive import from France and to a lesser degree from Germany, was the creation of the so-called incentive scheme. In November 1853, the then minister of the interior, F. Piercot, asked the permanent secretary of the Royal Academy for a report on the encouragement of drama literature in Belgium. In 1860 this initiative resulted in the royal decree of March 31, which introduced the incentive scheme. This scheme would be active, albeit with some changes, until 1926. It provided grants for playwrights and composers, with a system of financial support for companies and troupes performing plays for the first time. The criteria for granting financial incentives were determined by qualitative norms (which were investigated by reading committees, who subsequently passed on their findings to the minister of the interior) and two quantitative parameters: first, the volume of the work,

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which was calculated using the number of acts, and second, the geographical location where the work was being performed. The big cities such as Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges received higher subsidies, from 75 francs (1 or 2 acts) to 200 francs (4 or 5 acts); the other cities received 50 to 150 francs. It was not long before authors and would-be actors started to compete for financial incentives, and theatre companies experienced a spectacular growth. Within a period of about ten years, the number of theatre circles had trebled, and a production level was reached which had been unparalleled in Flanders for more than a hundred years. In 1872 alone 175 plays were awarded prizes!22 However, government support came to have the opposite effect to that intended, and instead of creating new, energetic, and edifying drama literature, the official decrees only generated more plagiarism and amateurism.

The Twentieth Century Before the end of the nineteenth century, the debate about theatre and nationality had largely disappeared from public interest. By then the Belgian state had been able to prove its vitality, and its sovereignty was no longer being questioned outside Belgium. Because the Belgian state was now experienced as a normal aspect of everyday life, the two communities in the country (Flemish and Walloon) were able to focus on their own languages and cultures within the Belgian construct. Because there was clear discrimination against the Flemish language, it was mainly the Flemish intellectuals who pointed out to the Belgian state that there was an inequality between the two language communities, leading to the so-called Flemish Movement. Up until the First World War their actions would be mainly limited to the cultural domain; after 1918 the Flemish Movement was given a political dimension, influencing, radically at times, the Belgian government during the following eighty years. The solidarity between French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgians, which was visible in the defense of the Belgian state during its first decades, was forced to give way to the strong polarization of both language communities. Both communities became home to separatist movements in favor of Flemish or Walloon independence or Dutch or French annexation. The idea of a national (Belgian) theatre

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seemed to have disappeared for good, with the exception that in 1945 the government decided to create a commission through the then Minister of Education Auguste Buisseret (French-speaking) to advise the government on the founding of the National Theatre of Belgium (Het Nationaal Theater van België/Le Théâtre National de Belgique).23 Joining Jules Delacre on the French-speaking side was the then famous writer Herman Teirlinck on the Dutch-speaking side, who became artistic advisor. The declaration of intent displayed continuing paternalist, middle class concern: the theatre was responsible not only for entertaining its audiences but also for educating them morally and artistically. Daan Bauwens saw this as a “typical example of encapsulation of the cultural sphere by the government.”24 Together with economic revival, it was the state’s intention to revive the national feeling by official means, including heavily subsidized initiatives aimed at increasing the nation’s prestige. It was questionable, however, whether the founding of a National Theatre in 1945 could be explained as surplus value for Belgium. According to Herman Teirlinck, who was well placed to judge the scope of a National Theatre project, the project was meant to benefit mainly the French-speaking community.25 Teirlinck even went as far as to say that the project was doomed before it had even started, because it failed to consider the political reality 130 years after Belgian independence: “The fraternal intermingling imposed by a common motherland, far from uniting them in a joint effort, seems to degenerate into a kind of tacit hostility which isolates them from each other. They do not know each other and, worse still, they are no longer even curious to know each other.” As a prominent Flemish intellectual, at home in the highest circles of the francophone Brussels aristocracy,26 Teirlinck knew full well what he was talking about, and history proved that he was right. Right from the start, in 1945, the National Theatre was established with two completely separate companies, the French-speaking Théâtre National and the Flemish Nationaal Toneel. The only thing they had in common was the epithet “national.” In 1967 the Nationaal Toneel was dissolved; the French-speaking company still exists, but its name makes the policy of “apartheid” clear: Le Théâtre National de la Communauté française. By the second half of the twentieth century, Belgium showed hardly any likeness to its nineteenth-century forerunner, the only constant being the middle-class social ethics, which still characterize the project

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to this day. In addition to this, the country was heading down the road of federalization, in which both language communities would live alongside one another. Surprisingly, the yearly magazine Balkon/Balcon, which provides overviews of performing arts in Belgium, published several texts toward the end of the 1990s in an attempt to cut across the “cultural regime of apartheid” present in a federal Belgium.27 The magazine represented the thoughts of young intellectuals living in the (bilingual) Belgian capital as Flemish or Walloon citizens and who were in favor of integrated, intercultural coexistence. Of course this had nothing to do with nostalgic neo-Belgicism but rather with a sincere need to meet theatre makers from other cultures, and the closest culture — so near, yet so unknown to us Belgians — is that of the other community, be it Dutch-speaking or French-speaking. The aim was artistic cooperation and a collective cultural experience. For these artistic policy makers, Belgium is nothing more than the arbitrary material precondition under which they want to present theatre. The most important factor from this moment on is the theatre. One question, however, still remains: How does all this reflect in Belgian theatre history?

Toward a Belgian Theatre History? Theatre history, especially in the nineteenth century, remained the playground of well-intentioned and often driven amateurs who (mainly in the initial period, in a number of essaylike writings trying to find a Belgian theatre history, rather than a Flemish or a Walloon theatre history) discovered that Belgian theatre history actually did not exist and subsequently formulated proposals to remedy this void: in particular, A. T. Van Hecke’s Considérations sur le théâtre en Belgique (1839) and C. Potvin’s Du théâtre en Belgique (1862). In 1878 the first part of F. Faber’s Histoire du théâtre français en Belgique was published. Upon its completion in 1880, Belgium’s French-speaking theatre history had a starting point at its disposal. Faber was first and foremost a positivistic collector and a gifted chronicler: his five-volume history contains a wealth of factual information and sheds light on hundreds of archive records. To the present day it is an indispensable reference book. A judgment is not found in the book: “I leave this task to the ones more able than me; I for my part consider myself happy if my research has served some purpose” is what he writes in his modest preface.28 At the same time, his

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work explained the Belgian theatre historians’ biggest problem: although Belgium had legitimized itself politically and had adopted the belgitude as doxa, no one had been able to tell the history of the “Belgian” theatre. And although the academic historians went to great lengths to prove that the language border, which literally cut Belgium in two, had no repercussions on the existence of an indivisible Belgian identity, it appeared to be a complete barrier for theatre, which made the writing of a shared, Belgian theatre history impossible. This dichotomy is clearly visible in the titles: H. Liebrecht, Histoire du théâtre français à Bruxelles (1923); L. Solvay, Le théâtre belge d’expression française depuis 1830 (1936); P. Aron, La mémoire en jeu: Une histoire du théâtre de langue française en Belgique (XIXe–XXe siècle) (1995); M. Sabbe, L. Monteyne, and H. Coopman, Het Vlaamsch tooneel: Inzonderheid in de XIXe eeuw (1927); Th. Deronde, Het tooneelleven in Vlaanderen door de eeuwen heen (1930); A. Van Impe, Over toneel: Vlaamse kroniek van het komediantendom (1978). At regular intervals, the government did decide to take national initiatives to increase the production of Belgian drama and theatre (see the aforementioned triennial prizes), but in practice this boiled down to encouraging either Flemish or French-speaking drama and theatre. An integrated, “Belgian” theatre history covering both language regions was not available. In The Belgian Theatre since 1890 (1950), a publication written by order of the Belgian Government Center in New York, the author followed some of his nineteenth-century colleagues and arrived at a most one-sided description of what exactly constituted “Belgian” theatre: Every so often, an inquiry is made to discover whether there is a Belgian theatre. The asking of such a question, which sounds ridiculous in the country that produced Maeterlinck, Crommelynck and Herman Teirlinck, has but one excuse: it is based on an equivocation. Those who bring this question up try to connect with the idea “Belgian” everything that is characteristic in the production of our dramatic authors. They do not succeed for the very good reason that the traits they have in common are Flemish. The Belgian theatre is a Flemish theatre. . . . From the moment one admits that the Belgian theatre is a Flemish theatre, even when written in French, the case becomes clear.29 The short contributions in national encyclopedias (H. Liebrecht, “Notre vie théâtrale,” in Encyclopédie belge, 1933) or international theatre

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histories (G. Dumur, Histoire des spectacles; The Cambridge Guide to Theatre30) were closest to a “Belgian” (mini)history, but even these works did not get any further than a juxtaposition of both language regions. They more or less contained individual contributions grouped and presented under a common denominator. In H. Kindermann’s Theatergeschichte Europas, the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking theatres are treated in separate chapters, with the Flemish theatre discussed together with the Dutch theatre. The national theatre history is traded in for a binational history with a common cultural language (Dutch) as criterion. This already happened in J. A. Worp’s two-volume Geschiedenis van het drama en van het tooneel in Nederland (1904). J. A. Worp systematically discusses “the drama in the Southern Netherlands” in the second volume, which looks at the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The classic example of this “pan-Dutchspeaking” approach is Robert Erenstein’s Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Tien eeuwen drama en theater in Nederland en Vlaanderen (1996). Seldom are the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking theatres discussed together, but in a context of urban theatre history this has been done. An example is P. Claeys’s Histoire du théâtre de Gand (1892), in which its author chronicles the theatre developments in and around Ghent from the fifteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century. All existing theatre histories in Belgium are merely half-told stories, in which the foreign language half of the Belgian story is not mentioned, even when the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking theatre practices are located in immediate physical proximity, as is the case in Brussels, the bilingual capital. This “absence” is flagrant, but at the same time it does not upset anyone. This is because of the abovementioned cultural apartheid, which is not introduced by the government but in which both cultural regions exile one another, as it were. The number of so-called mauerschauers, who as consumers of culture are at home in both the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking culture systems, is extremely small. In addition to this major lack of a fully national approach to Belgian theatre history, we can also find hiatuses, voids, concealed histories or upsetting mythologies that deserve rewriting. In concluding this essay, I shall limit myself to two examples. The first relates to the representation of the melodrama and the second to one of the greatest myths of Flemish theatre history: the Vlaamse Volkstoneel (Flemish People’s Theatre).

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The melodrama largely if not completely fell short of the nineteenth-century nationalist cultural model with which the middle class confronted itself and the rest of the population as a form of ethical imperative. As was the case in surrounding countries, the romantic drama was sweeping through Belgian theatres and would dominate the theatrical landscape in Flanders, Brussels, and Wallonia until the end of the nineteenth century. It was mainly authors of the so-called second and third generation who captivated the audiences: V. Ducange, F. Soulié, F. Pyat, J. Bouchardy, A. Dennery, A. Anicet-Bourgeois, X. de Montépin, P. Decourcelle, and so on. Since the relationship with France was one of admiration (for le génie latin) and distrust (for possible territorial claims), both the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking Belgians regarded French drama as one of the biggest obstacles blocking the development of an authentic “Belgian” theatre. The technical mastery of the French authors had been the cause of the theatre management’s limited commercial interest in Belgian drama, which at the time was being shown to half-full houses. This lack of interest on the theatre makers’ part would be shown through criticism until after World War I. In addition, there was a feeling of aversion to anything French in Flanders as a result of a growing Flemish conscience. French was the language not only of the foreign oppressor but also of the home oppressor. But there was even more. In a century in which self-control in all spheres was preached as salvation, the fierce emotions brought out in the melodrama and loved by the audiences were severely condemned. Later on, in the twentieth century, when the first theatre histories worthy of that name were written, the ethical indignation had given way to aesthetic contempt: the word melodrama was by no means a neutral indication of the genre, but connoted “dramatic,” “spectacle,” “tear-jerker,” “weepy,” “exaggerated,” “incredible,” “predictable,” “schematic,” “superficial,” and so on. Despite this, the melodrama, as it was written in the nineteenth century, is still being written today. Nevertheless, in R. Erenstein’s previously mentioned Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden (1996),31 the most recent standard book on Dutch-speaking theatre, the word melodrama is not even an entry in the index. The fact that this kind of theatre dominated the Belgian stages for more than seventy years and that it was the only form of theatre for tens of thousands of theatregoers, is reduced to a footnote in our theatre history. It is high time for a new history of the melodrama

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to be written, based on the correct evaluation of the poetics and social relevance of the melodrama at the time. A second example is the need for the demythologization of the success story of the Vlaamse Volkstoneel (VVT). The VVT was a traveling troupe which from 1920 to 1924 was run by philologist Dr. Jan Oscar de Gruyter (1885–1929) and tried to present a revolutionary repertoire in both the most important cities (Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels) and in the country. It was revolutionary because de Gruyter believed in the educational power of the canonized Western theatre of Sophocles, Molière, Goethe, Lessing, Hebbel, Wilde, Shaw, and so on, which was not programmed in any of the big city theatres. Immediately after his untimely death, de Gruyter and his Volkstoneel became a mythical period in the Flemish theatre, becoming “an irrational phenomenon in the memory of the average Fleming.”32 This was related to de Gruyter’s past as a frontline soldier and Flemish-minded intellectual and led to his being proclaimed hero and victim of the pro-French Belgian state by the Flemish Movement. This myth-making affected not only the quality of the repertoire but also the performance and underlined the unique solidarity brought about by the VVT among the Flemish people. The chroniclers wanted us to believe that de Gruyter and the VVT had managed to stimulate the Flemish people to participate in his theatre, regardless of which walk of life they were from or what political conviction they held. The ideal of a volksbühne seemed to have been turned into reality in the Flanders of the interbellum period. The myth was born in the numerous necrologies and was finally given form in the book published in 1934 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of de Gruyter’s death. Publications in 1939, 1960, 1978, and 1983, with an increasing degree of academic seriousness, accompanied and helped to create this image.33 It is not until the availability of until then unknown archive records in 1989 that a new history surfaced,34 completely bringing down the myth. The repertoire renewal remained just as revolutionary. But because of different reasons (some of which were legitimate), the performance often left much to be desired, and the idea that the VVT was able to stimulate all sections of Flemish society to participate in the masterpieces of Western theatre appears to be a complete falsification of history. Miracles simply did not happen. In the meantime, this episode has been brought back to its correct proportions and has been available to the interested reader. There are other historical misrepresentations as well. For example, there is the

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Flemish theatre of the eighteenth century, which is systematically portrayed in a negative light, at best as a nonevent but more often as a step backward.35 There is also the cursed French period (1796–1815), which, if we are to believe tradition, was supposed to have been fatal for the Flemish theatre, but about which no reliable study has appeared. In many regards, several of the important phases of development of our theatre history are still waiting for their first description. Together with the need to reconsider and rewrite some of the crucial developmental phases in our mutual history, the absence of histrionic activities of “the other” no doubt outrivals all of these smaller deficiencies. After all, up to 1970 Belgium was a firm unitarian state and even today true expressions of “belgitude” can be perceived at moments: at crucial sports events or when the monarchy is at stake (the death of King Boudewijn I in 1993 gave rise to a rare expression of national mourning and grief ). To look for, describe, and explain traces of this same sentiment — or, certainly as interesting, their absence — in the theatre, seems to me one of the important challenges that Belgian theatre historians are facing. notes The heading for the chapter’s opening translates as “Sire, there are no Belgians.” This well-known epigram is from the Belgian politician Jules Destrée (1863–1936) in a letter (1912) to the king regarding the separation of Wallonia and Flanders in which he advocates dividing the two regions. Throughout the essay, all translations are my own. 1. It is not always straightforward for outsiders to grasp the difference between “Nederlands” and “Vlaams.” To keep things as simple as possible, we can say that Nederlands (i.e., Dutch) is the language spoken in the Netherlands and in the northern part of Belgium (i.e., Flanders). Since the Belgian variety differs somewhat from the Nederlands spoken in the Netherlands — just as Canadian French differs from that of France, Brazilian Portuguese from that of Portugal, or American English from British English — this is often referred to as Vlaams (Flemish). The totality of Dutch speakers in Belgium officially constitute the Vlaamse Gemeenschap (Flemish Community). So Nederlanders are not Belgians, while the Dutch speakers in Belgium are Vlamingen (Flemish). Are you still following or do you feel like Theseus in search of the Minotaur? In that case, let me recommend Het Belgisch Labyrint by G. Van Istendael (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1989), which gives a humorous but reliable guided tour through this small but complex land.

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2. “Il n’existe à leurs yeux qu’une seule nationalité: la nationalité belge. On sait bien entendu que tous les Belges ne parlent pas la même langue. Il y a des ‘provinces flamandes’ et des ‘provinces wallones’. Mais à aucun moment, à l’époque de la révolution, on n’aperçoit la trace de la moindre solidarité de groupe entre, soit les Flamands, soit les Wallons. Nulle part on n’entend dire ‘Nous les Flamands’ ou ‘Nous les Wallons.’ Le terme de ‘Flandre,’ pour désigner le pays flamand, n’existe pas encore, pas plus d’ailleurs que le terme ‘Wallonie.’” Jean Stengers, “La Révolution de 1830,” in Anne Morelli, ed., Les Grands Mythes de l’Histoire de Belgique (Bruxelles: Editions Vie Ouvrière, 1995), p. 139. 3. The first fully fledged history of Belgium appeared as early as 1805, a quarter of a century before independence: L. Dewez, Histoire général de la Belgique. After independence the two most popular were H. Moke’s Histoire de la Belgique (1839) and Th. Juste’s Histoire deBelgique(1840). The fact that both works were richly illustrated helped to create a romantic-patriotic iconography. 4. “Le théâtre est la seule forme de littérature accessible à la foule, au public illittré, et le prestige de la scène, l’émotion que produit l’art par lui-même, rend le théâtre plus puissant que toutes les tribunes.” In C. Potvin, Du Théâtre en Belgique: Historique et statistique (Bruxelles, 1862), p. 39. 5. Carlos Tindemans, Mens, Gemeenschap en Maatschappij in de Toneelletterkunde van Zuid-Nederland 1815–1914 (Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 1973), pp. 237–38. 6. Frank Peeters, “The Concept of Nationality in Nineteenth-Century Flemish Theatre Discourse: Some Preliminary Remarks,” in J. Fenoulhet and L. Gilbert, eds., Presenting the Past, Series Crossways, 3 (London: Center for the Low Countries Studies, 1996), p. 122. 7. Joris Vlasselaers, Literair bewustzijn in Vlaanderen, 1840–1893: een codereconstructie. (Leuven, Belgium: Universitaire Pers, 1985), pp. 107–8. 8. Peeters, “Concept of Nationality”; H. Verschaffel, “Nationael Tooneel,” in Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging (Tielt: Lannoo, 1998), pp. 2155–56. 9. “[T]empels van beschaving . . . alwaer elk goede huisvader, na afgedanen arbeid, zal kunnen deel nemen, en waer wy allen gelukkig zyn het onze te mogen bydragen, ter verlichting des volks, ter verheerlyking onzer moedertael, tot eer en roem van ons dierbaar vaderland.” Serafijn Willems, Het Vlaemsch tooneel, deszelfs oorsprong: Wat het vroeger was, wat het thans dient te wezen (Brussels: n.p., 1859), p. 20. 10. “Comment créer un théâtre national en Belgique, en se servant d’une langue qui n’est pas l’idiôme universel du pays?” T. Van Hecke, Considérations sur le Théâtre en Belgique et sur les Difficultés et les Moyens d’y Créer une Scène Nationale (1839), p. 11. 11. “principaux obstacles qui s’ opposent à son établissement” 12. “Mesures à prendre pour l’établissement d’une scène nationale.”

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13. A splendid example can be found in E. Van Driessche: “ The Flemish say: Hoe gaat het? [how goes it? — gaat more specifically means ‘walk’] because for the Flemish, always robust and down-to-earth, the preferred means of locomotion is by foot. The Dutch say: Hoe vaert gy? [how fare you — vaert more specifically means ‘travel by water’] because the Dutch are usually transported by canal barge or steamboat. The French say: Comment vous portez-vous? because the sedan chair was such a widespread and popular way of getting around. While the English say: How do you do? [which he takes to mean ‘. . .do your business’] because in London, with its mist and fogs, men have to resort to any means available to conduct themselves.” E. Van Driessche, Een wenk aen de Vlaemsche Tooneelspelers (Brussels: n.p., 1852), pp. 9–10. 14. A century later Suzanne Lilar would argue along more or less the same lines in her essay The Belgian Theatre since 1890 (New York: Belgian Government Information Center, 1950). 15. Tom Verschaffel, Beeld en geschiedenis: Het Belgische en Vlaamse verleden in de romantische boekillustraties (Turnhout: Brepols, 1987); J. Ogonovsky, “De monumentale schilderkunst: Aanschouwelijk onderwijs in vaderlandse geschiedenis,” in A. Morelli De grote mythen uit de geschiedenis van België, Vlaanderen en Wallonië (Berchem: EPO, 1996), pp. 147–58; R. Hoozee, J. Tollebeek, and T. Verschaffel, eds., Mise-en-scène: Keizer Karel en de verbeelding van de negentiende eeuw (Gent: Mercatorfonds, 1999), esp. part 1, “De historische cultuur van een natie,” pp. 16–63. 16. Tom Verschaffel, “Leren sterven voor het vaderland: Historische drama’s in het negentiende-eeuwse België,” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 113 (1998): 151. 17. Royal Decree July 10, 1858, and Royal Decree September 30, 1859. 18. F. Faber, Histoire du théâtre français en Belgique depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 5 (Bruxelles: Olivier, 1879), p. 130. 19. “mais, à mérite égal, le prix sera décerné à l’ouvrage dont le sujet aura été emprunté soit à l’histoire, soit aux moeurs nationales.” Ibid., p. 132. 20. A skilled laborer at that time earned approximately 1,000 francs per year. 21. Les Prix quinquennaux et triennaux en Belgique: Rapports officiels 1850–1870 (Bruxelles, 1870). 22. Between 1860 and 1890 more than 120 plays were written with a subject related to national history. My thanks to Tom Verschaffel for this information. 23. Suzanne Lilar, Zestig jaar toneelliteratuur in België (Antwerpen: De Sikkel, 1951). 24. Daan Bauwens, Kan iemand ons vermaken? Dokumentaire over teater en samenleving in Vlaanderen (Gent: Masereelfonds, 1980), p. 16. 25. Herman Teirlinck, “Two Temperaments — Two Theatres,” Le théâtre en Belgique, special issue of Le theatre dans le Monde (Bruxelles) (1960): 23–34. “But

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it only directly answered the requirements of a National Theatre in the French language and assumed that one in the Dutch language would have similar requirements.” 26. At one time H. Teirlinck taught Dutch to the future king Baudouin I. 27. Klaas Tindemans, introduction to Balkon/Balcon 2 (1998): 5. Also, A. Olaerts and A. Molitor, introduction to Balkon/Balcon 1 (1996): 5. 28. Faber, acknowledgments to Histoire du théâtre français en Belgique, vol. 1 (1878): “je laisse ce soin à de plus forts que moi, me considérant heureux si mes recherches peuvent leur être de quelque utilité.” 29. Lilar, Belgian Theater since 1890, pp. 4–5. 30. M. Hanot, “Histoire des spectacles,” in G. Dumur, eds., Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 1206–14; Martin Banham, ed., The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 84–86. 31. Robert Erenstein, Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden: Tien eeuwen theater en drama in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). 32. Carlos Tindemans, interview by J. De Roeck, “Tindemans over teater en wetanschap,” De Standaard der letteren (Brussels), March 5, 1983, p. 3. 33. Jan Oscar de Gruyter 1885–1929: zijn leven en werk (Antwerpen: De Sikkel, 1934); C. Godelaine, Het Vlaamsche Volkstooneel (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1939); A. Vander Plaetse, Herinneringen aan het Vlaamse Volkstoneel (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1960); A. Van Impe, Over toneel: Vlaamse kroniek van het komedianten dom (Tielt: Lannoo, 1978); K. Van Isacker, Mijn land in de kering 1830–1980 (Antwerpen: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1983). 34. See F. Peeters, Jan Oscar de Gruyter en het Vlaamse Volkstoneel 1920–1924 (Leuven: Peeters, 1989). 35. A. Van Impe, Over toneel, speaks of “Stille eeuwen” (quiet centuries); Th. Deronde, Het tooneeleven in Vlaanderen door de eeuwen heen (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1930), judges more severely when he uses the epithet “Het diepe verval” (the steep decline).

7 Named in Passing Deregimenting Canadian Theatre History alan filewod

I

n 1923, Andrii Babiuk, a young Ukrainian novelist and playwright who wrote under the name of Myroslav Irchan, arrived in Winnipeg, a western Canadian city that in the course of half a century had grown from a small settlement (and center of the Métis rebellion against Canadian federal expansion) into an ethnically diverse provincial capital of 180,000. Winnipeg was the launching site of the mass waves of Eastern European homesteaders of the Canadian prairies, the “stalwart peasant[s] in sheepskin coats” (in the famous words of an early twentieth-century minister of the interior) imported by the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the federal government to “open up” the prairie (notwithstanding unresolved aboriginal and Métis claims to the land).1 Irchan was one of 200,000 Ukrainians who immigrated to Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century. Five years before Irchan’s arrival, Winnipeg had been the site of an insurrectionist general strike, and when Irchan arrived, it was a center of political radicalism and diasporic cultural activism. As a playwright and a communist, Irchan became involved with the theatre work of the left-wing Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association (ULFT; the Ukrainian mass affiliate of the underground Communist Party of Canada), for whom he founded a theatre studio, wrote plays, and produced a training manual for the dozens of ULFT theatre troupes that had formed across Canada. Irchan stayed only five years before returning to Ukraine (and subsequent death in the gulag), but in that time he had a profound impact on the theatre of his adopted community. In 1929 an article in the liberal weekly magazine Saturday Night (to date the only article on Irchan in English) called him “the most popular and influential author in the country,” despite that he wrote only in Ukrainian, and asked, “Is there another writer in Canada whose appearance on the 106

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platform would be greeted with resounding, long-continued applause — whose every new play is eagerly witnessed, who can see his audience spellbound, women weeping, men grinding their teeth, and then elevated with joy when the story takes a welcome turn?”2 Irchan was perhaps the most widely performed playwright in Canada in the 1920s. “Perhaps” seems to be an ambiguous and tentative measure. Was Irchan the most widely performed playwright in Canada, or was he not? The ambiguity of my statement — he was, and he wasn’t — exposes the deeper ambiguities of Canadian theatre history that arise from complex layers of erasure. If Irchan was the most widely produced playwright in Canada, then the entire historical narrative of Canadian theatre collapses, because he is nowhere mentioned in the canons of Canadian theatre history; if he was not the most widely produced playwright, then someone even less visible was. Irchan was a professional playwright in a country where there were, by conventional account, no professional playwrights. In this ambiguity, Irchan occupies the symbolic crisis point in which the discourse of “Canadian theatre” diverges from the larger field of theatre in Canada. Irchan’s absence from Canadian theatre history as it has been narrated and professionalized by generations of academic research is real, but it is also symbolic, because there were other Irchans, writing in other languages, in the diasporic cultures that constructed Canadian nationhood in the twentieth century. The memories of these theatre artists survive within their cultural communities and in the occasional material artifacts of their theatre work: the painted backdrops of long-forgotten Finnish plays in community centers in Northern Ontario; the fleeting references to Beijing Opera troupes in Vancouver and Toronto; the posters of “community” productions by émigré artists from all over the world. Irchan’s erasure would be as complete as these others, were it not for the propaganda work of the ULFT in the 1920s and the subsequent work by historians within the Ukrainian Canadian community. (Even so, Irchan is unremembered by the “other,” larger, anticommunist Ukrainian community and was erased on the left from 1935 until his rehabilitation in the Soviet Union in 1959, twenty years after his death.) For the most part, Canadian theatre historiography has been content with these erasures because they have reinforced the governing thesis of the discipline, which developed to narrate the “emergence” of a professional theatre culture as a corollary of postcolonial Canadian

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nationhood.3 In this thesis, diasporic theatre has been perceived as an “ethnic” replication of the evolutionary teleology of Canadian theatre from community-based amateur “roots” to a professional theatre estate, in which “amateur” means “prenational.” But Irchan disturbs this thesis, because his career was clearly “professional” in a context that could not support the notion of professionalism within the fundamental argument of the discipline. His career leads to the conclusion that Canadian theatre history, as it has evolved in terms of disciplinarity and canonicity, is not about Canadian theatre at all but rather about the genealogies of performance that have legitimized changing ideological projects of nationhood. As a nation-state that achieved independence in a sequence of acts in several different legislatures over decades, Canada has always mediated conflicting “national” histories, principally divided by language. In that sense, “Canada” is a postcolonial fiction that provides legal and infrastructural cohesion to a country that has never succeeded in enlisting its citizens in a common national principle. The state project of postcolonial autonomy has forced a governing narrative of hybrid multiculturalism in order to produce a balance between anglophone and francophone nationhoods. At the same time, the political strategies by which these two historically indeterminate “nationalities” have been balanced have been stressed by recent attempts to acknowledge (while containing) the claims of other national projects, particularly in the aboriginal First Nations and diasporic cultures (known usefully in Québec as “allophones.”4 Considered as a historical process of colonial projects that have been legitimized through the narrative of national development, “Canada” is a text in which the writing of theatre history offers a unique problem. In both English- and French-speaking Canadas (the latter encompassing not only Québec but also francophone communities in the prairie provinces and Ontario, the Métis aboriginal community, and L’Acadie, the French-speaking portion of New Brunswick), the writing of theatre history can be said to precede the theatre it narrates, as theatre historians and critics have sought to project the terms in which the theatre might develop. In the same way that colonial nations like Canada began with a sense of historical ambivalence (a project whose time had come, but which could just as readily come on another date, or with a different configu-

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ration) so did their theatre cultures begin with an absence. Canadian theatre historiography has always proposed a template for the development of national culture that the idealized, aspired theatre would materialize and enact and which the actual theatre culture frequently disproved. This holds true in both anglophone and francophone Canada, whose theatre histories are deeply and inextricably connected, but have been written separately under the pressure of competing emergent nationalisms. (Replicating the governing logic of Canadian federalism, synthesizing histories, such as Londré and Watermeier’s The History of North American Theater and Benson and Conolly’s The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre resolve this by narrating “English Canadian” and Québécois histories as equally but not reciprocally constitutive of the nation; parallel but essentially separate.5) Irchan’s absence in anglophone Canadian theatre discourse (which has never found a way to locate multicultural, non-English theatre culture in its nation-building project) mirrors the marginality of the non-Québécois francophone communities in Québec theatre discourse. In both cases, the national genealogical project has on the whole denied the porousness of theatre culture, although Québécois theatre historians have been more comfortable in recognizing a larger American continental context than have anglophone Canadians. In recent years, scholars have begun to examine the interconnections of anglophone Canadian and Québec theatre on a case study basis, following the increasing theatrical success of artists such as Michel Tremblay (whose plays are as popular in anglophone Canada as they are in Québec) and Robert Lepage, whose intercultural theatre work is rooted in Québec but connects deeply into anglophone theatre, both in Canada and elsewhere. Whereas in anglophone Canada the crossborder success of artists such as Tremblay, Lepage, and Cirque du Soleil might seem to confirm a growing sense of a truly national culture released from historical boundaries, the fact remains that anglophone audiences across Canada are more receptive to Québécois culture than Québécois audiences are to anglophone Canadian culture. In this imbalance, the prominence of Québécois artists elsewhere in Canada reinforces a sense widely held in Québec of a separate nation whose culture merits international currency. The major consequence of the nation-building imperative in Canadian theatre discourse was the dislocation of Canada from its

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American history and geography. Like the United States, Canada was an expansionist frontier nation that developed from disparate colonial ventures into a federal state that continued to annex territories well into the twentieth century. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, for example, Britain’s first American colony brought four hundred years of autonomous history into Canadian confederation, and its theatre history thereby remapped “Canadian” theatre history. In the shared American history of Canada and the United States, the historical remapping of colonial experience has been more complicated. “American” theatre history, considered as the histories of the colonies that formed or joined the United States, is from the Canadian perspective a history of erasure that retroactively imposes postrevolutionary national borders and excludes those colonies that did not sign the Declaration of Independence (including the three “Canadian” colonies of Newfoundland, Canada [Québec], and Nova Scotia as well as Bermuda and the Caribbean colonies). These shared histories of shifting borders have defeated various attempts to identify national theatre origins — such as naming “the first theatre in Canada.” In one sense, the first European theatre in Canada was Marc Lescarbot’s Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, a nautical masque performed on the Bay of Fundy in 1606. In another sense, the first performance, as David Gardner has argued, was a festive hobbyhorse on board Humphrey Gilbert’s ship in 1583 on his expedition to Newfoundland.6 But Gilbert’s hobbyhorse had no place in the genealogies of Canadian theatre history before 1949. By the same token, the colonial performances in Virginia did not become America’s “first” theatres until 1784, at which point Newfoundland hobbyhorses, French imperial masques, and British garrison theatricals in Québec and Nova Scotia became the history of a foreign country. The cultural histories of colonial regimes have always been provisional and subject to such revisioning, but in Canada this provisionality has remained the defining condition of theatre historiography. It has produced two formative historiographic mechanisms, both of which this chapter will trace and challenge. The first is a disciplinary narrative that identifies the notion of “Canadian theatre” with the development of a professional theatre system capable of producing a national canon, and the second is the trope of “movements” that has given that narrative its periodic structure.

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The Disciplinary Narrative The idea of a distinctly and organically Canadian theatre came into being as an aspiration in the decades after Confederation in 1867, principally through the musings of various members of Canada First (a proEmpire, anti-American, and antifrancophone nationalist movement), Québécois nationalists, and the ambitions of a handful of literary dramatists in both languages. But in these first expressions of theatrical nationhood, the theatre was understood as its textualities, not as a system of production and consumption (which in anglophone Canada was largely an extension of the American popular theatre economy) but as a living literature of national dramas that would enact the character of the new nation(s). The fact that this literature did not in fact exist was a minor deterrent to literary nationalists who sat down to write it into being. (This was a familiar condition of nineteenth century theatrical nationalism, from the romantic monumentalism of Friedrich von Schiller at the dawn of the century to the anti-imperial ethnic nationalisms of Adam Mickiewicz and William Butler Yeats at its close.) If the nation, even the legislated colonial nation, was to be understood as a moment of historical arrival, then the arrival of its literature was an obvious corollary. The canon of nineteenth-century Canadian drama is surprisingly large, although it is still difficult to assemble. The several hundred plays that can actually be gathered together offer an odd assortment of verse tragedies, religious melodramas, community polemics, and political burlesques. They are fascinating, especially as historical artifacts, and some of them read well. But with a few exceptions (particularly political burlesques) they were rarely performed and even more rarely studied. Anglophone playwrights who wanted to see their work on stage knew to go where the market was; they headed south and wrote for the giant producing syndicates that controlled the playhouse circuits across North America. At the close of the nineteenth century, a small group of liberal nationalist critics began to argue that the perceived failure of Canadian playwriting was a consequence of the financial realities of a theatrical system centered in New York.7 Hector Charlesworth, writing in the Toronto Mail and Empire and Saturday Night, called for public subsidies in the theatre as early as 1897 as a corrective to American melodrama; over the next

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decade B. K. Sandwell wrote numerous articles and speeches denouncing the “annexed” and “adjunct” theatre. This was an argument that shaped the formation of what became Canadian theatre studies. It recurs throughout the century and was the thesis of Michael Tait’s influential 1972 study, “Playwrights in a Vacuum.”8 In this early attempt to explain the obvious derivative qualities of so much of the surviving nineteenth-century Canadian drama, Tait argued that dramatists like Charles Mair and Sarah Anne Curzon lacked the opportunity to develop their playwriting craft because the American syndicate-controlled theatrical economy effectively locked them out. But as the example of popular entertainment troupes (melodrama companies, burlesque troupes, and minstrel shows) in English and French showed in fact, playwrights weren’t denied “access” to the stage. Their plays seem so untheatrical and naive today precisely because they were deliberately written against the popular taste; they were written for the imagined theatre that did not exist, a theatre in which Québécois dramatists put alexandrine couplets in the mouths of patriotes, while across the river their Ontario counterparts gave British generals the gift of blank verse. The qualities that seem so laughable today, of pompous verse, tendentious speechifying, and bombastic patriotism were already archaic in post-Confederation Canada; they were consciously retro-chic even at the time. The literariness and lack of theatrical sophistication in these texts were markers of cultural authenticity that in anglophone Canada announced a refusal to participate in a theatre economy centered in New York, and in Québec marked the conspicuous absence of a professional national stage. In francophone Québec, where professional theatre developed later than in anglophone Canada (primarily because of the rigid antitheatricalism of the Catholic Church), the many literary nationalist dramas of the nineteenth century were influenced by the French classical tradition.9 In these texts and the critical discourses that followed them, “Canadian theatre” can be perceived as a deferred aspiration at odds with the working theatre profession of the day. The theatre industry had been one of the first sectors in the Canadian economy to be penetrated by American capital during the great rush of monopoly business in the 1890s. The idea of Canadian theatre originally surfaced as a trope of resistance, as the aspiration of national autonomy deferred by American cultural expansion, just as the idea of Québécois theatre

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developed as a trope of resistance against anglophone hegemony. This produced an overdetermined concept of Canadian theatre, as both a cultural and an economic field of possibility. The objection to American theatre in anglophone Canada cultural nationalism was both practical and ideological. On the practical level, the deep circulation of American popular culture, then as now, presented a powerful argument that Canadians really are Americans, and that far from locking Canadians out of their own systems of representation, American theatre was a field in which Canadian artists and audiences were deeply complicit. There is some justification in this when we consider, along with the popularity of touring American productions (and British companies booked through New York), the number of local minstrel shows and Uncle Tom’s Cabin companies played by Canadian performers to Canadian audiences. The ideological objection that followed from this was that despite affinities of race and history, American theatre culture circulated republican values foreign to monarchist angloCanadians. For them, the absent Canadian theatre was one that was therefore marked by its “freedom” (both ideological and economic) from American themes and forms. In this, critics tended to agree that British models would be useful. As Bernard Sandwell argued time and again in the first decade of the twentieth century, “There are good reasons why Canadians should familiarize themselves with the social conditions and problems of Great Britain, and there is no better way of doing it than by the serious British drama. . . . The British drama is the drama of our own people, or our brothers and fellow subjects. The American drama is an alien drama.”10 The desired but absent Canadian(ist) theatre became more real but no less imagined over the course of the century, in large part because of the efforts of Vincent Massey, the diplomat and politician who dedicated much of his life to establishing the cultural infrastructures of professional subsidized art in the midtwentieth century and who led the Royal Commission that recommended establishing a national arts council in 1951. For Massey, the theatre was “the central structure enshrining much that is finest in a nation’s spiritual and artistic greatness.”11 The report of Massey’s Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences may be considered the foundational document of Canadian theatre history as an intellectual discipline. It also contains the seeds of the disciplinary crisis that has

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since effectively dismantled theatre history as an academic profession in Canada. The son of a prominent industrial family (and elder brother of the famous actor Raymond Massey), Vincent Massey combined a distinguished career in public service with a lifelong commitment to theatre. As a young man, he endowed the University of Toronto with its Hart House Theatre, in which he programmed the first seasons of allCanadian drama; in the 1920s he collected those plays into the first published anthologies of Canadian drama and wrote numerous articles and speeches championing a movement for a national dramatic canon and a theatre system to produce it. For Massey, nation, drama, and race were inseparable, and all three were framed by the fundamental notion of tradition.12 His repeated argument against American cultural imports was that they represented “alien influences” that, although the United States shared an “AngloSaxon” heritage, were coarsened by the vulgarity of American republicanism and the capitalist monopoly of “New York gentlemen with Old Testament names.”13 But Massey’s ethnocentrism did not stand in the way of his liberal humanism. If the nation is the material organization of culture, then it was possible to respect pluralism (“there are several Canadas,” he once wrote) and at the same time admit the primacy of a formative cultural tradition.14 The paradox that he had to solve was one that we today understand in terms of postcolonial nation building: if national character is a given condition of nationhood, and if art reflects national character, why was Canadian culture underdeveloped? For some, inclined to a cultural positivism, the lack of a self-sustaining professional arts culture proved that Canada was simply part of a larger American cultural sphere. This was the position advanced by Merrill Denison, whose one-act plays had been the most important contributions made by Hart House. In his 1923 essay “Nationalism and Drama,” Denison insisted that New York was our theatrical capital and that “Life in Cleveland and Toronto is identical.”15 From Massey’s perspective, this suggestion of cultural free trade was an abnegation of nationhood. Yet he was not a simple protectionist who believed that a national culture was a nationalized culture. The solution to this dilemma is inscribed deeply in the Massey Report. It is the trope of the young country on the brink of maturity.

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This notion of the adolescent nation coming into maturity is deep and resilient in Canadian cultural history. Despite Massey’s reference to “relative youth,”16 Canada is no younger a nation-state than Germany or Italy; like them, it is a product of nineteenth-century liberal nationalism. But German and Italian nationhood expressed a romantic vision of the imagined, deferred national past which in Canada can only be traced through imperial history. It is the idea of a postimperial national character that is always already coming of age, the cultural narrative rather than cultural practice. The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences has become mythologized as a transformative moment of cultural emergence, as, in fact, the point of maturity promised in its name. It has become conventional to see in the Massey Commission the seeds of our contemporary public theatre industry. Writing in 1974, Don Rubin, who founded Canadian Theatre Review in that same year, stated categorically that “the Massey Commission Report then becomes a key to understanding the rapid rise of Canadian arts and arts organizations in the period following World War II. It is the major precipitating factor in the creation of the Canada Council, which, in its turn, was to become the prime mover of arts organizations.”17 In this narrative, the Massey Report legitimizes the principle of intervention, and the Canada Council for the Arts (established in 1957) spreads the seeds of cultural development by enabling infrastructures to be built and by establishing a model for the provincial and municipal arts councils that would come to carry the larger proportion of public funding in the performing arts. In fact, the commission’s chief legacy to the theatre was the institutional system it would develop, a system clearly designed to implement a model of theatrical federalism that would serve as a metonym of the national state. Most histories of Canadian theatre agree on a dominant narrative that remains virtually unchanged since Don Rubin attempted to synthesize it in 1974. Building on Massey’s analysis, this orthodoxy posits that the cause of Canadian playwriting was artificially inhibited by the absence of a professional theatre system until the postwar years, at which point the introduction of public funding established a “mainstream” that generated a radical “alternative” theatre movement where Canadian playwriting came into its own.

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In this pattern, Rubin articulated a genealogical sequence that narrates the maturation of a professional theatre, in which the drama and the theatrical system function as reciprocating engines of growth: new dramatic “voices” encourage new forms of theatrical production; new theatres enable new drama, and so on through the generations. For Rubin, public funding was the sign of national cultural maturity that primed the pump. In this positivist account, the theatre “evolves” in stages that supersede colonialism; every accomplishment is a step closer to deferred autonomy. Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly reiterate this thesis in their English-Canadian Theatre (the discursive offshoot of their 1989 Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre) when they write, “It has been one of the purposes of this study to show that the factors militating against an indigenous Canadian theatre were cultural and political, not climatic, and that Canadians were long denied — or denied themselves — full imaginative expression in drama and theatre.”18 The professional system of subsidized theatres that came into place during the 1960s was deeply complicit in and affected by the new popular movements of cultural nationalism. In the theatre this nationalism expressed itself in the artistic vocabularies of the counterculture, a mistrust of large institutions, and a demand for new plays. The exponential increase in the canon of Canadian drama in the 1970s was the starting point for theatre history as an academic discipline, beginning with occasional university courses on Canadian drama and hobbyist histories of local performance cultures. At York University, Mavor Moore began teaching the first courses in Canadian theatre history in the early 1970s, at the same time that Ann Saddlemyer began supervising the first Ph.D. candidates in the field at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama. In this period of disciplinary consolidation, particular emphasis was placed on recuperative work, on primary sources, on performance calendars, regional histories, play text recovery, and often pedantic quests for origins. This was the period that produced the first historical bibliographies of Canadian theatre, edited by John Ball and Richard Plant, and the several volumes of the Canada’s Lost Plays series, edited by Anton Wagner. The climactic moment of this recuperative phase may have been 1976, the year that saw the founding of two scholarly bodies: the Association for Canadian Theatre History (ACTH) and the Societé d’histoire du théâtre du Québec (SHTQ). (Both of these bodies changed their names in the disciplinary

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reconfigurations of the next two decades, ACTH to the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, and SHTQ to the Societé québécoise d’études théâtrales.) Their journals, Theatre History in Canada (now Theatre Research in Canada) and L’annuaire théâtral continue to operate as the peak peer-reviewed standards of their disciplines. By the end of the 1970s, the remarkable institutional growth of the theatre profession and the emergence of a recognized academic discipline seemed to prove Rubin’s thesis. In its first year of operation in 1957, the Canada Council had funded four theatre companies. Twenty years later it was funding (or trying to fund) hundreds and trying to make sense of a theatre profession that refused to grow in the categories that Massey had envisioned and the Canada Council had materialized. The model of a national culture organized institutionally in a pyramid of excellence secured by tradition held little appeal for the postwar generations of young, often radical artists. For culture policy makers, the midcentury statist model projected by the Massey Report was challenged almost immediately by the cultural renewals of the 1960s and by the very real demographic impact of the federal government’s decision to ease immigration quotas and pursue an official policy of multiculturalism. This was to cause a major historiographic problem for theatre historians and has led to the effective disintegration of the discipline. Myroslav Irchan may have disappeared from theatre history, but more Irchans were arriving daily, and they would not so easily be erased.

The Trope of Movements The failure of the national project in theatre historiography can be attributed to internal contradictions and external pressures. Toward the end of the 1980s, a new tendency of postmodern historiography began to scrutinize the absences of the statist project, critiquing the recuperative approach as positivist, too reliant on unexamined sources, and complicit in a national boundary narrative that had failed to accommodate cultural diversity. Postmodern historiography came into the newly established discipline through two vectors, in the work of textual critics who had begun to explore new methods of historicism, which led inevitably to an engagement with theatre history as the locus of textual practice, and

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through a new cohort of researchers whose theatrical taste and knowledge had been formed in the postcolonial theatres of the post-1960s cultural boom. Under the editorship of Rubin’s successor, Robert Wallace, Canadian Theatre Review began exploring questions of theory, marginality, and social discourse in its coverage of theatre, and the scholarly associations reconfigured themselves to embrace “theatre research” and “études théâtrales.” In Québec the battle for sovereignty may have been lost in the ballot boxes, but it was won in the field of culture. Québécois theatre research developed its project of exploring and theorizing the layers of national history, thereby consolidating in discourse borders that were much less secure in actuality. In contrast, the movement in anglophone theatre research was toward local practices and cultures that destabilized, and often refused, national borders. In this, the influence of postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Benedict Anderson enabled a new cohort of researchers to challenge and (in the language of the postmodernism they adopted) interrogate the boundaries of the national paradigm. In this evolving historiographic argument, the thesis that theatrical governance and canonicity are indexical of nationhood has collapsed to the point where it has been widely critiqued as an instrument of historical racism and class hegemony. At the same time, the antinational pressures of global market capitalism have destabilized confidence in the idea of national culture. This has been particularly acute in anglophone Canada, where the practice of culture for most people is deeply integrated into a larger American cultural formation and is becoming increasingly a matter of concern in Québec, where North American consumerism and multicultural demographics destabilize the historical sense of les gens du pays. In the writing of theatre history, the productive affinities of postcolonialism and postmodernism (first identified in Denis Salter’s influential 1992 essay “On Native Ground: Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Postmodernism/Postcolonialism Axis”19) exposed the inadequacies of the trope of “movements” that had consolidated as the principal historiographic strategy in the 1970s. Theatre historians have relied on coherent movements to create the narrative structures of history and at the same time have accepted these movements as positivist evidence of their narratives. In the accumulated teleology of Canadian theatre as written since 1974 (when Rubin first synthesized the federalist argu-

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ment), Canadian theatre progresses from prenational origins through a narrative sequence that achieves national character and preprofessional status in the Little Theatre movement (organized in Canada by the Dominion Drama Festival, which Vincent Massey was instrumental in forming in 1932) and its supposed antithesis, the Workers’ Theatre Movement in the 1930s. This sequence evolves into the federalist “regional theatre movement” of the 1950s and 60s, and generates its antithesis in the radical and nationalist “alternative theatre movement” of the 1970s. A crude dialectical narrative sought to reconcile these movements by adapting an evolutionary theory by which (as discerned in writings of Renate Usmiani, Denis Johnston, and the several collaborations of Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly) movements can be marked in generational waves.20 Hence the “alternate theatre” generates its antithetical “second wave” after it has met and absorbed in reciprocal embrace the mainstream it had emerged to contest. At this point, as successive researchers have shown in more local, situated, and partisan studies, the trope of movements falls apart under its own weight, but it has remained fundamentally intact as a method of periodization, even by historians (and here I include myself ) who have disagreed with its premises. In Québec a similar mechanism has applied historically, but with perhaps more evidentiary validity, because “movements” in Québécois theatre were more clearly manifestations of organized structures. Although it is tempting to explain this in terms of national cultural difference (Québécois intellectuals write manifestos, but anglophone Canadians rarely do), it may also be a result of the major material difference between Québécois and anglophone Canadian theatre cultures. Québécois theatre is primarily located in Montreal and Québec City, and in consequence the theatrical community is compressed, interconnected, and metropolitan; in anglophone Canada, the tenuous spread of theatre culture across a small population and a vast landmass makes a productive sense of a theatre community difficult to sustain. In Quebec, “movements” have tended to emerge from within cultural practice; in anglophone Canada they have more often been discursive categories defined by critics, policy makers, and scholars. Perhaps no problem illustrates the nature of the disciplinary failure of Canadian theatre history as clearly and urgently as that of what has been called in historical succession “Indian,” Native,” “Aboriginal,” “Indigenous,” and “First Nations” theatre. The penetration of the

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professional theatre by aboriginal artists, who defined their aesthetics through cultural difference and resistance in the 1990s, clearly originated from outside the teleological narrative of Canadian theatre as it had consolidated, but just as clearly originated from within the domains of theatre practice in Canada. Myroslav Irchan remained invisible and unrecovered, but First Nations cultural activists successfully commanded the structures of legitimation — in the arts councils, university curricula, and critical distinction — that announced professional status in the theatre. Playwrights such as Tomson Highway, Monique Mojica, and Daniel David Moses came into the public eye as the theatrical front of a critical national debate about the Canadian federal state and the political role of the First Nations. Their theatrical success, produced within alliances between new aboriginal theatre companies and the already established professional theatre, increasingly exposed the entire structure of professional theatre discourse in Canada, whether in English or French, as ethnocentric at best. In 1953 Vincent Massey had influenced the powers of the state to assist the founding of the Stratford Festival so that Shakespeare might stand as an impartial symbol of humanist tradition and excellence; four decades later the voices of aboriginal playwrights, commanding historical presence, recast Shakespeare as an ideologically overinvested ethnic playwright.21 Virtually every history of Canadian theatre has begun with an acknowledgment of First Nations performance, usually described in terms of an atemporal present interrupted by European “contact” (or, as more commonly used today, invasion). Despite cultural and linguistic differences that were no less complex than in Europe, the episteme of aboriginality placed all precontact cultures on the same plane and described their performance cultures in terms of a dehistoricized concept of pretheatrical ritual. Recent attempts to escape the ethnographic biases of this approach have begun to acknowledge the cultural complexities and diversities of indigenous cultures in North America, but theatre historians still tend to perceive their performances through the optic of European theatrical experience. Typically, the entry on Canada in the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre refers to the Pacific Northwest cultures as the “theatrically most developed” and refers to Nootka performances as “Mystery Cycles.”22 Beyond this attempt to recognize and name (however incorrectly) the theatricality of preinvasion cultures, theatre historians only recog-

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nized aboriginality as a recent phenomenon because of its contemporary political affirmations and its entry into the canons of dramatic literature. They have been unable to apply the techniques of periodization to the four centuries of interim aboriginal cultural life that have continued to preserve memory and build political community through performance, negotiating complex issues of tradition, modernism, and hybridity. In Canadian theatre, aboriginality has for the most part existed only through surrogation (principally in images of aboriginality enacted in “white” culture and through cultural ethnography). It can be argued that the absence of First Nations theatre culture in Canadian theatre historiography has been a form of cultural genocide. Only in recent years has there been a concerted effort to document and theorize First Nations work in terms arrived at in collaboration with aboriginal artists, activists, and intellectuals. The operating principle of theatre research in Canada has been to exclude those historical phenomena that do not accord with the overarching disciplinary thesis. Irchan disappeared as a minor figure whose career does not contribute to the thesis; aboriginal theatre disappeared except for rare moments when it intersected with the development of the professional theatre estate. The focus in the 1970s and 80s on synthesizing narratives compounded this process of exclusion. It is significant that in 1989 the Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre (which may be considered a monument to the state of the discipline, and indeed the high water mark of disciplinarity) contains no entry for Aboriginal, Native, Indian, or First Nations theatre, although individual playwrights and actors are named in passing. In the three decades since its inception, the discipline of Canadian theatre history has thus been upset by a complex of related factors: the demographic changes in Canadian society, which challenge the ethnocentricism of the European tradition; the political assertion of aboriginality forced by land claims and the demand for redress of human rights abuses; and the introduction of postmodern and postcolonial research historiographies brought to bear on the changing landscape of theatrical practice. Some of those changes have been produced by substantial shifts in the theatre economy in Canada, and these have had a particularly critical impact in both anglophone Canada and Québec, because they have questioned not just the integrity of the idea of national theatre culture, but the integrity of the national state(s) it mirrors and enacts.

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The fundamental premise of theatre historiography in Canada reiterates the nationalist polemics of the late nineteenth century and Massey’s subsequent humanist federalism: that in a nation whose economy has always been dominated by American business interests, a truly national culture must be a public enterprise. “Canadian” or “Québec” theatre in this sense has always been taken to mean the literature of the people as produced in public theatres. The corollary to this has been that commercial theatre has always been perceived (often inaccurately) by liberal nationalist critics as a projection of foreign theatre business. This perception was valid when Sandwell voiced it, and it appeared to retain validity in the renewal of commercial theatre in the 1980s, when local franchises of blockbuster British and American musicals created a notion of a theatrical market which they then began to dominate. By the end of the century, commercial theatres were selling more seats in Canada than the partially subsidized theatres of the public sector, but as was the case with the “adjunct theatre” that Sandwell decried a century earlier, almost all of these productions were imports. The failure of the national paradigm, especially in anglophone Canada, effectively removed the objection that these productions were “non-Canadian,” because the term had lost any stable reference. As local franchises, these shows were in fact productions of local theatre industries, and they clearly answered the demand that their marketing created. In 2002, more people saw The Lion King in Toronto than attended the entire season of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the largest and most heavily subsidized public theatre in the country.23 The problem is not one of transnational corporate versus national state cultures (although in the latter case it must be remarked that the Stratford Festival remains a disturbing remnant of ethnocentricity in “multicultural” Canada). The audiences that saw The Lion King are no less “national” than the ones that went to Stratford (Ontario), and the show is no less “national theatre” than the seasons of the Canadian Stage Company a few blocks away in Toronto. Nor is it useful any longer to discuss both The Lion King and the Stratford Festival as colonial obstructions to an “authentic” Canadian culture. The audiences that thrill to Julie Taymor’s elative fantasy of a mythic intercultural humanism are no more or less colonial and nonnational than the audiences that cheered Myroslav Irchan eighty years ago. The problem for theatre historians in Canada, then, is that if “the” theatre is not a category of the national, it cannot at the same time be

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uploaded into a diffused notion of a transnational global culture: it operates in fields of cultural formation and policy that are formed by national experience and legislated by national states. It may be that we are living in an era of decentered imperium, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, and it may be that empires consolidate by inducing local nationalisms that come into definition through difference rather than principle (Canada and Australia attest to this, as nations formed within imperial allegiance but informed by a growing sense of particularity); nevertheless, “nation” remains a formative site of identity, allegiance, and possibility.24 In working through these questions, which have become recurrent topics in the scholarly associations, theatre historians have sought collaborations with other disciplines, especially cultural geographers and literary theorists. The result has been a process of deregimentation, as the precepts of national culture have been dismantled in academic discourse and overturned in theatre practice. The practice of theatre history today is more diverse and plural than at any previous point in Canadian history. Released from the ordinate systems that charted theatre history as a process of development in an evolving narrative of national culture, researchers have effectively inverted the premise that established their discipline. Instead of investigating how the nation has produced theatre, they ask instead how theatre has produced the nation. The result has been a shift from macroscopic narratives to situated investigations into local cultures and practices that identify connections with similar projects in other countries. (My own work, with David Watt in Australia, on the history of late twentieth-century labor theatre in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom is one such example, and it stands beside numerous similar projects that examine, to name but a few, the workings of diasporic theatre cultures, gendered bodies, audience receptions, and the international circulations of mise-en-scène.25) If theatre history has diffused into a wider, less regimented field of theatre studies, it has, in Canada at least, become at the same time more fruitful, productive, and capable of addressing the historical absence of Myroslav Irchan and the unknown cohorts of the culturally disappeared. notes 1. Enderby and District Museum, “Ukrainians in Grindrod,” http:// www.sjs.sd83.bc.ca/museum/thepast/ethnic/scandia.htm.

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2. Charles Roslin, “Canada’s Bolshevist Drama — Miroslav Irchan, Playwright and Prophet of a Proletarian Revolution,” Saturday Night 44 (February 9, 1929): 2–3. Reprinted in John Kolasky, ed., Prophets and Proletarians: Documents on the History of the Rise and Decline of Ukrainian Communism in Canada (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1990), pp. 72–77. For a history of the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association, see Peter Krawchuk, Our Stage: The Amateur Performing Arts of the Ukrainian Settlers in Canada, trans. Mary Skrypnyk (Toronto: Kobzar, 1984). 3. The arguments in this essay owe much to a series of conversations in a graduate seminar on Canadian theatre historiography that I conducted at the University of Guelph in 2002. In that seminar I found myself challenged by the cultural affirmations and refusals of six postgraduate students, and their responses to my arguments have made their way into my discussions of erasure and absence. I would like to thank Rebecca Caines, Debra Henderson, Jane Mullis, Ingrid Mundel, Marissa McHugh, and Kim Nelson for their provocative insights, their passionate insistence that “all history is standpoint history,” and their caution to “signpost the gaps.” 4. For a definition of allophone as it is used in Québec, see Claude Bélanger, “Quebec History,” http://www2.marianopolis.edu/quebechistory/events/ allos.htm: “Allophone is a term used in Quebec, and in the rest of Canada, to describe people whose language is neither English nor French; the term is derived from Greek and simply means ‘other languages.’” 5. Felicia Hardison Londré and Daniel Watermeier, The History of North American Theater (New York: Continuum, 1999); Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly, eds., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also, Denis Salter, “Performing Sovereignty: Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna,” in Helen Gilbert, ed., Post-Colonial Stages: Critical and Creative Views on Drama, Theatre and Performance (London: Dangaroo, 1999) pp. 64–77; Denis Salter, “Who’s Speaking Here? Tremblay’s Scots Voice,” Canadian Theatre Review 74 (Spring 1993): 40–45; Barbara Hodgdon, “Splish Splash and The Other: Lepage’s Intercultural Dream Machine,” Essays in Theatre/Etudes Théâtrales 12, no. 1 (November 1993): 29–40; Jennifer Harvie and Erin Hurley, “States of Play: Locating Quebec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina and the Cirque du Soleil,” Theatre Journal 51, no. 3 (October 1999): 299–315. 6. David Gardner, “Forum: David Gardner Argues the Case for 1583,” Theatre History in Canada 4 (Fall 1983): 226–37. 7. See, for example, Denis Salter, “Hector Willoughby Charlesworth and the Nationalization of Cultural Authority, 1890–1945,” in Anton Wagner, ed., Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 137–76; Anton Wagner, “Saving the Nation’s

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Aesthetic Soul: B. K. Sandwell at the Montreal Herald, 1900–1914, and Saturday Night, 1932–1951,” in Wagner, Establishing Our Boundaries, pp. 177–98; Alan Filewod, “National Theatre/National Obsession,” in Don Rubin, ed., Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1996), pp. 424–31. 8. Michael Tait, “Playwrights in a Vacuum: English-Canadian Drama in the Nineteenth Century,” in W. H. New, ed., Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1972), pp. 13–26. 9. For information on Québécois theatre in the nineteenth century, see Leonard Doucette, Theatre in French Canada: Laying the Foundations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); and Gilbert David, “Quebec, Theatre in (French),” in Benson and Conolly, Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, pp. 444–50. 10. B. K. Sandwell, “Our Adjunct Theatre,” in Addresses Delivered before the Canadian Club: Season 1913–1914 (Montreal, Canadian Club, 1914), p. 102. 11. Canada, Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–1951, Briefs and Transcripts of Public Hearings, vol. 18, brief 188, microfilm (Toronto: Micromedia Ltd, 1972). 12. Vincent Massey, “Art and Nationality in Canada,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd series, vol. 24 (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1930), p. 66. 13. Vincent Massey, “The Prospects of a Canadian Drama,” Queen’s Quarterly 30 (1922): 197. 14. Massey, “Prospects,” p. 207. 15. Merrill Denison, “Nationalism and Drama,” in Don Rubin, ed., Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996), p. 93. 16. Massey, “Art and Nationality,” 64. 17. Don Rubin, “Creeping toward a Culture,” in Rubin, Canadian Theatre History, p. 320. 18. Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly, English-Canadian Theatre (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 113. 19. Denis Salter, “On Native Ground: Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Postmodernism/Postcolonialism Axis,” Theatre Research in Canada 13, no. 1–2, (Spring/Fall 1992): 134–43. 20. Renate Usmiani, Second Stage: The Alternative Theatre Movement in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983); Denis Johnston, Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto’s Alternative Theatres, 1968–1975 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). 21. Shakespeare’s iconic status in Canada is materialized in the Stratford Festival of Canada, in Stratford, Ontario. As the largest and most heavily subsidized theatre in Canada, the Stratford Festival is the cultural mechanism that regulates the standards and values of the classical tradition in anglophone

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Canada; its equivalent in Québec, le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, grounds an engagement with contemporary Québécois drama in an international classical repertoire. The Québécois theatre economy has been less affected by the arrival of imported “megamusicals” than has been the case in anglophone Canada. 22. Anton Wagner, introduction to “Canada,” in Don Rubin, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, vol. 2, Americas (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 84. 23. The Toronto production of The Lion King has played to full houses at the Princess of Wales Theatre, with annual audiences of 850,000; the Stratford Festival announced a record audience total of 672,924 for its 2002 season. (http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/). My argument that The Lion King actualizes a fantasy of a deregulated intercultural market that uses the theatrical language of cultural democracy can be found in Alan Filewod, “Theatrical Capitalism, Imagined Theatres and the Reclaimed Authenticities of the Spectacular,” in Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi, eds., Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium (Brussels: P.I.E.–Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 219–30. 24. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 25. Alan Filewod and David Watt, Workers’ Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970 (Sydney: Currency Press, 2001). Alongside this diversification of subjects and methodologies in recent Canadian scholarship, there has emerged a considerable body of theory to account for it. In this, two recent works merit particular mention: Robert Wallace’s critique of the intellectual history of Canadian theatre history in a major address published as Theatre and Transformation in Contemporary Canada (Toronto: Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University, 1999); and Janusz Pryzychodzen’s encyclopedic retheorization of Québec theatre, Vie et mort du théâtre au Québec (Montréal: L’Harmattan, 2001).

8 Narrative Possibilities for U.S. Theatre Histories bruce m c conachie

D

uring the 1990s, an increasing number of historians framed their work in American theatre history as a short essay rather than as a long narrative. This is not to characterize the essay and the narrative as distinctive historical genres; indeed, most good histories combine an argumentative point of view with interesting storytelling. Nonetheless, there are some formal differences that typically shape essays and narratives as rhetorical modes with different emphases and investments. Following Paul Ricoeur, it is clear that all historical narratives rely on a coherent point of view and the interpretation of events in time to shape a story about the past, but this story need not demonstrate a single thesis.1 Essays, in contrast, always seek to substantiate a major truth claim, often by arranging their argumentative points in an ascending order of complexity and rhetorical impact, a structure that need have no relation to historical events in time. Although historians can exercise almost as much freedom as modern novelists in departing from strict chronology, those attentive to a crucial demand of narrative will find ways to emphasize the weight of the past upon the unfolding of events. Historical essayists may feature the influence of the past as one of their arguments, but the mode of the essay does not necessarily entail its emphasis. Good narratives culminate in a credible and logical ending. Good essays conclusively demonstrate their initial claim as truth. Before 1990, most historians of American theatre crafted their work near the narrative end of the essay-narrative continuum.2 By 2000, historical writing in American theatre had shifted along this continuum toward the mode of the expository essay. Counting the three-volume Cambridge History of American Theatre (1997, 1999, 2000) as a single book, four books were published during the decade that purported to survey American theatre history from colonial times to the present. Of these, only Felicia Hardison Londre and Daniel J. Watermeier’s The History of 127

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North American Theatre: The United States, Canada, and Mexico: From PreColumbian Times to the Present (1998) told a full-scale historical story with a beginning, middle, and end. The movement away from single or coauthored books to the anthology of articles partly accounts for the rise of the expository history essay after 1990. Nonetheless, earlier in the decade, half of the contributors for The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present (1993) continued to rely on narrative development for the coherence of their short essays. Most of the entries in the well-reviewed Cambridge History of the American Theatre combined narrativist and essayist emphases. The organization of the three-volume series sacrificed an overarching narrative for each volume, however, to provide discrete sections focused on different areas of theatrical development, such as management, playwriting, and acting. These stand-alone historical essays, including the longer overview essays that begin each book in the series, often overlap in historical interpretation, but attempt to tell no general story throughout the volume. By 1999, with the publication of Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, an emphasis on narrative was in full retreat. In contrast to the American Stage anthology in 1993, only one of the twelve contributors to Performing America chose to fashion her or his historical argument through narrative development.3 This swing from the narrativist toward the essayist end of the continuum of historical writing in American theatre history is hardly unique. Many other histories of national theatres are now or soon will be in print that are written primarily as expository essays rather than as cohesive narratives.4 My concern in this chapter is not to bemoan the fall of the narrative and the rise of the essay in historical writing. Both extremes of the narrative-essay continuum, after all, invite problems of historical explanation. Good storytelling can sacrifice complexity of interpretation, for example, while smooth argumentation can define its thesis so narrowly that historically relevant evidence and context are excluded. Rather, I am urging us to shift our focus from the shortcomings of narrative, which has animated discussions among historians since Hayden White first drew our attention to it,5 to the problems posed by historical essays that slight narrative development in their argumentation. In the reaction against narrative, American theatre historians are in danger of abandoning a formal mode and a rhetorical strategy that continues to offer useful and persuasive ways into historical interpretation and explanation.

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Although freedom from the restraints of narrative may seem to open up new possibilities for historical knowledge, from my perspective this apparent liberty is a cul de sac for theatre history. Savvy historians have come to recognize that their usual reliance on narrative is a strength that gives cohesion to their discipline. According to Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob in Telling the Truth about History, Narrative continues to be fundamental, albeit in different ways, to history as a form of knowledge about human life. . . . Despite the decline of grand narratives, history has retained a strong narrative cast, even in the most specialized monographs of social and cultural history. Like memory itself, every work of history has the structure of a plot with a beginning, middle, and end, whether the subject is social mobility in a nineteenth-century American city, the uses of art as propaganda in the Russian Revolution, or the analysis of the rise of postmodernist theory in historical writing.6 As their allusion to “postmodernist theory” suggests, Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob acknowledge the poststructuralist critique of narrative — a critique that, at its extreme, denounces all Western master narratives for producing a host of evils, including individualism and imperialism. They deny, however, that such effects necessarily follow from all narratives and affirm that “narrative is essential both to individual and social identity” (235). In this, Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob are joined by a host of anthropologists, sociolinguists, and cognitive psychologists. From this point of view, it would seem that the need for narrative is deeply embedded in human desire.7 If historians turn away from narrative, they may be frustrating a basic human need as well as undermining the foundations of their discipline. What are the primary reasons for the retreat from narrative during the 1990s? No doubt there are many, and they range from the economics of publishing to a desire for inclusiveness and democracy among the editors of theatre history anthologies. These reasons include, as well, the “linguistic turn” in scholarship, which tends to privilege the synchronic potential of the essay form over the diachronic narrative. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob also discuss another reason, linked to the last, for the general deemphasis of narrative in historical writing — the waning credibility of “grand narratives.” From the 1950s through the 80s, the Cold War tended to freeze the development of new narrative strategies among

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American historians. Although many historians after 1970 questioned the orientations that drove these narratives, few provided viable new narratives to take their place (198–283). As Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob point out, some poststructuralists in the 1980s and 90s offered their own grand narrative in the place of the old ones, but others denounced all narrative writing as inherently totalitarian (232). For historians who see no future for historical writing without narrative, most poststructuralisms provide little epistemological basis for practice or hope.8 As this essay will show, the field of American theatre history has generally reflected these developments in the larger arena of American historical discourse. Not surprisingly, the narrative legacies from the Cold War continue to shadow many of the essays in Performing America. The resulting contradictions have left most of the contributors to the 1999 volume, especially those writing multicultural history, at an impasse. In such circumstances, abstaining from narrative altogether may seem the better part of valor, but such a retreat, while it shrinks history to the manageable constraints of the expository essay, also sacrifices the larger explanations that historical narrative can provide. The primary question for me, then, has to do with the emerging possibilities for writing credible and valid narrative histories about American theatre. If the grand narratives of the Cold War era have fragmented, might we pick up some of the historical pieces and begin to imagine the telling of other stories, far less grand than before? Two of the historical essays in Performing America provide some basis for optimism about the possibilities for shifting historical writing away from the present essayist extreme of the continuum and back toward the center, where narrative and argumentation can share more equally in the construction of history. To understand these possibilities, however, requires that you, “gentle reader,” follow my own narrative path back to the historical tales told during the American Cold War, when American theatre history established itself as an accepted discipline in the academy. In a short essay on the scholarship of American theatre history, Oscar Brockett notes that amateur historians dominated the present academic field until the twentieth century.9 As English professors won gradual acceptance of American dramatic literature as a legitimate area of study after 1900, American theatre history began to be taught as a contextual addendum to the plays. After World War II, with the bur-

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geoning of theatre departments and the creation of doctoral programs, academic societies, and scholarly journals in theatre studies, trained historians transformed American theatre history from a mostly popular arena into an academic field. The first generation of American theatre historians included Barnard Hewitt, Glenn Hughes, Jonathan Curvin, Richard Moody, and Garff B. Wilson. Among the histories produced by this group of scholars, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theatre, 1750–1900, by Moody, and Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bare and Ye Cubb to Chorus Line, by Wilson, were representative of what might be identified as the two dominant Cold War orientations of historical scholarship on American theatre, culturalism and universalism.10 While culturalism emphasizes the unique and superior qualities of a national culture, universalism celebrates the cultural trends in a national history that unite it with practices and beliefs that the historian assumes best represent all of human history. Both orientations have deep roots in the Western tradition dating from the eighteenth century. Culturalism builds on the historicist assumptions of J. G. Herder, and universalism draws on the ideology of Voltaire and other Enlightenment figures committed to a belief in the possibility of progress. The genealogy of culturalism may be traced from German romanticism through the multicultural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss; in the United States, historians Frederick Jackson Turner and others who emphasized distinctive features of the American experience continued to work within the tradition of culturalism. Positivist historians, including Karl Marx, shaped nineteenth-century universalism, which altered in the twentieth to inform the work of the Annales historians and others; the books of progressives Charles and Mary Beard and most post-1960 social historians epitomized this tradition in the United States. In theatre scholarship, Moody’s America Takes the Stage generally falls within the culturalist orientation and Wilson’s Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre works primarily in the universalist tradition. Despite their substantial differences, however, Moody and Wilson, like many other Cold War historians, grounded their narratives on a belief in American exceptionialism — the faith, dating from Puritan times, that the story of America might provide a moral example to other national cultures around the world.11 In this prejudice, as in their general orientations, Moody and Wilson can hardly be blamed for the Cold

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War concerns that influenced America Takes the Stage and Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre. Although both books have passages of subtle interpretation, the following discussion will focus on the narratological shortcomings of culturalism and universalism in these representative texts. As will become evident in the following sections of this essay, subsequent historians of the American theatre reshaped Moody’s patriotic culturalism into multiculturalism and subverted Wilson’s “free world” universalism with Marxist humanism. Most theatre historians, however, did not alter the narrative patterns (and their shortcomings) that had shaped and were shaped by these traditional orientations. In the first sentence of his book on American theatre from 1750 to 1900, Richard Moody invokes “the spirit of romance” as central to any understanding of American politics, society, and culture (1). Moody hastens to add that this “spirit” was “not native born, nor was it entirely derivative. It was both” (1). The “romantic temper” came to America from Europe, Moody explains, but “the new land, the freedom from social or political restraint, [and] the adventurous dream of unexplored frontiers” reshaped the European “romantic spirit” into the foundation for an American national character (1). Indeed, the frontier experience “gave the vital spark to American romance,” asserts Moody (6). The historian devotes a specific section of his second chapter to the “frontier and the folk,” noting that frontier dwellers were “imbued with the romantic spirit in its fullest intensity” (169). Like several other American historians in the first half of the twentieth century, Moody understood the experience of the frontier as the defining and elevating feature of America’s unique history.12 Further, like many historians and sociologists of the early Cold War, Moody was writing for a public in 1955 that worried that the “national character” of America might not be able to meet the many international and domestic challenges of communism.13 Moody’s implicit answer to such doubters was that America needed a vigorous theatrical culture, among other institutional practices, to reaffirm and recapture its romantic spirit. Moody’s emphasis on a national spirit emanating primarily from the American people draws on the Herderian historiographical tradition. In his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784), Herder argued that reason itself was invariably subservient to the “spirit” of a people, a volksgeist. The history of each national people must be unique, Herder

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argued, because historians could never transcend their particular volksgeist to write from a universal point of view; in effect, all knowledge was epistemologically contained by culture. Enlightenment notions of universal reason remained dominant in Europe in the eighteenth century, but Herder’s beliefs, and modifications to them added by his advocates, shaped much of the discourse of German romanticism, cultural nationalism, and racial superiority in the nineteenth century.14 In the American context, Herder’s legacy animated historians to search for the origins and unique characteristics of American culture and to define and celebrate a particular national character. Although Herder did not suggest that one national history might rise above others as a beacon for all humans — indeed, his historicism implicitly invites comparativist rather than messianic understandings — American culturalist historians like Moody joined Herder’s legacy with the Cold War historiographical mandate of American exceptionalism. For Moody, the frontier experience not only distinguished American theatre as unique, it also helped to elevate it as morally exceptional. Moody’s belief in the significance of the frontier on the American volksgeist, and hence on the development of national drama and theatre, encouraged him to argue that the kinds of plays reflecting and embodying American romanticism would tend to be unpolished, lacking in formal accomplishments, and more appealing to the masses than to a cultured elite. What emerges in Moody’s discussion of American theatre and drama, which draws on earlier scholarship by Constance Rourke on folk humor and folk traditions,15 is the prevalence of a kind of populist romanticism, the result, says Moody, of the “persistence of the romantic temper” rather than the “elevated perceptions of the romantic ideal” (24). Although his culturalism can partly account for the generally low quality of nineteenth-century American drama, Moody, lacking an autochthonic, American Shakespeare, can posit no national dramatic greatness against which the melodramas, social comedies, and minstrel skits he is discussing might be ranked as second-rate. Nonetheless, Moody departs from his culturalist orientation to announce an abstract standard of “good drama” (157), a term he uses a few times but never bothers to define. At one point, Moody even recognizes a category called “traditional plays” from Europe that treat “universal passions” such as love, revenge, and hatred (187), which were popular vehicles for American stars. Consequently, although Herder’s culturalism remains

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the general basis for his narrative, Moody maintains some flexibility in his argument. His implicit endorsement of an international standard for “good drama,” a kind of play that may even delve into “universal” themes, allows him to slip the traces of a rigid culturalism. Nonetheless, Moody’s narrative evinces several of the problems of culturalist historiography. The first is a search for origins, animated by the Herderian (and later Social Darwinian) belief that the nature of a people could be discovered in the core beliefs and practices of its primal past. This search leads Moody to hazard some vague generalizations about America’s cultural legacy from Europe, the experience of the frontier, and “the romantic spirit” in early American literature, painting, and other arts — few of which have demonstrable, developmental links to the post-1800 theatre that Moody wishes to celebrate. A related problem of Herderian history is its implicit essentialism. The culturalism of America Takes the Stage leads Moody to personify the American character as “the romanticist,” the essential American of the pre–Civil War era, always gendered as male. Moody’s introductory first chapter traces the outline of this dashing figure and establishes him as the protagonist of his history. Some of the romanticist’s notable traits include “his loving and longing looks into the past,” a “preoccupation with the curious, the strange, and the mysterious,” his distrust of “the strictures and painful rigidities of reasoned behavior,” and his “insurgent” and rebellious quality, balanced, however, by the fact that “he remains a common man, tenderhearted and sentimental in his expansive love for his fellows and in his unshakable belief in a glorious future” (2–3). A third problem of Moody’s culturalist orientation is his ethical relativism. Because culturalists cannot claim a universal ethics and remain true to Herderian historicism, they must find their moral values within the volksgeist. Consequently, Moody’s explanation of the Revolutionary War and the kinds of plays that emerged from it has little to say about the Enlightenment ideals that motivated some of the colonists to form a more republican government. Instead, for Moody, the revolution was about “the blooming of the romantic ideal, representing faith in the power of individual man to shape his own destiny” (131). Not surprisingly, the historical realities of slavery and racism present Moody with a harder historiographical task. Moody recognizes that the white actors who performed the Jim Crows and Zip Coons of minstrelsy depicted an unrealistic, “romanticized picture” of black life, but he barely mentions

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slavery as a cause of this problem and does not blame racism, a term which might have invoked an international standard of behavior. From Moody’s point of view, “any attempt to represent the Negro realistically would have frustrated the free, expansive, and inventive comic spirit of the typical blackface performer and denied him the theatrical freedom that was necessary to his art” (55). When discussing the Sambos and Uncle Toms in regular drama, Moody acknowledges “the strong prejudice against the Negro” (60) that kept black characters in mostly foolish and subservient roles. According to Moody, however, such prejudice was slowly receding because American theatre and drama, like American culture generally, was becoming more realistic. Like many other Cold War liberals, Moody understood the legacy of racial “prejudice” in the United States as a major public relations problem for America on the world stage. If the beacon of America’s exceptional Freedom were to win hearts and minds away from communism, the shroud of “prejudice” must be removed from the light. Like many other American literary and dramatic historians of the 1950s, Moody understood the gradual triumph of realism and racial justice as progress, but he lamented the decline of romanticism that accompanied realism’s rise. Consequently, America Takes the Stage traces a narrative of loss: The depredations of realism gradually undermine and transform the romantic character of pre–Civil War Young America. One of Moody’s early paragraphs captures the romantic-realist conflict that energizes his narrative: Unlike the realist, who appears when the romanticist’s dreams are beginning to lose color, he [the romanticist] ignores the practical, steers clear of offensive details, and inclines toward an optimistic view of the world. The realist dwells on the homely, the humble, even the repulsive, and tends to take a pessimistic attitude. . . . [The romanticist] skips the vulgar details, sketching each scene and person with a few grand and general details. . . . The realist, on the other hand, specializes in minute details of character and, in general, prefers to view man and his environment at glaring noontide rather than at dawn or dusk. (3) Given such a contrast, what reader would prefer the niggling realist to the warm-hearted romanticist? Not surprisingly, perhaps, Moody admires the music of Stephen Foster for its “romanticized picture of

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the Southern Negroes on the plantation” (57). Despite Moody’s liberalism (for the period) on racial matters, America Takes the Stage traces much the same narrative pattern as “Old Folks at Home.” For Garff B. Wilson, however, a strong dose of “realism” was just what American drama and theatre needed to spark its “Renaissance” in the twentieth century. In addition to favoring the dispassionate analysis of realistic plays, Wilson singles out their “increased concern for the social, economic, and personal problems that beset the average person” (148). The turning point of American theatre history in Wilson’s narrative, as in Arthur Hobson Quinn’s earlier history of American drama,16 is the early twentieth century, when “the cleansing, therapeutic effects of such giants as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov” helped Americans to cure their “addiction” to melodrama (65). The chapters devoted to describing this renaissance (actually a misnomer because Wilson makes it clear that this era saw the birth of high quality theatre, not its rebirth) feature praise of the international power of the United States, significant sections devoted to European modernism and its effects on theatrical practice in the United States, and two long sections on the plays of Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill’s universal accomplishments, his search for “fundamental meaning[s]” to questions that haunt all “humanity” (220, 272), set a high-water mark in Wilson’s narrative. After O’Neill, the tide of theatrical history recedes and the trivialities of film and television culture leave the American theatre a backwater of mediocrity. Despite some notable exceptions (excluding Death of a Salesman, by the way, which for Wilson “does little to exalt the human spirit” [287]), the prospects are not bright. We can only hope “that the phoenix is once more undergoing rebirth” concludes Wilson at the end of his story (322). Unlike Moody, Wilson draws primarily on the universalistic tradition of historiography dating from the Enlightenment. Following Voltaire and the later scientific orientation of Leopold von Ranke and others in Germany, Wilson purports to be narrating an objective interpretation and overview of American theatre history. His standards are forthrightly international, and he draws on ideals of social justice and aesthetic transcendence that he believes represent the aspirations of all humanity. During the Cold War, many Americans understood the United States as the international defender of the Enlightenment values of objectivity, social justice, and individual freedom.17 This belief, too, provided a source of pride in the ability of exceptional American

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know-how to transform the world. Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre affirms the kind of “realism” that was popular among the leaders of the “War against Poverty” and the real war in Vietnam during the mid and late 1960s. Wilson’s confused dismay in his last chapter at the rebelliousness of the young in the late 60s and his casual use of such terms as “the free world” to denote the noncommunist West mark him as a Cold War internationalist. In its rendition of U.S. theatre history before 1900, however, Three Hundred Years seems generally split between culturalist and universalist values. Influenced by Moody’s scholarship, Wilson states that the theatre and drama of the nineteenth century helped “in the formation of the national character” (21). And Wilson’s depiction of “typical Americans” at midcentury reads like a summary of Moody’s romantic nationals; Wilson’s citizens are “restless,” “ingenious,” “boastful,” and “intensely patriotic and nationalistic,” as well as demonstrating other qualities celebrated by Moody. Other prerenaissance parts of American theatre history, according to Wilson, however, pull away from culturalist values. Wilson praises the universal value of the rule of law in his discussion of legalizing copyright protection for playwrights, for example. More interested than Moody in the quality of American acting, Wilson also categorizes American star performers of the nineteenth century according to “schools” that he believes to be based in universal aesthetic standards. Like Moody’s occasional deployment of universalism, Wilson believed he could borrow from culturalism to qualify his generally universalistic narrative. Their casual appropriations from each other’s traditions are based in their mutual commitment to American exceptionalism. American Freedom will guide the world either because of our homegrown traditions or because the United States has come to embody the universal hopes of humankind. Both historiographical traditions converge in Cold War exceptionalism. Wilson’s interpretation of dramas dealing with racial matters and of African American actors and theatres leaves little doubt of his allegiance to the universal value of racial equality under the law. Ignoring the fact that “the national character” celebrated by him (and Moody) drove the black actor Ira Aldridge out of the country and into a life of star performances in Europe, Wilson asks, “Can he [Aldridge] be called an American actor? Pride in his accomplishments tempts us to claim

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him, but recognition of the injustice and prejudice which forced him to leave the United States makes us acknowledge that we hardly have the right” (62). Clearly influenced by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Wilson cheers the abolitionist message (though not the melodramatic form) of Aiken’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, points with pride to a number of black “firsts” in the theatre, and spends more time discussing several arguably minor black plays than many major white ones. Although according to his chapter heading, the phoenix of the U.S. theatre was “in flames” during the 1960–80 period, Wilson praises the drive for “racial justice and equality” in American theatre and culture after 1960 (312). He quotes playwright Loften Mitchell to the effect that the best contribution the black minority can make to the nation is to “redeem the majority” (314). Never considering the possibility that African Americans might be part of a separate subculture, Wilson hopes that black theatre will arouse white America to live up to its universalist values of liberty and justice for all. Several typical shortcomings of universalist history pervade Wilson’s narrative. Like Voltaire and many others in this tradition, Wilson frequently reifies abstract categories, giving them active historical agency over and above more concrete agents of historical change. Wilson’s “schools” of acting, for instance — “classicism,” “emotionalism,” and “modernism” — do substantial historical work in his narrative, even though his own evidence supports a narrative involving more discrete agents and diverse effects. Another problem with universalist narratives evident in Three Hundred Years is their casual slide into historical metonymies. For Wilson, O’Neill’s achievements not only represent the acme of the American theatrical renaissance, but also come to stand for the entire renaissance itself. Students relying on Wilson’s text as a guide to other “Renaissance” plays in the early twentieth century, few of which come close to the quality of O’Neill’s dramas, would be in for a rude awakening. Finally, Wilson, like other universalist historians, leads his readers to assume that his narrative provides a total explanation for American theatre history. Despite his distaste for melodrama, Wilson has written a melodramatic narrative, replete with virtues (classic acting, European modernism, “Negro playwriting”) and villains (melodrama, provincialism, television) and charted within a metaphor (the rise and fall of theatre as a phoenix) that is capacious enough to encompass the total story of American theatre and drama. While totalization

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is a recurrent temptation for all historians because of their desire to tell a coherent story, the universalist drive to transcend the particulars in order to arrive at grand explanations makes it a more pressing problem for historians of that persuasion. The universalist assumptions apparent in Wilson’s narrative also generate an objectifying rhetoric. Sometimes, as in his question above about Ira Aldridge, Wilson appeals directly to his readers through the invocation of universal values of justice. His more characteristic rhetorical move, which Wilson deploys five times in lengthy sections of his history, is to invite the contemporary reader to attend a historical performance with him, the author. Reader and author are side-byside in New York City in 1850, for example, when “we note with regret that the famous old Park Theatre has disappeared,” we scan “the advertisements of the New York Herald” for a good show, then walk to the Bowery Theatre and notice its “dignified classical exterior” (83–84). Later, “we” join the audience to watch the production and interpret it through much the same formal, universal categories that Wilson used to describe his schools of acting. Wilson’s assumption here is that the contemporary reader can ascend (with him) to a God’s-eye view of various historical productions and, with proper tutoring, will experience no difficulty in understanding what was going on in the auditorium. Language, culture, and specific historical circumstances simply fall away before the transcendent, objective historical mind. This is a rhetoric to make even Voltaire blush! By 1999, the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, eight years of Reaganism, the resurgence of racism, the culture wars of the 80s and 90s, and the end of the international Cold War had punched numerous holes in the narrative ambitions of Moody’s and Wilson’s histories, especially their implicit claims of moral exceptionalism for American theatre. Nonetheless, grand narratives are hard to kill. One of the curious features of Mason and Gainor’s Performing America is the persistence of the old narrative orientations and tropes, even though they no longer serve their Cold War functions. Although the essayists in Performing America have altered their interpretations of many of the plays and movements covered by Moody and Wilson and abandoned the confident rhetorics of the earlier authors for a more guarded or ironic engagement with their readers, the desire for an

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authentic American culture or for Enlightenment values that can transcend all cultures persists. Such continuity may not be surprising, but it usually remains unacknowledged. The shortcomings typical of universalist history — the reification of abstractions, the leap to metonymy, and the tendency to totalize narrative explanation — are apparent in several of the essays in Performing America. Historians Kim Marra, Leigh Woods, Charlotte Canning, Ann Larabee, and David Savran work within the general tradition of Marxist humanism to critique several events, personalities, and institutions in American theatre history. In “American Vaudeville, American Empire,” Leigh Woods reifies the concept of imperialism to argue that American vaudeville “colonized” European stars when it paid them handsomely to tour the United States. In the essay, “imperialism” tends to become an abstract force that works above rather than through the business dealings of the actual historical agents. Despite many excellent insights, Kim Marra’s “Taming America as Actress: Augustin Daly, Ada Rehan, and the Discourse of Imperial Conquest” falls into the metonymic trap of assuming that Ada Rehan’s spectators frequently equated her with the whole of America. Consequently, while there is persuasive evidence that this sometimes occurred, it seems likely that her “taming” as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew had more appeal to the imperializing ambitions of her manager, Augustin Daly, than to those of her audience. Deploying Gramscian theory, Ann Larabee’s essay locates the community ideology of the Neighborhood Playhouse in the early twentieth century within one current of Progressive Era nationalism. Larabee’s article effectively demonstrates that the elite producers and artists of the Neighborhood Playhouse attempted to enroll the immigrants of the Lower East Side “into the newly hegemonic Progressive utopian myth of American cultural pluralism” (126). Within the parameters of Raymond Williams’s Gramscian Marxism, Larabee’s essay provides an outstanding analysis. Yet this brand of neoMarxism, like several other universalist orientations, does entail totalization. Williams theorized that the processes of Gramscian hegemony totally encompassed and contained historical subjects.18 In several significant ways, the essays by Woods, Marra, and Larabee have traveled a long way from Wilson’s grand narrative. None, for instance, assumes that the incidents they relate about the American theatre can stand as moral exemplars for the world to emulate. With respect to the univer-

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salist historiographical problems of reification, metonymy, and totalization, however, Three Hundred Years seems only yesterday. Those essays in Performing America working out of the Herderian tradition encountered more difficulties than those on the universalist side of the aisle. This is so in spite of the fact that the editors of Performing America attempted to construct their anthology from a culturalist perspective. “Underlying our overt agenda has been our interest in situating the theater as a product, an expression, and an integral constituent of its culture,” states Mason on page one of his preface. Likewise, Gainor notes that a significant goal of the anthology “has been to demonstrate the role of theater in the construction of American identity” (8). In part, both editors shaped their books as a response to what Gainor calls the “culture wars still dominating our political discourse [in 1999]” (10). Nonetheless, despite the editors’ evident interest in American cultural identity, less than half of their authors draw primarily on the Herderian tradition of culturalist historiography to shape their essays. And those that do run into the same problems of the search for origins, the claim of essential identity, and the ethical relativism of the volksgeist orientation that dog the pages of Moody’s America Takes the Stage. Both Tiffany Ann Lopez and David Krasner acknowledge some of the difficulties of Herderian culturalism in their essays, but neither of their contributions escapes assumptions about the need to search for origins and the claim of an essential identity. In her discussion of the writings of Chicana playwright and lesbian activist Cherríe Moraga, Lopez endorses Moraga’s push for the construction of a Chicano community that can encompass more than the masculinist nationalism of the 1960s. Lopez critiques Moraga’s essay “Queer Aztlan: The Reformation of the Chicano Tribe” for assuming that Chicano nationalists can be convinced to embrace nonnormative female agency in their imagining of the origins of Chicano culture in what is now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Despite the validity of this point, however, Lopez never questions Moraga’s need for a myth of national origin and the ramifications of that quest in terms of her own writing of history. In “‘The Pageant Is the Thing’: Black Nationalism and The Star of Ethiopia,” Krasner rightly recognizes W. E. B. Du Bois’s debt to the cultural nationalism of J. G. Herder and G. W. F. Hegel. To term the ideology of Du Bois’s 1913 pageant “black nationalism” (106),

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however, as Krasner does, is to underrate Du Bois’s more obvious debt to Marx and to the Enlightenment value of progress. Krasner points to the essentialist ideology of Ethiopianism as a clear influence on the pageant, but his own evidence demonstrates that the pageant’s celebration of black contributions to civilization had little in common with the mysticism and separatism of Ethiopianism. Krasner’s attempts to claim an essential identity for the black celebrants involved in the pageant as participants and spectators are oddly at war with the pageant’s apparent agenda. Neither the essays of Lopez or Krasner escape the entanglements of origins and identity within the culturalist tradition. The ethical relativism of culturalism presents a greater challenge to the authors of Performing America. In The Defeat of the Mind, French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut discerns the legacy of Herderian ethics in the multiculturalism of Lévi-Strauss and his U.S. and French successors in the present culture wars.19 From Finkielkraut’s point of view, the cultural nationalism of identity politics overlaps in too many ways with nineteenth-century versions of nationalism and racism, especially in its rejection of the universal ethics and natural rights of the Enlightenment. He reminds his readers that “it was at the expense of their culture that European individuals gained, one by one, all of their rights” (106; italics in original). According to Finkielkraut, contemporary multiculturalists may seek to merge their nationalist ideology with humanist values, but, “like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extreme, and in the name of the multiplicity of specific causalities destroy any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples” (79). In the context of American historiography, Finkielkraut’s critique suggests that multicultural historians have transferred the notion of American exceptionalism from the nation as a whole to a specific ethnic or racial group. Following the transfer of this moral burden with its messianic expectations from nation to group, the history of one or another minority culture within the United States would be expected to serve as a salvific story for all Americans. Several of the essays in Performing America suggest that this has, in fact, occurred. Lopez and Krasner, for example, seek to celebrate the humanizing, progressive values of Chicana culture and Ethiopianism. But ethnic exceptionalism, as it might be called, contradicts the ethical

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relativism of the culturalist tradition. In the past, historians oriented toward culturalism were often able to paper over the disjuncture between universal rights and national identity by celebrating a people whose love of democracy and social justice was immanent in their volksgeist. Moody, in line with many other Cold War historians, found that his “romanticist” was also, luckily, a Jeffersonian democrat. Post-1990 historians, however, have understandably enjoyed less credibility when professing to discover an abiding allegiance to the universalist principles of justice and equity within a particular historical culture. In Performing America, the problem of ethical relativism comes into sharp focus in “‘Speaking a Language That We Both Understand’: Reconciling Feminism and Cultural Nationalism in Asian American Theater,” by Josephine Lee. Lee’s title asks her readers to believe that such reconciliation is possible, but is it? Can the universalist principles of feminism (equal rights, the elimination of patriarchy, economic equity, etc.) ever be reconciled with Asian American (or any other) cultural nationalism, or is such a synthesis simply a pious hope, as Finkielkraut’s analysis suggests? To shape a persuasive narrative, the historian must arrive at a well-reasoned point of view on this question, but Lee assumes that she already has the theoretical answer and evades several of its historical complexities. In the course of her essay, however, she does recognize the importance of several relevant issues. She notes, for example, the overlapping histories of Asian American and feminist activism while also acknowledging that cultural nationalism often works to stabilize gender stereotypes in repressive ways. Lee criticizes the plays of Frank Chin for pitting feminization against male cultural nationalism and celebrates Diana Son’s 1993 play R.A.W. (’Cause I’m a Woman) for exploding the stereotype of the Asian butterfly and allowing for lesbian desire. By the end of the essay, however, the historical role of Son’s play (and of others like it) in the context of Asian American nationalism is not clear. How popular was R.A.W. among Asian American audiences? Was it a part of a wider tradition that may continue to flourish, or was its performance an anomaly? Because culturalist historical understanding privileges cultural tradition and memory, it crucially depends on the answers to such questions, but Lee does not provide them. Indeed, for all of the acuity of her textual analysis, she gives readers little historical perspective on the actual possibilities for reconciling feminism and Asian American cultural nationalism.

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Perhaps, in the context of a short essay, Lee did not have the opportunity to explore contextual traditions and possibilities. The form of the short essay, however, is part of the problem. Lee’s thesis that R.A.W.holds out the possibility of reconciling feminism and cultural nationalism did not require her to adopt a wider perspective about the ethical relativism of her culturalist assumptions. All Lee had to show was that Diana Son’s play provides a basis for believing that these universalist and culturalist orientations might come together. That Son’s play upholds such a belief is sufficient for the thesis of Lee’s essay. Whether such reconciliation is historically likely — a necessary judgment for any historian writing a narrative about the problem — could be safely excluded from her argument. “Speaking a Language That We Both Understand” nicely demonstrates its thesis, but fails as contextual and historical explanation. Once again, the expository essay with a tightly defined thesis falls short in terms of historical understanding. This brings us back to the larger problem of narrative. One response to the collapse of grand narratives has been to abandon narrative explanation altogether. Convinced by poststructuralist arguments that the narrative form is beyond redemption, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth urges postmodern historians to compose “an interminable pattern without meaning” about the past.20 The closest that any essay in Performing America gets to this conception of historical writing is Rosemarie Bank’s piece, “Archiving Culture: Performance and American Museums in the Earlier Nineteenth Century.” Like the museums she is writing about, this article collects and catalogs information, analyzes particularities, and dismantles the arguments of others, but makes no general truth claim overall. Although Bank invites us “to examine the processes [of normalization] and their accumulation in performances inside museums and galleries” (49), she is not writing narrative and, indeed, even eschews the form of the expository essay. Bank notes in passing the “casual racism and ethnocide” (49) that some of these processes produced, but her basis for making this judgment is not clear. If, as appears likely, the article follows Nietzsche in denying the possibility of any transcendent authority in the construction of knowledge, it could rest on no foundation for an ethics that might condemn such processes as “racist.” By narrowing historical insight to the recognition of patterns in the past, “Archiving Culture” pushes the

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epistemological relativism implicit in culturalism toward a cul de sac that undercuts the possibility of any ethical (and hence narrative) explanation. Avoiding an ethical point of view, Bank’s essay avoids the problem of American exceptionalism, but the price may be too high. Bank’s attenuated historiography at least recognizes a difference between history and fiction. Harry Elam and Alice Raynor implicitly abolish this distinction in “Echoes from the Black (W)hole: An Examination of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks.” Early in their essay, Raynor and Elam approvingly quote Parks’s observations: “Where is history? . . . I take issue with history because it doesn’t serve me — it doesn’t serve me because there isn’t enough of it. . . . I don’t see any history out there, so I’ve made some up” (181). Instead of understanding Parks’s comments as fanciful exaggeration and creative scatting, Raynor and Elam take her literally. Building on Parks’s Lockean assumption that the history of America is a “blank slate,” they deploy the poststructural psychology of Lacan to locate “a historical Real” in Parks’s play that, along with “the invisibility or marginalization of African-American history” (187), allows Parks “to make up some history.” Parks may be an excellent playwright, but she is a poor historian. Pace Locke, America was never a “blank slate;” dozens of histories of Native and African Americans have debunked that myth in the last thirty years. Parks seeks to justify her creativity with the historical evidence she uses about Lincoln and slavery as “history,” and Elam and Raynor abet her claim by denying significant differences among fictitious and historical narratives. But they do her no favors. From their poststructuralist, Lacanian perspective, both playwriting and historical writing have no more claim to validity than the writing in a comic strip or a commercial; all are simply the effects of discourse and desire. In addition to the shortcomings of poststructuralism, their essay points to a general problem for all of the historians of Performing America working out of a culturalist perspective. Neo-Herderians have little leverage with which to challenge the language used by advocates of a specific national vision. Elam and Raynor are not the only historians who take their cultural informants at their word. Krasner is constrained by the language of black nationalism, Lopez does not stray far from the Chicano lesbian locutions of Moraga, and Lee embraces the dialogue of R.A.W. for its political possibilities. In “Marking Change, Marking America: Contemporary Performance and Men’s Autobiographical

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Selves,” Robert Vorlicky effectively challenges the notion that a single male performer might somehow find the right words to represent all males with evidence that contemporary autoperformers present a diversity of voices that undercut the notion of a universal male identity. In the course of demonstrating his thesis, however, Vorlicky backs into the assumption that the Spalding Grays and Dan Kwongs of contemporary performance art are authentic purveyors of their several male subjectivities. The effect of this generalization on Vorlicky’s language is much the same as on that of the other multiculturalists in Performing America. When the authentic voice of “the people” is heard, critic-historians tend to drop their skeptical perspectives and reach for long quotations. Once again, the problem of ethnic exceptionalism seems to be clouding insight. Without principles that transcend their own and their artists’ cultures, these writers encounter difficulties finding a language that facilitates the questioning of their subject’s “authentic” discourse. Poststructuralism offers one possibility for overcoming this problem, but adopting the theories of Lacan or Derrida undercuts other options for writing historical narrative.21 In Performing America, the scholarly discourses of multiculturalism and poststructuralism collude to marginalize the possibility of critical narrative histories. Despite the paucity of actual narratives in Performing America, this anthology does offer some hope for the future of merging the narrative and the essay in the writing of American theatre history. Of the two traditions that have dominated historical discourse since the 1950s, these articles suggest that the universalist offers more possibilities for the future of narrative history than the culturalist. The legacy of Herderian culturalism in the current scholarship of multiculturalism is somewhat ambivalent in this regard, however. On the one hand, the search for origins that inflects the work of Lopez, for instance, might continue to invite the kind of old-fashioned narrative that traces a volksgeist from its rough beginnings through the generations and into modern, sophisticated fruition. On the other hand, Michel Foucault has rightly taught historians to question originary moments that claim to encapsulate the essence of a people, an essence that will blossom in later developments. Consequently, narratives based on this assumption are fraught with problems of credibility. Similarly, the claim of essential authenticity for

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a culture, a claim that might also provide the motive for narrative, as it did for Moody’s history, is caught up in too many contradictions to undergird a believable story. At the same time, the assumption that the discourse of a representative of “the people” harbors some residual authenticity hampers critic-historians from adopting their own language to shape a coherent narrative. The ethical relativism of the culturalist position is probably the biggest impediment to the emergence of future narratives within multiculturalist historical scholarship. As long as historians could be confident that “their people” also embraced some universal, or at least international principles of ethics, they might find a point of view from which to narrativize their struggles, defeats, and triumphs. Moody and Wilson could borrow from each others’ orientation across the culturalistuniversalist divide because both were confident that America, despite its problems, was a fundamentally moral nation. Contemporary multiculturalist historians claim some moral exceptionalism for their “people,” but are less certain that their histories will provide a beacon for everyone else. Consequently, at least in Performing America, these historians turn more easily to the containable form of the essay rather than chancing the larger ethical necessities of narrative explanation. The ethical relativism of multiculturalism also bleeds into the epistemological positions of poststructuralism, which, in some forms, calls into question the validity of all narratives and may even abolish history altogether as a mode of truth telling. Relativism, of course, is also a problem for the inheritors of the universalistic tradition of Voltaire, Marx, and von Ranke. Clearly, the God’seye point of view undergirding Wilson’s Three Hundred Years is no longer a rhetorical option for organizing narrative history, if it ever was. But, as Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob make clear, the old epistemological claim of objectivity within this tradition was never the only basis for narrative history. They recommend “practical realism,” a third epistemology that avoids the objective claims of the universalists and the bleak relativism of some poststructuralisms (247–70). Nor should contemporary historians oriented toward universalism worry that their Enlightenmentderived ethics cannot be grounded in what were once thought to be transcendent truths. Most of their readers will probably agree that democracy, the rule of law, and economic equity have historically proven

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ethically superior to racism, imperialism, sexism, and homophobia; despite ongoing (and probably unresolvable) problems of definition, process, and context, these virtues do not require “objective” validation. David Savran’s essay in Performing America, “Queering the Nation,” points a way through the ethical difficulties of writing history today and opens up one possibility for historical narrative. Savran demonstrates that parts 1 and 2 of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America draw on several contradictory narratives — Mormonism, queer nationalism, and Marxist humanism — to invigorate a utopian fantasy of democratic possibility for the future of the nation.22 In working through the overlapping narratives of the play, Savran takes some time to discuss the problematic ethical position of Queer Nation, a short-lived group in the early 1990s that attempted to merge nationalist identity politics with a universalist ethics designed to counter the prerogatives of heteronormativity. As Savran reports, the incompatibility of culturalism and universalism doomed Queer Nation from the start: “To be viable, in other words, [the universalist principles of ] queer nationalism must finally call into question the very categories of identity that have authorized its production in the first place” (224). Like Finkielkraut, Savran moves beyond the ethical relativism of culturalism to embrace a modified Marxist humanism. Following Kushner, he also critiques the narrow American exceptionalism embedded in the Mormon tradition. Savran borrows from the playwright to forge a perspective about Angels in America and implicitly about the writing of history that involves a loose coalition among Gorbachev’s ideas for perestroika, Frantz Fanon’s notion of national liberation, and the “new humanism” of Neil Lazarus. Although “Queering the Nation” is a short expository essay, it suggests a point of view that could anchor a longer narrative history with the potential to celebrate the universalist goals of many cultural nationalist movements without acceding to their ethical relativism. As a narrative strategy, however, Marxist humanism may run into the same problems as other traditions anchored in the Enlightenment: the reification of abstractions, the leap to metonymy, and the tendency toward a totalized narrative. These shortcomings deriving from universalism are not necessarily endemic to that orientation, however. Careful historians may be able to avoid the kinds of explanations based on reification and metonymy that trouble two of the essays in Performing America. The urge for historical totalization is another matter. While

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totalized explanation can provide a clear focus and motive for narrative, whether such stories remain credible with readers depends on the reading audience and may be changing as narrative expectations shift. In any case, there are alternatives to totalization within the universalist tradition, such as narratives based in perspectival paradigms.23 Charlotte Canning’s essay on the Chautauqua movement for Performing America draws on Marxist humanism but dodges the dangers of the universalist narrative tradition. In “‘The Most American Thing in America’: Producing National Identities in Chautauqua, 1904–1932,” she provides a careful reading of the repertoire of lectures, recitations, and theatricals that flourished beneath Chautauqua tents in the rural North and Midwest. She also devotes sufficient attention to the historical developments and contextual relationships that made Chautauqua possible and popular. Drawing on the neo-Marxism of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991), Canning demonstrates that Chautauqua served up a meal of Protestantism and patriotism, liberally spiced with exotic others, to become a “national religion” in the Republican hinterlands of early twentieth-century America. It is clear from Canning’s account, however, that there were other “national religions” in the United States — that the Chautauqua movement played out against a complex backdrop of many competing groups with overlapping practices and ideologies. And Canning keeps her distance from both of these national and ethnic exceptionalisms. Neither the term “national religion” nor Canning’s understanding of broader social processes backs her into totalized explanation. Although the article does not attempt to relate Chautauqua’s development and ideology through storytelling, nothing in Canning’s essay militates against its later expansion as a monograph with a strong narrative line. Overall, then, an analysis of Performing America suggests that the legacy of universalism, minus its unnecessary claim of objectivity, provides a better basis for writing narrative histories about the American theatrical past, including its oppressed groups and minorities, than a multiculturalist orientation. Appearances to the contrary, the historian who embraces democratic socialism may tell better stories than the cultural nationalist about the involvement of the theatre in the oppression (or liberation) of Asian American women, the grinding poverty (or economic success) of Chicano families, and the plight (or relief ) of black homosexuals with AIDS.

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notes 1. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See also D. Wood, ed., On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1991). In Narrative (London: Routledge, 2001), Paul Cobley provides a useful summary of Ricoeur’s position, pp. 17–21. 2. See, for example, the following journal articles from the mid-1950s, the mid-1970s, and the late 1980s: Alan J. Hammack, “An American Actor’s Diary — 1858,” Educational Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (1955): 324–37; Kermitt Hunter, “The Theatre Meets the People,” Educational Theatre Journal 7, no. 1 (1955): 128–35; William R. Reardon, “The Tradition Behind Bostonian Censorship,” Educational Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (1955); Roger Alan Hall, “The Brook: America’s Germinal Musical?” Educational Theatre Journal 27, no. 3 (1975): 323–30; R. Russell, “An Early Soviet Play at the Moscow Arts Theatre,” Theatre Research International 1, no. 1 (1975): 37–41; Richard Stoddard, “The Haymarket Theatre, Boston,” Educational Theatre Journal 27, no. 1 (1975); Herbert Blau, “With Your Permission: Educating the American Theatre,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 1 (1988): 5–11; Stephen U. Dock, “The Petit Marquis, The Jeune Blondin, and the Monarch: Issues in Appropriate Costuming for Moliere’s Dom Juan,” Theatre Survey 30, no. 1 (1989): 1–33; and Daniel J. Watermeier and Ron Engle, “The Dawison-Booth Polyglot Othello,” Theatre Research International 13, no. 1 (1988): 48–56. 3. Felicia Hardison Londre and Daniel J. Watermeier, The History of North American Theatre (New York: Continuum, 1998). The editors of the anthologies under discussion are Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller for The American Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby for The Cambridge History of American Theatre series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 1999, 2000), and Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor for Performing America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). By my count, ten of the twenty essayists in The American Stage wrote essays with a strong narrative component: Brockett, Davis, McDermott, Roberts, Meserve, Carlson, Hill, Archer, Watermeier, and Woods. In Performing America, only one essay, by Strand, relied principally on narrative to substantiate its major claim. 4. These include Simon Shepard and Peter Womack, eds., English Drama: A Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); Chris Morash, ed., A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky, eds., A History of Russian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Benito Ortolani, ed., The Japanese Theatre: From Shaministic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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5. For a summary of Hayden White’s discussion of narrative and history, see his “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Also useful is White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Recently, historiographer Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 53–73, effectively countered White’s claim that historical writing necessarily involves the imposition of narrative on the past. 6. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 231. For several recent essays examining the problems of narrative in the writing of American history, see Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 7. See, among others, Dell Hymes, Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative, Inequallity: Towards an Understanding of Voice (London: Taylor & Francis, 1996); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982; repr. London: Routledge, 1988). 8. See my essay, “Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians,” Theatre Journal 53, no. 4 (December 2001): 569–94. 9. Oscar G. Brockett, “Introduction: American Theatre History Scholarship,” in Engle and Miller, The American Stage, pp. 1–5. 10. Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theatre, 1750–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955); and Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bare and Ye Cubb to Chorus Line (1973; repr., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982). See also Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 1668–1957 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959); and Glenn Hughes, A History of the American Theatre, 1700–1950 (New York: Samuel French, 1951). Jonathan Curvin served as the editor of the premiere journal in the new field, The Educational Theatre Journal, in the 1950s. 11. See Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Molho and Wood, Imagined Histories, pp. 21–40. 12. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” in 1893 and its later publication as the Frontier in American History (1920) initiated a school of American historical writing that remained influential through the early Cold War. See Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 179–222, for a discussion of Turner’s ideas and their influence. 13. See Rupert Wilkinson, The Pursuit of American Character (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

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14. See Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), pp. 3–47. 15. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; repr., Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985). 16. Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War (New York: Harper Bros., 1923); and Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day (New York: Appleton, Century, 1927). 17. Regarding the tradition of objective, universal history, see Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, pp. 52–90. 18. On the problem of totalization for neo-Marxist theatre history, see my “Social Practices and the Nation-State: Paradigms for Writing National Theatre History,” in Helka Mäkinen, S. E. Wilmer, W. B. Worthen, eds., Theatre, History, and National Identities (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2001), pp. 119–39. 19. Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind, trans. Judith Friedlander (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 20. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 212. See also Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), which urges a form of historical writing similar to modern music. 21. A Lacanian perspective does not rule out all possibilities for narrative. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) is perhaps the chief example in American theatre history of a narrative that rests on Lacanian assumptions. 22. David Savran, “Queering the Nation,” in Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, eds., Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 210–29. 23. See Fulbrook, Historical Theory, pp. 31–50. My essay “Social Practices and the Nation-State,” pp. 119–39, demonstrates one example of Fulbrook’s notion of a “perspectival paradigm.” It draws on the position of Theodore Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgenstenian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and urges historians to move beyond the totalized explanations of neo-Marxism to embrace the more relativized understandings of sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens.

9 Performing Mexico stuart a. day

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ontemporary Mexican theatre displays border tension, tension between the Federal District, home to Mexico City, and what is known as the “interior,” the vastly differing territories that reach, and flow beyond, Mexico’s borders with Central America and the United States. In the age of globalization, borders appear to be crumbling before our eyes, falling to cultural, economic, and political pressure. Yet geopolitical borders, which have come to seem so porous, are anything but porous for many Mexicans. They wait in endless lines at the U.S. embassy only to be denied visas or attempt to cross — through deserts, over walls made of steel landing strips used by the U.S. military in Desert Storm, and past the ever-increasing presence of the Border Patrol — Mexico’s northern border to “el otro lado,” the other side, much of which was Mexican territory before 1848. The divisions between Mexico City and the rest of the country are equally extant: Mexico has a long history of centrist control that often silences the voices, both cultural and political, of the margins. Conceptual borders also appear to be crumbling as power centers are destabilized by voices from the periphery; nevertheless, barriers seem to be reconstructed as soon as they are defied, and progressive forces, despite preliminary moves toward a more open, democratic society, seem to be fighting an uphill battle. Of the myriad themes that can be used to understand Mexican theatre and the writing of Mexican theatre histories, the metaphor of the border proves fruitful for considering the reshaping of theatre canons, the iconoclastic Mexico City playwrights who question conceptual boundaries, and the challenges to the centrist forces of Mexico City by theatre from the “interior” — including the political performances of the Zapatistas in and beyond Chiapas. In their introduction to The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, John Beverly and José Oviedo question, as have many others, the appropriateness of using the term postmodern in relation to Latin America: 153

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“There is something about the very idea of a Latin American postmodernism that makes one think of that condition of colonial or neocolonial dependency in which goods that have become shopworn or out of fashion in the metropolis are, like the marvels of the gypsies in One Hundred Years of Solitude, exposed to the periphery, where they enjoy a profitable second life.”1 Cautious consideration of the “postmodern turn,” which can lead to the prognosis of the end of all ideologies (except, of course, “liberal democracy,” as Francis Fukuyama and others have argued) or to the destabilization of power centers, can be a fruitful line of inquiry.2 Martín Hopenhayn refers to postmodernism as a “package of euphemisms to dress up the neoliberal project of cultural hegemony.” He also notes, It is more seductive to talk about diversity than the market, about desire than the maximization of profits, about play than conflict, about personal creativity than the private appropriation of the surplus. . . . It is more seductive to speak in favor of autonomy than against planning, or in favor of the individual than against the state. . . . In this way, the social contradictions of capitalism, accentuated on the Latin American periphery, disappear behind the exaltation of forms and languages.3 As with neoliberalism, the appropriation of the postmodern push cuts both ways and carries multiple messages. Just as many embrace neoliberalism (but not neoliberal economics) for its championing of individual liberty, many embrace the destabilizing forces of postmodern ideology as a weapon to counter the monologic of the borders that are anything but natural. Despite his critical approach to postmodernism, Hopenhayn argues that “positions such as the passion for the present, aestheticism, the exaltation of diversity, the rejection of ethnocentrism, the desire for open societies, the return to pluralist individualism, cultural polymorphism, and the prioritization of creativity can be adapted to political projects of another kind.”4 Indeed, in Mexican theatre and theatre criticism, this has been the case; without ceding the possibility of agency, both follow a path of denaturalizing the status quo, of challenging the reality effects of not-so-imaginary borders. Recent plays and theatre histories respond to and critique hegemonic power centers, conceptual and geographical borders. Along with this decentering come histories that do not focus on the possibility of capturing

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the “essence” of Mexican theatre; rather, there has been a flowing forth of specialized histories, articles, and monographs that grapple with themes more narrow in scope than previous, seemingly all-encompassing works such as Antonio Magaña Esquivel and Ruth S. Lamb’s 1958 Breve historia del teatro mexicano (Brief History of Mexican Theater); Antonio Magaña Esquivel’s 1964 Medio siglo de teatro mexicano: 1900–1961 (A Half-Century of Mexican Theater: 1900–1961); John B. Nomland’s 1967 Teatro mexicano contemporáneo: 1900–1950 (Contemporary Mexican Theater: 1900–1950); and Yolanda Argudín’s 1985 Historia del teatro en México: Desde los rituales prehispánicos hasta el arte dramático de nuestros días(The History of Theatre in Mexico: From Pre-Hispanic Rituals to Present-Day Dramatic Art).5 As these titles suggest, theatre historians hoped to mold a panoramic view of Mexican theatre that often subtly affirmed the project of postrevolutionary nation building, promoting, through titles and content, the idea of a unified country. There is also an emphasis on finding the local origins of Mexican plays, either by tracing theatre to its Aztec roots or by focusing on the innovators of the twentieth century or both. Yolanda Argudín, for example, explains that “the history of Mexican theater is very short, just like the history of our young country.”6 Thus, while the first chapter of her text is on preColumbian rituals, and subsequent chapters span five centuries of theatre in Mexico, for Argudín the “roots” of current theatre are to be found in the 1920s, specifically with the Teatro de Ulises, which, ironically, staged primarily European plays. Mexican theatre histories illustrate a trend that began, according to Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora, after the 1947 publication of Rodolfo Usigli’s El gesticulador (The Gesticulator).7 Following the period during which theatre chronicles were the most important source of information on theatre productions in Mexico (1821–1916) and the period during which theatre criticism was generally not separated from literary criticism in general (1917–1946), Schmidhuber writes of post-Usiglian specialized theatre criticism: “With the advent of foreign critical interest . . . in Mexican theater [come] numerous books and articles by professionals who possess academic training and critical tools.”8 Within this last category, in the years since the publication of El gesticulador, theatre criticism has moved from the sweeping manuals listed above, which often included the “entire” history of Mexican theatre, to studies that favor theoretical, thematic approaches focusing on a small number of authors and texts. Two excellent examples of this trend are Enrique

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Mijares’s 1999 La realidad virtual del teatro mexicano (The Virtual Reality of Mexican Theater) and Gastón A. Alzate’s 2002 Teatro de Cabaret: Imaginarios Dididentes (Cabaret Theater: Dissident Imaginaries).9 When present-day chronological or generational studies are published, they combine analysis, valuation, and a more limited time period than previous works, as in the case of Ronald D. Burgess’s 1991 The New Dramatists of Mexico: 1967–198510 and Guiellermo Schmidhuber de la Mora’s 1999 El adventimiento del teatro mexicano: años de esperanza y curiosidad, which covers the period 1922–1938. Given the rich past of theatre criticism, it also follows that authors of more recent studies will turn to their predecessors with an eye toward filling in perceived gaps, reevaluating positions, and reviewing past plays in a new light. Thus, there are two main strands of Mexican theatre criticism — both of which call into question established borders — on which I would like to focus: the reconsideration of the canon(s) of Mexican theatre and the evolution of recent plays, which generally, but not always, is mirrored in present-day theatre criticism. Before turning to the centrifugal forces seen on the recent stage, I will focus on the reevaluation of plays related to two key historical events, the Mexican Revolution and the Tlatelolco massacre. Traditionally, Mexican theatre histories highlight Mexico City and, more specifically, they signal twentieth-century playwright Rodolfo Usigli as the foundation of contemporary Mexican theatre. Willis Knapp Jones, for example, affirms that “According to [Usigli’s] own self-evaluation, [he is] the writer who, almost on his own, created contemporary Mexican theater. Few would argue with this affirmation.”11 Seen as the “father” of Mexican theater, the central influence on contemporary writers, Usigli’s impact has been remarkable. Yet his dominant position is also indicative of the centrist tendencies that often stifle the voices of the periphery. Kirsten Nigro, in “Twentieth-Century Theater,” notes that “The problem of geographic destiny is a major one in Mexico, where the capital city dominates everything cultural and economic. For the theater, this has damning consequences, as playwrights are forced to migrate to Mexico City if they want a successful career.”12 One of Mexico’s most famous plays and the cornerstone of the U.S. canon of Mexican theatre is Usigli’s El gesticulador. It takes place after the Revolution, during the years of political consolidation. The voice of dissatisfaction in the play comes from a professor of revolutionary history who has just lost his position in Mexico City and moved his fam-

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ily to northern Mexico. His name, by coincidence, is the same as that of a hero of the Revolution — César Rubio. Rubio, the down-and-out professor, takes on the role of Rubio the revolutionary and, in the process of his own gestures of deception, exposes politicians as traitors to the Revolution: “Perhaps I am not the great César Rubio. But who are you? Who is each person in Mexico? They are all a bunch of gesticulating hypocrites.”13 Rubio later ends up murdered by his political rival and, ironically, becomes a martyr of the Revolution. Usigli’s criticism of the Mexican government, seen in the above-quoted dialogue, is biting, and for this reason El gesticulador did not make it to the Mexican stage until 1947, nearly ten years after it was first published. Enrique Krauze explains that “the public welcomed it with great interest, but the government reacted violently. Some of its performances were canceled, and critics were paid to attack the play in the press.”14 The reaction of the government, as well as the public’s response, affirm that El gesticulador rang true in the years after the Revolution; Usigli’s play points to the disappointment felt by many Mexicans after the fighting stopped: the Revolution brought some changes, but in many ways the status quo was maintained well into the twentieth century. Interestingly, one of the key characters in this play, Oliver Bolton, is a Harvard professor who “discovers” César Rubio. He repeatedly mentions that his flush institution would gladly buy any information Rubio is willing to sell and is quick to convince himself that he has found Rubio the revolutionary. He publishes his “research,” including information he had promised not to reveal. Unlike Rubio the professor, he has the advantages of a university system with adequate funding and thus the possibility to make his voice heard. But he is equally dishonest, and his “revolutionary” work in the end serves only to strengthen his own career — not to mention the position of the regional leader who has Rubio murdered. My intent is not to suggest that the canon of Mexican theatre, like the “canon” of history to which Bolton contributes, has been maliciously created, deceptively designed to serve personal interests. However, it is interesting — and necessary — to consider the reality of the conceptual and geopolitical borders that separate Mexico and the United States and the ways people in the United States imagine Mexico as they reconsider the U.S. and Latin American canons of Mexican theatre. Kirsten F. Nigro points out that “El gesticulador is rarely staged professionally in Mexico these days. Yet in North American [U.S.]

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universities it is considered both a masterpiece and a living text, which surely says something about gaps between cultures and discrepancies in the criteria used in establishing the theatrical canon in Mexico.”15 David William Foster, in the introduction to Mexican Literature: A History (1994), emphasizes the need to reassess Mexican literature, testing the limits of the canonical. In her chapter in Foster’s volume, Nigro does just this in her attempt to present a new view of Mexican theatre. She begins by “questioning the prelude” to twentieth-century theatre production by shedding light on the literary tradition that influenced Rodolfo Usigli. Her idea is not to challenge Usigli’s position in the canon; rather, she adds to the picture key predecessors that are generally acknowledged only in passing. She affirms that “because of its critical success and influence on subsequent playwrights, El gesticulador is seen as the one play that breaks with a theatrical past that for the most part is best forgotten” (220). By following the two main veins of twentieth-century Mexican theatre, experimentalism and socially committed realism, Nigro traces a new path for Mexican theatre history by restoring the artistic — and not merely practical — influence of the Teatro de Ahora: It is from about 1925 on that all histories of Mexican theater begin to talk about renovators and experimenters, of the individuals and groups who worked hard to make of their country’s playwriting and play production a legitimate and critically acclaimed enterprise. . . . Some, like the Teatro de Murciélago and the Teatro de Ahora, rather in the line of the Mexican muralists, wanted a serious national theater that would deal with the sociopolitical realities of Mexico’s past and present. . . . Although most histories give a critical nod to experimental efforts like that of [Teatro de] Ulises . . . , it is in fact the more realistic vein of theater that actually came to take hold of the Mexican stage in the 1940s and 1950s, a triumph that is attributed almost unanimously to one playwright — Rodolfo Usigli. (214–15) Nigro’s reassessment of the Teatro de Ahora, which includes her analysis of Juan Bustillo Oro’s 1933 play San Miguel de las Espinas (San Miguel of the Spines), provides insight into the formation of canons. Nigro explains, “The failure to appreciate a play like San Miguel de las Espinas not only gives a false sense of the development of Mexican theater in general, but has also meant that traditionally Usigli’s El gesticulador has been con-

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sidered both the first modern play and the only play of worth about the Mexican Revolution” (222). If there is still a nationalist trend in Mexican theatre histories, it involves the desire, as seen in Nigro’s reading of San Miguel de las Espinas, to redeem autochthonous origins. In her 1997 book Perfil y muestra del teatro de la Revolución mexicana (Profile and Examples of the Theater of the Mexican Revolution), Marcela del Río Reyes explains that the study of specific texts on the Revolution could “make it possible to appreciate what each text and each author has offered in the evolutionary process of an aesthetic that has rebelled . . . against cultural colonialism and the hegemonic canon of styles and models born in Europe.”16 To some extent, then, the information presented in major theatre histories is not what we might expect — it is now that the native roots of theatre are being traced within Mexico. It is now, long after the “revolutionary” government turned its back on the ideals of the Revolution in favor of another flawed foray into economic liberalism, that critics have begun to pay increased attention to local roots, to local influences. The recent work of U.S. critic Jacqueline E. Bixler has also helped to fill in some of the gaps in literary histories, from which theatre itself is often marginalized. Different from the study of literary predecessors, plays on the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student protestors (by government forces during the Olympic games) point to the issue of censorship — not of the publication of plays but in the more subtle denial of the resources necessary to stage them. In her article on the 1968 massacre, “Re-Membering the Past: Memory-Theatre and Tlatelolco,” Bixler affirms that all major studies on literature related to the Tlatelolco massacre, so named for the Plaza de Tlatelolco, where the bloodbath took place, completely ignore the vast dramatic production on this theme. Of the plays that were written soon after 1968, most were not staged because of indirect censorship that made it impossible, for example, to find a venue in which to stage such a play. Bixler explains that “consequently, the memories of Tlatelolco remained relatively unstaged until the 1980s, when Emilio Carballido, Adam Guevara, and Gabriel Inclàn produced new plays that put those images on stage. More recently, a cycle of Tlatelolco plays was staged in Mexico City in October 1998 to commemorate the . . . massacre. Soon afterward . . . Felipe Galván published an anthology entitled Teatro del 68.”17 Until the 1980s, it was primarily

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Tlatelolco that symbolized the unity of progressives in Mexico. In the 1980s and beyond, the numerous entities of the political left, as memories of Tlatelolco fade but are not forgotten, see neoliberal economic policies that favor the economic stratification of society — far removed from social liberalism — as the primary enemy of justice. Yet despite the urgency with which Mexican writers address the issue of neoliberalism, theatre historians have been almost silent on the theme. The Mexican Revolution, and even the Tlatelolco massacre, are distant enough to give us the crucial hindsight necessary for their analysis. Nevertheless, plays that respond to a new, neoliberal revolution, contradictory to the (albeit tainted) ideals of the Mexican Revolution, present perhaps the most remarkable theme on the recent stage. Though many plays questioned postrevolutionary governments, it is possible to argue that during much of the seventy-one year rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party), dramatists were many times in line with the revolutionary ideals championed by the ruling party. As faith in the PRI eroded over the years, however, the distance between the artistic community’s vision and that of the government became more and more severe. This fissure has reached new heights in post-1982, neoliberal Mexico. No longer would a “leftist” paint murals on the walls of the National Palace; behind Diego Rivera’s utopic paintings, in the offices of government officials, neoliberalism rules the stage. While artists often participated officially in postrevolutionary politics, as the years went by fewer and fewer progressive artists did so. Adam Versényi signals a recent example that underscores the situation under Vicente Fox. He says, Sabina Berman “is the commercially successful, critically acclaimed playwright who was seriously considered by President-elect Fox for the post of minister of culture in his new administration until she made clear her proabortion, feminist beliefs and enraged Fox’s conservative backers.”18 While successive governments, including that of Vicente Fox, have continued to espouse revolutionary rhetoric, the neoliberal technocrats — following the economic recipe known as the Washington Consensus, and with the complicity of Mexican elites — took a different course. Kathleen Bruhn and Daniel C. Levy explain the importance of this shift: “In a world astonished by the fall of Soviet communism, it is easy to overlook the economic changes that have taken place in Mexico since 1982. Yet in their magnitude and rapidity, neoliberal reforms amount to little less than an

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economic revolution.”19 Indeed, there are more billionaires in Mexico than ever before, but also more people living in extreme poverty. In July 2002 Mexico’s towering president bent his body in reverence to kiss the ring of the Pope. The main performance of the Pope’s visit was the canonization of Juan Diego, the indigenous man whom the Vatican asserts had a vision of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary in the sixteenth century. Fox spoke of the visit as a spiritual revolution, and despite the illegality of his attendance at the canonization ceremony, expressly prohibited by law based on the constitution of 1917, he affirmed that he would be the only postrevolutionary president to attend a religious ceremony “without hiding.”20 Fox, the first opposition leader in more than seven decades, is following — in terms of economic policies that favor reduced social spending, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and trade agreements that lower tariffs — the neoliberal footsteps of his PRI predecessors Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo. Neoliberal ideology, a flashback to the dictatorial days of Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico for over three decades preceding the Mexican Revolution of 1910, has forever changed Mexican society. Cracks in the armor of Mexico’s former ruling party, the party of the institutionalized revolution, had already appeared on key dates: the Tlatelolco massacre of students during prodemocracy demonstrations that coincided with the Mexico City Olympic games of 1968; the government’s inadequate response to a massive Mexico City earthquake in 1985; the fraudulent 1988 election of President Salinas (the records of which he later had burned);21 and the zapatista uprising on New Year’s Day 1994. This uprising, in the name of Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary leader who fought for indigenous rights, exploded onto Mexico’s political stage the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the neoliberal flagship because of its championing of the free market, became law in Mexico. Referring to one of the Zapatista leaders, the media-savvy Subcomandante Marcos, Enrique Krauze explains: “Marcos would have been about eleven years old in 1968, one of those about whom the student leader Eduardo Valle had prophesied: ‘The government of this country will have to be very wary of those who were ten or fifteen in 1968. . . . They will always remember the assaults upon, the murders of their brothers.’”22 Indeed, pent-up frustration with the ruling party, not to mention the 1992 “celebration” of five centuries of oppression in indigenous communities, resulted in

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a spilling over of collective memory, in a common cry, as the Zapatistas stormed Mexico’s political stage with the words “Ya Basta” — Enough! Revolutionary ideals were put to rest during the Salinas administration. Ernesto Zedillo, the last in a long line of PRI presidents, followed the neoliberal model that Salinas had shaped beginning in 1982 (as finance minister under President Miguel de la Madrid) while also opening the way, through significant electoral reforms, for the difficult path toward the democratization of Mexican politics. Instead of the leftleaning Cuautémoc Cárdenas, from whom Salinas usurped the presidency in 1988, however, it was Vicente Fox from the National Action Party who came to power in 2000. With the election of Fox, the ruling party lost, at least temporarily, its political hegemony. Yet what remained unchanged was the driving force behind Mexico’s economic revolution: a neoliberal ideology, which with Fox in power has been married with increased social conservatism. Notwithstanding the rebirth of liberalism, there was another marriage in Mexico, another kiss that brings us to a different political stage — that of Mexico City performance artist Jesusa Rodríguez, who, in an extravagant ceremony complete with white (paper) wedding dresses, married her partner of twenty years, Liliana Felipe. The article in Mexico’s leading progressive newspaper, La Jornada, in a perfect parody of nuptial news, noted: “it was just before ten on the night of February 14 when the priestess Claudia Hinojosa declared the happy couple, both in white, wife and wife.”23 Tim Weiner puts Jesusa Rodríguez’s artistic production in the context of present-day Mexican politics: When the sclerotic old regime that ran the country for 71 years lost the presidency to Mr. Fox last year, it might have been the sort of creative problem for Ms. Rodríguez that the end of the cold war posed for John le Carré. “It was difficult for me at first,” she said. “Depressing.” But the old regime and the new are pretty much Pepsi and Coke in her eyes, both offering people thirsty for justice “democracy lite.”. . . “I realized the new government was the same, just worse,” she said. “Same economic ambitions, but different ideology — more dangerous, with this perverse mix of religion and merchandising, this mystical attraction to money and power.”. . . Ms. Rodriguez is part of a tradition in Mexico City that reaches back almost a century, to the tent shows, known as teatro de carpa, and

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the political cabarets that served as a kind of living newspaper, written in the language of parody — endless puns and wordplay, savage caricatures and satirical songs. In her youth, in the 1950’s and 60’s, that tradition all but disappeared, folding under pressures that included the government’s subtle censorship of politically deviant art and its sponsorship of creative artists who would work within acceptable limits. But in the early 1980’s, Ms. Rodriguez and her lifelong partner and creative collaborator, Liliana Felipe, began to revive it and to test those boundaries.24 Just as economic liberalism has returned to the stage, so have creative ways to subvert authority. This artistic revival of the 1980s, which coincides with the beginning of the neoliberal “revolution,” has provided a powerful counterpoint to a system of beliefs that parallels religious fervor. Add to this economic ideology the socially conservative agenda of Fox, who represents the probusiness, proreligious National Action Party, and the stage is set for unprecedented, counterhegemonic theatrical activity. Mexican playwright and director Felipe Galván writes: “Neoliberalism has not led to positive changes, except perhaps in that it provokes the imagination to find ways to combat it in practice, to evade its barriers, to leap over it, to organize forms of transcendence with which to destroy it, something that will happen sooner or later. It is not possible to live this way, and humanity will overcome these barbarous technocrats.”25 The reaction to neoliberalism, combined with the postmodern desire to question center-periphery binaries, makes for a Mexican stage in revision, a stage on which authority is tested and contested and which represents a trend that will need to be acknowledged by future theatre historians. Jesusa Rodríguez’s play Misa en Los Pinos (Mass in Los Pinos) takes place in the presidential residence and was staged in 2001.26 The set for Misa en Los Pinos (which includes, among other props, an altar/Coke cooler, four toilets with Coca-Cola bumper stickers on the cistern, and a podium/Coke refrigerator) leaves no doubt as to the anti-neoliberal sentiment felt by many Mexicans. Rodríguez uses English to subvert the image of U.S. economic hegemony. Indeed, with the change of one vowel, the famous brand name becomes Caca-Cola, as the huge banner on the back wall of the stage (and, it turns out, the bumper stickers on the toilets) proclaims. There are even English classes (at Bush University)

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where the characters learn, through repetition, key words, oil being the most important. One of the most outstanding students at Bush University — where eager cabinet members sit on the toilets and recite words from a textbook developed by Laura Bush — is Jorge G. Castañeda, who is satirized for switching political parties to join the Fox administration and for his close ties to the U.S. This character’s words remind the audience of the more intimate economic relationship (including the astonishing visit by the ultraconservative senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms) that was furthered by the elections of Bush and Fox. The nature of this budding friendship is made clear when Castañeda shouts into his cellular phone, in a line that is not to be found in the published script, “If it’s Jesse Helms, tell him yes to everything.” Many other Mexican playwrights have taken issue with neoliberal ideals in explicit ways. In his 1998 play La Malinche, for example, Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda directly attacks neoliberal policies.27 In the opening scene of the play, the Spanish conquerors enter the stage. Yet instead of a repeat of sixteenth-century savagery, we have an eerie update: the soldiers are dressed like U.S. tourists in Cancún, a clear indication that the names have changed but the reality of foreign economic dominance has not. NAFTA is presented as another deadly, foreign plague in an endless line of fatal imports. When Malinche Joven (Young Malinche) and Malinche Vieja (Old Malinche) try to recall the plagues that have swept Mexico, the past becomes the present; plagues carry different names but always the same result. After listing diseases like smallpox and measles, they mention more recent, equally potent menaces: “But now, there are new plagues that are killing us. Halloween kills Day of the Dead. Mall kills flea market” (98). Equally iconoclastic is Alejandra Trigueros’s 1997 play Muerte deliberada de cuatro neoliberales (The Deliberate Death of Four Neoliberals), which parodies the pseudo-religious fervor of four students studying neoliberal doctrine at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.28 Boston provides a fitting context; the city has seen its share of technocrats in training, as Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw explain: In the mid-1970s, for instance, Pedro Aspe, Mexico’s future finance minister, was doing his Ph.D. at MIT, where the future finance minister of Chile, Alejandro Foxley, was a visiting professor, while Domingo Cavallo, the future finance minister of Argentina, was

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writing his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard. They talked together and jogged together. . . . They met MIT faculty members Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley Fischer, now deputy manager at the International Monetary Fund.29 Trigueros’s neoliberal characters are the future Aspes and Zedillos of Mexico, and although Muerte deliberada takes place in present-day Boston, it clearly conjures up post-1982 Mexico. The neoliberal creed cited by the students of economics, while providing comic relief and biting satire, highlights the entrenched values of liberal economics among many Mexican elites: “I believe in Him, Adam Smith, the only son of the Economy, born of the Economy before all other economists.”30 The transposition of Catholicism and neoliberalism makes one thing clear: neoliberalism is based on beliefs, not opinions. The above mentioned plays that treat the theme of neoliberalism have been staged successfully, and while indirect censorship (e.g., the denial of funding and theatre space) is still relatively common, in general directors are able to stage plays that criticize the government. Jesusa Rodríguez, however, has experienced direct censorship as recently as the 1980s and proudly displays a threatening letter from the PRI “suggesting” that she ease her political attacks. Mexico City author Sabina Berman also parodies neoliberal ideology (albeit in more subtle ways) in plays such as Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Villa and a Naked Woman), Krisis (Crisis), and La grieta (The Crack).31 Nevertheless, she is best known for questioning gender roles and demythifying “natural” categories, providing iconoclastic themes that coincide with critics’ increasingly theoretical approaches to Mexican theatre. Unlike plays that treat neoliberal ideology, Berman’s genderbending plays have been the subject of numerous studies, including a recently completed, unpublished collection of articles edited by Jacqueline E. Bixler: Sediciosas seducciones: Sexo, poder y palabras en el teatro de Sabina Berman (Seditious Seductions: Sex, Power, and Words in the Theatre of Sabina Berman). Berman’s El suplicio del placer (The Agony of Ecstasy), a collection of four one-act plays published in 1994, presents a series of relationships that in one way or another challenge our perceptions of human relationships.32 In one act, El bigote (The Moustache), Berman presents a “feminoid” male and “masculinoid” female who, depending on which of the two wears a detachable moustache, switch

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gender roles. The conflation of the roles creates a temporary blurring of the fixity of gender, and at one point the stage directions indicate that the two characters speak lines interchangeably, leading to the possibility that the characters represent two gendered possibilities within each person: “I love you. You are me. . . . I am you” (177). Though critics often point out that the play questions the naturalness of gender, they also indicate that this subversion is temporary, that in the end the audience is left with only two plausible possibilities — the stereotypical male or the stereotypical female. Another vignette in the same collection is La casa chica (The Love Nest33), in which Berman presents a stereotypically macho man (El) and his “kept woman” (Ella), whom he places in the same category as his many possessions. When Ella laughs, he scolds: “What are you laughing at? That was a joke. . . . When I insult you I want to see you suffer,” at which time she practices the word ay until he is satisfied that she is suffering (181). His insults, and her act of submission, continue until the play comes to an end, when El slaps Ella and penetrates her. Shortly before, El had warned her that he would take her to “paroxysm.” Indeed, the final act in her performance is an orgasmic shudder, though the multiple meanings of paroxysm — a shudder or spasm but also the “sudden increase or recurrence of symptoms” — point to an illness in society.34 Jacqueline E. Bixler notes that Berman “stylizes history to foreground its representation and to remind her audience that events from the past acquire their meaning through their representation, whether it be on the page or on the stage.”35 Though La casa chica does not take as its theme a specific event, the historicity of female-male relationships is highlighted through the overt performance of gender roles. Ella prepares for her role by getting dressed and putting on makeup, and El is able to “dramatize” her. As with El bigote, the exaggerated, self-conscious performance lays bare the mechanized “nature” of human relationships. Adam Versényi, in the introduction to his translation of this and other Berman plays, notes: “In The Agony of Ecstasy Berman’s focus is upon the meaning of gender itself and, by extension, sexual politics.”36 Berman’s modus operandi is to engage her audience politically, to lead us to question our own social roles; her work is representative of the direction of theatre in Mexico City, which is continuously pushing the limits of conceptual, political borders — a process that is mirrored in theatre criticism.

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Kirsten Nigro explains, “There is another new theatrical voice in Mexico that is now, and probably will remain, both culturally and politically disenfranchised . . . the so-called teatro gey (gay theater).”37 Since the publication of Nigro’s text in 1994 it has become much more common to see teatro gey on the Mexican stage, and the queering of critical studies, which extends beyond teatro gey, has followed suit. In his study on Mexican cabaret performers published in 2002, Gastón A. Alzate notes, “in Mexico and Latin America there is a parallel system to hegemonic sexuality, a queer system that coexists with the heterosexual system.”38 Alzate’s use of queer theory indicates that an important part of his theoretical framework is influenced by foreign forces, which points to a crucial dilemma similar to that faced by the use of feminist theory to analyze Latin American literature: to what extent do foreign formulas and theories distort the texts we analyze? For Alzate the answer is clear: “I use the term queer in this book because the Spanish language does not have its own term” (22). A queer reading allows Alzate to treat not only gay and lesbian sexuality, but also bisexual, transvestite, and transexual sexualities. Alzate’s study of Mexican performance artists includes the above mentioned Jesusa Rodríguez as well as Astrid Hadad, Paquita la del Barrio, Francis, and Tito Vasconcelos, all of whom question our conceptions of gender politics and national politics through sexually subversive performances that routinely draw large audiences in the capital. Alzate highlights the parallel between Berlin and Mexico City, both with the “birth” of the cabaret movement in the 1920s and the present-day rebirth of this genre in both cities (12). He explains the origin of this “boom” in Mexico: “it grows parallel not only next to the development of indigenous participation but also certain feminist organizations, or organizations that fight for homosexual rights. . . . The EZLN [Zapatista Army of Nacional Liberation] sent a communiqué in support of sexual diversity, with which it broke the clearly homophobic tradition of Latin America” (14). Alzate, in specific reference to Astrid Hadad, shows how artists and critics have been challenged to respond to the “univocidad cultura” (univocal culture) of social conservatism, a challenge that has also resonated beyond the borders of Mexico City. Many Mexico City plays, including El gesticulador, actually are set in the “provinces”; Mexico City authors, for example, routinely write on themes related to the indigenous struggle for justice, most recently the

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Zapatista uprising, in order to question the centrist forces of the country’s political machine. Vicente Leñero, who along with Emilio Carballido and Hugo Argülles forms what is often referred to as the “santísima trinidad” (most saintly trinity) of Mexican playwrights, treats the theme in his 1995 play Todos somos Marcos (We Are All Marcos).39 Specifically, he focuses attention on the fissure among the political left in the country following the explosion of pent-up frustration among the various indigenous groups in the state of Chiapas. Leñero wrote the play for the Teatro Clandestino (Clandestine Theatre) series, which he and other Mexican authors established in order to stage current events. Todos somos Marcos was thus staged shortly after the Zapatista uprising in an effort to promote dialogue about the way intellectuals reacted to the neoZapatista movement. The play mirrors the divided reaction of the political left in Mexico; one of the protagonists, Laura, leaves to join the Zapatista movement, while her boyfriend, Raúl, is shown to be part of an increasingly stagnant, demoralized faction of the left. In addition to his dialogue, which at first is revolutionary but becomes more and more like the official communiqués of the Zedillo administration, Raúl’s violent reaction to Laura’s departure lets his political motives show through: Marcos has disrupted the political stage, but it is the domestic revolution — Laura’s departure — that most displeases Raúl. Though Leñero himself is never optimistic regarding the ability of theatre to affect politics, it is clear that this type of teatro urgente (urgent theatre) — like the theater studied by Donald H. Frishman in his 1990 book El teatro popular en México (Popular Theatre in Mexico),40 street theatre, and “teatro campesino,” all of which can quickly stage current events — has often been neglected by theatre historians and is an area rich for further analysis. Though the theme of the “provinces” has long been represented in plays from the capital, regional artists who refuse to make their home there have consistently suffered regional discrimination. Kirsten Nigro notes, “Although marginalized, this regional theater is nonetheless very much alive, and its exclusion from the canon gives a quite blinkered vision of theatrical life in Mexico as a whole. . . . For example, the peninsula of Yucatán has a long and rich theatrical history dating from pre-Columbian times, its real flourish beginning with the 1910 Revolution, when many theater artists fled the capital for safety in Yucatán.”41 Indeed, Sergio Magaña Esquivel affirms that there were more active theatres in the

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Yucatán than in Mexico City by 1916–1917.42 While many critics and historians signal some of the important writers who have migrated to Mexico City (e.g., Hugo Argüelles, Emilio Carballido, Luisa Josefina Hernández, Elena Garro, and Jorge Ibargüengoitia), many others who have not traveled to Mexico City continue to produce works worthy of study. Nigro, referring to the need for increased attention to border theatre, writes: “Not surprisingly, the [Mexico-U.S.] borderlands, like Yucatán, are seen from Mexico City as either cultural backwater or a place unconnected to the capital-city reality. Indeed, the prejudice against the fronterizo (Mexican who lives in the border zone), who rubs elbows with the U.S. . . . may well have something to do with the marginalization of this particular regional theater.”43 Despite the relatively limited critical attention paid to regional theatre, and despite the fact that many dramatists continue to travel to the capital to further their possibilities, the voices of regional authors who have not migrated to Mexico City are making themselves heard, and important work in this area is becoming more and more common. In addition to new studies like the issue of the journal Autores on regional authors, edited by George Woodyard, Enrique Mijares’s recent study, to give one example, responds to the hegemony of Mexico City theatre while contributing to the body of theoretical works by regional authors. In La realidad virtual del teatro mexicano (The Virtual Reality of Mexican Theatre), Mijares underscores the feeling of many people who live in regions other than Mexico City toward the self-centered attitude (“ensimismamiento”) of the federal government, past and present: It is an incontrovertible fact that the self-centered attitude [of Mexico City authors] does not correspond, from any point of view, to what is happening in the rest of the republic, where in the provinces . . . we are still waiting for the federal pact, promised as the first quarter of the eighteenth century came to an end, to be fulfilled, we are still waiting to receive the promises of decentralization revived by the governments that supposedly represent the Revolution, we continue to suffer the havoc of the presidential hegemony of Zedillo.44 George Woodyard, in his prologue to Enrique Mijares’s study, notes that until the publication of Mijares’s critical text “one had not seen such a penetrating and comprehensive study of postmodern theater in

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Mexico.”45 Not only is theatre in Mexico transforming, theatre criticism is responding to new themes in the theatre and, equally important, to new and varied theoretical perspectives, perspectives that have given rise to exciting studies on Mexican plays, past and present. In his own theatre productions, which number over one hundred, Mijares, who lives and works in the northern state of Durango, focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border but also other themes, including the Zapatista uprising on Mexico’s southern border. His play Enfermos de esperanza (Sick of Waiting), which won the prestigious Premio Tirso de Molina in 1997, treats the uprising from a decidedly proindigenous point of view and thus offers a necessary complement to Mexico City visions of the uprising. The voices of indigenous Chamulas from the state of Chiapas share the stage with Subcomandante Marcos, politicians, and journalists, among others. Through a series of distancing techniques, such as a spotlight that picks out Chamulas who are sitting among the audience and a television news program (one of many that painted the Zapatistas in a negative light) that plays through the intermission, the audience is drawn in to a web of complicity. At one point, the spectators are on the receiving end of a massacre; at another the Chamulas point their crude weapons toward the audience and fire, shattering the invisible fourth wall, as well as our desired feeling of innocence. The audience also shares seating with government officials as they plan the official story about, the official response to, the 1994 uprising. The rejection of a postmodern style in Enfermos de esperanza, though not in all of his dramatic works, underscores the social commitment of Mijares to the disenfranchised people of Mexico. Though Enfermos de esperanza takes place in Mexico’s southern borderlands, Mijares’s position on the Mexico-U.S. border often leads him to engage Mexico-U.S. politics. In the case of Enfermos de esperanza, one of the characters relays a specific warning to those on the other side of the border not to intervene militarily: “People of the United States: Don’t stain your hands with our blood.”46 The Zapatista movement, often represented by spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, who himself has written in numerous genres, including drama, signals another area that needs further study in Mexican theatre history — performance, in the realm of politics (e.g., the Zapatista caravans to Mexico City), in cabarets such as those studied by Gastón A. Alzate, and so on. The thin line between formal theatre

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and the theatre of politics was recently blurred, once again, when Comandante Estér, a Zapatista leader, addressed the Mexican Congress during a historical performance in which she demanded dignity for the indigenous people of Mexico. This courageous act by an indigenous woman reminds me of the opening scene of Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda’s La Malinche, in which the title character stands before congress to demand that her name be included, in golden letters, among Mexico’s heroes.47 Fiction and politics mirror each other, on the stage of politics and on the political stage, resulting in performances that question preexisting borders in order to denaturalize the status quo. The study of twentieth-century Mexican theatre has taken two general paths: the reevaluation of the past and the study, under increasingly theoretical lenses, of present-day theatre, which itself is transforming as borders are drawn and redrawn. The focused theatre histories studied above, which now by far outnumber national theatre histories, many of which attempted to be all-encompassing and which without a doubt serve as an important foundation for present-day criticism, show the fragmented reality of Mexican theatre. At the same time, they leave room for dissension, for multiple perspectives, for the consideration of counterhegemonic voices that, in all their contradictions, bring us closer to Mexican theatre. notes 1. John Beverly and José Oviedo, eds., The Postmodern Debate in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 1. 2. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992). 3. Martín Hopenhayn, “Postmodernism and Neoliberalism in Latin America,” in Beverly and Oviedo, eds., Postmodern Debate in Latin America, p. 100. 4. Ibid., 101. 5. Antonio Magaña Esquivel and Ruth S. Lamb, Breve historia del teatro mexicano (Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea, 1958); Antonio Magaña Esquivel, Medio siglo de teatro mexicano: 1900–1961 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1964); John B. Nomland, Teatro mexicano contemporáneo: 1900–1950 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1967); Yolanda Argudín, Historia del teatro en México: desde los rituales prehispánicos hasta el arte dramático de nuestro días (Mexico City: Panorama Editorial, 1985). All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 6. Argudín, Historia del teatro en México, p. 10.

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7. Rodolfo Usigli, El gesticulador, La mujer no hace milagros (Mexico City: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1994). 8. Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora, El adventimiento del teatro mexicano: años de esperanza y curiosidad (San Luis Potosí: Editorial Ponciano Arriaga, 1999), p. 15. 9. Enrique Mijares, La realidad virtual del teatro mexicano (Mexico City: Ediciones Casa Juan Pablos, 1999); and Gastón A. Alzate, Teatro de cabaret: imaginarios disidentes (Irvine: Ediciones de GESTOS, 2002). 10. Ronald D. Burgess, The New Dramatists of Mexico: 1967–1985 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991). 11. Willis Knapp Jones, Breve historia del teatro latinoamericano (Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea, 1956), p. 171. 12. Kirsten F. Nigro, “Twentieth-Century Theater,” in David William Foster, ed., Mexican Literature: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). 13. Usigli, El gesticulador, p. 107. 14. Enrique Krauze, Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996, trans. Hank Heifetz (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 526. 15. Nigro, “Twentieth-Century Theater,” p. 109. In large part, El gesticulador’s position in the U.S. canon is practical — for years the published text has been readily available for use in university courses on Latin American theatre. Thematically, the play feeds the desire to imagine Mexico as a society of masked simulators, a topic Octavio Paz addresses in El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude). 16. Marcela del Río Reyes, Perfil y muestra del teatro de la Revolución mexicana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997), p. 9. 17. Jacqueline E. Bixler, “Re-Membering the Past: Memory-Theatre and Tlatelolco,” Latin American Research Review 37 (2002): 121. 18. Adam Versényi, The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), xii. 19. Kathleen Bruhn and Daniel C. Levy, Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 177. 20. “La constitución permite ir a actos religiosos: Fox,” La Jornada [newspaper on-line], July 31, 2002; available from www.jornada.unam.mx/2002/ jul02/020731/005n2pol.php?origen=index.html, accessed February 4, 2003. 21. Krauze, Biography of Power, p. 770. 22. Ibid. 23. “Felices y níveas las contrayentes enlazaron sus vidas: Nupcias de Liliana y Desusa,” La Jornada [newspaper on-line], February 16, 2001; available from http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2001/feb01/010216/056n1con.html, accessed 4 February 2003.

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24. Tim Weiner, “Pummeling the Powerful, with Comedy as Cudgel,” New York Times, June 15, 2001, p. 4A. 25. Felipe Galván, e-mail interview by author, February 5, 2003. 26. Jesusa Rodríguez, Misa en Los Pinos, GESTOS 17 (2002): 119–41. 27. Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, La Malinche (Mexico City: Plaza and Janés, 2000). 28. Alejandra Trigueros, Muerte deliberada de cuatro neoliberales, in Stuart A. Day, ed., Diálogos dramatúrgicos: México Chile (Puebla: Tablero IberoAmericano, in press). 29. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 240. 30. Trigueros, Muerte deliberada de cuatro neoliberales. 31. Sabina Berman, Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda, Muerte súbita, El suplicio del placer (Mexico City: Gaceta, 1994); Berman, Krisis, Tramoya 52 (1997): 51–100; and Berman, La grieta, in Day, Diàlogos dramatúrgicos. 32. Berman, Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda, Muerte súbita, El suplicio del placer. 33. The translation of this title comes from Versényi, Theatre of Sabina Berman, p. 10. 34. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 2nd ed. 35. Jacqueline E. Bixler, “From Ecstasy to Heresy: The Theatre of Sabina Berman,” in Versényi, Theatre of Sabina Berman, p. xxiii. 36. Versényi, Theatre of Sabina Berman, p. xiii. 37. Nigro, “Twentieth-Century Theater,” p. 230. 38. Alzate, Teatro de Cabaret, p. 22. 39. Vicente Leñero and Antonio Zúñiga, Todos somos Marcos, Sol blanco (Mexico City: Alborde Teatro, 1999). 40. Donald H. Frischmann, El Nuevo teatro popular en México (Mexico City: INBA/Centro Nacional de Investigación, 1990). 41. Nigro, “Twentieth-Century Theater,” pp. 227–28. 42. Magaña Esquivel, Medio siglo, p. 17. 43. Nigro, “Twentieth-Century Theater,” p. 228. 44. Mijares, Realidad virtual, p. 86. 45. George Woodyard, prologue to Mijares, Realidad virtual, p. 16. 46. Enrique Mijares, Enfermos de esperanza (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1998), p. 29. 47. Rascón Banda, La Malinche, pp. 15–17.

10 The Creation of a Canon Re/Evaluating the National Identity of Israeli Drama yael zarhy-levo & freddie rokem

I

sraeli theatre and its processes of canonization pose an especially interesting test case for theatre historians. Unlike most national theatre traditions, Israel’s does not have a longstanding indigenous tradition of playwriting readily available to present-day theatres for use as a point of departure for their new productions. Most of the original Hebrew/Israeli plays performed today are newly written. An investigation of the Israeli theatre makes it possible to draw attention to a broad range of methodological issues that have so far received only marginal attention regarding canon formation of dramatic texts within an emerging national theatre tradition and culture. In particular, the case of the Israeli theatre exemplifies a pattern in which the forming and re-forming of the canon occur almost exclusively around national themes. An overview of the short history of Israeli theatre — a history predominantly centering on the national ethos — illustrates how hegemonic cultural values are created and preserved, subsequently questioned and subjected to critique, and then reformulated, within an emerging theatrical culture. The professional theatre performances in Hebrew, the major official language of the country, began with the founding of the Habima Theatre (today Israel’s National Theatre, located in Tel Aviv) in Moscow in 1917. Beginning in the 1920s, several cultural institutions, including theatres, were founded in the recently established city of Tel Aviv, where Jews who had immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in fulfillment of their Zionist dream, were reviving Hebrew as a secular language to be spoken in the home, on the streets, in schools, and, of course, on stage. By the beginning of the 1930s, the Habima Theatre had itself also migrated to Israel. The theatres performing in Hebrew needed plays to perform, but there was no existing reservoir of plays from which to choose. Moreover 174

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during the first years of Israeli theatre, beginning with the founding of the state in 1948, a clearly defined theatrical tradition had not yet been formulated. However, the newly formed and gradually developing collective Israeli consciousness and the complex cultural dynamics and social and political conflicts it had, and still has, to confront and to reflect have constantly been mobilized toward consolidating some form of cultural canon appropriate to the intrinsic needs of the Israeli society. A national cultural canon has gradually developed, even if this canon has by no means stabilized but is constantly being redefined, renegotiated, and reevaluated.1 This applies to the canon of plays associated with the national tradition, as well.2 One of the most obvious expressions of the canonization of a certain playwright or of a specific play is their reappearance in the repertoires of the established theatres. Israeli plays have proven to be very popular among the Israeli audience, and according to a recent study by Levi and Shoef,3 Israeli plays in fact currently constitute at least 50 percent of the repertoires in the country. Strikingly, however, most of these plays are produced only once, whereas just over twenty plays written in Hebrew have been revived a second time by established theatres, and fewer than ten plays have been produced more than twice.4 This means that out of the many hundreds of plays written in Hebrew only a handful have had a “stage life” beyond their first run. And of the plays performed only once, only those that have raised extremely controversial issues, have established new aesthetic norms, or have had an unusually long run (the latter also no more than a handful) have remained in the public consciousness. Inevitably there are several additional factors that contribute to establish the canonical status of a play or playwright, such as critical evaluations and academic assessments, inclusion in the curricula of schools and universities, amateur performances, as well as various prizes and awards. In the assessment of the process of canonization, further consideration should also be given to the complex interaction between traditional Jewish values and the secular Israeli culture, particularly exemplified by plays based on the Bible. Another heavily charged subject is the Shoah (Holocaust), an issue raising a whole set of cultural/ideological factors. A distinct characteristic of Israeli drama concerns the demand for ideological involvement or confrontation that typifies Israeli audiences,

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who have clearly incorporated this demand into the horizons of expectations they have developed. Consequently, the timing of a new production of a particular play and the way it deals with a current crisis may sometimes even carry an uncanny significance in the context of the Israeli national history. Moreover, the position of the play in relation to the emerging canon very much depends on its ability to reflect, or rather to be perceived as reflecting, the “national spirit” at a certain point in time and to mirror a moment of national elation or crisis on the stage. The first two plays that we discuss here have been revived more than once, and each corresponds to a clear-cut criterion of canonization, especially within the context of Israeli theatre. Contrasting the first productions of each play with their revivals allows different phases in the emerging canon to be examined and provides an opportunity for analyzing the impact of the ideological/cultural transformations taking place in Israeli society, manifested in a shift of dominance on the one hand, and in the marketing and reception of the plays on the other. The next two cases concern the careers of two playwrights whose processes of canonization tie in with major questions relating to the emergent canon of Israeli drama. These four cases, which reflect significant phases in the relatively short history of Israeli theatre, demonstrate the ongoing process through which the canon is constantly renegotiated.5 This investigation will no doubt reflect the central area of Israeli theatre history. This means that many aspects of Israeli theatre will not be treated. Within the context of the present volume of rewriting national theatre history it should be noted that the peculiarity of the Israeli case lies in the predominance of the national ethos suppressing other issues such as gender, ethnicity, and class structure. Furthermore, the concerns and debates typifying the ongoing process of canon formation in the Israeli case, though affected by new conceptions of and approaches to theatre, stem primarily from the reservoir of the national ethos. The canon is contested from “within,” and reconstructions of the canon are primarily read within the national context. The following account suggests a historical outlook and a critique that simultaneously addresses the criteria for canonization and reevaluates them. It confronts the issue of processes of canonization, which is a concern not only for theatre historians, but also seems to be an obsession of Israeli culture and society at large in its efforts to create a fairly welldefined cultural corpus reflecting the collective identity of the country.

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He Walked through the Fields He Walked through the Fields marks the beginning of Israeli national theatre in every possible respect. The play, written by Moshe Shamir6 and directed by Joseph Milo, was first performed at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv in 1948. Milo, an actor and stage designer, had founded this theatre in 1944. Unlike the Habima Theatre, which consisted initially of a group of actors who immigrated to Israel from Russia, bringing the Russian theatrical traditions with them, the expressed aim of the Cameri Theatre was to establish a new “local” Israeli theatre that would present the daily life of the individual in the newly emerging society.7 The premiere of He Walked through the Fields took place on the May 30, 1948, a mere two weeks after the declaration of Israel’s independence, and its immense popularity was no doubt the result of its treatment of the most burning issue at the time of the national struggle for independence: the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the collective. In this sense, it served as a counterpoint to the famous Habima production of The Dybbuk, produced in Moscow in 1922 (which remained in the theatre’s repertoire until the early 1960s), where the conflict between the collective and the individual remains unresolved.8 He Walked through the Fields was actually the first Israeli play to be performed in the newly founded state. It was frequently performed in Tel Aviv while the city was under attack, and many of the spectators attended performances in army uniform. Later it was performed for soldiers in army camps and in Jerusalem while the city was under siege. It can in many ways be seen as the ultimate Israeli classic, and since its initial premiere, it has been performed in three additional productions as well as remade into a popular movie adaptation. At the present time, in the Israel of the new millennium and the second Intifada, however, this play is perceived as belonging to a period in Israeli history that for most people is irrevocably past. He Walked through the Fields is based on a novel by Moshe Shamir, which was published a few months before its stage adaptation premiered. It presents the story of Uri, born in a kibbutz, and his relationship with Mika, a refugee girl from Poland. It follows the events leading to Uri’s decision to join a mission of the pre-state fighting brigade, the Palmach, with the intention of blowing up a bridge in order to stop the British troops. During this mission, the twenty-year-old Uri

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is killed in action. By the end of the play Mika, who is still unaware of his death, finally resolves her own conflict and decides not to have an abortion. The newborn child is given the name Uri. Several components, however, complicate this somewhat simplistic and formulaic plot. Uri’s relationship with Mika begins following his discovery that his parents have separated. Willie, Uri’s father, an organizer of youth groups for immigrants, has been frequently absent from home. Unlike Uri, who was born in the country (under the British mandatory rule), Mika, a Holocaust survivor, has immigrated to Israel. Indeed, Uri’s relationship with Mika clarifies their different views and needs regarding the issue of how to create a new “home.” It is important to note that Uri’s death occurs in an accident prior to the mission of blowing up the bridge. The men in the play sacrifice their private lives for the collective dream of an independent state, but between the lines, the play hints at the problematic nature of their choices. The naive surface of the play’s narrative thus disguises an undercurrent of duality manifested in dissonant components of the plot. Hence, the play touches upon the discrepancy between the individual and the collective, albeit implicitly, using the symbol of the bridge to explore the interface between “home” and “nation.” It is worth noting that objections from the leaders of the leftist Hashomer Hatzair movement to the portrayal of kibbutz life in the text delayed the publication of Shamir’s novel.9 It appears that in spite of the changes made in the play, the stage version still contained an undercurrent of critique, whose suppression by audience and critics alike sheds further light on the governing ideologies current at the time of its first stage production.10 A month prior to the publication of the novel, Shamir’s brother, Elik, had been killed in a battle on the way to Jerusalem. Shamir dedicated the novel to Elik’s memory. Indeed, the novel and the play differ with respect to several major components of the plot, significantly, the circumstances of the protagonist’s death. Whereas in the novel, the protagonist’s death appears to be a training accident, suggestive in fact of suicide, in the play, Uri’s death (occurring prior to a mission) is presented as the consequence of a heroic act.11 Although the play clearly ratifies the author’s commemoration of his brother, the timing of its first performance also made an obvious contribution to its particular reception and to the way in which it was perceived.

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Similar ambivalence regarding the issue of personal sacrifice for the sake of the collective dream also surfaces in a number of other early Israeli plays and literary works. The coexistence of these two opposing voices was seminal for the creation of the myth of the Sabra, the native Israeli, while it also became an integral subtext of emerging Israeli culture in general, and of theatrical developments in particular. However, the “packaging” of He Walked through the Fields through the program notes for its initial performance — an important indication of directorial intentions — downplays, or even ignores, this underlying ambivalence, attempting instead to cultivate the myth of the Sabra within the context of the Zionist dream. Consequently, the gaps suggested by the play are filled up with an ideological content that corresponds to the urgent needs of the times. Summing up this theatrical event, Abramson claims that “it was an emotional play given at an emotional time.”12 Needless to say, this theatrical event has been accorded canonical status by all theatre critics and historians who treat early Israeli theatre.13 The program notes for the first production of the play included a number of additional texts through which its ideological messages were foregrounded. The first was a quotation from a well-known poem by Nathan Alterman (the leading Hebrew poet of the period from the late 1930s to the beginning of the 1960s, perceived during the years of the national struggle for independence as the voice of the nation). It reads: “My son is large and silent / and here I make a festive shirt for him / He walks through the fields. / He will arrive. / He carries a bullet in his heart.”14 The second text adorning the program was by the playwright himself. Shamir explains why he dedicated the play to the memory of his brother, Elik, emphasizing that the primary function of Hebrew literature and Hebrew culture as a whole is to eternalize Hebrew youth — fighting youth — in order to create a model for imitation by the coming generations. The text closing the program was a well-known song by Chaim Hefer, the more or less official poet of the Palmach, recounting the heroic death of a young handsome man during a mission. The initial critical reaction to the performance confirms that the play was “marketed” as well as perceived according to the needs of the public at the time. The majority of the critics felt it reflected the unique position of Israeli youth (and the need felt by the public to support their

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actions) during this extraordinary period of the war of independence.15 Chaim Gamzu, one of the most influential critics at the time, began his review by exhorting his readers not to adopt an objective attitude with respect to a play that depicted the (then) current bloody contemporary situation.16 Concluding his review, Gamzu presented the play as a significant contribution to original Israeli drama, emphasizing the obligation of the Cameri to pursue this chosen route further on the one hand, and the obligation of Israeli audiences and critics to express their support for it, on the other. Most other reviewers also stressed the local and timely dimensions of the play as its major contribution.17 The actors playing the lead roles of Uri (Imanuel Ben-Amos) and Mika (Hanna Marron) became cultural heroes by virtue of their appearance in this production. He Walked through the Fields represents a classic instance of canonization, one where the ideological presuppositions of the 1948 production completely overlapped with the ideology of the newborn country, the characters served as role models for a whole generation of Israelis, and the actors playing the main roles instantly became celebrities and cultural icons. In view of this immediate canonization, it is interesting to see how facets of He Walked through the Fields have been confirmed or questioned by its three stage revivals as well as by its film version. The dates of the four subsequent productions are particularly important. The first revival by the Cameri Theatre took place in 1956, the year of the Sinai war, during which the play was even performed in army camps. The second revival, by the Haifa Theatre in 1966, celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Palmach, a year before the Six Day War. The third stage revival of He Walked through the Fields was performed by the Beer-Sheva Municipal Theatre in December 1997. It marked the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, as well as of the play’s first performance. The 1956 production, directed by Joseph Milo, was slightly revised by the playwright. Significantly, the revision entailed a commemorative frame being added to the play. The play’s new opening scene, borrowed from the novel, now consisted of a gathering of kibbutz members in memory of Uri, the kibbutz’s firstborn son, who had died ten years earlier. During the gathering, the members of the kibbutz recount the events of Uri’s life and death. Considering the commemorative nature and function of the play, it is significant that its first revival

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integrated the commemorative event into the body of the play itself, actually causing this dimension to become materialized on stage. The 1956 production was chosen to represent Israeli theatre at the International Theatre Festival in Paris. Furthermore, the program for the 1956 revival included an additional text, which appeared as well in the program of the 1966 revival at the Haifa Municipal Theatre, also directed by Milo (the founder of this theatre, too, and its artistic director at the time). This text is “The Wanderer’s Song,” a well-known song, written by A. Ashman, describing the wanderer’s decision to stop his wandering upon meeting with a blue-eyed girl. Unlike the earlier texts included in the program for the first production, which strove to cultivate the Sabra myth, “The Wanderer’s Song” foregrounds the implicit opposition between “home” and “nation” referred to above. Whereas the 1956 revival was a success, receiving favorable critical notices, the 1966 revival received mixed reviews. In addition to the critics’ reservations regarding the acting (compared with the “original” cast), the critics were divided between those who related to the play in a nostalgic manner — thus presenting it as an important reminder of other times18 — and those who thought that the play was too reductive, that it achieved the mere recirculation of stereotypes,19 or that it was outdated.20 Consideration of the ideological/cultural transformations that had taken place in Israeli society since the first production of Shamir’s play shows these critical responses to confirm that something of the original sense of fusion between stage and audience, characteristic of the first performances, had obviously been lost. The next production of He Walked through the Fields, a film version directed by Milo, dates from 1967. It is significant to note that the film was made following the Six Day War, when national sentiments ran high. The film received generous financial support, and became one of the major events celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Israel. The Prime Minister at the time, Levi Eshkol, as well as ministers and other public figures were present at its premiere. Endowed with the support of the political establishment and acclaimed by the critics, the film turned into a national event. If, as Nurith Gertz suggests, the creators of the film had intended, at least to some extent, to reflect shifting cultural currents, its reception by its critics as well as the support it received from the establishment stressed the film’s compliance with the national ideological ethos instead.

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Gertz has addressed the change of norms that had obviously taken place in the Israeli culture between the first production of the play and the film version.21 She claims that, unlike the Uri of the first version, who strives to harmonize his national/social values and his personal world, the Uri of the film version is torn between opposing value systems which he is unable to integrate. Gertz’s perception of the heterogeneity or confusion of the film version should also be taken into account. The film is, she claims, confused and heterogeneous not only with respect to the diverse film models it endorses, but also with respect to its attempt to display past and contemporary ideological or cultural conceptions simultaneously. Whereas many of the literary works published in Israel during the 1960s directed their critique at the nationalheroic modality of Zionism, prioritizing instead individual or personal goals and achievements, according to Gertz, the film version of He Walked through the Fields lacks critique and consequently presents empty clichés, the “leftovers” of past national conceptions. In this respect the film version somehow comes to reflect the attempt to retrieve the heroic path of the national vocation itself. When discussing the film version, the casting of Uri requires a special mention. The actor who played the lead, Asi Dayan (currently considered one of the major figures in the film industry in Israel), is the son of the “mythical” general Moshe Dayan, who was the Minister of Defense during the Six Day War. Asi Dayan, perceived in his youth as the perfect representative of the Israeli Sabra, continued to play the mythological Sabra in other films as well. Over the course of time, however, Dayan has strayed somewhat, becoming a rather notorious enfant terrible. Strangely enough, both his personal history and his professional career embody the dissolution of the Sabra myth. In a later film, which Dayan directed, Life after Agfa (1993), he manifested his repudiation of the mythology embodied in the Sabra through staging an apocalyptic vision of the consequences of the militarization of Israeli life. In yet another film he directed, Mr. Baum (1997), in which he also took the leading role of Micki Baum, Dayan apparently kills the mythological figure of the Sabra, for whom he had become synonymous, through a telling reference to the figure of Uri: “Micki did not come from the sea, he did not walk through the fields, he will not arrive tomorrow. Micki is dead.”22 The theme of dissolution and critique is continued off-stage in the work of a major Israeli artist, Yigal Tomarkin, who created a sculpture entitled He Walked

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through the Fields in 1967. Another version of this piece was included in the artist’s exhibit in 1992. It presents a male figure whose lower torso is exposed. Tomarkin literally depicts the Sabra “caught with his pants down,” thus channeling his view of the disintegration of the Sabra myth through another medium.23 The third stage revival of He Walked through the Fields, directed by Gadi Inbar, was performed by the Beer-Sheva Municipal Theatre in December 1997. This production marked the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel as well as of the play’s first performance. The program for this production includes three texts in addition to a brief stage history of the play. The quotation from Alterman’s poem has been retained, alongside commentary by the playwright written for this particular production and entitled “Still on the Road.” There is also a quotation from Oz Almog’s book The Sabra — A Profile concerning the term Sabra and its mythical turn. Note, however, that in 1997, two years after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli society, though clearly divided, had not given up the peace process, which appeared more plausible following the Oslo agreement (1993), eventually electing Ehud Barak as Prime Minister on the premise that he would advance a comprehensive peace agreement. At this point Shamir’s play had become outdated. Indeed, the majority of critics found this production’s attempt to revive the myth by conserving the initial nature and spirit of the play to be anachronistic. In her review, Sarit Fuchs, for example, criticized the production as inadequate and ridiculous, and she attacked the director for (apparently) placing it in a historical vacuum.24 Tsipi Shochat, however, presented a dissenting — because favorable — view. She disclosed the fact that the director had himself lost his brother in the Yom Kippur War, and hence she read the play as primarily addressing the phenomenon of bereavement as the salient feature of the fifty years of Israel’s existence.25 Interestingly, an article in Yediot Achronot (the largest Israel daily newspaper) closing a special issue commemorating the forty-ninth anniversary of the State of Israel used a reference to Shamir’s play, “He Did Not Walk through the Fields,” to examine the history of Israeli cinema.26 This suggests that the position assigned to Shamir’s play over the years has become so linked to the myth of the Sabra that the play has taken on an almost idiomatic status. He Walked through the Fields, initially presented

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and perceived as serving a particular ideology, had, by 1997, become implicit in the dissolution of the very myth it set out to cultivate. However, the ongoing attention devoted to the play, albeit in modes that deconstructed its original intent and revised the original enthusiasm and identification it produced, paradoxically attests to the maintenance of its canonical status. Paradoxically, canonization is further cultivated by a process that can be termed countercanonization, through which the ideological and aesthetic norms set by the emerging canon are constantly reexamined.

Most Cruel, the King Israeli culture, while still in the process of constructing its own identity, is at the same time also deliberating upon the nature of its more longstanding cultural resources and traditions. This is the point at which this culture almost becomes overwhelmed by the most canonized of all canonized books: the Bible. It is no exaggeration to claim that any theatre in Israel, merely by choosing a biblical theme or a biblical story as the basis for a performance, regardless of how controversial its use of these elements is in the larger ideological contexts of the country, relies on the virtually unquestioned symbolic and canonized values of this textual corpus.27 The newly founded Hebrew/Israeli secular culture was initially perceived as a search for an alternative form of expression to the orthodox religious traditions of the Jews. The Habima Theatre, for example, first named itself The Biblical Studio, simultaneously pointing at its self-image as a continuation of the biblical prophetic tradition, while simultaneously undermining it since the actors self-consciously played on their position as “prophets” of the avant-garde theatre traditions already established in Moscow, instead of preaching the word of God. Seen in this light, the biblical play is “canonical” through its reliance on an existing textual tradition and, at the same time, the source of an avant-garde revolt to the extent that it produces theatre — a secular form of cultural expression — on the basis of tradition. Needless to say, this cultural rebellion has gradually established its own canonical values based on aesthetic and ideological values. The ways in which the Israeli theatre has integrated texts from the Hebrew Bible — by adopting, confronting, and even subverting these texts — have, perhaps paradoxically, created

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possibilities both for renewal and innovation, and even for new forms of canonization. Many performances based on biblical materials have been overtly avant-garde for various reasons, sometimes even contesting and criticizing the hegemonic cultural and political establishments of the country.28 The Bible, with its traditional, mainly religious apparatuses of interpretation, has also been a major source of inspiration for the ideology of the Zionist movement. These ancient texts were held as “evidence” (written in a Hebrew that could still be easily understood by contemporary speakers and readers) that the ancient biblical land had been promised to the Jewish people. For the emerging Israeli theatre, the Bible not only provided a classical source that was strongly charged ideologically, but also a huge reservoir of literary narratives that could be told on the stage more or less directly. The traditional, religious canonical nature of the biblical texts makes their dramatization on the theatrical stage potentially subversive. According to the Orthodox Jewish faith, theatre as an art form is actually forbidden. But the transformation of biblical materials into performances paradoxically also relied on an already existing tradition in Jewish religious and cultural practices. During the festival of Purim that celebrates the miraculous rescue of the Jews from the Persian ruler Ahasver in ancient Persia, commemorated in the short biblical novella Esther, it has been the custom (probably since the Middle Ages) to dramatize different stories from the Bible in a humorous or even subversive manner. The carnivalesque aspect of Purim was used to sanction it as the only day in the calendar when religious law permitted theatre to be performed. The Israeli theatre has not preserved the carnival spirit of Purim as its prime goal but rather tends to employ biblical sources in order to debate not only the significance of these canonical texts but current political and ideological issues as well, just as the celebration of Purim, indirectly at least, reflected the situation of the Jews in most countries during the period of the Diaspora. Here, the case of one biblical play, Most Cruel, the King, by Nissim Aloni (the only playwright awarded the Israel Prize for Theatre, in 1996), first performed in 1953, will be examined in detail. This is not only one of the first plays of its genre performed in postindependence Israel, but it is also the most frequently performed. The action, in complete opposition to He Walked through the Fields, belongs to a very different world from that

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occupied by the spectators. The play is based on the narrative from Kings I (chapter 12), giving it a quasi-historical status based on the national myth of the origins of the Jewish people in ancient Israel. In his later work, Aloni would tend to situate the action in worlds of fantasy with only coincidental connections to the everyday realities of modern Israel, yet this, his first play, was based on the Bible and clearly uses this attribution to construct a facade of relevance. The chapter in question recounts the struggle for political power between Rehoboam and Jeroboam following the death of King Solomon, finally leading to the division of the kingdom. Aloni, however, theatricalizes the biblical narrative in a cultural-ideological context that draws clear parallels between this narrative and the political struggles within contemporary Israeli society when it was first performed, a dimension of the play that characterizes its revivals as well. Rehoboam is the cruel nationalist king ruling the country, while Jeroboam, a universalist and a humanist, has recently returned home after having spent ten years in exile in Egypt. But when he enters the political arena, he also becomes corrupted by power and is transformed into a cruel politician. The allegorical interpretation of the play is further strengthened by the imaginary continuity between contemporary Israeli society and its received biblical heritage. Previous performances based on biblical themes had been important in terms of investigating the ancient mythical past of the Jewish pioneers, giving the biblical text a contemporary physical habitation and a theatrical form. But Aloni was the first playwright who succeeded in giving these more general cultural and ideological intentions a clear-cut political significance, reflecting the tensions between different groups within the newly founded country. So far the play has been produced four times. The first production took place at the Habima Theatre in 1953 and was directed by Shraga Friedman. Oded Kotler of the Haifa Municipal Theatre directed the second production in 1975. The third production, directed by Yigal Azrati, was a fringe production presented at the Acco Festival for Alternative Theatre in 1989. The most recent production, again at the Habima Theatre, took place in 1997 and was directed by Chanan Snir. In addition, a photograph reprinted in the program of the Haifa production of Most Cruel, the King documents the fact that the play has also been performed by the National Popular Theatre in Poland (no year, however, is indi-

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cated). Each of these productions adopted a different approach to Aloni’s text, which is written in a kind of pseudoclassical, poetic style that preserves the stylistic features of the Bible, but Aloni’s style also mimics ancient Greek tragedy through the use of a chorus and relatively few main characters. Azrati, however, cut the chorus, while Snir, in his 1997 production, asked the playwright to add new material to be performed by the chorus. The biblical narrative contains male characters only. The two female characters in Most Cruel, the King, Jeroboam’s mother, Zeruah, and his former mistress, Maacha, married to his opponent, Rehoboam, when the play begins, are literary-dramatic inventions of the playwright. Since the women have such a dominant role in the plot, the present analysis will focus on the manner in which the two female characters are introduced in the synopsis published in the program of each performance. This reflects a series of moves that invest the play with its contemporary relevance as well as its psychological depth.29 The synopsis for the first production (1953) tells us that upon his return from Egypt, after ten years of exile, Jeroboam “is greeted by the unchanged fanaticism of his mother and the furious people. When the queen, his former lover, appears at his home and suggests an escape to another country, he refuses, though inwardly tending towards such a personal solution (emphasis added). The Haifa synopsis (1975) assigns a much more active role to the mother in Jeroboam’s plot against Rehoboam. Jeroboam has returned at the instigation of his mother, Zeruah, and the elders of Ephraim. They all urge him to raise the flag of rebellion anew and mount the throne. The role of Maacha is also presented in a much more extreme manner in the Haifa synopsis. Jeroboam’s great love for Maacha — now Rehoboam’s wife — adds to the complexity of the plot. She appears dressed in veils at his house to renew their love, and when he refuses her, her passion turns vindictive. She exhorts Rehoboam to imprison Zeruah, who is hostile toward her, and he acquiesces to his wife’s demand. The program notes for the Azrati production (1989) present a more emotional and personal perspective on the political struggle, pointing at a private solution. The mother “is responsible for keeping the fire of rebellion burning,” while Jeroboam’s stay in Egypt has turned him into “a different person,” more tolerant and more reluctant to use force.

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In the early morning hours another person arrives at the same house in Shechem — the house of Zeruah. It is Maacha, who was the mistress of Jeroboam ten years ago. The years have passed and Maacha has married Rehoboam the king and has born him children. In spite of this, she comes to the house of Zeruah in order to ask Jeroboam to flee with her to a faraway country — the country of love. The synopsis for the Snir production (1997) presents Jeroboam as having to confront more of a direct conflict between emotional and political motives. His hesitation in rebelling against Rehoboam is not only due to a reluctance to shed blood, but is intensified by an emotional motive: his exbeloved Maacha, now the queen, Rehoboam’s wife, smuggles her way in disguise to his home, ready to renounce her position and to betray her husband in return for Jeroboam’s love. She wishes to flee with him from the land of Israel. She even fights for her love against the fanatic Zeruah, who regards her as a threat to Jeroboam’s valor and his dedication to the uprising. In each case, the text of Aloni’s play ends before the division of the kingdom. Whichever way the complex motives are presented in the different productions, it is basically Jeroboam’s refusal to flee with Queen Maacha, his former lover, that leads to the imprisonment of his mother, Zeruah, and this in turn triggers the fatal rebellion. The synopsis of the first Habima production, however, significantly fails to mention this. It is no doubt significant that the influential critic Gamzu also had problems pinpointing the “core” of this production, arguing that “the lack of conceptual clarity clouds some of the advantages of the materialization of history enacted here.”30 A variant of this oscillation between the individual and the collective was also central to the early productions of He Walked through the Fields. In the case of Aloni’s play, while the tensions between the two conflicting factions inside biblical Israel were perceived as central to the performance, the critics of the first production also emphasized the dangers directed at the country by its enemies beyond its borders. This external threat, crucial to the self-image of the young Israeli state, seems to have been deemphasized in the later productions, which stressed the threat deriving from internal tensions instead. The social impact of the first production was felt well beyond the theatre’s walls. In fact, the question of the reasons behind Jeroboam’s decision to revolt

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and to betray his own universalistic values, triggered a debate among politicians as to the best way to achieve a peaceful, harmonious society. The performance was perceived as a form of criticism directed against David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister. This polemic, arousing much public debate, is possibly yet another of the factors leading to the canonization of the play. The synopses for the Haifa production and for the later Habima production show that the emphasis has changed. These synopses are much clearer about the centrality of the women, pointing out that it is actually the struggle between the two women that ignites the devastating political conflict between the two men. The two rival women, inserted by Aloni into the biblical narrative, can be seen as the political forces eventually leading to the open conflict with which the play ends, as well as the embodiments of the opposing voices constituting Jeroboam’s internal conflict. The dichotomy between the two men has also been reinforced in the later productions, where Rehoboam represents corruption — in the Haifa production he was depicted as a drunkard, while in the later Habima production he had become a religious fanatic — whereas Jeroboam is a man of the people, enlightened and farsighted, who becomes drawn into the corrupting political arena by forces he cannot master. Mendel Kohansky, who reviewed the Haifa production, claimed that “Most Cruel, the King is a political play par excellence,” but, he added, the insistence on the political allegorical dimension has “obscure[d] its significance as theatre, which is a pity, because the play, with all its faults, is good theatre.”31 In particular Kohansky draws attention to the poetic language, a pastiche of biblical and contemporary Hebrew, but which has dispensed with some of the linguistic complexities of the original. Elyakim Yaron, writing about the most recent production of the play at the Habima Theatre in 1997, begins his review by arguing the play had such a strong impact as early as 1953 because of “the beautiful language, which is like the biblical Hebrew, but also very modern.” At the same time, he argued, the linguistic associations functioned very differently for the audience of the first production than they did for the audience of the 1997 production. “That is the strength of classical plays. Today we are aware of the madness of messianic fanaticism, of the dangers of a division of the people, of the destructive warmonger attitudes and of religious officials who try to influence the business of

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the state.”32 The reviewer’s comments can be used to underscore the critics’ role in reinforcing the drive to canonization present in the revival of a play like Most Cruel, the King. In all of their various manifestations, processes of canonization are directly affected by the resurgence, time after time, of the “old” yet still unresolved issue of how the Israeli individual creates a viable social sphere and a sense of cohesion and continuity within the evolving collective. Canonization is in itself the sign of such continuity. In the case of Aloni’s play, the historical situation was read as providing an instance in which social unity was surrendered to individual passions and desires.

Hanoch Levin and Yehoshua Sobol A methodological discussion of the processes of canonization of Israeli drama requires a brief mention of at least two more cases having a bearing on its dynamics — cases both involving playwrights rather than discrete texts. The first instance concerns the total oeuvre of the playwright Hanoch Levin. Hanoch Levin embarked on his multifaceted career as a writer, mainly for the stage, in 1968 — the year his first satirical cabaret program, called You and Me and the Next War, was performed. Levin was also a director, only of his own plays, however. During his thirty-year long artistic career Levin published fifty-six plays (in eleven volumes; the last volume of six plays, written before his death from cancer in 1999 at the age of fifty-six, was published posthumously). About thirty plays were produced on the stage during his life; two volumes of satirical reviews and songs were published, as well as two volumes of prose, a feature film, a volume of poetry, children’s books, as well as other occasional writings. Between 1972 and 1998, Levin directed twenty-two of his own plays at most of the major theatres in Israel — the Habima National Theatre, the Cameri Theatre (both in Tel Aviv), the Haifa Municipal Theatre, and the Jerusalem Khan Theatre — gradually developing his own distinct theatrical style both as a writer and a director. In both of these roles, Levin’s art constantly took on unexpected turns and expressions, frequently surprising his audiences with new satirical twists and fantastic narratives, as well as with the heavily charged and poignant poetic and visual images for which he has become known to Israeli audiences. His career developed from initial

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appreciation and admiration as a rebellious and somewhat eccentric playwright and director by a fairly limited sector of theatre spectators, to ever-growing recognition by larger sections of the audience. Although Levin’s radical left-wing views were generally disparaged by many sections of Israeli society, his art, as it developed, was embraced by a steadily growing audience. Levin’s legacy is now taken for granted as a given of Israeli theatrical culture. His work has given rise to strong reactions in the face of its consistency and artistic honesty on the part of most Israeli audiences, but it is chiefly valorized for its constant probing of the ideological issues that are at the heart of the “Israeli experience” — with all of the contradictions attaching to the latter. After his first three satirical reviews (Ketchup [1969] and The Queen of the Bathtub [1970] followed You and Me and the Next War [1968] and were produced by his brother David Levin), the playwright turned to writing his own brand of domestic comedy. The strong critical reactions to the satires, in which Levin criticized the war ethos of Israeli society in the wake of the Six Day War, influenced the turn to plays like Hefetz and Yaakobi and Leidenthal (both written in 1972) and Shitz (1975), as well as many others, based mainly on the so-called theatre of the absurd but incorporating their own distinctive, sometimes even quite grotesque, characteristics. Yaakobi and Leidenthal was the first play that Levin himself directed. After a phase of writing as well as directing his own domestic comedies in the early 1980s, which established him as a playwright as well as a director in the major repertory theatres, Levin turned to writing plays based on mythical themes, returning both to the ancient Hebrew texts as well as to other classical sources, but generally adapting them according to his own poetic and ideological agendas. Some of the more prominent plays from this phase include Execution (1979), The Torments of Job (1981), a radical rewriting of the well-known biblical narrative, and The Great Whore of Babylon (1982). The family in the grotesque bourgeois comedies was presented as a necessary evil that exists in order to ensure some form of social continuity, a “given” that evokes both laugher and bitter criticism. In the mythic dramas, on the other hand, the family was caught in a tragic impasse where such continuity was no longer possible. In Levin’s mythic dramas, in a manner that more closely resembles Greek tragedies than biblical sagas, the family as a social construct is gradually completely destroyed, most often by the greed and selfishness of

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the individual, but frequently also because of metaphysical forces seemingly beyond the control of human will. Rewriting canonized biblical texts in this manner, so as to present a world where God does not exist or has become completely helpless, constitutes a form of subversion that has only gradually become accepted on a larger scale. From the mid-1980s until his death in 1999, Levin experimented with a number of different mixtures or fusions of the three basic genres of writing and performance — satire, comedy, and myth — through which he had established himself. Sometimes the plays written and produced during these years had a kind of cruel, almost sardonic, fairytale quality that seemed to engage in the pastiche or even parody of the previous more unambiguous and more direct mythical writing. Elsewhere, the black humor of the earlier domestic comedies, with their frequently cynical criticism of bourgeois life, stood out as the dominant feature of the later plays and performances. Plays like Mouth Open and Beheading, produced in 1995 and 1996, respectively, are cruel “fairy tales” set in royal courts where the servants become victims of the whims of the merciless autocratic rulers; while plays like The Child Dreams, produced in 1993, The People That Walked in Darkness, produced in 1998, and Requiem, Levin’s last production, which he directed in 1999, can be seen as a trilogy of poetic-existential performances about death and its inescapability. But these plays also have a fairy-tale quality, set in a never-never land with dreamlike qualities, which at the same time is all too familiar as a kind of nightmare landscape where the vulnerability of the individual is mercilessly exposed. Levin also occasionally returned to more direct political writing during the latter part of his career, as in his satirical cabaret The Patriot dating from 1982, produced during the war in Lebanon, and the 1997 play Murder, about the fatal inevitability of violence and bloodshed engendered by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In plays from this period like The Labor of Life (1989) and The Whore from Ohio (1997), Levin also returned to the genre of domestic comedies. But whereas the early domestic comedies focused on the younger generation and their inevitable future similarity to their parents, during this later period Levin looked more closely at lost hopes from the perspective of the older generation. The last decade of Levin’s work can best be characterized through its hybrid character of mixing styles and genres freely and by further developing his masterful command of pastiche and satire, which he had already

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practiced, but to a lesser degree, from the very beginning of his artistic career.33 The singular and even unique process of the canonization of Levin’s plays — which began with a massive attack by the “old” critical regime accompanied by a media/public scandal following the performance of his first political/satirical cabaret (You and Me and the Next War) and which ended with Requiem, his last performance, and the posthumous publication of the last volume of his plays, enhancing his position as a “cultural hero” — reflects the complex transformations Israeli society has undergone from the end of the 1960s to the end of the last millennium. There are still a fairly large number of plays by Levin that have not yet been performed and await staging. At the same time, the theatres will certainly also look back at his earlier plays in order to fill their repertoires for the coming years. However, which of Levin’s plays will ultimately be canonized by being performed again remains a question that will take time to resolve. Another major Israeli playwright, whose career presents a unique case within the context of the emerging canon of Israeli drama, is Yehoshua Sobol. Unlike Levin, whose plays have (at least before his death) only rarely been produced outside of Israel, Sobol’s play Ghetto, depicting the theatre in the Vilna ghetto during the Nazi occupation, seems to be at once a typical and yet exceptional example of a canonical play. So far it has been produced three times in Israel (first by the Haifa Municipal Theatre in 1984, directed by Gedalia Besser, then in a student production at the Tel-Aviv University Theatre in 1996, and lastly in a production in Haifa, directed by the playwright himself in 1998). The rehearsals for the 1984 Haifa production were filmed for a documentary produced in 1989 by Chaim Tchelet for Israel’s educational television channel, and it is repeatedly broadcast on the annual day of remembrance for the Holocaust, an obvious sign of canonization. The writing of the play actually began as a common project of Sobol and Tchelet for an educational television program. What makes this play exceptional from the perspective of canonization is the fact that since 1984 it has been produced at approximately sixty theatres all over the world, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, but mainly in the German-speaking countries. This wave of international fame started with Peter Zadek’s production of Ghetto at the Volkstheater in Berlin in 1984, a few months after the Haifa world

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premiere. There is no other Israeli play that has been so widely produced. The play apparently attracted foreign audiences since it presented a complex and even ambiguous view of the notion of Jewish survival during the Shoah. While previously, at least in the more official Israeli context, the Holocaust was perceived as a heroic struggle against the forces of evil, Sobol presented a more complex interaction between the victimizers and the victims. Sobol’s thesis in Ghetto, as well as in his two additional plays of the so-called Ghetto-triptych, Adam (first performed at the Habima Theatre in 1989) and Underground (first performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, 1990) — which have not received the same critical acclaim as Ghetto and have not been played as universally — was that, in order to survive, the Jews in the ghettos developed a complex form of cooperation with the Nazis. Sobol implies that this past cooperation has in different ways also influenced the collective unconscious of the present-day Israeli society, in particular the relationship to the Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation and who have now become victims of the Israelis. In his trilogy Sobol argues that the Jews have somehow become “infected” by the previous cooperation with the Nazis, even if the goal of this cooperation was survival. This thesis, which from an Israeli perspective reflects a kind of self-probing and even critical revision of traditionally accepted values, has sometimes (but not exclusively) been seen from an international perspective as justifying a more general critique of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians and their land.34 The subject of the Shoah has always resonated powerfully within Israeli society and its public discourses, comprising a central aspect of the creation of a collective Israeli identity. The theatre is no exception. This subject, a priori, provided that a work is sufficiently good, contributes to the canonical status of a play or of any other cultural creation, even if the work presents a critique of more official perceptions of this event and its significance. Due to its magnitude, the subject of the Shoah always ties in with the problems that the Israeli society has confronted and is still confronting. Although far from all the plays written by Levin and Sobol have become canonized, both playwrights have acquired a canonized position within the Israeli theatre, and even within an international context. Canonization in a national and an international context does not necessarily correspond, even if, to a certain extent, they are depend-

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ent on each other. The specifics of canonization (which text? how many texts?) remain unresolved in the case of Levin and Sobol, but their uncompromising confrontation as playwrights with highly charged ideological issues in Israeli society has conferred canonical status on both.

A Final Note: A View of the Theatrical Field This examination of the gradually emerging theatre canon in Israel has illustrated primarily the impact of ideological/cultural and political changes on the canonicity of specific playwrights or plays, as well as on their chances of being performed again. Evidently there are additional mediatory-promoting forces, such as directors and artistic directors of theatre companies, providing a stage for productions or revivals, as well as other contributive factors, such as the publication of plays, their inclusion in the curriculum of schools or of universities, enhancing the canonicity of plays and playwrights. Theatre critics, acting as mediating forces, also constitute a crucial factor in the processes of canonization. Theatre critics frequently set the tone for the reception of plays (new as well as revivals), highlight their relevance in light of timely occurrences, and mark their significance in view of the emerging theatrical tradition. In this respect, theatre critics prepare the ground for the theatre historians, whose accounts, in turn, can form a more stable reference point for the critical views of plays-to-come. In fact, when considering an emerging canon, theatre criticism functions as a leading mediating factor in enhancing and reflecting processes of canonization.35 The contributions of theatre criticism toward the creation and establishment of a national theatre canon, as seen within the broader contexts of the developing theatrical field in Israel, thus deserve particular mention. A brief overview of this field reveals two major groups that comprised the theatrical critical community in Israel of the 1940s and the 1950s: one driven primarily by its commitment to the Zionist ideology and the other mainly governed by artistic criteria. Whereas during the 1940s the former group constituted the majority, during the 1950s the latter group began to dominate.36 The 1960s, however, mark a significant point of transformation in which critical policy undergoes a more substantial change. Moreover, during the 1960s the borders of the community of theatre critics are also defined more clearly. Whereas during

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the 1940s theatre reviews were written by public figures such as politicians, journalists, editors, and literary and art critics, toward the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s, theatre reviews became the domain of a more clearly defined group of professionals. The gradual consolidation of the theatrical critical community was consequently marked by a growing distinction between central and marginal reviewers. This change was reflected in the transformation of critical criteria which served, in turn, as the basis for the processes of canonization presented above. Also, during the 1960s symposia devoted to theatre issues became more frequent. In this context, it should be noted that, whereas a number of accounts focusing on Israeli drama appeared in the 1970s,37 it is only recently, at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, that studies endorsing a broader perspective on issues concerning the Israeli theatre have been published.38 It is of further significance that the curriculum of theatre studies in high schools that was composed in the 1980s is currently being revised. The ideological/cultural changes that took place in Israel during the 1960s, and the transformation of the theatrical field in particular, set the ground for the theatrical career of Hanoch Levin and his critique of the old ethos. Levin’s case further confirms the pivotal transition that occurred in the Israeli theatre from the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s. It may even be suggested that the preliminary consolidation of the borders of the canon made it possible to “contain” the rebel figure of Levin within its own framework. At the beginning of his career, Levin was a liminal figure, but he has gradually become integrated and even welcomed within the canon. In this respect, the case of Sobol is somewhat different. Although winning international acclaim in the 1980s and centrality within the Israeli theatrical field, Sobol’s more recent plays have received much less attention. The latter factor has probably also somewhat diminished his current status as a canonical playwright. However, the transformation of the theatrical field illustrated by the present account relates in particular to the changing criteria affecting the boundaries of the canon. It has not addressed issues such as peripheral theatre companies, popular entertainment, nondramatic performance, the Arab voice, gender issues, and fringe festivals, all of which require separate consideration. Though now more visible, these phenomena are still marginalized because of the short history of the Israeli theatre and its predominantly national concerns.

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In a theatre symposium held in 1988, Michael Handelsaltz, a major theatre critic, claimed that Israeli theatre has always attempted to prove its importance and sense of belonging by responding directly to the needs and causes of the country, whether social or political. Distinctly characterized by this unique pursuit of relevance, Israeli theatre, he stressed, is constantly expected to provide a mirror that reflects reality.39 Indeed, as this account has demonstrated, the dominance of the national ethos, which is constantly renegotiated, underlies the emergent canon. On the basis of Handelsaltz’s claim, it seems that Shamir’s He Walked through the Fields, the first truly Israeli play, has in a sense designated the path, or the major inclination, of the Israeli theatre, whereas the prominent position ascribed to Levin’s plays within the canon of Israeli theatre reflects the transformed state of affairs in the country itself. However, at the specific time of crisis which marks the time of the writing of this study (in 2003), the theatres themselves are unwilling (mainly for economic reasons) to embark on a dramatic repertoire that corresponds to the controversial issues stirring the Israeli society. Therefore, the assignment to explore and confront the dramatic canon becomes one of the more urgent tasks of the theatrical critical community. notes 1. See, for example, a recent study by Hannan Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 2002). This study of modern Hebrew literature challenges the Zionist hegemonic narrative, attempting to create an alternative to the Zionist canon. See also Michael Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 2. See, for example, the collection of essays edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, Theatre in Israel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). This collection presents one of the most extensive academic assessments of the “tradition” up to the late 1990s. 3. See Shimon Levy and Korina Shoef, The Israeli Theatre Canon: One Hundred and One Shows (in Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002), p. 9. This newly published book, addressing similar issues to the ones discussed in this article, is much more general concerning the criteria for canonization. 4. Ibid., p. 16. 5. Since our study addresses the issue of processes of canonization in Israeli theatre (i.e., drama and playwrights), examining in particular the phenome-

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non of revivals of certain plays, we have sought to refer specifically to and to integrate, with respect to their relevance, earlier and later approaches to Israeli drama and theatre, respectively. 6. Moshe Shamir, an Israeli born author (1921), is perceived as one of the major writers associated with the “Palmach generation.” Shamir has been awarded various literary prizes. He first published short stories, and He Walked through the Fields was his first novel. It is noteworthy that while writing the play version he left his kibbutz, moved to Tel-Aviv, and became the editor of the journal Hamachaneh, a publication which eventually became the formal journal of the IDF (Israel Defense Force). 7. Milo specified the intentions of the new company in the first program of the opening performance, October 1944. See Ben Ami Feingold, “The Cameri Theatre — the Beginning,” in Gad Kaynar, Freddie Rokem, and Eli Rozik, eds., The Cameri: A Theatre of Time and Place (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv University: Assaph Publications, 1999), pp. 9–24; and Korina Shoef “The Cameri Theatre and ‘Art for Art’s Sake,’” in Kaynar, Rokem, and Rozik, The Cameri, pp. 49–56. 8. Although written in Yiddish, The Dybbuk, by Shmuel Anski, has become one of the cornerstones of the Israeli theatre, but its status of canonization is very different from the cases we are dealing with here. It needs to be taken into consideration in a more comprehensive study of the processes of canonization. Here we have limited ourselves to cases of Hebrew drama. 9. See Chagit Halprin, “Literature, Biography and Politics: The Banning of He Walked through the Fields and Its Reflection in On His Horse on Saturday, by Moshe Shamir” (in Hebrew), Sadan: Studies in Hebrew Literature (Tel-Aviv University) 5 (2002): 378–400. 10. On the highlighting of the heroic aspects of the play and the “selective” reading of the novel, see Michael Gluzman, “The Aesthetics of the Mutilated Body: On the Culture of Death in He Walked through the Fields” (in Hebrew), Sadan: Studies in Hebrew Literature 5 (2002): 347–77. 11. For a comparison between the novel and the play, see Avner Ben Amos, “He Walked through the Fields in 1948,” in Kaynar, Rokem, and Rozik, The Cameri, pp. 25–47. 12. See Glenda Abramson, Modern Hebrew Drama (London: Weindenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), p. 53. 13. See, for example, Chaim Shoham, Challenge and Reality in Israeli Drama (in Hebrew) (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1975), pp. 25–70; Gideon Ofrat, The Israeli Drama (in Hebrew) (Hertzlia: Shericover, 1975), p. 19; Gad Kaynar, “The Play He Walked through the Fields and Its Position in Israeli Theatre” (in Hebrew), Jewish Studies (Jerusalem) 39 (1999): 67–76; Korina Shoef, “The Cameri Theatre and the ‘Art for Art’s Sake,’” in Kaynar, Rokem, and Rozik, The Cameri, pp. 49–56; Shimon Levy, “The Extreme Moderation: Discussing the Cameri

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Repertoire,” in Kaynar, Rokem, and Rozik, The Cameri, pp. 71–72; and Amos “He Walked Through the Fields in 1948.” 14. Quoted from the poem “The Third Mother,” in Nathan Alterman, Shirim Mishekvar (1938; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), p. 123. The translation of the quotation is ours. 15. See, for example, Ezra Zusman’s review in Davar, June 18, 1948, and the review (the name of reviewer is not specified) appearing in Haboker, June 11, 1948 (both in Hebrew). 16. See Chaim Gamzu, in HaAretz, June 11, 1948 (in Hebrew). 17. For a detailed discussion of the dramatic attributes of the play and the different perceptions of this play within the context of Israeli theatre, see Gad Kaynar, “The Play He Walked through the Fields.” 18. See Chaim Gamzu, in HaAretz, September 9, 1966; Ezra Zusman, in Davar, September 9, 1966; and Nachman Ben-Ami, in MaAriv, September 5, 1966 (all in Hebrew). 19. See Zeev Rav-Nof, in Omer, September 23, 1966 (in Hebrew). 20. See Carmit Meron, in Kol Haam, September 23, 1966 (in Hebrew). 21. See Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film (in Hebrew) (TelAviv: Open University of Israel, 1993), p. 63. 22. See Shmuel Duvdevani, review of Mr. Baum, HaEir, December 19, 1997 (in Hebrew). 23. On the two versions of Tomarkin’s work, see Avigdor V. G. Posek, “‘He Walked through the Fields’ by Tomarkin: On Hebrew Literature and Israeli Sculpture” (in Hebrew), Jewish Studies (Jerusalem) 39 (1999): 91–110. 24. See Sarit Fuchs, “He Took Ecstasy and Walked through the Fields,” Maariv, December 12, 1997 (in Hebrew). 25. See Tsipi Shochat, “The Fields Are the Same Fields,” Haaretz, November 13, 1997 (in Hebrew). 26. See Nachman Ingbar, “He Did Not Walk through the Fields,” Yediot Achronot, May 11, 1997 (in Hebrew). 27. Note that, according to the study published by Levy and Shoef (Israeli Theatre Canon, p. 16), a dozen plays out of about twenty-two canonized Israeli plays draw on biblical themes. 28. See Freddie Rokem, “The Bible and the Avant-Garde: The Search for a Classical Tradition in the Israeli Theatre,” European Review 9, no. 3 (2001): 305–17. 29. All the programs are in the Israel Theatre Archives, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv. We will base the comparison on the Hebrew introduction included in the program of the Azrati production and on the English synopses provided in the programs of the other three productions. 30. HaAretz, December 25, 1953.

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31. Mendel Kohansky, Jerusalem Post, July 8, 1975. 32. Elyakim Yaron, Maariv, March 11, 1997 (in Hebrew). 33. For English translations of his plays, see Hanoch Levin, The Labor of Life: Selected Plays, trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 34. For a detailed analysis of Sobol’s plays, see Freddie Rokem, “Yehoshua Sobol — Between History and the Arts: A Study of Ghetto and Shooting Magda (The Palestinian Woman),” in Ben-Zvi, Theater in Israel, pp. 201–24. 35. On the major role played by theatre criticism in processes of canonization, see Yael Zarhy-Levo, The Theatrical Critic as Cultural Agent: Constructing Pinter, Orton and Stoppard as Absurdist Playwrights (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 1–8, 95–106. 36. On the issue of national themes as manifested in the Israeli theatre during the 1940s and 1950s, see Ofrat, Israeli Drama; Gershon Shaked, “The Illuminating Mirror,” in Masa, May 11, 1973; and Shoham, Challenge and Reality in Israeli Drama (all in Hebrew). 37. See studies such as Shoham, Challenge and Reality in Israeli Drama; Ofrat, Israeli Drama; Shaked, “The Illuminating Mirror.” 38. See, for example, Dan Urian, The Arab in Israeli Drama (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997); Urian, The Judaic Nature of Israeli Theatre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000); Kaynar, Rokem, and Rozik, The Cameri; and Levy and Shoef, Israeli Theatre Canon. 39. See Michael Handelsaltz, “What Is ‘Israel’ in the Israeli Theatre?” (in Hebrew), Bama (Gur Archive and Theatre Museum, Jerusalem) 112 (1988): 6.

11 When Did Brahma Create Theatre? and Other Questions of Indian Theatre Historiography rakesh h. solomon Get yourselves cleansed, be attentive and hear about the origin of the fifth Veda1 devised by Brahma. After the end of Kritayuga [the Golden Age] commenced the Tretayuga [the Silver Age] in which people under the influence of lust and greed, jealousy and anger started behaving uncouthly, diluting their happiness with sorrow. On observing this, the gods, under the leadership of Indra, approached Brahma and requested him to create an entertainment, audible as well as visible—a fifth Veda, accessible to all! Brahma decided to create a Veda which would reflect all future actions of the people and be the meeting place of all the sciences and arts and will also be the giver of wealth, fame, good counsel and knowledge of one’s duty. Recalling four Vedas, Brahma went into meditation . . . [and] created the fifth Veda, the Natya Veda. Bharata and his hundred sons learnt it, and with the help of beautiful damsels they made preparations to put it into practice.2

The writer of Indian theatre history encounters some bewildering paradoxes. The ancient world’s most comprehensive and minutely detailed compendium of theatrical information, Bharata’s Natyasastraor the Natya Veda, offers the historian copious data about every conceivable theoretical and practical aspect of theatre: acting and dance, music and prosody, shapes and sizes of playhouses, organization and management of theatre companies, costuming and makeup, properties and stage decorations, theories of emotions and sentiments, types and rules for dramatic composition, and even requirements for critics and audiences. Yet this library of information offers no dates or chronology, no trajectory of the development of the art and craft of theatre, and no verifiable names of playwrights, company leaders, producers, or actors. TheNatyasastra’ssilence on such vital matters is compounded by its asser201

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tion that the ancient Indian theatre appeared full blown, created in one stroke by Brahma, the Creator of the Universe, and was entrusted to the legendary author of the treatise, Bharata, and his one hundred sons.3 In short, the Natyasastra furnishes little of the kinds of concrete details imperative for historians to practice their craft of providing verifiable evidence and constructing credible contexts. In this essay I will examine how writers of Indian theatre history have grappled with some key historiographic challenges. I will first analyze histories written during the colonial period to see how they deal with or ignore some of these problems or offer what in my view are only partial solutions. In the second half of the essay, I will examine histories written in the postcolonial period and discuss how, and with what degree of success, they face the complexities of Indian theatre history. I will conclude by suggesting some avenues for further investigation so that we may arrive at a fuller understanding of the history of Indian theatre. In addition to the early Indian texts’ seeming disdain for chronological time, another difficulty faced by the writer of Indian theatre history is the absence of a stable, well-defined, or chronologically continuous political entity called India.4 Instead of a single nation, India over most of its four-thousand-year history consisted of scores of kingdoms with shifting boundaries, different races, several major languages and hundreds of dialects, and an extraordinary multiplicity of cultural practices. During this four-millennia-long unbroken history, moreover, India existed as a unified state only during six or seven brief periods. The norm was scores of small independent kingdoms with changing loyalties and confederacies. In the fourth century BCE, Seleucus Nikator, Alexander’s Greek heir to western Asia, sent an ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, the first ruler in recorded history to unify India as an empire. The Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, noted in his diary the erstwhile presence of as many as 118 kingdoms.5 As Vincent Smith and Percival Spear conclude in their Oxford History of India, “In all ages the crowd of principalities and powers has been almost past counting,” except on those rare occasions when a paramount ruler provided a brief period of unity.6 “When no such power existed, the states, hundreds in number, might be likened to a swarm of free mutually repellent molecules in a state of incessant movement, now flying apart, and again coalescing” (5). Geographically and demographically too, the historian of India must deal not with a

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country but with a subcontinent defined by a 3,500-mile peninsular coastline and a 1,600-mile-long mountainous barrier and a diverse and huge population that today numbers over a billion people. In the face of such a reality, the writing of a national history of theatre in India may strike one as impossible. Yet in the last 175 years we have had at least fourteen national theatre histories of India.7 Most of these are significant contributions, and some are pioneering and indispensable scholarly works on India’s theatrical history. Published between 1827 and 1992, all are written in English, except one written in French and subsequently translated into English. Given this time frame, they reflect in many ways their genesis between the late Orientalist and the late modernist, nationalist periods of the scholarship on India. These scholars’ attempt to provide what they consider representative national histories and thus to treat India as one political entity, however, is not artificial, anomalous, or politically driven to advance either Orientalist or modernist-nationalist agendas. Their treatment stems neither from Orientalism’s essentializing view of India as an always singular, unchanging, and mysterious land, nor from modern nationalism’s need to construct a unified, independent, and great Indian nation. These histories’ national focus actually derives from their recognition of another paradoxical fact about India. Throughout history, India’s political, regional, racial, linguistic, and social divisions have been overpowered by a fundamental cultural and civilizational oneness. From as early as the Aryan period, circa 1500 to 1000 BCE, an idealized concept of a unified India, called Bharatavarsa, exercised a critical hold on the Indian mind. Foundational civilizational texts from this period clearly enunciate the idea of an Indian nation defined by the entire subcontinent’s lands and rivers, religion and culture, races and tribes. It would appear from our postcolonial vantage point, following Homi Bhaba and Benedict Anderson, that the early Aryans were, in fact, “narrating” and “imagining” their nation into existence.8 Mirroring life and thought circa 1000 BCE, the Mahabharata, the massive defining poem of Indian culture, clearly portrays Bharatavarsa as one nation and one people bound by a common geography, religion, and culture — well before such a pan-Indian nation state ever existed.9 India’s other defining poem, the Ramayana, whose essential core may predate the Mahabharata’s even though it arrived at its current form much later, etches a similar Bharatavarsa — an idealized nation under the rule

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of Rama, the perfect king, martial hero, and beloved avatar of Vishnu. Similarly, the Natyasastra, reflecting views between circa 200 BCE and circa 200 CE, speaks of a single nation called Bharatavarsa.10 It advises playwrights that the action of “all plays which have celestial heroes” should be set in Bharatavarsa, “because the entire land here is charming, sweetsmelling and of golden color.”11 The ideal nation concept persisted in the medieval period, when Hindu religious movements, like Bhakti, swept through an India substantially ruled by Muslim kings, and saint-poets often celebrated Bharatavarsa. Antagonism against the Muslim rulers, and later against British rulers, only made the idea of a Bharatavarsa more potent and more widespread. The writing of national histories and surveys treating India as a single entity thus remains an intellectually valid proposition and a long honored tradition. The first modern history of Indian drama was Horace Hayman Wilson’s three-volume Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, published in 1827 in Calcutta.12 It consisted of Wilson’s comprehensive account “Treatise on the Dramatic System of the Hindus,” his translation of six major Sanskrit plays, and a final section that offered brief comments on twenty-three Sanskrit plays. A distinguished scholar, Wilson was the author of the first Sanskrit-English dictionary (1817) and of numerous studies and translations of ancient Sanskrit texts, and he was the secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a director of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the first occupant of the Boden Chair in Sanskrit at Oxford University.13 Wilson’s analytic survey and graceful, though relatively free, translations of the plays into modern English proved immensely influential: a French translation was published in Paris in 1828, a German translation appeared in Weimar also in 1828, and in London a reprint was issued in 1835 and was followed by a second edition in 1871.14 The quick succession of translations of Wilson’s theatre history and anthology into different European languages reflects the expanding interest in Indian philosophy and culture in Europe at that time. That wave of interest was originally set in motion by the translation of another Sanskrit play, Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntala, by Sir William Jones and published in Calcutta in 1789 as Sacontalá, or, The Fatal Ring, an Indian Drama, and which, in turn, had been followed by new editions in London in 1790 and 1792 and in Edinburgh in 1796 and by translations into German by Georg Forster in 1791, into Danish by Hans West in 1792, into French

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by A. Bruguiere in 1803, and into Italian by Luigi Doria in 1815.15 Mirroring the literary bias of these late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century European translators and scholars, Wilson’s avowed goal in his study was to champion Sanskrit plays as great literature. Thus the Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, notwithstanding its own title, ignored practical staging matters pertaining to his Sanskrit plays and completely dismissed the theatre of the nonSanskrit languages of ancient India as well as that of the subsequent eight centuries. After a half century of burgeoning European and Indian scholarship on Sanskrit literature and culture, we have the next major theatre history: Sylvain Lévi’s two-volume Le Théâtre Indien (The Indian Theatre), published in Paris in 1890. Lévi was only twenty-seven when he completed this study, first submitted as a doctoral thesis in Paris, but his chapters furnish some astute commentary. “The Indian drama is so literary that it often appears to be unfit for the stage,” he writes, “yet, it is actual theatre. Kalidasa and his successors did not write for readers but for an audience; they meant [their plays] to be staged”(1:7). True to this claim, Lévi devotes a full chapter to “Dramatic Practice,” where he examines the stage, theatre buildings, actors, theatre companies, and what he somewhat anachronistically labels “The Direction” and “Stage Management.” The other chapters in his 444-page work cover such topics as “Treatises on Dramaturgy,” “The Dramatic Art,” “History of the Indian Dramatic Literature,” “Dramatic Aesthetics,” “The Origins of the Drama,” “The Greek Influence,” and “Modern and Contemporary Theatre.”16 Armed with the late nineteenth-century belief in evolutionary development of art and literature and the scientific approach as the historian’s principal method, he condemns some early Sanskrit documents as “so contaminated by imagination, prejudice and preconceived ideas that they have little chance to reflect the exact truth” (1:6). He articulates his own methodology: “We prefer . . . the method . . . of putting the question objectively, starting from a solid and precise position and leading the discussion with scientific detachment” (1:54). But he also recognizes the inadequacies of this system, which he, ironically, finds exemplified in the labors of some early Sanskrit theoreticians whom he compares to modern chemists who “treat the works of the spirit like inorganic bodies. They deem it sufficient to separate the elements and list them one by one, to classify them in groups

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and types, and to reproduce ad infinitum the established combinations” (1:20). In other respects, however, Lévi’s Le Théâtre Indien presents some serious problems. Ostensibly committed to writing a comprehensive theatrical history, Lévi declares, “The name of Indian theatre must embrace both the most humble dramatic productions and the masterpieces of the great poets. All scenic entertainments, including lifetableaus and puppet-shows belong to the Indian theatre” (1:3). Thus he intellectually acknowledges that Indian theatre consists of not just Sanskrit theatre but also of all the other nonelite genres that existed before, during, and after the Sanskrit period. Yet, given the prevailing cultural and scholarly attitudes, he essentially dismisses the nonSanskrit theatre genres, including all those that flourished after the ancient period, in other words, the wide variety of vernacular genres that Indian theatre historians today generally label traditional theatre, popular theatre, or folk theatre. In effect, like his predecessor Wilson, Lévi equates a history of Sanskrit theatre with a history of Indian theatre. In fact, he spells out his position quite clearly, “We have, without hesitation . . . reserved the term ‘Indian theatre’ for the Sanskrit drama. . . . We think that the Sanskrit theatre is the Indian theatre par excellence” (1:3). As if not to leave any doubt, Lévi dubs the popular nonSanskrit theatre “unsophisticated,” “indifferent to literary qualities,” offering “very little originality,” and a “mere abstraction,” and he concludes, “The popular theatre has no history” (1:4–5). Given such views, one can understand why Lévi felt justified to entitle his book, “The Indian Theatre.” A more accurate title, however, would have been “The Sanskrit Theatre,” just as H. H. Wilson’s Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus should have been called “Select Specimens of the Sanskrit Theatre of the Hindus.” Wilson’s and Levi’s imprecise titles are symptomatic of several major difficulties that have from the beginning afflicted the writing of Indian national theatre histories. To continue this discussion, however, I must first briefly outline the main phases of India’s cultural and political history. According to broad scholarly consensus, a well-developed urban culture, the Indus Valley Civilization, flourished between circa 2500 and 1600 BCE.17 This civilization was supplanted by Sanskrit-speaking Aryans beginning circa 1500 BCE. The Aryans’ religious books, the four Vedas, became the foundation of Hinduism.18 By the fourth century BCE,

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these Vedic Hindus had gradually conquered and assimilated the preAryan peoples of most of India, culminating in the first Indian empire of Chandragupta Maurya. Until the tenth century CE, Hindu culture — with Sanskrit as the language of religion, court, and literature — dominated but did not replace the numerous regional languages and artistic genres, which charted their own independent courses but without closing themselves off from Sanskrit influences. By circa 1000 CE, succeeding waves of Muslim invaders achieved political supremacy and eventually displaced Sanskrit literature and culture with Persian language and culture. Sanskrit slowly died out as a spoken language while remaining the medium of Hindu religion and scriptures, but the various vernacular languages and artistic genres thrived. This new period, traditionally labeled the medieval era of Indian history, continued up to the rise of British power between the mid eighteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries, which, in turn, inaugurated the modern phase of Indian history. English gradually supplanted Persian as the language of government and other institutions of power and as the language of India’s political, economic, and cultural elites, facilitating India’s encounter with modern European ideas and institutions. In the light of this history, it is clear that in their respective studies Wilson and Lévi portray a single genre — the Sanskrit theatre that ended in circa 1000 CE — as the entire theatre of a nation, and thus they effectively erase the extraordinary variety of theatrical genres that flourished in different Indian languages during the subsequent eight to nine hundred years. These volumes thus represent an exceedingly skewed historiographic perspective and amount to radically incomplete histories masquerading as national theatre histories. By elevating the theatre created in one language over those created in all other languages of a nation, such historiography, knowingly or otherwise, takes a highly political position in the case of a multilingual and multiethnic country such as India. From the earliest time, different regions in India had their own languages, which gradually developed sophisticated linguistic, literary, and performance traditions. Even when Sanskrit dominated as the language of courtly, religious, scholarly, and artistic domains, regional languages held their own, enriching and being enriched by Sanskrit. On one level, even Sanskrit theatre was multilingual. Each play consisted of dialogue composed in Sanskrit for men of higher status and for highly educated women, and dialogue composed

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in three or four different regional languages or prakrits (literally, “original” or “natural” languages) for most women and all men of lower status. Thus Kalidasa’s famous Abhijnanasakuntala (Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection) consists of dialogue in Sanskrit, Sauraseni, Maharastri, and Magadhi, and Sudraka’s Mrcchakatika (The Little Clay Cart) consists of dialogue in Sanskrit, Sauraseni, Avantika, Pracya, Magadhi, Sakari, Candali, and Dhakki — a point lost in translations into European languages.19 By rendering Indian theatre monolingual, Wilson and Lévi fail to convey the multilingual complexity of Indian theatre, and, ironically, even the full multilingual essence of Sanskrit theatre and culture that they obviously wished to champion. A part of the blame for such privileging of Sanskrit theatre lies in the historical context that gave birth to Indology in the mid eighteenth century. Europeans eager to investigate India’s ancient past inevitably relied on brahman priests and scholars who were by tradition the sole preservers, transmitters, and guardians of Sanskrit texts, whether religious or secular. The brahman’s pride in Sanskrit culture and belief in its superiority over all other Indian traditions colored the early Indologists’ interpretations. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was this bias in Indological scholarship gradually tempered, as the distinguished historian Romila Thapar points out in A History of India, by reference to additional sources such as India’s own Persian and Arabic texts, foreign travelers’ accounts in Greek, Latin, Chinese, and Arabic, and inscriptions, numismatics, and archeological excavations.20 Regardless of the origin of their bias, Wilson’s Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus and Lévi’s Le Théâtre Indien, by virtue of their being the first two modern studies in any language, whether European or Indian, exerted immense influence on subsequent scholars of Indian theatre and thus also perpetuated their narrow perspective. Twenty-two years after Lévi’s study, the next theatre history, also entitled The Indian Theatre, appeared in London in 1912.21 Again, it was not about Indian theatre but rather about the Sanskrit theatre. On its title page, however, its author, Ernest Philip Horrwitz, unlike Lévi, wisely appended a subtitle for accuracy: A Brief Survey of the Sanskrit Drama. A dozen years later Arthur Berriedale Keith published the next theatre history, which for the first time in the modern study of Indian theatre did not treat it as synonymous with Sanskrit theatre. A member of the Inner Temple and the Regis Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at the

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University of Edinburgh, Keith labeled his work with precision: The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory and Practice.22 Without discussing the matter in any detail, Keith gives the impression of evenhandededness in his approach to the traditional theatres. He explains that his investigation is focused on Sanskrit theatre without reference to vernacular theatre in order merely “to bring the subject matter within moderate compass” (5). Well through the century, Keith’s book, like his earlier History of Sanskrit Literature, remained one of the most widely read and cited texts.23 Although Keith authored numerous subsequent books on a number of subjects, it must be noted, he never devoted any effort to examining any of the traditional theatres. Remarkably, even in postcolonial India, as late as 1991, a purported history of Indian theatre demonstrates the staying power of the brahmanical-orientalist prejudice against vernacular theatre first seen in Wilson and Lévi a century earlier. Chandra Bhan Gupta’s The Indian Theatre, published in Delhi in 1954 and revised in 1991, becomes the fourth study to employ Lévi’s misleading title.24 Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Delhi, Gupta quotes Keith on several issues with approval, but he more closely mirrors Wilson and Lévi (whom he also quotes) in his focus on Sanskrit theatre to the exclusion of the traditional theatre as well as the vital modern Indian theatre, which by 1954 had amassed a hundred-year history. The designation “modern Indian theatre” refers to a new genre that developed between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. Shaped by the imperatives of empire, nationalism, and nativism, this was a metropolitan genre, created by a bilingual high-caste bourgeoisie, who strategically adapted elements from a gallery of models that included the Sanskrit theatre, traditional theatre, and European theatre. By and large they borrowed most heavily from European playwriting and staging practices; they also sporadically and very selectively adapted a few features from their region’s traditional theatre; and they copied, although sometimes only nominally, some elements from the Sanskrit theatre. Ironically, it was only after the Orientalists had first championed Sanskrit literature and translated it into European languages that these Westernized Indian elites had turned to Sanskrit drama and revalued it as “classical,” as a part of their nationalist aspirations.25 The modern Indian theatre began as refined cultural consumption for the upper crust but developed into broad-based

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entertainment for large audiences in cities across the country and thus manifested itself in several different languages. Irrespective of its language, however, this theatre sought to project both modernity and Indianness in its style and subject matter and thus constituted a fundamental component of the Indian intelligentsia’s grand nationalist enterprise to invent, on the one hand, an identity that was modern but with roots in an ancient past and, on the other hand, a pan-Indian nation-state that was modern but which incorporated the numerous old royal kingdoms. In short, like the authors of the ancient Hindu epics noted earlier, they too were trying to “imagine,” “narrate,” and “perform” a nation into existence. As a result of this origin, the modern Indian theatre enjoyed great prestige among the cultural elites, which, in turn, led to a new genre chauvinism and historiographic elitism, as represented by the next two theatre histories — both produced at the height of the nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Like their European predecessors, these Indian theatre scholars also neglected the traditional theatre and focused only on one genre as the representative national theatre. They now treated the new genre of the modern Indian theatre as synonymous with Indian theatre, although they did this with a token acknowledgement of the Sanskrit theatre and occasionally with a nod toward the traditional theatre. In 1934 Ramanlal Kanaiyalal Yajnik, a professor of English at a small college in Bhavanagar state in western India, published in London a study of the modern Indian theatre but named it The Indian Theatre.26 The problem posed by his title was not ameliorated by his subtitle, Its Origins and Its Later Developments under European Influence, With Special Reference to Western India, as was the case with some previous histories discussed earlier. Yajnik’s history treats the largely European-inspired modern Indian theatre as the only genre among all others worthy to stand for Indian theatre. Begun as a PhD thesis at the University of London and dedicated to Allardyce Nicoll, the book reveals an author clearly in thrall of European and especially British theatre and largely dismissive of traditional Indian genres, except for those elements in them that resemble British dramatic and theatrical conventions. Although the work deals primarily with the modern Indian theatre, a preliminary section examines Sanskrit theatre and a few traditional theatre genres, but chiefly in order to locate parallels with Western theatre practices. Thus, even this section becomes another part of an overall enterprise of projecting Indian theatre as possessing many affinities with

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European theatre and therefore deserving of respect and attention. In spite of these pronounced biases, Yajnik’s painstaking research in government and private archives, his unearthing of important documents of performance, and his consistent emphasis on staging over literary values make his book an extremely valuable historical account of the growth of the modern Indian theatre. The other theatre history written in the final years of the nationalist struggle was Hemendra Nath Das Gupta’s four-volume The Indian Stage, published in Calcutta between 1944 and 1946.27 Like Yajnik, Das Gupta too offers an introductory nod to the Sanskrit theatre and to a few traditional theatre genres, especially the Jatra of Bengal, but his primary goal, again despite his comprehensive title, is a history of the modern Indian theatre, and in fact, of almost exclusively its Bengali-language manifestation. He makes this intent explicit in his preface, which in effect contradicts his own title, for it declares his overall aim “of writing a complete History of the Bengali Stage”(1:i). No doubt the modern Indian theatre first emerged and achieved its earliest flowering in Calcutta in the province of Bengal, yet there can be no justification for this implicit claim that the modern Bengali theatre could stand for the entire modern Indian theatre. Similarly, although Das Gupta completed his book during the three years immediately preceding India’s independence, when nationalists fervently sought to project Indian culture as modern, that circumstance cannot excuse his portrayal of the traditional genres as inconsequential or worse. In discussing the still vibrant and popular theatre called Bhavai in the state of Gujarat, to cite one example of Das Gupta’s nearly wholesale denigration of traditional theatre, he insists, “Gujrat [sic] from 14th to 18th century had no stage . . . nor any dramatic literature worth the name. The Gujrati Bhabais [sic] . . . were the only drama liked by the people, rather by the people of the low classes” and their “vulgarity” was a “shock to cultured minds” (3:177). Perhaps even more seriously, the prejudice of historians like Yajnik and Das Gupta against the ungenteel genres prevented them from recognizing that even the modern Indian theatre, despite its urban-bourgeoisWestern veneer, shared several affinities with the folk and rural genres, especially in the area of acting styles, which in turn contributed to this theatre’s appeal for the urban masses. While the modern theatre’s playwrights had direct access to Western dramatic styles via printed plays, the

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vast majority of actors did not have access to Western acting styles and actor-training techniques, notwithstanding the occasional touring company from England. Perforce these actors relied on the acting they had encountered in India, which was the acting of traditional theatre troupes. Beyond elitist prejudice and historical inexactitude, such claims for the supremacy of the modern Indian theatre meant a devaluation and even erasure of the traditional theatre forms from public consciousness, especially in the influence-wielding metropolitan centers, at a time when they were already under enormous pressure from the effects of modernization and the consequent shrinking of their traditional patronage base. Through their publications, Yajnik and Das Gupta, especially as de facto members of the emerging nation’s cultural elites, exerted considerable influence on public officials and other leaders who made cultural policy and controlled government funding for the arts. In short, at least in an emergent India, the writing of national theatre histories had serious — sometimes negative — consequences beyond the academy and in the real world of theatre companies and theatre artists. India achieved independence in 1947, and the fifty-six years since have seen eight national theatre histories in English.28 Unlike the preindependence histories, seven of these do not posit any one period or genre as the single, preeminent or representative achievement. The eighth, Chandra Bhan Gupta’s The Indian Theatre (1954), stands out as atypical because, as already discussed, it treats the Sanskrit theatre as synonymous with Indian theatre and thus represents an older attitude characteristic of one strand of colonial Indian theatre historiography. All of the remaining postcolonial works show a remarkable convergence in the way they construct Indian theatre history. For the first time, theatre historians, albeit with varying emphases, define Indian theatre as made up of all three of its main branches — the Sanskrit theatre, the traditional theatre, and the modern theatre. This inclusive construction also means an all-encompassing coverage of the nation’s three historical periods — ancient, medieval, and modern — as well as its important languages, regions, social classes, and peoples. Such a comprehensive coverage makes these works credible national theatre histories of India. In good measure this approach reflects the shifting values and national goals of a new democratic India’s intellectual and cultural elites. Moreover, six of the volumes are by Indian specialists and one by a team of North American scholars, indicating at least a

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quantitative shift toward Indian and American scholarship and away from European, especially British, expertise. Of these seven histories, Manohar Laxman Varadpande’s History of Indian Theatre, (1987–) an ambitious six-volume work, is still in progress and will be excluded from the following discussion, although his proposed framework and two completed volumes clearly share the other historians’ comprehensive vision of Indian theatre history.29 Another book, Indian Drama (1956, rev. 1981), published by the Government of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, also reveals a similar vision, as evident in the range of its topics and authors. Nonetheless, having been put together by a government bureaucracy, its essays vary greatly in scope, depth, and quality and overlap to a degree that makes any fair assessment impractical. I have therefore also excluded this work from the analysis that follows.30 The five histories for further examination are Balwant Gargi’s Theatre in India (1962), Som Benegal’s A Panorama of Theatre in India (1968), Adya Rangacharya’s The Indian Theatre (1971), Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli’s Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance (1990), and Nemichandra Jain’s Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity and Change (1992).31 Four of the books above—all by Indian authors— devote the maximum space to the modern theatre — cumulatively in both its pre- and postindependence phases. On the one hand, this reflects a continuation of Yajnik’s and Das Gupta’s emphasis on the modernity of Indian theatre but — significantly — without their exclusion of the traditional and Sanskrit theatres. On the other hand, this mirrors India’s lionization of its postindependence theatre as equal to the best of any nation, an assessment that functions as a part of a larger effort at defining itself as a progressive and important nation-state. These postcolonial historians are thus participating in a national process and, as experts, are providing the necessary authority to bolster the country’s high valuation of the artistic achievement of the postcolonial era of the modern theatre, an era that most of these historians laud for having developed a significant corpus of excellent drama largely superior to most preindependence work. In three of the five histories — those by Gargi, Benegal, and Rangacharya — the Sanskrit theatre comes in second and the traditional theatre third, in terms of the amount of attention each merits. The renewed emphasis on the Sanskrit theatre shows that historians in

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the postcolonial phase of Indian theatre historiography, unlike Yajnik and Das Gupta in what could be called the radical-nationalist phase, clearly acknowledge the ancient theatre’s continuing significance. Yet this theatre’s secondary status in relation to the modern theatre also suggests that future historians are unlikely to give it the preeminent position accorded it in the Orientalist phase exemplified in the works of Wilson, Lévi, and Keith. Although these three postcolonial histories offer the traditional theatre the least space, that space — in all cases except Benegal’s, where publishing exigencies ruled otherwise — is substantial and considerably greater than that allowed in any of the previous histories. In the remaining two postcolonial histories, the traditional theatre for the first time receives the maximum attention (in Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli) or only slightly less than the maximum (in Jain). These studies are the most recent ones examined here and thus also presage a new emerging focus on the traditional theatre in the years to come. Overall, the new attention accorded traditional theatre in these five histories mirrors a postcolonial cultural assertiveness and self-assurance in India that allows artists and historians to embrace indigenous, often rural, and nonliterary performance genres long denigrated and silenced by Europeans and Westernized Indian elites. This unprecedented status is connected in complex ways, rather than in any simple causal fashion, with the highly successful blending of traditional theatre practices with contemporary ones by leading postcolonial Indian playwrights (like Girish Karnad, Satish Alekar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, and H. Kanhailal) and postcolonial Indian directors (like Kavalam Narayana Panikkar, Habib Tanvir, and Ratan Kumar Thiyam) as well as some internationally influential European directors (like Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine). The first history of the postcolonial period, Balwant Gargi’s Theatre in India, is also the first published in America and displays the author’s extensive firsthand knowledge of world theatre. Gargi contextualizes his discussion throughout to show parallels and divergences between various Indian theatres and those of the West and Japan and China. Partly as a result of this and partly as a result of lingering colonial-era habits of explaining away the unfamiliar, Gargi affixes too many and ultimately misleading Western labels to unique Indian genres: “classi-

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cal” for the Sanskrit theatre and Bharata Natyam, “opera” for Jatras, “pageant plays” for Ram Lila, and so on. Aside from such labeling, though, his Western theatre vocabulary and references prove both precise and illuminating, while simultaneously revealing his modernist perspectives and prejudices, such as his rejection of late nineteenthcentury Gujarati melodrama. A playwright and a short story writer, Gargi offers colorful and swiftly etched portraits of each theatre, with brief but valuable comments on context, history, and current state. Having attended performances of virtually all the contemporary genres he examines, Gargi comes across as an omnipresent and omniscient narrator but one who rarely stops to cite sources, marshal evidence, or articulate his historiographic vision. Implicit in his coverage, however, is an all-embracing vision of Indian theatre that includes not only the Sanskrit, traditional, and modern theatres but also dance, puppetry, children’s theatre, modern ballet, and amateur theatre. Among the postcolonial histories, as already noted, Som Benegal’s A Panorama of the Theatre in India is the only one without a meaningful traditional theatre section. This omission, however, was not a result of the author’s choice but, as is clear from the preface, that of his publisher’s need to avoid competition with one of its other books devoted exclusively to the traditional theatre. It is a pity to miss Benegal’s views on that theatre, because his comments on the Sanskrit and modern theatres offer many insights. Overall, more analytic than descriptive, he notes wryly that “A Herodotus, Thucydides or Plutarch is alien to Indian tradition,” in order to explain the dearth of historical documentation about Sanskrit theatre (3). He interprets Bharata’s claim that the Natyasastra is a sacred fifth Veda as a strategy to gain acceptance from upper-caste audiences for entertainers who chiefly belonged to the low Shudra caste (3). Benegal analyzes the Sanskrit society’s worldview and finds its focus on the individual versus the group as the primary reason for its decline, challenging the traditional view that blames the successive Islamic invasions. His investigation into the low quality of the nineteenth-century Parsi dramatic repertory faults “the fatuous farces, contrived thrillers, low tragedy, imitation comedy of manners, and extravaganzas” of the British provincial companies that traveled to India and thus became the only models available to the Parsi theatres. The aesthetic and personnel of this Parsi theatre did not decline, he

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writes with some irony, but metamorphosed into the Bombay film industry (now called Bollywood).32 Such insights are the strength of Benegal’s history, notwithstanding his circumscribed coverage. Adya Rangacharya’s The Indian Theatre, first published in 1971 and reissued in 1980, appears regularly in many bibliographies of Indian theatre. Rangacharya was a professor of Sanskrit for two decades, wrote several novels and scholarly works, and participated in Kannadalanguage theatre for nearly four decades as an actor, producer, and playwright. Thus it is astonishing that his history suffers from so many fundamental problems. By the author’s own admission, except for the chapters on Sanskrit and Kannada theatres, the book derives almost all its information from three secondary sources: Indian Drama, the problematic Ministry of Information and Broadcasting anthology discussed above; The Marathi Theatre, 1843–1960, a short work issued under the aegis of the Marathi Natya Parishad (Marathi Theatre Council) and published in 1961 by Popular Prakashan, Bombay; and Seth Govind Das Abhinandan Grantha, an occasional volume of essays in Hindi brought out in 1956 by an Abhinandan (or felicitation) Committee. In addition to this dependence on some less than impeccable secondary material, Rangacharya’s book is deeply flawed in other ways too. Some of his statements, such as the following, are simply baffling: “An ordinary man’s language would not have a vocabulary of more than 500 words” (29). There are numerous problems of logic; the citing of evidence is inconsistent at best; at times an argument or a description is abandoned halfway through; and the prose is hobbled by awkward and unclear phrasing. One must reluctantly conclude that such deficiencies probably are a result of his less than rigorous overall approach to writing, especially his routine refusal to revise his prose. Thus his disclaimer in the preface to The Indian Theatre, “I have never liked and have always avoided reading a second time anything that I wrote,” must be taken more as a literal rather than a rhetorical statement (vi). Scholars and students of Indian theatre had to wait twenty years to see the next history. Their wait was amply rewarded by a rigorously researched and historiographically self-aware work, Richmond, Swann and Zarrilli’s Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 1990. The book’s three principal and four contributing authors — each with years of specialization in one or two Indian genres — collectively bring a breadth and depth of expertise

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unmatched in any of the other postcolonial histories. The book benefits, moreover, from new approaches to theatre and performance studies, with nearly all its authors having undertaken practical performance training and fieldwork in India in their respective genres, in addition to their traditional academic preparation and research. Most of the book’s extensive photographic documentation also comes from the authors’ own fieldwork. For each genre, these scholars provide historical background, performance context, analysis of salient features, performance documentation/reconstruction, and assessment of current conditions. The important introductory chapter, moreover, offers an analysis of historiographic issues unique to Indian theatre, such as the ramifications of using genre and period labels like “classical,” “traditional,” “popular,” “ritual,” “devotional,” and “modern.” At nearly five hundred pages, longer than any of the other postindependence histories, Indian Theatre is comprehensive, authoritative, and richly detailed. All the four postcolonial histories discussed so far — those by Gargi, Benegal, Rangacharya, and Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli — not only share an all-embracing vision of Indian theatre, but they also share a common organizational framework and approach. Their similar method consists of an examination of the different constituents of Indian theatre separately one by one — in discrete chapters or discrete clusters of chapters. Thus, each author first discusses the Sanskrit theatre in one or more chapters; then the traditional theatre, usually in multiple chapters but with each chapter devoted exclusively to one genre; and then the modern theatre, again in one or more chapters. An otherwise reasonable framework becomes quite problematic, especially in the context of Indian theatre, when these authors almost uniformly treat their chapters as a series of independent and unrelated units. In other words, such an approach in effect portrays Indian theatre as a conglomeration of disparate theatre traditions and genres and leaves a cumulative impression of a theatre that is profoundly fragmented — not an artistic whole with sinewy interconnections and a unifying core, not the creation of a nation and its people. Yet from ancient times, as the discussion of Bharatavarsa above shows, a concept of civilizational and national unity has undergirded Indian thought, defined an Indian identity, and been manifest in all kinds of commonalities and interrelationships within Indian art forms, including the performing arts. Reflecting this essential cultural identity

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and worldview, Indian theatre genres are interrelated and possess numerous common features, which the theatre historian, especially one writing a national history, must unveil and analyze as part of the job of constructing a proper context. Given the complexity of Indian theatre, this is a difficult but not impossible task. To be fair, Richmond’s introduction offers a graphic framework of five partially overlapping circles to suggest common features within several, though not all, genres. Yet this perspective is only sporadically and minimally present in the chapters that follow, presumably because most chapters were prepared individually by the seven different authors. Fortunately, the last of the postcolonial histories, Nemichandra Jain’s Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity and Change, demonstrates the feasibility and the value of analyzing interconnections within India’s numerous theatres. Jain is the editor of the Indian theatre journal Natarang, a former professor at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, author of numerous Hindi-language theatre studies, a theatre critic, and a winner of the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi award given by India’s National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama. Jain covers a surprising range of topics and offers keen insights within the confines of a short book. He follows the traditional tripartite Sanskrittraditional-modern division found in the other histories but systematically seeks links between these theatres, broadly pursuing his theme spelled out in his subtitle and preface: to stress “achievements in different phases” as well as “strands of change and continuity” (10). Particularly interesting are his analyses of the differences and similarities in the amount and function of music and dance in the Sanskrit and traditional theatres, and also within different genres of the traditional theatre itself, especially when separated as northern and southern genres. His comparative approach informs much of the book, including his section on the modern theatre, where he explores the connections between the modern theatre manifestations in the states of Bengal, Maharashtra, and Tamilnadu. Also excellent is his assessment of new developments in playwriting and directing in the postcolonial era of the modern theatre, with which he has been intimately connected. This involvement and his strong nationalist feelings, however, sometimes skew his perspective, especially in his disparagement of the earlier era of the modern theatre. His comment, for example, that this “new theatre which began in our country . . . was, if not a total imposition,

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almost entirely an imitation of the western theatre,” certainly overstates the case (66). Overall, though, he offers thoughtful, knowledgeable, and analytic comments, and, most significantly, he consistently traces convergences and divergences between the various theatres and periods to a degree unmatched by any previous history. Locating Indian national theatre historiography within the context of the country’s political, social, and cultural aspirations and its own evolving self-image, as done above, demonstrates how extratheatrical factors affect the theatre historian’s selection, arrangement, and treatment of subject matter and by extension reveals how theatre histories are not simply the result of a dispassionate search for data and evidence and the application of some universally acceptable set of objective criteria. A comparison of the most recent histories with the earliest ones, by Horace Hayman Wilson, Sylvain Lévi, and Arthur Berriedale Keith, shows a clear movement from a narrow elitist focus on a single ancient theatre to a broad, democratic, and comprehensive perspective embracing all genres, from high to low, from ancient to contemporary. The latest of these histories, Nemichandra Jain’s Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity, and Change, illustrates the rewards of analyzing interconnections and mutual influences within India’s multiple genres. But this is only a beginning. Historians need to show, much more than they have done so far, how these genres are a part of a larger, plural whole. They should reveal the underlying unity and connectedness of Indian theatre across chronological, regional, and linguistic boundaries, while at the same time documenting its remarkable plurality and diversity. They should illuminate and document both these facets if they are to paint a reasonably complete picture of Indian theatre. Far more than has been evident in the works examined here, historians of Indian theatre also need to reflect on their own principles and methods as theatre historians and to be self-aware of the unspoken assumptions and values underlying their writing. A group of Indian political historians in the last few years have challenged elitist historiography by championing a “history from below” model and inventing the field of Subaltern Studies, whose methods and perspectives, if applied to Indian theatre history, are sure to yield fresh insights.33 For example, what the subaltern thinks of the bourgeois-urban modern theatre or what the outcast thinks of the exclusively higher-caste Kuttiyattam theatre of Kerala would be most instructive. Audience reception, the

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impact of the practice of publishing plays since the introduction of the printing press in the nineteenth century, the shifting of patronage away from royal houses after independence, and the impact of decades of Bollywood films and now of global television are critical areas that future historians could investigate. Together with the earlier histories, such new research will contribute to a deeper understanding of the history of the Indian theatre. notes 1. The four Vedas, literally “Books of Knowledge,” constitute the fundamental religious texts of the Hindus. Still regarded as Shruti — i.e., revelation “heard” by Rishis or seers — these ancient Sanskrit verses represent the beliefs of the Aryans, the central Asian pastoral tribes that settled in India circa 1500 BCE. The first Veda, the Rig Veda, also dates back to this period and thus remains the oldest extant piece of Indo-European literature in the world. Transmitted orally for several centuries, the Vedas were first written down beginning circa 600 BCE. 2. Opening stanzas of Bharata’s Natyasastra, translated and quoted by Manohar Laxman Varadpande in his History of Indian Theatre, vol. 1 of History of Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1987), p. 1. 3. The legendary Bharata does provide a list of his hundred sons, who may represent the names of important theatre artists. Of course, this assessment has to be tempered by the knowledge that some scholars think the Natyasastra is the result of a compilation by diverse hands over a very long period. Some commentators have interpreted the hundred sons as members of an artistic rather than a biological family, and others have identified a few names with known writers; see Kapila Vatsyayan, Bharata: The Natyasastra (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), p. 8. 4. Most ancient Indian texts’ emphasis on cyclic time over linear time must not be read as their lacking a sense of history, a misinterpretation most famously articulated by James Mill in A History of British India, 3 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817). For a recent critique of Mill and subsequent manifestations of his view, see Romila Thapar, Time as a Metaphor of History: Early India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5. See Megasthenes, Ancient India as described by Megasthenes and Arrian; being a translation of the fragments of Indika of Megasthenes collected by Dr. Schwanbeck, and of the first part of the Indika of Arrian, by J. W. McCrindle. With inrod., notes, and map of ancient India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1877). 6. Vincent Smith and Percival Spear, The Oxford History of India (1919; 4th ed., Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 5. Subsequent page references will be given in the text.

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7. In this study I have included only book-length studies that offer (or intend to offer) a national history. I have therefore necessarily excluded a great number of valuable but narrowly focused histories that examine one or two genres, regions, periods, or specific issues. Thus, for example, Ralph Yarrow’s specialized, if somewhat ambiguously titled, monograph Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom (Richmond: Curzon, 2001) falls into my excluded group. 8. Whereas Benedict Anderson suggests that nations are imagined communities, Homi Bhaba argues that nations are themselves narrations. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Homi Bhaba, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 9. For dates and the historical context at the time of the composition of the Mahabharata and of the Ramayana, I follow Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 37–40; subsequent page references to this work will be given in the text. 10. For dates of the composition of the Natyasastra, I follow the conclusions presented in Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli, eds., Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), pp. 34–35; subsequent page references to this work will be given in the text. 11. Bharata, The Natyasastra, translated and edited as The Natyasastra (A Treatise on Ancient Indian Dramaturgy and Histrionics) Ascribed to Bharata-Muni, by Manmohan Ghosh, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya; vol. 1, 1951; 3rd ed., 1995; vol. 2, 1961; 2nd ed., 1995), 1:307–8. 12. Horace Hayman Wilson, Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, 3 vols. (Calcutta: V. Holcroft, 1827). 13. H. H. Wilson also contributed three continuation volumes covering the period from 1805 to 1835 (vols. 7–9) to the later expanded editions of James Mill’s A History of British India, mentioned earlier. 14. Sylvain Lévi, Le Théâtre Indien, 2 vols. (Paris: E. Buillon, 1890); translated by Narayan Mukerji as The Theatre of India, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1978), 1:2. All subsequent page references are to this translation and will be given in the text. 15. Kenneth G. Zysk, “The History of Indology in Denmark,” Asien Institut, København, Denmark, www.hum.ku.dk/asien/D_PDF/Indology%20in%20 Denmark.pdf; Lévi, Le Théâtre Indien, 1:1; and Nicola Savarese, “Bibliography,” www.nicolasavarese.it/frcnbib3.htm. 16. The chapter entitled “Modern and Contemporary Theatre” devotes four pages to the traditional theatre genre called Jatra and the remaining nineteen pages to translations or imitations of Sanskrit dramatic forms since the ancient period and to Western-influenced plays of the nineteenth century (2:97–119).

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17. I follow the periodization employed in the latest edition of Wolpert’s A New History of India. 18. Bharata claims for his Natyasastra the lofty and sacred status of the fifth Veda, the Natya Veda (Theatre Veda). 19. For the interplay of different Prakrits and Sanskrit in Kalidasa’s plays, see Barbara Stoler Miller, “Kalidasa’s World and His Plays,” in Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 3–41. 20. Romila Thapar, A History of India (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), pp. 17–19. 21. Ernest Philip Horrwitz, The Indian Theatre: A Brief Survey of the Sanskrit Drama (London: Blackie, 1912). 22. Arthur Berriedale Keith, The Sanskrit Drama in Its Origin, Development, Theory and Practice (London: Oxford University Press, 1924). 23. Arthur Berriedale Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1920). 24. Chandra Bhan Gupta, The Indian Theatre, rev. ed. (1954; New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1991). The third book that had echoed Lévi’s title was Ramanlal Kanaiyalal Yajnik’s The Indian Theatre: Its Origins and Its Later Developments under European Influence, with Special Reference to Western India (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934; repr. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970); it will be discussed later. 25. Given modern India’s glorification of its Sanskrit drama heritage, it is remarkable that while Abhijnanasakuntala had been widely translated into European languages beginning in 1789, as noted earlier, no translation into a modern Indian language appeared until at least eighty years later. See G. P. Deshpande, introduction to Modern Indian Drama: An Anthology (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2000). 26. Yajnik, The Indian Theatre. 27. Hemendra Nath Das Gupta, The Indian Stage, 4 vols. (Calcutta: Metropolitan Press, 1944–1946; repr. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2002). Subsequent page references will be given in the text. 28. In this counting I have excluded the far too sketchy illustrated survey found in many Western libraries and some bibliographies: Mulk Raj Anand’s The Indian Theatre, International Library of Film and Theatre (London: D. Dobson, 1950). 29. Manohar Laxman Varadpande, History of Indian Theatre, vol. 1: History of Indian Theatre, and vol. 2: Loka Ranga: Panorama of Indian Folk Theatre (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1992). 30. Indian Drama, rev. ed. (1956; New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1981).

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31. Balwant Gargi, Theatre in India (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1962); Som Benegal, A Panorama of Theatre in India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1968); Adya Rangacharya, The Indian Theatre, 2nd ed. (1971; New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1980); Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli, Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance; and Nemichandra Jain, Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity and Change (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1992). Subsequent page references to these works will be given in the text. 32. Benegal’s trenchant critique of Bombay films has been rearticulated forcefully since the mid-1990s by his son, Dev Benegal, a rising film director, who denounces both Bollywood and the art cinema that emerged in reaction to Bollywood. Instead, he advocates a new genre that focuses on India’s contemporary urban reality, which in a way introduces to Indian film what many modern Indian playwrights have been doing with regularity. 33. For a comprehensive assessment as well as some vigorous critiques of the Subaltern Studies project as it has now evolved, see Vinayak Chaturvedi, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000). For a further revaluation of Subaltern Studies, see the early chapters of Dipesh Chakravarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

12 Shadow and Method Meditations on Indonesian Theatre Historiography evan darwin winet

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ndonesia contains over thirteen thousand islands inhabited by nearly two hundred million people (making it the world’s fourth most populous nation) from over a hundred native ethnic groups, who speak over three hundred mutually unintelligible languages. Yet archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic genealogies and the impact of military and religious incursions into the western islands from South Asia, beginning around the fifth century CE, have created some cultural as well as religious commonalities amongst various Indonesian peoples (Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any nation). However, the dominant ethnic groups (Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Buginese, Batak) are more similar in culture and traditions to the Malay populations of mainland Southeast Asia than to the native inhabitants of the eastern archipelago or to Chinese Indonesians, who wield disproportionate influence in Indonesian politics and economics. The Netherlands India government, which took control of Dutch interests in the East Indies in 1800 following the bankruptcy of the East Indies Company (VOC), shaped modern Indonesia through military expansion (extending their territory from coastal fortresses to the current Indonesian borders by the time of their rout from Java by the Japanese in 1942) and social policy (creating archipelagic bureaucratic infrastructure and, most significantly, standardizing the Indonesian language). Indonesian nationalism is in many respects a continuation of these policies. This neocolonial nationalist ideology and its attendant cultural manifestations are clearly hegemonic and patriarchal. However, nationalism has played a fundamental role in the development of Indonesian society over the past half century, creating new traditions with their own legitimacies. Especially in the capital, Jakarta, and other major Indonesian 224

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cities, a cosmopolitan urban culture has developed in which artists address their compatriots as well as global audiences from distinctly Indonesian perspectives. As critics of the insidious monologism of national culture, we should be careful not implicitly to prioritize the authenticity of regional, ethnic, or religious affiliations whose parochialism Indonesian nationalist artists have expressly rejected. We must appreciate that national culture provides a framework for Third World artists to participate in a broader community and that its false assumptions are not necessarily more problematic than the false assumptions of any other categorical identification. In this chapter, I will discuss difficulties attending the historiography of sandiwara, a modern, spoken, scripted theatrical form based on Western dramatic theatre, which, since its creation in the 1920s, has become the constitutive genre of modern Indonesian theatre. Sandiwara is hardly the first, the most influential, or the most popular of theatrical genres practiced in Indonesia. Nevertheless, it may be the most “Indonesian” of Indonesian theatre forms, as its practitioners explicitly or implicitly pursue nationalist aesthetics and ends. Since independence in 1949, Indonesian government policy has played a significant role in the development of sandiwara through official arts institutions (i.e., ministries, academies, and conservatories) and occasional acts of overt censorship or persecution. However, the choice to work within sandiwara as a genre (rather than any of hundreds of regional performance traditions) implies a nationalist ideological framework. Sandiwara artists have challenged government cultural policy (particularly in its commitment to democratic progressivism) but rarely Indonesia itself as the object of representation and struggle. Historical accounts published in Indonesia during the Suharto era (1966–1998) have ascribed with near unanimity a simple progressive narrative to the history of sandiwara. By emphasizing differences between national modernity and regional/ethnic traditions rather than heterogeneities within Indonesian modernity, these accounts link sandiwara to the development of a unified national culture. The story thus told runs something like this: Traditional Indonesian theatrical performance forms may be traced within the contexts of ethnically determined subnational cultures throughout the past millennium.1 Theatrical modernity began with the professional “Stambul” operetta troupes that toured Java and Sumatra from the Malay Peninsula beginning in the 1870s.2 In the

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1920s, anticolonial nationalist playwrights wrote the first explicitly Indonesian plays. In the 1950s, national academies and troupes developed sandiwara into an indigenous modern theatre highly derivative of Western (and especially American) psychological realism. Either in the late 1950s or in the late 1960s (depending upon the critic’s willingness to ascribe innovation to the Sukarno era), theatre artists began “Indonesianizing” (meng-Indonesia-kan) sandiwara by interpolating elements of regional traditional theatres (e.g., Balinese topeng, Sumatran randai, etc.) In the late 1970s (with the rise of an urban middle class), cosmopolitan Indonesian directors began experimenting with more elaborate stagings and mises-en-scène (influenced by imported Western troupes and technologies), a trend that has continued to the present. Looking back from the fin de siècle, sandiwara appears to have progressed alongside the nation itself as an expression of Indonesian modernism, local in character yet global in outlook.3 This chapter consists of six meditations that challenge the coherence of this univocally nationalistic historiography, while tracing the development of an alternative nationalism within sandiwara that has often come into conflict with government policy. The first, “Avoiding Better Alternatives,” considers the significance of sandiwara as an explicitly Indonesian art form against the ostensibly more profound significance of the wayang shadow theatre. The second, “Colonial Orientalism Precedes Cultural Nationalism, 1830,” argues that Thomas Stamford Raffles’s ingenious amalgamation of conservative ethnic traditionalism with paternalistic modernization in the 1810s has overshadowed subsequent aesthetic discourse in anti- and postcolonial Indonesia. The final four meditations are drawn from sandiwara’s eighty-year history. “Source of the Poet’s Power, 1926,” “A Methodical Struggle, 1955,” “Occupying the Margins, 1971,” and “Appropriation or Negation, 1999” reflect on aspects of sandiwara’s ideological complexity in relation to state nationalism. They range from the Islamic and communist influences that inspire Rustam Effendi’s nationalistic Prince Bujangga to the representational strategies of street demonstrators and theatre artists during the overthrow of President Suharto in the late 1990s. These “counternarratives” present early sandiwara as having shared with early twentieth-century political anticolonialism a simultaneously progressive (modernizing) and conservative (traditionalist) ideological lineage rooted in nineteenth-century Orientalism. Through Raffles’s

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conservative progressivism (or nostalgic utopianism), sandiwara initially disciplined its ideological heterogeneity to the anticolonial project, but after independence (in 1949) it pursued a democratic individualism that placed it in opposition to the authoritarian cultural policies of Presidents Sukarno (1950–1965) and Suharto (1966–1998). As sandiwara developed, it did not abandon a nationalist framework, but it increasingly represented a different vision of Indonesia than that presented by the government. I should note at the outset that this democratic individualism is not the only alternative strain in sandiwara’s history. The contributions of Islamic theatre troupes have been significant but largely unremarked by historians. The seminal influence of professional Chinese Indonesian stambul and bangsawan troupes in the 1910s and 1920s have been acknowledged by historians but not yet explored in detail. Jakob Sumardjo, in his Development of Modern Indonesian Theatre and Drama (1992), lists sixty-six plays written between 1912 and 1942 by Chinese Indonesians for various forms of popular urban theatre, a far greater output than that of sandiwara itself before the war. Understanding this Chinese Indonesian tradition is crucial to getting a full picture of sandiwara’s history and cultural complexity. Nevertheless, I would argue that it is still meaningful to discuss Rustam Effendi’s Bebasari (1926) as the first Indonesian play, insofar as no play before it (by Chinese Indonesians, Indo-Europeans, or anyone else) explicitly addressed an Indonesian context.

Avoiding Better Alternatives Wayang is, by nearly any estimation, more important than sandiwara. Through its profound cultural significance in Java and Bali, it dominates most histories of Indonesian theatrical performance. The dalang (puppeteers) are revered popularly and officially, not only as master performers but also as grassroots socioreligious leaders. Wayang transmits cultural narratives (particularly the Hindu Mahabharata and Ramayana), embodies cosmic mysticism, and intervenes creatively in local and national affairs. The world and practice of wayang provide for Indonesian politics a metanarrative that so pervades social discourse at every level — from colloquial speech to representations in Indonesian and foreign media and pop culture to the imagery in presidential

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speeches — that it has been studied by social scientists as fervently as by students of performance. As the dalang Sukarya put it to Kathy Foley, “everything is in the wayang already” — not only all performance but also all politics, philosophy, and culture.4 However, wayang is dubiously Indonesian. It is one of many components of the national culture that have been nationalized from regional traditions; one of many “Indonesian” traditions that belong more compellingly, more profoundly to a more local identity; one of many that belong specifically to the Javanese and Balinese, who dominate national political discourse in relation to the nations’ many other ethnic groups. The postcolonial cultural question thus spills over into one of the most fundamental political questions for postcolonial Indonesia: is the Indonesian nation-state representative of its heterogeneous population, or merely of dominant ethnic constituencies and hierarchies? The 1998 resignation of President Suharto unleashed a swell of resentment against the centralization of Indonesian political as well as cultural discourse (for example, against nepotism and corruption amongst cultural officials and the lack of sufficient distribution of cultural funding throughout the provinces), reflecting the government’s most profound failures to create a civil society and national culture over the past half century. If the anchoring of national culture in ethnic traditions has simply reinforced old patterns of Javanese hegemony, it should not be surprising that progressive Indonesians of all ethnicities might identify with the abstract expressionism of the Indonesian painter, Popo Iskandar, as much as traditional Balinese painting, or postcolonial theatre as much as wayang. Wayang is Indonesian through historical amnesia, through intracultural appropriation or, more to the point, intracultural imperialism (i.e., the nationalization of the provincial). It is as Indonesian as the ancient Javanese temples of Borobodur and Prambanan, edifices that predate by a millennium any geopolitical or sociocultural entity resembling contemporary Indonesia. It belongs to Indonesia as Attic tragedy belongs to the European Union or the music of the black slaves to the United States. That is to say, it is and does insofar as epistemic violence can be recuperated as strategic visibility, insofar as it is desirable for vastly heterogeneous polities to identify with the cultural histories of their constitutive peoples. However, the operations through which nations appropriate subnational practices too often rip these practices

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from their nourishing contexts, nationalizing prestige while alienating substance. A flagrantly invented national culture functions ideally like a capitol city constructed as a territory politically distinct from all other regions (such as the District of Columbia or Jakarta.) It is a space which every citizen must cross a border to enter. Sandiwara, in contrast to wayang, is Indonesian through constant struggle over the meaning of “Indonesia” itself. It is Indonesian in the sense that a postcolonial parliamentary republic based on Dutch models is Indonesian. It is Indonesian in the sense that the official Indonesian language (standardized from myriad regional creoles and superseding several hundred ethnic dialects) is Indonesian. Its Indonesianness is marked, equally foreign to every Indonesian citizen with an ethnic first language, whereas the Indonesianness of wayang is dangerously obvious, invisibly ideological to the dominant Javanese culture. To turn to sandiwara from wayang in search of Indonesian theatre is to replace intracultural with intercultural appropriation. It is to avoid an obviously better alternative in favor of practices that are obviously derivative of the colonizers. Yet it is also to take seriously the question of whether Indonesian identity is possible. It is for such reasons that Indonesian theatre artists have embraced sandiwara for the past eighty years. It is through this utopianism that sandiwara artists have aligned themselves fundamentally with Indonesian nationalism in spite of its problematic credentials, though not necessarily with the Indonesian national government nation-state.

Colonial Orientalism Precedes Cultural Nationalism, 1830 Before founding Singapore in 1819, Thomas Stamford Raffles served as the British lieutenant-governor of Java from 1811 to 1816. Marveling that the Dutch had taken so little interest in the ancient Hindu civilization of its colonies, he applied his formidable energies to rectifying the omission.5 His magnum opus, History of Java (1817, which earned him a seat as a fellow of the London Royal Society), called Europe’s attention to the island as a source of culture as well as commodities. In the aggressive aftermath of the Napoleonic world war, as the colonial powers gazed out across the globe with a new fervor to incorporate all space into their “protectorates,” Raffles called attention to an unclaimed frontier in the East Indies: Javanese culture. Following

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Raffles’s insight, every colonial and postcolonial government on Java has considered traditional culture an exploitable resource. After Raffles, nineteenth-century European anthropologists wrote hundreds of studies on village adat (traditional custom) and strove to integrate their interpretations of Javanese social structure into the framework of a colonial bureaucracy. Raffles’s cultural “discovery” set the stage for the Dutch Cultivation System (the apotheosis of bureaucratic plantation colonialism) by yoking an aesthetic view of the Javanese aristocracy (priyayi) as the living inheritors of a noble culture with a Hegelian commitment to building new subjects of this degraded progeny through rational social planning, in other words, paternalistic colonialism. If, as Terry Eagleton suggests, the goal of Hegelian bildung is to awaken in the individual an aesthetic “second nature,” “converting their ‘first’ nature of appetites and desires to a second, spiritual one which will then become customary to them,”6 Raffles bequeathed modern Java two separate “second natures,” two civilizing aesthetics: one utopian in accordance with colonial bildung, the other nostalgic toward pre-Islamic civilization. For most of the nineteenth century, the Batavian government pursued Raffles’s “nostalgic utopianism” by segregating its contradictory components to separate administrative regions. Whereas Batavia itself became a laboratory of modernization, policies of “Javanization” were implemented in the central Javanese sultanates. While the sultans and minor aristocrats in Central Java retreated from actual governance into cultural aestheticization (i.e., turning their courts into conservatories where traditional performance genres became increasingly refined in isolation from new influences), an influx of European civilians in the first few decades following the defeat of Napoleon brought modern European culture to Java’s cities. Nearly two centuries after Raffles, the gulf between native tradition and imported modernity remains a fundamental assumption of all cultural policy. The sultanates of Central Java, whose plundered wealth inspired Raffles’s exaltation of Javanese Hindu civilization, continue to be valued by the postcolonial government as conservatories of Javanese cultural tradition. The modern Schouwburg theatre, erected by the Dutch upon regaining Batavia in 1817 to entertain the growing European population, was refurbished by the Jakarta city council in 1987 as the Gedung Kesenian (Art House) and this stately neoclassical

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temple is now a preferred venue for all forms of modern theatre. The Central Javanese city of Yogyakarta has a thriving modern art scene, but its products are constantly evaluated against conservative notions of Javanese tradition. Jakarta’s modern art houses host a wide array of traditional performances, but these practices are valued in the metropole as cultural treasures imported from the hinterlands. In short, every cultural practice associated with Indonesia interpellates its participants as subjects of a cultural apartheid. Every artistic “utterance” is always already shadowed by a colonial ideology that situates it in relation to nostalgic utopianism, the two irreconcilable second natures reconciled through segregation. For two centuries, the traditions of ethnic Central Java have “endured,” while modern Jakarta has “progressed.”

Source of the Poet’s Power, 1926 The anticolonial literati who gathered around the literary journal Pujangga Baru (Modern [Noble] Poets) in the 1930s wrote sandiwara’s first dramatic repertoire, a small number of curiously bittersweet Western-style plays.7 As A. E. Teeuw writes of two plays by Sanusi Pane, “There seems to be very little connection between the nationalist ideal of a new dawn for Indonesia and the gloomy mood of these dramas, in both of which the heroes . . . who fight for what is right, have to die tragically, without seeing their aspirations fulfilled.”8 Compared to this lack of emancipatory optimism in Pujangga Baru drama, Rustam Effendi’s Bebasari (written in 1926 as the nationalist student movement rose to power in Bandung) boldly incites revolution through positive images of Indonesian identity. The play’s protagonist is named Bujangga, which invokes pujangga (a noble court poet, also anticipating the anticolonial pujangga baru) in the role of ratu adil (the just prince popularly imagined as a liberator from tyranny). This noble poet/prince fights not for his own sake, as in the old folklore, but rather to free the Indonesian people from foreign oppressors. For this literary achievement, Effendi is remembered as Indonesia’s first playwright (though, obviously, he was not the first to script dramatic performances in the Malay archipelago, nor even the first to write dramatic spoken plays in Batavia — see the discussion of Chinese Indonesian theatre above.) However, a close reading of Bebasari reveals that Effendi’s anticolonialism did not consist

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merely in nationalism, as the histories typically suggest, but also in Islam and communism.9 With political Islam marginalized since independence (1949) and communism demonized since 1965, it is little wonder that these aspects of Effendi’s creation would be minimized by Indonesian theatre historians under Suharto. The plot of Bebasari draws from the genre of meditation and battle narratives common in wayang lakon (performance scenarios) in which a ksatriya (noble knight) meditates in order to accumulate power before going into battle against the ogres from across the seas. The young hero, Bujangga, strengthens himself against the fears of his parents, gathering wisdom from a succession of mysterious ascetics (kyai) before assailing the ogre king, Rawana (i.e., the Batavian state), who keeps the Princess Bebasari captive. The play explicitly recollects the Ramayana story (a common source for numerous traditional Javanese and Balinese performance genres) in which the ogre king, Rawana, has abducted Sita, wife of the ksatriya, Lord Rama, who must then gather his strength to battle the ogres and win her back. Effendi turns the traditional story into a contemporary political allegory. Bujangga is both pemuda (radicalized youth) and pujangga (noble poet), the champion of the new age, bearing timeless wisdom and faith. His princess, Bebasari (containing the word bebas, meaning “free”), represents the colonized nation as object of romantic patriotism. The modern pujangga must fulfill a cosmological mandate to evict the colonizers from the nation, through violent struggle if necessary. To defeat the ogres, Bujangga symbolically amalgamates the same three “emerging forces” that the young Sukarno first identifies in his seminal 1926 lecture, “Nationalism, Islam and Communism.” Of these three, it is Islam, not nationalism, which is most explicit. Bujangga and his ascetic advisers openly acknowledge throughout the play that anticolonial resistance is empowered by religious piety. His mother urges him that faith will be his weapon, and even the (Dutch) ogre, Rawana, admits at the moment of his defeat, “This is the will of almighty God.”10 That said, the play’s many religious allusions are difficult to read in a strictly Islamic sense. For instance, the Dutch ogres, in keeping with the Ramayana allusion, seem to operate within a Hindu cosmology. They acknowledge anticolonial success as the will of “dewa Sang Hijang,” before returning to “kajangan,” abode of the Hindu gods. This sort of religious eclecticism is fairly typical of Indonesian narratives,

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reflecting a complex palimpsest of tribal, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian influences. The communist and nationalist aspects of the play are more implicit, and intertwined at a linguistic as well as metaphoric level. The land that Bujangga will emancipate is never called “Indonesia,” but rather bangsa, a word that denotes “nation,” but in the sense of its people. That is to say, its use to mean “nation” in a political sense implies a nationalized populace more than a geopolitical territory or a national government. However, the multivalency of the word reinforces a slipperiness in Effendi’s descriptions of the suffering wrought by the ogre regime between communist and more broadly nationalistic implications. A communist perspective might be more productive, for example, in accounting for the defeat of the ogres that sends them to the Hindu (Kajangan) heavens. Given a communist spin, they might be seen as returning to a bourgeois sphere, leaving the proletariat to their earthly paradise. The anticolonialism of Bebasari is unmistakable. However, the play’s precise balance of Sukarno’s “emerging forces,” and hence its specific ideological meaning, is poised on a razor’s edge. Although Effendi’s politics are quite compatible with those of the nationalistic Pujangga Baru, and indeed with those of Sukarno in the 1920s, there are already currents evident in his work of the democratic individualism that began to alienate sandiwara from national cultural policy after independence. If Bujangga stands for the pujangga/ratu adil who liberates the nation, he is a model for the “guided” (i.e., authoritarian) democracies of Sukarno and Suharto. Conversely, if Bujangga gives power to the people, Bebasari implies a democratic populism suggestive of communism and radical Islam, two ideologies fervently avoided in Suharto-era cultural criticism.

A Methodical Struggle, 1955 Asrul Sani cofounded the Indonesian National Theatre Academy (ATNI) in Jakarta in November 1955. ATNI’s acting courses, based in American Method acting,11 inspired imitation in other Indonesian troupes and theatre schools, greatly influencing the development of modern Indonesian acting theory. There is hardly a sandiwara artist in contemporary Indonesia who cannot in some way trace a genealogy back to ATNI.

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Many Indonesian theatre critics denounced Sani’s emphasis on the Method portrayal of Western dramatic characters as a wholesale submission to the ideology of the colonizers. However, Sani frequently replied that ATNI did not encourage the rote imitation of Western actors. He insists that it is the mastery of a more authentic creative process that is desired. Goenawan Mohamad explains, in his way of thinking, it is not a graceful gesture that makes someone into an actor, but the consistent inner aspect that makes the gesture genuine. . . . What Boleslavsky presents are the first problems that must be tackled by an actor before he performs a gesture. And these first problems are valid for every actor, regardless of his nationality. Because of this, we can also make use of him for our purposes.12 In Boleslavsky, as in most American Method acting theory, realistic action onstage derives from truthful psychological impulses on the part of the actor. Sani appropriates the psychology of this process as simply a “consistent inner aspect.” This subtle recasting abstracts the Method from the American fascination with individual feelings in order to interpolate it into Sani’s “revolution of the soul.” Psychological truth in service to mimetic realism becomes a personal mystical truth in service to postcolonial subjectivity. The psychology of identification with the character becomes, for Sani, an internalization of anticolonial struggle. He writes that “for actors, the basis for truth is the struggle between their own personalities and the personalities of the characters they wish to portray.” It is a “struggle” that will not result in complete identification. “A one hundred percent identification surely cannot be achieved, because within ourselves we keep substances (unsur-unsur) that reveal our identities, and which it is not possible for us to escape.” The struggle for identification trains the actor to recognize his or her own “substance” and to be able to construct personae to achieve specific actions beyond that basis. Sani views this process of struggle with a character that is insurmountably Other, that cannot be identified with “one hundred percent,” as a path to a creativity consisting of identification coordinated with artificial construction. He believes that a true characterization can be achieved across the spectrum of identification and construction, from the rare cases of pure identification — “a correspondence between the actor and the character,

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such that the two make use of the same emotion” — to combinations of identification and construction (the vast majority of cases), to pure construction, when “the situation portrayed by the actor is indeed foreign.”13 Indonesian actors, in their inalienable “substance,” continue the inner revolution in confrontation (not merely identification) with foreign roles. The actor interpolates the colonial ideology coded into Western characterization as a means to discover his own soul. Sani’s profoundly individualistic understanding of Indonesian cultural nationalism increasingly parted ways with state policy. Mohamad cites Sani in 1955 describing Indonesian nationalism as “a nationalism still in search of its foundations,” and he was certain that these foundations lay not with any easy national chauvinism, but with a difficult individualism. In this, Mohamad credits Asrul Sani with moving beyond the essentialist rhetoric of the day and anticipating Edward Said’s criticism of Orientalism a quarter century later. He cites Sani on the failures of cultural policy toward the individual, stemming from this narrow essentialism: “This is something disavowed by those who want to turn us into a group of soldiers who get spurred on from right to left. This is something that people are protected from in this variety of democracy that wants to strangle all inner nationalisms.”14 Sani declares that Indonesia must turn now to the “inner revolution (revolusi jiwa)” that “will not end.”15 In the revolusi jiwa, the leadership of actors will outstrip that of soldiers or politicians, because only they will achieve the requisite inner discipline through methodical training. Actors will be the new pemuda (revolutionary youth) at the gates of the neocolonial palace, who will lead the people to a more realized democracy by modeling revolutionary agency. This radical aspect of Sani’s practice directly challenges the efficacy of paternalistic cultural policy, and only countercultural critics such as Goenawan Mohamad have insisted upon it in recalling the man’s contributions to the nation.

Occupying the Margins, 1971 By 1970, student democracy activists, initially optimistic toward President Suharto and his “New Order,” began to lose patience. They began to demonstrate against the same sorts of political and economic abuses and “prestige projects” they had seen under Sukarno (whose regime Suharto distanced himself from as the “Old Order”).16 In

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particular, the construction of the Taman Mini amusement park on the southern outskirts of Jakarta and the open manipulation of the first post-Sukarno election in 1971 convinced many students that the new regime was not committed to improving the plight of the poor. Demonstrations became more strident over the following years, encouraged by Soemitro, a high-ranking general who openly criticized Suharto. This escalation came to a climax on January 16, 1974, when students from the University of Indonesia in Jakarta demonstrated against corrupt dealings with global financiers and capitalists during a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka. The demonstrations moved from the campus into the streets, where they were joined by thousands of poor Jakartans. Peaceful marching turned into riots, leaving at least eight demonstrators dead. Following this confrontation, Suharto closed six independent newspapers and imposed draconian restrictions on student political life.17 The students had marched out like revolutionary pemuda to criticize the president (the “Father of Development”) for failing to develop Indonesia toward greater democracy. The Father had responded by suppressing and appropriating them, diminishing democratic freedoms on campuses, and consolidating his power even further. The students felt that they had been manipulated to serve the competing interests of politicos and turned to emphasizing their popular moral authority as pemuda, refusing political alliances in order to represent the democratic aspirations of the Indonesian people with greater purity.18 W. S. Rendra, who had become the nation’s most celebrated sandiwara artist after returning in 1967 from four years in New York, increasingly associated himself with the student movement in the early seventies. In October 1971, he attracted nationwide media attention by conducting a “camp out” on Parangtritis beach south of Yogyakarta, attended mainly by young men. It was something of a temporary experiment in communal individualism, set out as an alternative to paternalistic developmentalism. In an article written shortly after the event, Rendra distinguishes his program as a political and economic “alternative” to state programs: “We didn’t ask for help from the government. Our organizational costs were extremely cheap. And we didn’t have a complex committee.” In this simple, self-sufficient nongovernmental camp, Rendra and members of his Workshop Theatre supervised a loose program of improvisational and meditative theatre exercises, always

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stressing “spontaneity,” a value that Rendra described as crucial for people to be able to act independently and take responsibility for their own actions. The young participants were often frustrated, not knowing what to do and looking for a leadership that Rendra and the members of his troupe adamantly refused to provide. Rendra reflected that this was precisely the kind of struggle that these young Indonesians needed: I don’t want to become their leader in the course of their maturation. I choose the role of sympathetic witness towards their rebellion, towards their self-definition. My sympathy and dialogue are available, but I cannot provide a prescription for a way out, because I am certain that the one who is involved is the only one who will discover the prescription, but only after fully experiencing the challenges of life.19 Whether productive or harmless, the Parangtritis demonstration was clearly intended as a challenge to Suharto’s view of the people. The camp served as an organized community on Indonesian soil, but uniquely (at that time) unaffiliated with any governmental administration. In its selfsufficiency and in its strict refusal to provide leadership to the participants, it challenged the most fundamental assumption of Suharto’s government: that Indonesia needed a father figure to oversee all forms of development and to safeguard against social chaos. With Parangtritis, Rendra argued that Indonesian communities modeled after actor collectives could maintain themselves without leaders and without chaos as long as everyone took responsibility for themselves. Parangtritis represented deference to paternal figures as an erroneous emphasis on the “authoritarian elements” that have characterized Indonesian political thought since the Javanese courts and the colonial governments. It modeled this progressive community within Indonesia, but outside the supervision of any state apparatus. And lastly, it presented young actors, Asrul Sani’s revolutionary pemuda, modeling personal responsibility and creative spontaneity in theatrical ensemble improvisation as a preferable model of maturation to that provided by the Father of Development.

Appropriation or Negation, 1999 The removal of President Suharto after over thirty years of authoritarian rule (1966–1998) left a lingering after-image as well as a gaping

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hole in Indonesian public life. Images of puppets and masks belying sophisticated critiques of the continuity of post-Suharto politics riddled the transitional presidency of B. J. Habibie (May 1998–November 1999.) Caricatures showed Suharto as the face animating the mask of Habibie, or Habibie as the puppet prodigy of Suharto, his “professor.” Such images conveyed a profound irony in the predicament of presidential character. Even as Habibie might have claimed legitimacy as the scion of a just predecessor, he was more commonly portrayed as a character who could not stand “as his own man.” Some of the most compelling images of the demonstrations against Suharto from May 1998 on involved the defacement of Suharto, not only through vandalism of public posters or portraits, but also through mock-ups of official presidential portraits whose faces had been cut out, leaving a hole for anyone to insert his or her own face — presidential character as “the liberatory Lacanian negative” as Slavoj ZHiz˙ek has described it, the open face of democracy.20 In July 1999, a group of University of Indonesia students executed an ingenious protest in which they occupied an intersection in Jakarta wearing masks consisting of photocopies of Suharto’s face. When they were arrested and taken before a judge, they identified themselves only as Suharto and insisted that they would not remove their masks until Suharto himself was brought to justice. In the confusion that this created for the legal authorities (faced with registering the entire disturbance under the name of the ex-president), the students dispersed before their actual names could be discovered. These sorts of representations (or refusals of representation) in public demonstrations resembled many performances on the postSuharto stage. Sandiwara artists often represented images of Suharto himself and his many doubles, but represented the Indonesian people (especially those people who had most stridently taken responsibility for their own views) as a pervasive absence, a voice that could only accuse its murderers from beyond the grave. Ratna Sarumpaet, a prominent sandiwara artist who had worked with Rendra in the 1970s, produced some of the most striking examples of this sort of postmortem agency in her Marsinah plays. The title character alludes to an East Javanese factory worker and labor activist who was abducted, raped, and murdered by soldiers in 1993. The Indonesian courts never brought the perpetrators to trial, and Marsinah

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became a martyr for the labor and women’s movements and a symbolic victim of state violence and corruption. In several plays written and performed throughout the 1990s, Sarumpaet did not so much represent Marsinah as perform through her image, using “Marsinah” as a mask through which Sarumpaet accused the Suharto administration. Wielding the moral authority of Marsinah herself (akin to the enduring moral authority of revolutionary pemuda), the tokoh (“character”) of these plays condemns New Order corruption, paternalism, and above all, its arrogance and violence toward women. Sarumpaet’s Marsinah is an ordinary Indonesian woman through whom Sarumpaet speaks strident criticisms of the Indonesian state. In portraying so powerful a character, the artist has struggled to retain her own identity. In a discussion with Sarumpaet in 1999, she expressed to me how profoundly she had struggled with the ghost of Marsinah. As she put it, Marsinah’s powerful force has overwhelmed her own voice. Indeed, the success of these plays has catapulted Ratna Sarumpaet from a relatively conservative director, mainly of Shakespeare, to a public figure who is constantly in demand to give interviews and lectures and participate in events relating to labor and women’s issues as if she is actually Marsinah. The voice from the wound, from one of the burial pits into which the New Order consigned all “disorder” after the 1965–1966 massacres, demands to speak through her face and will not be silenced. A new generation of Indonesian sandiwara artists struggles with such liberatory and yet terrible absences as they attempt to step out from under the long shadow of Suharto, the puppetmaster. In order to account for the impact of Sarumpaet’s work, the significance of labor activism, feminism, and (once again) Islam to sandiwara must be acknowledged. The popular press, which views Sarumpaet as a celebrity on a par with Rendra, has been quicker to do this than Indonesian theatre historians.

The Youth behind the Nation, the Method behind the Shadow Effendi, Sani, Rendra, and Sarumpaet all imagined the figure of the Indonesian actor as a revolutionary youth mastering a method for postcolonial democratization. Their projects are all motivated by the will to represent the actual heterogeneity of Indonesian identities and ideologies, to locate the constitutive agency of postcolonial Indonesian

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identity in the bangsa (the people), not the bapak (father figure). When Effendi wrote Bebasari, this aspiration did not differ markedly from the strategies of young Sukarno in his political resistance to the Batavian government. As the first president of postindependence Indonesia, however, Sukarno reasserted the “traditional” role of bapak, and with it the paternalistic cultural essentialism first imagined by Raffles. Suharto renounced various ideologies ascendant in the previous generation (most significantly, communism) but expanded the scope of Sukarno’s authoritarian paternalism in the name of national development. Accordingly, Sani, Rendra, and Sarumpaet have imagined Indonesian theatre as an expression of the bangsa’s autonomy from the negeri (the nation, in the sense of nation-state.) They have radicalized the paradox of Raffles’s “nostalgic utopianism” into a struggle for postcolonial agency, the ongoing revolution of the individual Indonesian soul. The significance of sandiwara as a distinct theatrical genre derives from its complicity with Indonesian nationalism. To the extent that the Indonesian governments of Presidents Sukarno and Suharto have patronized and regulated the genre since 1949, cultural officials (including many who have contributed to the historical literature) have emphasized a nationalism congruent with state policy at the expense of the genre’s ideological and representational complexity; that is, at the expense of sandiwara’s intimate struggle with the elusive meaning of “Indonesia.” The dominant strain of democratic individualism I have noted in the works of some of sandiwara’s leading practitioners suggests that, despite the primacy of nationhood as a superseding identity, artists have used the framework of national culture to represent Indonesian heterogeneity. In the climate of democratic reformasi that has followed Suharto’s 1998 resignation, many marginalized histories are being recovered, and we should expect to see more complex histories of sandiwara. notes 1. Many works on Indonesian theatrical traditions have acknowledged the importance of historical conditions to the changing expression of forms. For example, Laurie J. Sears’s Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) locates the history of wayang in relation to the history of Dutch cultural policy in relation to the Javanese sul-

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tanates, arguing that Dutch notions of ancient Hindu civilization encouraged conservatorial refinement and a diminishment in popular as well as Islamic elements. Such arguments should raise doubts about the greater authenticity of ethnic traditions such as wayang in relation to overtly syncretic forms such as sandiwara. However, few Indonesian politicians, scholars, or even artists question the basic division of their cultural heritage into ethnic traditions, and most Western scholarship accepts these assumptions. 2. Various genres of so-called Malay Opera appeared in British Malaya in the 1870s through inspiration by troupes from the Near East (hence the reference to “Stambul,” or Istanbul) and Parsi Theatre troupes from Gujarat. These troupes toured throughout the region in the following decades, inspiring an Indo-European by the name of August Mahieu to found a Stambul troupe in Surabaya, Java, in 1891. Chinese Indonesian impressarios founded similar theatres in Batavia in the 1910s and 1920s, providing a direct inspiration to the first amateur sandiwara artists. See Matthew Isaac Cohen, “On the Origin of the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Culture, Colonial Society and the Parsi Theatre Movement,” in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 157, no. 2 (2001): 313–57. For a history of these forms from a Malaysian perspective, see Sooi Beng Tan, Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3. The two leading histories upon which most subsequent studies depend were written in Indonesian by Boen S. Oemarjati and Jakob Sumardjo. Oemarjati, who served on the faculty of ATNI (the National Theatre Academy), wrote the first book-length history of Indonesian drama in 1971, Bentuk Lakon Dalam Sastra Indonesia (Jakarta: Gunung Agung.) Sumardjo, who is affiliated with the Bandung Studyclub Theatre (STB), covers a far broader sweep of dramatic and theatrical history in Perkembangan Teater Modern dan Sastra Drama Indonesia (Bandung: Citra Aditya Bakti, 1992). Many retrospective festschriften on individual artists, troupes, and institutions (such as the Jakarta Arthouse and Galeri Utan Kayu) have been published over the past fifteen years, constituting a distinct historical genre unto themselves. In the past ten years, a younger generation of Indonesian theatre scholars, including Afrizal Malna and Garin Nugroho, have applied poststructuralist models to the study of Indonesian culture, which may herald new possibilities for theatre historiography. Western scholars such as Barbara Hatley, Tony Day, Ellen Rafferty, Kathy Foley, Mary Zurbuchen, Michael Bodden, Cobina Gillett, Matthew Isaac Cohen, and I have published articles in English on modern Indonesian theatre. I am currently working on a book project on the history of postcolonial Indonesian theatre, which would be the first such study in English. 4. Kathy Foley, “My Bodies: The Performer in West Java,” in Phillip Zarrilli, ed., Acting (Re)Considered (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 172.

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5. See Paul Johnson’s colorful portrayal of Raffles in The Birth of the Modern (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 344–50. 6. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 22. 7. Of original Indonesian plays, Jakob Sumardjo lists one by Effendi, two by Yamin, five by Sanusi Pane, three by Armijn Pane, and one by Adlin Affandi. Sumardjo’s list does not account for foreign plays in translation. Between Balai Pustaka and Pujangga Baru, dozens of foreign plays were translated into Indonesian before the war that, to my knowledge, have never been tabulated. Jakob Sumardjo, Perkembangan Teater Modern dan Sastra Drama Indonesia (Bandung: Citra Aditya Bakti, 1992). 8. A. Teeuw, Modern Indonesian Literature (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p. 27–28. 9. For instance, K. M. Saini, in his recent article on sandiwara in the Asia/Pacific volume of the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre edited by Don Rubin (London: Routledge, 1998), recognizes Bebasari solely for its nationalistic content (175), as does A. Teeuw in Modern Indonesian Literature (18). Ikranagara, in an as yet unpublished manuscript on the history of Indonesian theatre, discusses Bebasari at some length in a chapter on “National Theatre.” 10. Rustam Effendi, Bebasari: Toneel dalam 3 Pertoendjoekan (Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1953), p. 41. 11. Sani came into contact with the Method on several trips to the United States: a visit to the Los Angeles branch of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1952, a visit to Harvard in 1954, and a more extended visit to study dramaturgy and cinematography at the University of Southern California in 1956. See Ajip Rosidi, “Riwayat Hidup Singkat Asrul Sani,” in Ajip Rosidi, Ramadhan K. H., and H. Misbach Yusa Biran, eds., Asrul Sani 70 Tahun (Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya, 1997), pp. xi–xxi. 12. Ibid., p. 5–6. 13. Ibid., p. 13–14. 14. Goenawan Mohamad, “Lirik, Laut, Lupa: Asrul Sani dan Lain-Lain, Circa 1950,” in Asrul Sani 70 Tahun, p. 50. 15. Ibid., pp. 71, 56, 44. 16. President Sukarno relinquished power to Major General Suharto following an attempted communist coup in 1965, in the aftermath of which at least half a million “communists” were killed in mass reprisals and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was destroyed. Suharto rationalized his “New Order” government as a departure from the heated politics of the Sukarno years toward a more ordered developmentalism. The uncounted dead of the 1965–1966 massacres, many of whom were buried in unmarked graves, haunted subsequent Indonesian public life such that when Suharto himself began to amass a record of abductions and clandestine killings (as I mention

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later in relation to Marsinah), cries for justice often invoked images of unmarked and mass graves. 17. Joseph Saunders, Academic Freedom in Indonesia: Dismantling Seoharto-Era Barriers. (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998), pp. 18–19. 18. For more on the student movement revival in the early seventies, and the 1974 Malari riots, see Edward Aspinall, “Student Dissent in Indonesia in the 1980s,” Center of Southeast Asian Studies Monograph (Clayton: Monash University, 1993); Arief Budiman, “Portrait of a Young Indonesian Looking at His Surroundings,” Internationales Asienforum 4, no. 1 (1973): 76–88; Harold Crouch, “The 15th January Affair in Indonesia,” Dyason House Papers: Australia, Asia and the World 1, no. 1 (1974): 1–6; Cees van Dijk, “The Hariman Siregar Trial,” Review of Malayan and Indonesian Affairs 9, no. 1 (1975): 1–33. 19. W. S. Rendra, “Alternatif dari Parangtritis,” in Mempertimbangkan Tradisi, (Jakarta: PT Gramedia, 1983), pp. 24, 26. 20. In his book Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), Slavoj ZHiz˙ek looks at public erasure of symbols of power in the democratic transition of post-Soviet Eastern Europe. In a chapter titled “The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You,” he writes that “the Name [of the Father/Leader] must remain empty,” thus “democracy implies the distinction between the empty symbolic locus of power and the reality of those who, temporarily, exercise power; for democracy to function, the locus of power must remain empty; nobody is allowed to present himself as possessing the immediate, natural right to exercise power” (190).

13 Reassembling South African Theatre History loren kruger

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t the height of the antiapartheid struggle and of South Africa’s visibility worldwide, the Market Theatre, which opened during the Soweto Uprising in June 1976, presented itself as the country’s “only truly national theatre.”1 Original venue for such antiapartheid classics as Woza Albert (1981) and Born in the RSA (1986), the Market attempted to represent South Africa as an integral whole in the face of the ethnic and racial divisions fostered by colonization (1652–1910) and neocolonial segregation (1910–1948), and most systematically by the apartheid regime (1948–1990). Since the election of the first postapartheid government in 1994, however, the unifying force of the antiapartheid movement has waned and with it the shared sense that theatre can represent the entire nation. The problem of national identity has intensified in the last decade, but it is not merely a product of postapartheid divisions. Rather, as I intend to show, it has been an enduring condition of South Africa and its theatre, even though it was sidelined by the antiapartheid struggle from the 1940s to the 1980s. South Africa gained its name and geographical integrity when it became a British Commonwealth Dominion in 1910 and so achieved (limited) postcolonial status after two and a half centuries of colonization by the Dutch and later the British. Even after 1910, it lacked the unifying features usually, if not always accurately, attributed to national theatres, such as a national language and a central institution in a capital city. Unlike the classic national theatre movements of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Central Europe (German, Hungarian, Polish, and other Slavic), which typically preceded the secure foundation of the nation-states they wished to represent and whose leaders claimed that stage representations of literary works in the national language would create a national public in anticipation of the national state, theatre in South Africa has rarely been cast as national in aspiration.2 Despite the 244

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brief run of an all-white National Theatre Organization (NTO, 1947– 1960), a variety of performance forms have played before audiences divided by language, ethnicity, region, and class, and only in particular well-known periods unified by the presence of a common enemy or common goal. If even the most seemingly homogenous national theatres have been beset by cracks in the facade of linguistic, geographical, cultural, or aesthetic unity, then the South African case cannot be usefully discussed in terms that presume a normative homogeneity from which it would inevitably deviate.3 As a country with eleven official languages and significant minorities of speakers of international languages from Chinese to French to Urdu, adherents of all the world’s major religions, and an economy that acts as a magnet for migrants from the African continent and beyond, South Africa stands in the intersection of transnational traffic. The apparently exceptional status of South Africa at the crossroads not merely of European and African networks of trade, politics, and culture, but also of American (including African American) and Asian exchange make it an exemplary case study for rethinking and reassembling the conjunction of theatre, history, and nation in an era in which transnational movements and affiliations, religious, political, or cultural, have traduced the ideal-typical notion of the nation-state.4 Moreover, theatre, in the strict sense of performance of a text by designated if not always professional players for a paying audience in a designated space, intersects throughout with performances that might be identified as music, dance, storytelling, variety shows, or some combination thereof. This chapter will not attempt to rewrite the history of theatre in South Africa, but will highlight the problems faced by theatre historians, outline attempts to tackle them, and point readers to overlapping and competing accounts which they can evaluate themselves. All histories of South African theatre are partial, to the extent that their investigation is limited to certain periods, forms, or languages of performance, but some are more partial than others, either because they award privileged status to particular formations, whether hegemonic, such as metropolitan English culture or Afrikaner Nationalism, or counterhegemonic, especially the antiapartheid struggle or, more problematically, because their apparent neutrality hides an unwillingness to confront the legacy of apartheid.5 Although the analysis will

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draw on those histories of South African theatre, including my own, that announce themselves as accounts of theatre or drama, it will also take note of studies of related performance forms from praises and historical recitations to dub poetry and television drama.6 The most pertinent issues can be schematized as follows: 1. History and geography or boundaries in time and space. Before the unitary state of 1910, “South Africa” did not exist. A multitude of hunting and trade routes and competing African polities, were followed by a Dutch colony; several British colonies and two Boer Republics preceded the Union. Precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periodization, while useful, raises several questions, in particular: (a) the persistence of so-called traditional forms in the modern period; (b) the changing status of Afrikaner culture from subaltern to hegemonic (1948–1990); (c) the ambiguity of the term postcolonial which cannot in South African be simply used, as it is often elsewhere, as a synonym for postindependence. Further, the tendency of many theatre histories to begin detailed analysis with the antiapartheid struggle after 1950 tends to foreshorten history as a prelude to the author’s perception of the contemporary or the enduring present of that author’s memory.7 2. Boundaries of performance. Theatre in the European, specifically bourgeois, sense of the performance of drama by a designated group of actors for spectators in a specialized space, usually after the exchange of cash, enters the South African scene with late eighteenth-century colonial troops (military troops engaging in amateur theatricals). Urbanizing Africans in the twentieth century respond by combining precolonial performance modes from the specialized izibongo (Zulu praises) or iintsomi (Xhosa stories) to the general ingoma (Nguni dance/music/performance) with modernizing adaptations that include ingoma ebusuku (literally “night music” or, more analytically, performance by recognized professionals in urban settings for cash) and concerts, a term that still includes performance of written drama as well as songs and variety gags. Despite the prevalence of nonliterary performance, the academic privilege of written literature, as against unwritten but nonetheless traceable repertoire, remains

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largely uncontested. Conversely, literary performance cannot be limited to formal dramas but should take account of highly dramatic fictions in prose and poetry. 3. Language and ethnicity. In addition to the tension between the internationally hegemonic language of English on the one hand and indigenous languages on the other, there are inherited conflicts between African (mostly South Bantu) languages and Afrikaans as a formerly hegemonic language, and likely tensions in the future between Zulu as the largest, most expansionist ethnic group, and others, from the large Sotho group to the marginalized minorities of Tsonga and Venda. Activists and educators in favor of the value of English as a lingua franca among the bilingual majority have argued that ethnic identification is an apartheid legacy to be put aside. As this schema suggests, the most telling problems are those on the contested boundaries between categories. Their heuristic value lies in highlighting the points of contention on the boundaries and in the field as a whole.

Historical and Geographical Boundaries and Trajectories Taking the long view, “South Africa” includes the routes traced by nomadic hunter-gatherers at least ten thousand years ago, whose displacement by herders (Khoi) who called the nomads San (or “tramps”) and by herder-farmers (initially black Bantu speakers, later white Dutchmen) is recorded in folk-tales of the dispossessed “Bushmen.”8 Displacement occurred in multiple sites and overlapping periods, rather than on a linear time line. Conflicts between European settlers and Bantu farmers (Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, etc.) were followed by divisions between the two British colonies of Cape and Natal and the Boer (later Afrikaner) polities of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic until the South African War (1899–1902).9 In the period recognized as historical by Europeans, the Dutch (1652–1806) and the British (1806–1910) colonial regimes in the Cape clashed with Xhosa, who competed with white settlers for farmland and whose conflict with the colonists is most famously rendered in contemporary and subsequent narratives and dramatizations of the Cattle Killing (1856), in

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which many Xhosa heeded the prophetess Nongqause and killed their cattle in anticipation of the resurrection of the dead and the destruction of the whites.10 Although the immediate effect of this catastrophe was the capitulation of the Xhosa to annexation and conversion, the tensions between believers and unbelievers continue to shape the politics of modernization in the present. Its dramatic representation encompasses oral history and written fiction by playwrights as well as formal plays: from the assimilationist play The Girl Who Killed to Save (1934) by the man now praised as the “father” of black theatre, Herbert Dhlomo (1903–1956), to the antiassimilation novel The Wrath of the Ancestors by A. C. Jordan (1946), Fatima Dike’s play The Sacrifice of Kreli (1975), and The Heart of Redness (2000), a fictional response to Peires’s historical account of the cattle killing informed by author Zakes Mda’s experience as a playwright.11 In the generation before the Xhosa cattle killing, the most powerful polity was Zululand, which under the rule of Shaka (ca. 1785–1828) not only challenged Boer settlers and British traders but also created a refugee crisis (mfecane, or scattering) that destabilized areas from Mosheoshoe’s Sotho kingdom to the plains of Kenya. Even after the Boers defeated Shaka’s successor Dingane (1838) and the British banished his successor Cetshwayo and annexed the territory (1879), the Zulu continued to rebel into the twentieth century. The legacy of resistance has been the subject of conflicting fictions from King Solomon’s Mines (in the 1886 novel by colonial officer H. Rider Haggard and several films since 1936) to Dhlomo’s unpublished dramas of the Zulu kings (e.g., “Cetshwayo” in 1938) to the controversial reiterations of Zulu prowess at annual Shaka Day celebrations run by the African National Congress’s regional rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party. Afrikaners in turn celebrated the martyrdom of Piet Retief, killed by Dingaan, and the latter’s defeat at “Blood River” as the Day of the Covenant (and their divine right to the land), in retracing the so-called Great Trek from the Cape to Pretoria (covering far less territory than the mfecane), culminating with cinematic and dramatic representations as well as “folk” singing and dancing at the Voortrekker Centenary Celebrations in 1938, whose racial themes and performance scale were borrowed from Nazi rallies.12 As these historical vignettes suggest, well before the Union of South Africa was celebrated in 1910 with a historical Pageant of South Africa and a procession of citizens, mostly but not all white, before the Houses

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of Parliament in Cape Town, the history and geography of South Africa were marked by competing and often incompatible representations of the land and its people. Even after the unitary state of 1910, theatre and other performances demarcated lines of fissure and contradiction, rather than the unity implied by the 1910 pageant. Against the representation of white unity, members of the African elite staged the Emancipation Centenary in 1934, commemorating the abolition of slavery in 1834 but also the ongoing struggle thematized in Dhlomo’s historical dramas and in the short-lived but ambitious African National Theatre (ANT; 1936–41), which used local and imported plays (such as plays by Eugene O’Neill) to dramatize not only South African conditions but also the international concerns of “economic disintegration, the breakdown of tribal economy, and the impoverishment of Europeans, the massing of classes in their trade unions and employer organizations,” as well as the “emotional complications of race and colour.”13 Influenced, as this citation suggests, by an internationalist outlook and nonracial practice rather than the narrowly defined ideology of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA; in this period the most active integrated political organization), black and white activists harnessed culture to the critique of segregation and capitalism. Well before the Afrikaner Nationalist government of 1948 turned customary segregation into legal apartheid and suppressed the CPSA and eventually all active opposition, and also before Athol Fugard gained a national reputation with The Blood Knot (1961), theatre practices emerged with national aspirations more complex than the all-white NTO. Although the concerts, variety sketches, and practices I have mentioned were taking place mostly outside conventional theatre buildings, which then staged mostly hits imported from Britain or North America, it is these that would shape the distinctive South African development of the township musical and the workshopped testimonial play. Before turning to genre and form, however, we should note one further periodization problem: the habitual use of apartheid and the antiapartheid movement as the origin of South African theatre history. To be sure, apartheid was a notorious attempt to oppress the majority of South Africans in the name of alleged laws of racial difference and to justify white supremacy and Afrikaner dominance through a series of institutions from the secret Broederbond through the Land Bank to the state-sponsored Performing Arts Councils (PACs) that succeeded the

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more liberal NTO.14 During decades when legitimate political opponents such as the ANC were banned and their leaders in prison or exile, antiapartheid cultural activity, especially theatre, offered a key site for resistance, from the work of Fugard in the 1950s to the black South African Students Organization in the late 1960s and 1970s to the proliferation of workshopped testimonials against apartheid under the aegis of first the Space (1972–1980) and then the Market Theatre (from 1976). However, the very proliferation of this activity has obscured earlier and later practices that emerged from the different moments of colonial, neocolonial, apartheid, and postapartheid South Africa, and the cracks between them.15 Despite the rich theatre history that predates both apartheid and the antiapartheid movement, many accounts, whether book-length studies or influential articles, begin in earnest with the antiapartheid theatre and read into the earlier, often more ambiguous practices of African concerts (or, for that matter, the written drama of English or Afrikaans authors) an anticipation of the antiapartheid era. Thus the first chapter “Culture and Social Relations before 1976” and indeed the entire argument of Robert Kavanagh’s pioneering Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa (1985) hinges on the epochal turning point of the Soweto Uprising. Although the book includes chapters on the 1950s, theatre in that decade — from Fugard’s early plays to the “jazz opera” King Kong (music by Todd Matshikiza; book by several hands) that influenced several generations of township musicals from Gibson Kente in the 1960s to the present — is judged (and found wanting) by the standards of militant antiapartheid theatre. This standard is in turn embodied by the author’s own productions with Workshop 71, especially by Survival, which reached audiences during the Soweto uprising and influenced antiapartheid testimonial theatre in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although Martin Orkin’s Drama and the South African State (1991) incorporates research on Dhlomo and other earlier playwrights (but not the no less important unpublished work of concert impresarios like Griffiths Motsieloa), the introduction begins with “drama and the discourse of apartheid” (3ff ) and thus subordinates the argument to the development of antiapartheid drama. While the urgency of the antiapartheid movement partly rationalizes this teleological argument, it cannot explain the argument’s persistence after apartheid. A special issue of Theater in 1996, for instance, still dated

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the beginning of distinctly South African theatre with Fugard’s political theatre in the 1950s, rather than with the explicitly political theatre of the African National Theatre in the 1930s or, indeed, with the politically more ambiguous but no less artistically complex concerts of groups like Motsieloa’s Darktown Strutters (1930s) and Pitch Black Follies (1940s).16 The same issue hinted at developments in postapartheid drama that included new themes such as migration — in, for instance, John Ledwaba’s Jozi Jozi (1994), which offers a comic take on migrants in Johannesburg — and social problems, from AIDS to the reverberations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which would impact on a range of performance forms from theatre for development (TfD) and television drama to therapy and TRC testimony.17 Only since the last years of the twentieth century have researchers begun to balance the attention given to apartheid and antiapartheid culture with, on the one hand, historical investigations of earlier theatrical practices that had been obscured by the binary oppositions of the grand antiapartheid struggle and, on the other, systematic analyses of the performance forms and social concerns specific to the present situation.18 The cultural situation is as yet postantiapartheid rather than strictly postapartheid insofar as it has yet to tackle the loss of unity provided by the antiapartheid movement with a new national cultural dispensation. The scarcity of funding for expensive formal theatres, the logistical difficulty if not outright danger involved in getting to theatres in fragmented cities and the challenge of reaching audiences more attuned to radio, television, and new media than dramatic literature have also taken drama and performance into electronic and other media and into the production of hybrid forms such as health education melodrama that incorporates activist theatre and protest scenes.19 Theatre researchers must acknowledge and analyze these trends if they are to understand the institutions as well as the forms of performance in contemporary South Africa.20

Boundaries of Performance: Drama, Theatre, Ingoma, Concert, and Beyond As the foregoing historical sketch demonstrates, a narrow definition of theatre, the performance of a text by trained if not always professional players for a paying audience in a designated space, cannot

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encompass the complexity of theatre in South Africa. At issue is not simply the matter of expanding a received definition of theatre to include all manner of “cultural performance” excluded by allegedly Eurocentric definitions of “theatre” or, from the opposite perspective, of defending an allegedly more systematic definition of theatre against colonization by an over-broad conception of performance.21 It is rather a matter of acknowledging the complexity of the historical record. Rather than “pure” forms appearing in separate institutions in a manner that would mimic the logic of apartheid, performance events in South Africa have often brought together in one place and in one evening several genres of performance. This syncretic formation combines forms from a variety of traditions, cultures, contexts, and institutional amalgams, the improvisation of mixed institutional structures and formations. South African theatre, like practices in postcolonial contexts, should be seen as syncretic because its practice involves a “consciously sought-after tension between the meaning generated by [theatre] texts in the traditional performance context and the new function within a Western dramaturgical framework,” as opposed to the “impurity” suggested by the term hybrid or the lack of agency implied by mixed.22 To this emphasis on agency and on the conscious juxtaposition of elements from different performance repertoires, I would add a reminder that oppositions like “traditional” versus “modern” or “African” versus “Western” are historically variable and presently dynamic. The South African repertoire compels researchers to recognize both the historicity and the contemporaneity of tradition. While some historians begin with a gesture toward “traditional” forms like izibongo (Nguni: praises) or lifela (Sotho: narrative recitations) before moving briskly to allegedly “modern” forms of dramatic literature, others recognize that such forms can be properly evaluated only in the context of their ongoing performance and reception.23 The variety shows, or “concerts” as they have been called locally for a century, have included combinations of so-called tribal sketches, nationalist hymns, including Nkosi sikhalel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa, now the official national anthem), minstrel gags, and often a short play on a serious subject, such as slavery or urban migration. These concerts were initially identified by urbanizing Africans simply as ingoma ebusuku, or “night music,” in other words as music/dance that differed from rural ingoma in that it took place not only at night and in the city, but also for a pay-

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ing audience and thus resembled entertainment rather than ritual. Particular kinds of ingoma, such as indlamu or war-dancing, provoked disdain from African intellectuals who did not want to be associated with “savage” customs.24 “Tribal sketches” developed by Africans educated in mission schools had a more complex reception. Performed for white audiences, such as missionaries or the white patrons of the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg in 1936, sketches by well-known groups such as the Mthethwa Lucky Stars might be typecast as “naive” and a “welcome relief from the too conscious presentations of our own stage,” but even patronizing observers conceded that the sketches might “educate the white man.”25 Performed for black audiences as part of evenings that included serious drama like The ’Cruiter, folklorist John Matheus’s play about the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, sketches like Umthakathi (the wizard or trickster) became part of a complex negotiation of the modern uses of retraditionalization rather than a simple dichotomy between tradition and modernity.26 This syncretic repertoire fine-tuned for different audiences shaped the work of Gibson Kente in the 1960s and 1970s and Mbongeni Ngema, creator of the Broadway-bound and Broadwayinfluenced Sarafina (1986), and others from the 1980s to the present and, with them, the bulk of urban theatre. To those that imply that syncretic theatre is a black phenomenon, to be contrasted with the literary norms of “Western theatre,” we should point out that white theatre in South Africa has been far from generically pure. From the leading playwright of the immediately postcolonial (i.e., post-Union) period, Stephen Black, whose plays like Love and the Hyphen (1908/1928) combined social satire with broad comedy, to the popular comedy sketches of the 1960s, commercial English-language theatres favored light entertainment, occasionally spiced with satire, while the serious drama, from Red Rand to revivals of European modern dramatists from Karel CHapek to George Bernard Shaw was left to amateur reps and university stages.27 Afrikaans academic drama included nationalist texts like Uys Krige’s Magdalena Retief (widow of the martyred Piet; 1938) but commercial theatre favored farces or folksy drama like Ampie (1930, starring actor and later NTO founder André Huguenet) until state subsidy (1960s–1980s) supplanted Afrikaans commercial theatre with Afrikaans literary drama. Against the ethnic separatism of the PACs, workshopped testimonial plays from Call Me Woman (1977) to

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Born in the RSA (1986), which were collective dramatizations of crises in public and private life, developed at the Market Theatre under Barney Simon’s direction, can be seen as a reemergence of syncretic practices that once again prevail on South African stages, whether specialized, such as in the Market Theatre, or multiuse, such as in schools, unions, therapy groups and other venues. The well-made literary drama in English and Afrikaans, which appeared on nonprofit stages like the Johannesburg Repertory or the Kaapse Toneel in the 1930s and 1940s and dominated the stages of the subsidized PACS through the 1980s, can in turn be seen as an exception from the syncretic norm rather than instances of a prescriptive “Western” model. Although no single genre predominates, one could make a case for the durability of the musical, which has locally combined the expressive integration of music, dancing, and song associated with the American model (itself more indebted to African American influences than generally recognized) with hymns and songs in the vernacular and moral tales mediated by local and international traditions.28 Thus broadly conceived, the musical includes the jazz opera King Kong (1959), the township musicals of Gibson Kente, from Sikhalo (1965) through Too Late! (1977) to Sekunjalo (1985), and more recent imitators such as the upbeat Bloke (1994; adapted by writer Mothobi Mutloatse and director Walter Chakela from Bloke Modisane’s bleak memoir, Blame Me on History (1963)], and Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s critical history plays from The Fantastical History of a Useless Man (1976) through Sophiatown (1986) to Love, Crime and Johannesburg (1999), as well as the more loosely plotted “concerts” on display at community theatre festivals and school shows.29 The testimonial play, honed in the antiapartheid era from Survival (Workshop ’71) through the 1980s, also persists in the work, part therapy, part theatre, undertaken by TRC survivor support groups such as Khulumani! (Let Us Talk!) associated with NGOs like the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Meanwhile, the social issue play, developed against apartheid abuses, such as the school system targeted by the Bachaki Theatre Company’s Top Down (1988), but also in use in TfD across the world, continues in performances about currently pressing concerns, such as women and fundamentalist Islam in Purdah (1993), or xenophobia, such as Fong Kong (2000).30 Like the social issue play, the theatrical adaptation of nondramatic texts is not peculiarly South African, but it has offered a way of recovering texts

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whose historic value was masked because their authors were banned, imprisoned, or in exile under apartheid, and is exemplified by Can Themba’s story The Suit (1960), adapted and revived by writer Mutloatse, director Simon, and the Market Theatre cast (1993).

Language and Ethnicity The workshopped testimonial play was not only the distinctive genre of antiapartheid theatre. It was and still is a pragmatic response to the challenge of performing in English with multilingual casts. Although multilingual casts have been the rule since the early days of urbanization brought blacks from different ethnic groups together, the origins of the actors have not always been reflected in the languages of performance. While village-based performances, including those by migrant workers recounting their experiences, continue to take place in the language or local dialect of the region, urban blacks have performed in part in English since the 1920s, but for variable reasons. As part of an African elite who received a liberal education in mission schools shaped by an illiberal society, African theatre men from Dhlomo to Kente regarded English as a worldly language and thought little of Afrikaans. The playwright Dhlomo insisted on writing in English (1930s–1950s) not only to reach a broader audience but to highlight the national import (rather than ethnic Zulu value favored by the missionary presses) of his African history plays.31 The impresario Motsieloa (active 1920s–1950s) was more concerned to reach beyond the tiny literate minority to capture the larger market of urbanizing blacks; his concerts thus framed dramatic texts like The ’Cruiter with nationalist songs in Xhosa or Zulu, the most populous language, and variety gags in these languages as well as Sotho and street Afrikaans or tsotsitaal (gangster lingo). His disciple Kente (1960s–1990s) was likewise interested in reaching different audiences on tour across the country by staging musicals with basic dialogue in English and songs in the dominant language of the region, whether his native Xhosa in the Eastern Cape or Tswana in the area bordering Botswana. Literary drama in the former ruling languages of English and Afrikaans tended to stick to one language or the other, and school curricula in the apartheid era reinforced this separation with a strict ideology of purity, whether “standard English” or “suiver (pure) Afrikaans.”

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Although this obsession with linguistic purity may have helped to establish Afrikaans as a high-status language of literature, government, and science, local satire in the past and present has treated it as an object of ridicule, from Black’s Love and the Hyphen (1908), which mocked the linguistic pretensions of colonial upstarts, to the cabaret of Pieter-Dirk Uys, whose bilingual personas have mimicked the accents of South Africans from apartheid politicians to postapartheid leaders, via the Mrs. Malaprops, Grundies, and, his alter ego, Mrs. Evita Bezuidenhout, of the suburbs.32 Regional theatres have also demonstrated the dramatic and everyday resilience of local dialects, such as the Indian English of plays like Ronnie Govender’s The Lahnee’s Pleasure (1972), or the Cape Afrikaans of plays like Kanna, Hy Kô Hystoe (Kanna’s Coming Home; 1965) by Adam Small, who has identified himself on different occasions as a brown or a black Afrikaans-speaker, and District Six — The Musical by Taliep Pieterson and Dawid Kramer (1988).33 Afrikaans, once the vehicle of Nationalist ideologies of racial purity, has returned to its hybrid roots, as the Eastern and indigenous influences on the language once represented as the legitimate Western heir of Dutch have been officially acknowledged and playfully staged.34 While praises, oral histories, and stories in South Africa’s other official languages — from the dominant Zulu (more than nine million speakers out of a population of forty-two million) to the minority Venda (more closely related to Shona in neighboring Zimbabwe than to other South African languages) — continue to be composed, the publication of drama in these languages has not kept pace. While the apartheid government used the fiction of ethnic purity to justify separate housing, schools, and “homelands” for Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Venda, and others, regardless of the actual bilingualism of many South Africans, and attempted to sustain this fiction by encouraging cultural production (especially school texts and radio broadcasts) in the appropriate language, the postapartheid government has not, despite proclamations on language democracy, provided resources to supplement the work of community radios, small presses, and literary prizes.35 While black dramatists, from the populist Kente to the more overtly political Fatima Dike, Matsamela Manaka, or Maishe Maponya, have always included songs and jokes in the vernacular to supplement English dialogue and often to contradict and thus critique what is said in English, this strategy has also influenced work attributed to white authors or directors working with black actors, from Simon’s Market workshops

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to Junction Avenue Theatre to Sue Pam-Grant’s Curl Up and Dye (1991), in which a young black client speaks in Zulu to challenge the expertise of the white hair salon owner.36 But drama written wholly or primarily in a single indigenous language is rare, no doubt because such linguistic exclusiveness would reduce the already shrinking theatre audience. While many South African intellectuals such as Zakes Mda have joined Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o in advocating the development of indigenous languages, and their arguments certainly carry weight in the field of education (where the historical rise of Afrikaans from a slave dialect to the language of law shows that higher status functions can, in principle, be achieved for other languages), dramatic writing, including the work of Mda himself, such as the stage adaptation of his novel Ways of Dying (1999), continues to follow the established trend: essential plot in English, some dialogue and songs in several vernaculars.37 This deployment of the multiple languages on stage offers a more realistic representation of actual language use by urban and urbanizing South Africans than the purist promotion of a single language, which is more often associated with an agenda of ethnic dominance, whether English in the neocolonial era, Afrikaans under apartheid, or Zulu in certain circles at the present time.

Coda It is too soon to reach any conclusions about the revaluation of the South African past from the perspective of a fluid and incompletely postapartheid present, and impossible to make any convincing prognoses for the future, but the history of South African theatre demonstrates the greater resilience not of discretely defined national identities, genres, or languages, but rather of diverse, syncretic practices open to multiple influences from home and abroad. The nation-state remains the most durable form of political system, despite challenges at the regional and international level, and retains sufficient heuristic value in the discussion of culture to encourage us to continue referring, for instance, to “South African theatre.” As this chapter has shown, however, the content of this category and the meaning of each of its terms vary across time and space and are subject, in changing institutions of theatre and study, to syncretic assembly and reassembly. As I suggested at the outset, this project presents a challenge not only for theatre makers and investigators in South Africa, but for their counterparts abroad,

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since the South African case raises questions that call for the revaluation in this transnational era of national theatre histories the world over. notes 1. Barney Simon, Market Theatre Policy Statement (n.d.); qtd. in David Graver and Loren Kruger, “South Africa’s National Theatre: the Market or the Street?” New Theatre Quarterly, no. 19 (1989): 273. 2. For a summary of the characteristics attributed to the ideal national theatre, especially by Central European nationalist intellectuals against the hegemony of court cultures, see [Loren Kruger] “National Theatre: Europe,” in Dennis Kennedy, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia for Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 919–22. 3. On the reification of national theatre movements, see S. E. Wilmer, “Reifying Imagined Communities: Nationalism, Post-Colonialism and Theatre Historiography,” Nordic Theatre Studies 12 (1999): 94–103. 4. Given the current emphasis on transnationalism, it is useful to remember the status enjoyed a generation ago by nation-state theories based on nineteenth-century notions of ethnic homogeneity and territorial integrity promulgated by Johann von Herder and Ernst Renan. For the orthodox view, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); for a range of cultural critiques, see the essays in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1993). 5. The first group includes F. C. L Bosman, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, vol. 1, 1652–1855 (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1928), and vol. 2, 1855–1916 (Pretoria: van Schaik, 1963), which focuses on the emergence of Afrikaner Nationalist drama; his updated account of Afrikaner theatre, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, 1800–1963 (Pretoria: van Schaik, 1969); and Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 1780–1930 (Cape Town: Vlaeberg, 1994), which focuses mostly on colonial theatre in Cape Town. Counterhegemonic studies begin with the pioneering work of David Coplan, In Township Tonight! South African Black City Music and Theatre (London: Longman, 1985), Ian Steadman’s unpublished but influential “Drama and Social Consciousness: Black Theatre on the Witwatersrand to 1984” (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1985); and Robert Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa (London: Zed Books, 1985); and include Martin Orkin, Drama and the South African State (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991). 6. Loren Kruger, The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants, and Publics since 1910 (London: Routledge, 1999) includes revues, pageants, and unpublished sketches in a study otherwise focused on the performance of dramatic texts. Research outside the narrow confines of “theatre studies” highlights the variety of performance forms in South Africa and the critical importance of tracking theatre within this field of forces; see Elizabeth Gunner, ed., Politics and Performance: Theatre,

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Poetry, and Song in Southern Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994); Landeg White and Leroy Vail, Power and the Praise Poem: South African Voices in History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991); Isabel Hofmeyr, “We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told”: Oral Historical Narratives in a South African Chiefdom(Portsmouth, NH: Heineman, 1993); and special issues of journals, such as the Journal of Southern African Studies 16 (1990); Theatre Journal 49, no. 1 (1997); and Theatre Research International 27, no. 3 (2002). 7. On the problem of the contemporary as a projection of the critic’s subjectively extended present, see Loren Kruger, “History Plays (in) Britain: Dramas, Nations, and Inventing the Present,” in Peter Holland and W. B. Worthen, eds., Redefining British Theater History, vol. 1, Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 151–76. 8. Wilhelm Bleek et al., eds. and trans., Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: G. Allen, 1911). 9. John Omer-Cooper’s History of Southern Africa, 4th ed. (London: James Currey, 1994), provides a lucid account, especially of the precolonial, colonial, and early apartheid periods; Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) focuses on the modernization of South Africa and the economic and social contradictions of apartheid; Heather Deegan’s Politics of the New South Africa (London: Longman, 2001) includes a historical account of the fall of apartheid. 10. J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 11. A. C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors (Cape Town: Lovedale, 1980) first appeared in Xhosa as Ingqumbo yeminyanya (Cape Town: Lovedale, 1946). Mda, The Heart of Redness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) draws on Peiries’s The Dead Will Arise. Dhlomo’s The Girl Who Killed to Save was published by Lovedale (a missionary press), but his subsequent plays were not, in large part because they were more critical of missionaries and colonization. Several essays by Dhlomo were reprinted in English in Africa in 1971, but only after the appearance of H. I. E. Dhlomo Collected Works, ed. Nick Visser and Tim Couzens (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985), and Couzens’s The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985) did Dhlomo gain the stature of “father of black theatre.” For Dike’s “Sacrifice of Kreli,” see Stephen Gray, ed., Theatre One (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1978). 12. On the controversial history of Zuluness, see Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). The interpretation of the Voortrekker Centenary and other displays of Afrikaner identity is no less controversial. Anna Neethling Pohl, director of the theatrical component of the celebrations, and her husband, a member of the fascist New Order, traveled to Nuremberg and other Nazi rallies for inspiration. See Neethling-Pohl papers, State Archive, Pretoria, and Albert

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Grundlingh and Hilary Sapire, “From Feverish Festival to Repetitive Ritual? The Changing Fortunes of Great Trek Mythology from 1938–1988,” South African Historical Journal 21 (1989): 19–37. Critical Afrikaner Isabel Hofmeyr’s work on Gustav Preller, Afrikaner populist historian and scriptwriter for events from the South African Pageant of 1910 to Bou van ‘n Nasie (They Built a Nation), the film, modeled on D. W. Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation, that was the finale of the Voortrekker Centenary, provides compelling evidence for this home-grown fascism in “Popularizing History: the Case of Gustav Preller,” Journal of African History 29 (1988): 521–35. By contrast, Temple Hauptfleisch’s categorization in his textbook Theatre and Society in South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured Mirror (Pretoria: van Schaik, 1997) of “Voortrekker ceremonies” as “indigenous, Western, communal” (49) and his unreflected praise for the “immense energy and . . . flair” (8) of Afrikaner activists like Preller — without mentioning their contribution to the racial ideology of Afrikaner Nationalism — commits irresponsible history by omission. This erasure of the ideological baggage of key terms highlights the limited value of apparently neutral semiotic categories in the analysis of historical and present conflicts over the meaning and practice of categories. 13. Bantu Peoples Theatre [later ANT], Drama Festival Program, July 25–27, 1940, p. 10; Johannesburg Public Library, Strange Theatre Collection (hereafter: JPL/STC). For analysis of this group and its contemporaries, including Dhlomo, see Kruger, Drama of South Africa, pp. 55–76; and the detailed study of the period in Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), pp. 113–228. 14. For positive accounts of the NTO, see the autobiography of one of the founders, Leontine Sagan, Lights and Shadows: The Autobiography of Leontine Sagan (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996); and Rinie Stead, “The National Theatre Organization,” in Temple Hauptfleisch, ed., The Breytie Book (Randburg: Limelight, 1983) (“Breytie” was P. B. Breytenbach, founding manager). For critical remarks, see Loren Kruger, introduction to Sagan, Lights and Shadows, pp. xxxiii–xxxvii. For the Nationalist government’s promotion of the PACs as vehicles of “Western” aspirations, see Department of Information, Performing Arts in South Africa: Cultural Aspirations of a Young Nation (Pretoria: Government Publications, 1969); for a critical history of the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal, see Carol Steinberg, “Towards an Arts Council for South Africa,” South African Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (1993): 8–40. 15. In addition to the accounts of antiapartheid theatre by Kavanagh, Coplan, Steadman, Orkin, and Kruger, two books on the Market Theatre reinforce its preeminence: Pat Schwartz’s The Best of Company (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1988) is a detailed insider’s account; Anne Fuchs, Playing the Market: The Market Theatre, Johannesburg: 1976–86 (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990) has useful insights but is rather tendentious.

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16. Malcolm Purkey and Carol Steinberg begin “South African Theater in Crisis” (Theater 25, no. 3 [1995]: 24–38) with Kente and Fugard but omit two earlier decades of concert variety which influenced not only Kente but also Fugard collaborators John Kani and Winston Ntshona; Zakes Mda, in “Theater and Reconciliation in South Africa,” in the same issue, claims that “Fugard introduced political theater in the Western mode to South Africa” (41) despite the evidence of political theatre not only by little-known leftist groups like the ANT but also by white liberal members of more visible groups like the Johannesburg Repertory and the Reading Group, which produced occasional political plays, such as Lewis Sowden’s Red Rand (1937) about the 1922 miners’ strike (Kruger, Drama of South Africa, pp. 48–55). For Motsieloa’s place in concert variety, see Christopher Ballantine, Marabi Nights (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1993), and in the development of African music, see Veit Erlmann, African Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); for Motsieloa’s influence on Kente, Kani, and, more recently, Mbongeni Ngema, see Kruger, Drama of South Africa, chapters 2, 6, and 7. 17. See Mark Gevisser’s interview with John Ledwaba, “Writing for the Man in the Street,” Theater 25, no. 3 (1995): 19–23, and Mda, “Theatre and Reconciliation in South Africa,” Theater 25, no. 3 (1995): 38–45. For TfD in South Africa, especially in the controversial areas of health and AIDS education and gender socialization, see Mda, “When People Play People in PostApartheid South Africa” (interview with Denis Salter), Brecht Yearbook 22 (1997): 283–303; Gay Morris, “Reconsidering Theatre Making in South Africa: A Study of Theatre in Education in Cape Schools,” Theatre Research International 27, no. 3 (2002): 289–305; and Stephanie Marlin-Curiel, “Long Road to Healing: From the TRC to TfD,” Theatre Research International 27, no. 3 (2002): 275–88. For more recent dramatizations of migration and xenophobia, see Mda, “South African Theatre in an Era of Reconciliation,” in Frances Harding, ed., The Performance Arts in Africa (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 279–89. 18. The essays in Duncan Brown, ed., Oral Literature and Performance in South Africa (London: James Currey, 1999), and Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl Michael, eds., Senses of Culture: South African Cultural Studies (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2000), suggest the range of performance studies in South Africa. Case studies of minority cultures such as Kala Pani, Caste and Colour in South Africa (on South Africans of Indian descent) and Zimitri Erasmus, ed., Coloured by History, Shaped by Place (on South Africans of mixed descent), in the series Social Identities South Africa (Cape Town: Kwela: 2000), open up new avenues of historical research blocked by antiapartheid as well as apartheid discourse. 19. For analysis of purportedly educational melodramas, such as Soul City (1994–1999), see Loren Kruger, “Theater for Development and TV Nation: Educational Soap Opera in South Africa,” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 4 (1999): 105–26.

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20. Loren Kruger, “Introduction: Scarcity, Conspicuous Consumption and Performance in South Africa,” Theatre Research International 27, no. 3 (2002): 232–42. For work that links theatre research to performance in other institutions and media, from comics, film, and television to postapartheid takes on “traditional” performance, see Loren Kruger and Patricia Watson Shariff, “‘Shoo — This Book Makes Me to Think!’: Education, Entertainment, and ‘Life-Skills Comics’ in South Africa,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (2001): 475–513; Oren Kaplan, “Art Worlds: The Performances of Samson Mudzunga,” Lesley Marx, “Black and Blue in the City of Gold,” and Miki Flockemann, “Watching Soap Opera,” in Nuttall and Michael, Senses of Culture, pp. 85–106, 127–40, 141–54; and Arnold Shepperson and Keyan Tomaselli, “Culture, Media, and the Intellectual Climate: Apartheid and Beyond,” and Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, “Nation Building, Social Identity and Television in a Changing Landscape,” in Robert Kriger and Abebe Zegaye, eds., Culture in the New South Africa (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001), pp. 41–64, 117–38. 21. The most visible proponent of the expanded view of cultural performance is Richard Schechner, whose chart of “magnitudes of performance,” in Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 252–55, grants formal theatre few slots on a grid of cultural performances. In the South African context, Schechner’s insight is useful only if it is extended beyond an ahistorical outline of “categories of performance” (Hauptfleisch, Theatre and Society in South Africa, 46–60) to the historical analysis of the dynamic interaction of multiple performance forms, cultural institutions, and the apparatus of power, as pioneered by Coplan’s contextualized account of urban black theatre and music in In Township Tonight! 22. Christopher Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and PostColonial Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 5, 15. 23. While apartheid-era anthropologists, especially those in government employ, reinforced the notion that African ritual, oral, and ethnically specific performance forms were outside history, critical ethnographers and historians, including Brown, Coplan, Gunner, Hofmeyr, Hamilton, Peterson, White, Vail, and others, have demonstrated the adaptation of precolonial forms to modern conditions such as praise poems for Mandela or oral histories of Shaka performed at the current Shaka Day celebrations. Because this research demonstrates the deep impact of these practices on modern African dramatic literature since at least Dhlomo, theatre histories can no longer merely nod to “traditional” forms (e.g., Hauptfleisch, Theatre and Society in South Africa, 33–34) before moving on to “modern” theatre. 24. For this debate and its impact on tensions between tradition and modernity in Zulu culture, see Shula Marks, “Patriotism, Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness,” in Leroy Vail, ed., The

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Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 25. The white observer was T. C. Lloyd, “The Bantu Tread the Footlights,” South African Opinion, March 6, 1935, pp. 3–5; see also Kruger, Drama of South Africa, pp. 31–34. 26. Loren Kruger, “Acting Africa,” in Harding, Performance Arts in Africa, pp. 69–77. 27. Stephen Black, Three Plays, ed. Stephen Gray (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1983). 28. For the African American influence on the American musical, see Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of AfricanAmericans in the Performing Arts (New York: Da Capo, 1967). The history of the South African musical has yet to be written, but Andrew Horn’s dismissal of its characteristic mix of music and melodrama as reactionary, in “Ideology and Melodramatic Vision in Black South Africa,” English in Africa 12, no. 1 (1985): 1–10, has been partly answered by Kavanagh’s analysis of the complex conservatism of entrepreneurs like Kente, in Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, pp. 113–44. 29. See Martin Orkin, ed., At the Junction: Four Plays by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995). 30. Ismael Mahomed, Purdah, in David Graver, ed., Drama for a New South Africa: Seven Plays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Richard Manamela’s Fong Kong has not appeared in print, but it was performed at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and at the Market Theatre in 2000, and at the United Nations Conference on Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, 2001; see Mda, “South African Theatre in an Era of Reconciliation,” pp. 283–87. 31. Dhlomo, “Drama and the African” (1936), in Literary Criticism and Theory of H. I. E. Dhlomo, special issue of English in Africa 4, no. 2 (1977): 3–11. 32. Pieter-Dirk Uys, Funigalore: Evita’s Real-Life Adventures in Wonderland (London: Penguin, 1995). The title puns on “Fanagalo,” a pidgin used by apartheid-era mine foremen to address black workers. 33. Govender, The Lahnee’s Pleasure (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1977); Small, Kanna, Hy Kô Hystoe (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1965). On varieties of South African English, see Rajend Mesthrie, ed., Language and Social History: Studies in South African Sociolinguistics (Cape Town: David Philip, 1995). 34. The scholarly recovery of Afrikaans’s hybrid inheritance began with Adam Small’s “voice in the wilderness” in Die eerste Steen (Cape Town: Haum, 1961) at home and Vernon February’s Mind Your Colour (London: RKP, 1981) in exile. It exploded in the 1980s with debates among white and black Afrikaans writers in Skryf en Gemeenskap (Cape Town: Haum Literêr, 1985) and Achmat Davids’s

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demonstration that the first Afrikaans texts were not Afrikaner patriot papers but Muslim study guides for a slave population who spoke a local Dutch influenced by Melayu, the trading language of the Indies, as well as indigenous KhoiSan languages, in “The Contribution of the Slaves to the Generation of Afrikaans,” in Vernon February, ed., Taal en Identiteit (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1994). Theatre work among Afrikaans speakers identifying themselves as brown or black began earlier, but the comedy acts that were hidden in townships under apartheid are now the stuff of stars like Mark Lottering and shows at local casinos. 35. On developing higher-status functions (law, science, education) for South African’s major languages of Zulu and Xhosa (in the Nguni group) and Sotho and Tswana (in the Sotho group), see Neville Alexander, comp., Final Report of the Language Task Action Group (Pretoria: Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, 1996). Most publishers of vernacular texts do so mostly for the educational market; a rare exception is Kwela Press, which brings out fiction in indigenous languages as well as in English. 36. See Fatima Dike, The First South African (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1977), and Dike, “So What’s New?” in Kathy Perkins, ed., Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays (New York: Routledge, 1999); Maishe Maponya, Doing Plays for a Change (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995), Matsamela Manaka, Beyond the Echoes of Soweto: Five Plays (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997); Sue Pam-Grant, “Curl Up and Dye,” in Stephen Gray, ed., South Africa Plays (London: Nick Hern, 1993). 37. Ng˜ug˜ı’s best-known plea for the treatment of indigenous languages as national languages is Decolonising the Mind (London: James Currey, 1986); he reiterated the argument in “Africa and Its Interpreters” (English Teachers Connect: Conference on Local Diversity and Global Connections, Witwatersrand University) Johannesburg Mail and Guardian, July 18, 1997; retrieved 30 July 1997 at web.sn.apc.org/wmail/issues/970718/NEWS24.html. Although Ng˜ug˜ı argues eloquently for developing indigenous languages to match English, neither essay addresses the problem, which exists in Ng˜ug˜ı’s native Kenya as in South Africa, of the predatory ambitions of dominant indigenous languages. Mda, “South African Theatre in an Era of Reconciliation,” p. 289, mentions the rarity of minority language plays like Obed Baloyi’s Ga-Mchangani (Among the Shangaans — prejudicial term for Tsonga people — 1998) only to translate the xiTsonga title of Baloyi’s drama about anti-Tsonga prejudice into the majority isiNguni KaMshangana without apparently noticing the irony of this linguistic appropriation.

Contributors Stuart A. Day is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published articles on the work of Sabina Berman, Vicente Leñero, and Jesusa Rodríguez, among others. Staging Politics in Mexico: The Road to Neoliberalism, his most recent study, is forthcoming. Alan Filewod is professor of drama in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario. He has published widely on Canadian theatre history, postcolonialism, and political theatre practice. His books include Performing “Canada”: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, Workers’ Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970 with David Watt, and Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada, as well as several edited volumes of Canadian drama. Erika Fischer-Lichte is professor of theatre research at the Free University of Berlin and a former president of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT). She has published twenty books and more than one hundred essays, among them The Semiotics of Theatre, The Show and the Gaze of Theatre, and History of European Drama and Theatre. Loren Kruger is the author of The National Stage, The Drama of South Africa, and Post-Imperial Brecht and editor of special issues on South Africa for Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International. Her articles on South African performance and related topics have appeared in numerous journals. She teaches at the University of Chicago. Bruce McConachie is the director of graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a past president of the American Society for Theatre Research. His major publications include Interpreting the Theatrical Past, with Thomas Postlewait; Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870; American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962; and several recent essays on cognitive studies and performance. Frank Peeters is professor and head of department at the Associatie Universiteit and Hogescholen Antwerpen, where he teaches theatre 265

266 contributors

history and historiography. Since 1994 he has been a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) and counselor to the minister of culture for the Flemish theatre. He is the author of Jan Oscar de Gruyter en Het Vlaamse Volkstoneel 1920–1924, coeditor of Bij Open Doek: Liber Amicorum Carlos Tindemans, and Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden, and coauthor of Van De Dronkaerd tot Het Kouwe Kind: 150 jaar Antwerpse theatergeschiedenis. He wrote the section on nineteenth-century Flemish theatre and drama in Hoofdstukken uit geschiedenis van de Vlaamse negentiende eeuw and has published numerous contributions on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch theatre and theatre historiography. Barbara Pushi´c is assistant professor of theatre history at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television, University of Ljubljana. Her research fields include theatre in Slovenia (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), history of national theatres in Europe, cultural transfers, and theoretical issues of theatre historiography. She is the author of Med prevratnistvom in apologijo—nacionalna gledalishc ha skozi cas (Between Revolution and Apology—National Theatre through Time) and coauthor of a monograph about the Slovenian director Mile Korun. She was a coeditor of the publication O nevzvis henem v gledalishchu (On Nonelevated Theatre). Freddie Rokem is dean of the Faculty of the Arts and professor of theatre studies at Tel Aviv University. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and chapters in books on European and Israeli theatre. His most recent book, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, received the ATHE Prize for best book in theatre studies for 2001, as well as the CHOICE distinction for outstanding academic work that same year. His next book is Strindberg’s Secret Codes. He is associate editor of Theatre Research International, the Theatre Journal, and of Assaph: Studies in the Theatre. He also is a translator, a dramaturg, a member of the executive committee of IFTR/FITR, as well as a permanent visiting professor at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Willmar Sauter, professor of theatre studies at Stockholm University, has published studies on reception processes, in Teaterögon and Braaavo! He has also written on Swedish theatre history, in Theater als Widerstand. His interest in the theories of the theatrical event is summarized in his books on performance analysis, Understanding Theatre

contributors 267

and The Theatrical Event. In addition, he has edited a number of books and journals. He was the president of IFTR/FIRT from 1991 to 1995, and between 1996 and 2002 he was the dean of the Faculty of the Humanities at Stockholm University. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and FRAC Distinguished Scholar at Tufts University; his work has been honored with grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Society for Theatre Research. His many books include National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe 1746– 1900; The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance, winner of the Barnard Hewitt Award of ASTR in 1997; and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, given the George Jean Nathan Award for the best theatre book of 2000. He is currently editing and translating the complete plays of Chekhov. Rakesh H. Solomon teaches at Indiana University and has published articles on Indian theatre and on contemporary British and American theatre in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes. He has other articles forthcoming in Literary Encyclopedia and Literary Dictionary, Theatre International: Essays on the Theory and Praxis of World Theatre, Popular Theatres of South and Southeast Asia, and The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. He is the author of the forthcoming book Albee in Performance: The Playwright as Director and the past editor of South Asian Review. He is currently completing Culture, Politics, and Performance in Colonial India, 1753–1947. S. E. Wilmer is a senior lecturer in drama at Trinity College in Dublin. He is the author of Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities, edited Beckett in Dublin and Portraits of Courage: Plays by Finnish Women, and coedited Theatre Worlds in Motion: Structures, Politics and Developments in the Countries of Western Europe and Theatre, History and National Identities. Evan Darwin Winet teaches at Macalester College. He has published articles in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Symposium VI (Southeastern Theatre Conference, 1997). He is currently working on a sourcebook on postcolonial Indonesian theatre (incorporating historical analysis with excerpts of plays and criticism) and translating several plays for a four-volume anthology of modern Indonesian drama.

268 contributors

Yael Zarhy-Levo teaches in the department of poetics and comparative literature at Tel Aviv University. Her main areas of research are theatre history, contemporary British theatre, processes of canonization, and critical dynamics. Her publications include The Theatrical Critic As Cultural Agent: Constructing Pinter, Orton, and Stoppard as Absurdist Playwrights and articles in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter and various scholarly journals. She is currently working on a book on the role of mediation in the field of theatre, focusing on the postwar era in Britain.

index

Abbey Theatre, 23, 25 Adolf Frederick of Sweden, 34 Aldridge, Ira, 137–39 Alekar, Satish, 214 Alexander I of Russia, 52 Almog, Oz: The Sabra, 183 Aloni, Nissim: Most Cruel, the King, 184–90 Alterman, Nathan, 179 Alzate, Gastón A.: cabarets, 170; Mexican performance artist, 167; Teatro de Caberet: Imaginarios Dissidentes (Cabaret Theatre: Dissident Imaginaries), 156 The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present, 128 American theatre historians, 131. See also Moody, Richard, and Wilson, Garff B. Anderson, Benedict, 118, 149, 203 Andreev, Leonid, 48 Anicet-Bourgeois, A., 100 Appleby, Joyce: Telling the Truth about History, 129–30, 147 Arapov, P., 53 Argudín, Yolanda: Historia del teatro en México: desde los rituales prehispánicos hasta el arte dramático nuestros días (The History of Theatre in Mexico: From Pre-Hispanic Rituals to Present-Day Dramatic Art), 155 Argülles, Hugo, 168, 169 Aron, P.: La mémoire en jeu. Une histoire du théâtre de langue française en Belgique, 98 Ashman, A.: The Wanderer’s Song, 181. See also He Walked through the Fields

auteur, 30, 42 autochthonous performance traditions, 23, 133 avant-garde theatre, 1–2. See also Foucault, Michel Azrati, Yigal, 186–88 Babiuk, Andrii, 106. See also Irchan, Myroslav Bakhrushin, A. A., 53 Ball, John, 116 Banda, Víctor Hugo Rascón: La Malinche, 164, 171 Bank, Rosemarie, 144–45. See also Performing America Baudrillard, Jean: “stage of the body,” 2. See also avant-garde theatre Bavaria, 11 Beard, Charles and Mary, 131 Beckett, Samuel, 19 Belgium, 88–105 Benegal, Som: A Panorama of Theatre in India, 213–16 Benson, Eugene: The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, 109, 116, 119, 121 Bergman, Gösta M., 42 Bergman, Ingrid, 42 Berman, Sabina, 160; El bigote (The Moustache), 165–66; Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Villa and a Naked Woman), 165–66; La grieta (The Crack), 165–66; Krisis (Crisis), 165–66; El suplicio del placer (The Agony of Ecstacy), 165–66 Bernhardt, Sarah, 37 Besser, Gedalia, 193 269

Beverly, John: The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, 153–54 Bhabha, Homi K., 118, 203 Bharata: Natyasastra (Natya Veda), 201 Bharatavarsa, 203–04 “The Birth of Peace,” 34 Bixler, Jaqueline E., 159; Sediciosas seducciones: Sexo, poder y palabras en el teatro de Sabina Berman (Seditious Seductions: Sex, Power and Words in the Theatre of Sabina Berman), 165–66. See also Berman, Sabina Black, Stephen: Love and the Hyphen, 253, 256 Boleslavsky, Richard, 61, 234 Bollywood, 220 Boris Godunov, 53 Bouchardy, J., 100 Bouciault, Dion, 19, 24 Boudewijn I of Belgium, 102 Braun, Kazimierz, 25 Bremen, Adam von, 33 Brockett, Oscar, 3, 5, 130–31 Brook, Peter, 214 Buisseret, Auguste, 96 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 48 Burgess, Ronald D.: The New Dramatists of Mexico: 1967–1985, 156 Calderón, Pedro, 11 The Cambridge History of American Theatre, 127–28 Cameri Theatre, 180, 190 Canada, 106–26 Canadian Theatre Review, 115. See also Rubin, Don Cankar, Ivan: Hlapci, 74 Canning, Charlotte, 140, 149. See also Performing America Carbillado, Emilio, 168, 169 Carter, Huntly, 49

Catherine the Great of Russia, 12, 56–57 Charles XII of Sweden, 34 Charlesworth, Hector, 111 Chattopadhyay, Mohit, 214 Chekhov, Anton: The Cherry Orchard, 51, 61, 136; The Seagull, 58; Uncle Vanya, 60 Chekhov, Michael, 48, 61 Chin, Frank, 143. See also Lee, Josephine Christina, Queen of Sweden, 34 Claeys, Prosper: Histoire du théâtre de Gand, 99 Cold War, 129–43 commercial theatre, 253–54 Communism, 69 Congreve, William, 19 Conolly, L. W.: The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, 109, 116, 119, 121 Coopman, H.: Het Vlaamsch toonel: Inzonderheid in de XIXe eeuw, 98 Corneille, Pierre, 11 Curzon, Sarah Anne, 112 Dahlgren, Fredrik August, 39 Das Gupta, Hemendra Nath: The Indian Stage, 211–12 Dayan, Asi: He Walked through the Fields, 182; Life after Agfa, 182; Mr. Baum, 182 Daykarkhanova, Tamara, 61 Decourcelle, P., 100 Denison, Merrill, 114 Dennery, A., 100 Deronde, Theodor: Het tooneelleven in Vlaanderen door de eeuwen heen, 98 Dike, Fatima: The Sacrifice of Kreli, 248 Disa, 34, 38 Dmitrevsky, Ivan, 57 Dramatic Lexicon, 54

index 271

Drizen, N. V., 53 Du Bois, W. E. B., 141–42 Ducange, V., 100 Dumur, G.: The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, 98; Histoire des spectacles, 98 Edda, 32 Effendi, Rustam: Besbarsi, 226–27, 231–33, 239–40 Efros, N., 53–54 Eisenstein, S. M., 58 Elagin, Jurij, 49 Elam, Harry, 145. See also Performing America Engels, Friedrich, 55 Enquist, P. O.: The Night of the Tribades, 38 Erdman, Nikolay, 48 Erenstein, Robert, 19–20, 99, 100 Erik XIV, 38 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 144 Eskilstuna, Sweden: artifacts from Bronze Age, 30–33 Esquivel, Antonio Magañ: Breve historia del teatro mexicano (Brief History of Mexican Theatre), 155; Medio siglo de teatro mexicano: 1900–1961 (A Half-Century of Mexican Theatre: 1900–1961), 155 Euripides, 11 eventness of theatre, 43, 45n.1 Evreinov, Nikolai, 49 Ezhegodniki Imperatorskikh Teatrov (Yearbooks of the Imperial Theatres), 53 factography, 7 Fanon, Frantz: national liberation, 148 Farquhar, George, 19 Fastnachtspiele, 11 Fay brothers, 23

Figes, Orlando, 50 Finkielkraut, Alain: The Defeat of the Mind, 142 FitzSimon, Christopher: Irish Theatre, 19 Forsell, Lars: Christina, 38 Foster, David William: Mexican Literature: A History, 158 Foster, Stephen, 135 Foucault, Michel: theatrum philosophicum, 2, 146. See also avant-garde Fox, Vincente, 160, 162, 164 Frederick the Great, 10, 34 Fredriksson, Gustaf, 41 Friedman, Shraga, 186 Frishman, Donald H.: El teatro popular en México (Popular Theatre in Mexico), 168 Fugard, Athol: The Blood Knot, 249 Fülöp-Müller, René, 49 Gainor, J. Ellen, 139, 141. See also Performing America Galvàn, Felipe, 68, 159 Gamzu, Chaim, 180, 188 Garbo, Greta, 42 Gargi, Balwant: Theatre in India, 213–14 Garro, Elena, 169 Gellner, Ernest, 50 Glasnost, 47 Gnedich, P. P., 53 Goethe, Johann W. von, 11, 101 Goldoni, Carlo, 11 Goldsmith, Oliver, 19 Gorbachev, M., 47 Gorchakov, Nikolai, 49 Gourfinkel, Nina, 49 Gozzi, Carlo, 11 Grafenauer, Bogo, 69 Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, 57 Gregory, Lady, 23, 25 Grotowski, Jerzy, 48

272 index

Gupta, Chandra Bhan: The Indian Theatre, 209–12 Gustav III of Sweden, 34–35; Gustav Vasa, 38 Habima Theatre, 174, 186, 188–90, 194; as The Biblical Studio, 184 Habsburg monarchy, 65 Haggard, H. Rider: King Solomons’ Mines, 244 Haifa Municipal Theatre, 180–81, 186–87, 189, 190, 193 Hamburg Dramaturgy, 11 Handelsaltz, Michael, 197 Hardt, Michael, 123 He Walked through the Fields, 177–85, 188, 197; Beer-Sheva Municipal Theatre, 180, 183; Gertz, Nurith, 181–82; Inbar, Gadi, 183; Milo, Josef, 180–81; Shamir, Moshe, 177–79, 183 Hebel, 101 Hecke, A. T.: Considérations sur le théâtre en Belgique, 97 Hecke, Theodor Van, 92, 97 Hefer, Chaim, 179 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 141, 230 Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation (Holy Roman Empire), 10 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 20, 131–34, 141, 145–46 Hernàndez, Luisa Josefina, 169 Highway, Tomson, 120 Hopenhayn, Martín, 154 Horniman, Annie, 23 Horrwitz, Ernest Philip: A Brief Survey of the Sanskrit Drama, 208 Hunt, Lynn: Telling the Truth about History, 129–30, 147 Ibargengüoitia, Jorge, 169 Ibsen, Henrik: Peer Gynt, 26, 136

Impe, A. Van: Over toneel: Vlaamse kroniek van het konediantendom, 98 India, 201–23 Indonesia, 224–43 International Federation for Theatre Research, 74 Intimate Theatre, 41 Irchan, Myroslav, 106, 120–22 Irish Celts, ix Israel and Israeli Drama, 174–200 Ivanov, Vladislav: Mnemozina, 48 Jacob, Margaret: Telling the Truth about History, 129–30, 147 Jain, Nemichandra: Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity, and Change, 213, 218–20 James, Simon: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention, ix Jancar, Drago, 66 Jilinsky, Andrius, 61 Joan of Arc, 26 Johnston, Denis, 119 Jones, William (Sir): Sacontalá, or, The Fatal Ring, an Indian Drama, 204 Jones, Willis Knapp, 156 Jordan, A. C.: The Wrath of the Ancestors, 248 Joyce, James, 19 Jur´ci´c, Josip: Tugomer, 74 Juste, Théodor, 93 Kalevala, 26 Kalidasa, 12; Abhijnanasakuntala, 204–05, 208. See also Jones, William Kallash, A. A., 53–54 Kamerny Theatre, 57 Kanhailal, H., 214 Karamzin, Ivan, 52 Karnad, Girish, 214

index 273

Kavanagh, Robert: Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, 250 Keith, Arthur Berriedale, 214, 219; History of Sanskrit Literature, 209; The Sanskrit Drama in Its Origin, Development, Theory and Practice, 208–09 Kindermann, Heinz, 17, 74, 82, 99 King, Bruce, 25 Komisarjevsky, Theodore, 61 Kotler, Oded, 186 Kotte, Andreas, 21 Krasner, David, 141–42, 145. See also Performing America Krige, Uys: Magdalena Retief, 253 Kurbas, Les, 60 Kushner, Tony: Angels in America, 148 Lacan, Jacques, 145–46, 238 Lagerbjelke, Gustaf, 42 Lamb, Ruth S.: Breve historia del teatro mexicano (Brief History of Mexican Theatre), 155 L’annuaire théâtral, 116 Lazarus, Neil, 148 Ledwaba, John: Jozi, Jozi, 251 Lee, Josephine, 143, 145. See also Performing America Leftist Russian Theatre groups, 56 Leñero, Vicente, 168 Lenin, Vladimir, 53 Lepage, Robert, 109 Lermontov, M. Yu., 58 Lescarbot, Marc: Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, 110 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 11, 36, 101 Lévi, Shimon: Le Théâtre Indien, 205–09, 214, 219, 197n3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 131 Levin, Hanoch, 190–96; Beheading, 192; The Child Dreams, 192; The

Great Whore of Babylon, 191; Hefetz, 191; The Labor of Life, 192; Mouth Open, 192; Murder, 192; The People That Walked in Darkness, 192; The Queen of the Bathtub, 191; Requiem, 192–93; Shitz, 191; The Torments of Job, 191; The Whore from Ohio, 192; Yaakobi and Leidenthal, 191; You and Me and the Next War, 190–91, 193 Levstik, Fran: Tugomer, 74 Levy, Shoef: The Israeli Theatre Canon: One Hundred and One Shows, 175 Liebrecht, H.: Histoire du théâtre français à Bruxelles, 98 Linhart, Anton Tomazh: ZHupanova Micka, 66, 74 Linné, Carl von, 37 Lion King, 122 Lion’s Den Theatre, 34 Loewen, J. F.: History of German Theatre, 11 Londre, Felicia: The History of North American Theatre, 22, 109, 127–28 Lopez, Tiffany Ann, 141–42, 145–46. See also Performing America Lotman, Jurij, 49 Lunacharsky, A. V., 53–54, 56 Lyotard, Jean François: “philosophical and political stage,” 2. See also avant-garde Magyar culture, 50 Mahabharata, 203, 221, 228 Mair, Charles, 112 Marble Palace, 39 Mardzhanishvili, Kote, 60 Market theatre, 244, 250; Born in the RSA, 244; Woza Albert, 244 Marshall, Herbert, 49 Marx, Karl, 55, 131, 140, 147–49 Mason, Jeffrey D., 139, 141. See also Performing America Massey, Vincent, 113–15, 120

274 index

Matheus, John: The ’Cruiter, 253 Mayakovsky, V. V., 57 McConachie, Bruce, 78 McDonagh, Martin: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, 19 Mda, Zakes, 257 Meininger Troupe, 37 Memorial, 47 Merseburg, Tietmar von, 33 Messenius, Johannes, 34, 37–38 Mexico, 153–73 Meyerhold, V. Ye., 56–59; The Forest, 56; Masquerade, 58 Michaels, Walter Benn, 76–77 Mijares, Enrique: Enfermos de esperanza (Sick of Waiting), 170; La realidad virtual del teatro mexicano (The Virtual Reality of Mexican Theatre), 156, 169–70 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 214 Modernist movements in theatre and drama, 48 Mohamad, Goenawan, 234–35 Mojica, Monique, 120 Molière, 101 Montépin, X de, 100 Monteyne, L: Het Vlaamsch toonel: Inzonderheid in de XIXe eeuw, 98 Moody, Richard: America Takes the Stage: Romanticism in American Drama and Theatre, 1750–1900, 131–37, 139, 141, 143, 147. See also American theatre historians Mora, Guiellermo Schmidhuber de la: El adventimiento del teatro mexicano: años de esperanza y curiosidad, 155–56 Moraga, Cherríe, 141, 145. See also Lopez, Tiffany Ann Morash, Christopher: A History of Irish Theatre: 1601–2000, 19 Moscow Art Theatre, 57, 59, 61 Moses, Daniel David, 120 Motsieloa’s Darktown Strutters, 251

Mozart, W. A., 12 Mthethwa Lucky Stars, 253 Musical theatre, 254–55 National Romantic Movement, 25 Negri, Antonio, 123 Nemirovich-Danchenko, V. I., 59, 61 Ngema, Mbongeni: Sarafina, 253 Nigro, Kirsten F., 156–58, 167; teatro gey (gay theatre), 167. See also Usigli, Rodolfo Nomland, John B.: Teatro mexicano contemporáneo: 1900–1950 (Contemporary Mexican Theatre, 1900–1950), 155 Nosov, Ivan, 53 Oberiu, 48 O’Casey, Sean, 19 O’Neill, Eugene, 136, 138 opera, 8–9 Orientalism, 203, 226 Orkin, Martin: Drama and the South African State, 250 Oro, Juan Bustillo: San Miguel de las Espinas (San Miguel of the Spines), 158–59 Ostrovsky, A. N., 50 Ottoman Empire, 19, 51 Ouspenskaya, Maria, 61 Oveido, José: The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, 153–54 The Oxford History of India, 202 Pam-Grant, Sue: Curl Up and Dye, 257 Pane, Sanusi, 231 Panikkar, Kavalam Narayana, 214 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 145. See also Performing America Pavlowa, Tatiana, 61 Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre, 128–49

index 275

Peter the Great, 50 Pfalz, 11 Pitch Black Follies, 251 Plant, Richard, 116 Plautus, 11 playing culture, 29, 32, 40, 44, 45n.1 Plekhanov, G. V., 54–55 Pogozhev, N. O., 53 Postlewait, Thomas, 44 Potvin, Charles, 90, 97 processes of exchange, 9 Pudovkin, V. I., 58 Pujangga Baru, 231–33 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 52 Pyat, F., 100 Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 136 Racine, le théâtre de, 2 Raffles, Thomas Stamford: History of Java, 229 Ramayana, 203, 228 randai, 226 Randel, Andreas, 39 Rangacharya, Adya: The Indian Theatre, 213, 216 Raynor, Alice, 145. See also Performing America Reinhardt, Max, 42 Renan, Ernest, ix Rendra, W. S., 236–37, 239–40 Reyes, Marcela del Río: Perfil y muestra del teatro de la Revolución mexicana (Profiles and Examples of the Theatre of the Mexican Revolution), 159 Ribush, Dolia, 61 Richmond, Farley, P.: Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, 213–14, 216–17 Ricoeur, Paul, 55, 127 Río, Marcela del, Perfil y muestra del teatro de la Revolución mexicana

(Profile and Examples of the Theatre of the Mexican Revolution), 159 Rodríguez, Jesusa, 162–63; Misa en Los Pinos (Mass in Los Pinos), 162, 163, 167 Rosidor, 34 Rossi, Ernesto, 37 Rourke, Constance, 133 Rubin, Don, 115–17, 118. See also Canadian Theatre Review Rubio, César, 157 Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 58 Russia, 47–64 Russian theatre journals, 48 Sabbe, M.: Het Vlaamsch toonel: Inzonderheid in de XIXe eeuw, 98 Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, Leopold von, 89 Sakontala, 12 Said, Edward, 118 Salter, Denis, 118 Sami people, 37 sandiwara, 225, 227, 229, 231 Sandwell, B. K., 112–13 Sani, Asrul, 233–35, 237, 239–40 Sarumpaet, Ratma, 238–40 Savran, David, 140, 148. See also Performing America Sayler, Oliver, 49 Schiller, Friedrich von, 1, 111 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 52 Selinder, Anders: folk dance, 39 Seller, Maxine: Ethnic Theatre in the United States, 21 Senelick, Laurence, 82 Shakespeare, 11, 133; The Taming of the Shrew, 140 Sharoff, Peter, 61 Shaw, George Bernard, 19, 101 Shchepkin, Mikhail, 57 Sheridan, Brindsley, 19 Shoah (Holocaust), 175, 194

276 index

Shoef, Korina, The Israeli Theatre Canon: One Hundred and One Shows, 175 Sinai War, 180 Shkofja Loka Passion, 73 Skomorokhi (wandering jesters), 55 Slovenia, 65–87 Snir, Chanan, 186–88 Sobol, Yehoshua, 193–96; Adam, 194; Ghetto, 193–94; Underground, 194 Solvay, L.: Le théâtre belge d’expression française depuis 1830, 98 Son, Diana, R.A.W. (’Cause I’m a Woman), 143–44. See also Lee, Josephine Sophocles, 11, 101 Soulié, F., 100 South Africa, 244–64 Stalin, Josef, 55 Stambul and bangsawan troupes, 225–27 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 59, 61 Stengers, Jean, 89 Strindberg, August: Master Olof, 38, 40; Miss Julie, 41, 136 Sturlason, Snorri: Edda, 33 Sumardjo, Jakob: Development of Modern Indonesian Theatre and Drama, 227 Swann, Darius: Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, 213–14, 216–17 Sweden, 29–46 Sydow, Max von, 42 Synge, J. M., 23; Playboy of the Western World, 26 Táin, 26 Tairov, A. Ya., 57. See also Kamerny Theatre Taneev, S. V., 53 Tanvir, Habib, 214 Tatars, 50 Teirlinck, Herman, 96

Tell, William, 26 Terence, 11 Thapar, Romila: A History of India, 208 theatre: definition, 1–2 Theatre Research in Canada, 116 theatricality, 13n.5 ~g~ı wa, 257 Thiong’o, Ngu Thirty Years War, 34 Thiyam, Ratan Kumar, 214 Tlatelolco massacre, 159–60 topeng, 226 Toscanini, Arturo, 41 Tremblay, Michel, 109 Trigueros, Alejandra: Meurte deliberada de cuatro neoliberales (The Deliberate Death of Four Neoliberals), 164–65 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 251. See also South Africa, 251–72 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 131 Umthakathi, 253 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 113, 138 United States, 127–52 Usigli, Rodolfo: El gesticulador (The Gesticulator), 155–58, 167. See also Nigro, Kirsten Usmiani, Renate, 119 Varadpande, Manohar Laxman: History of Indian Theatre, 213 Värmlänningarna, 39 Vasa, Gustav, 33 Vera, Marija, 82 Verschaffel, Tom, 93 Vidmar, Josip, 66, 68 Vienna Conservatory for Music and Performing Arts, 82 Vikings, 33 Vlaamse, Volkstoneel, 101 Vlasselaers, Joris, 91 Volf, A. I., 53

index 277

volksgeist, 20, 25 Voltaire, 11, 147 Voprosy teatra (Theatrical Questions), 48 Vorlicky, Robert, 146. See also Performing America Vsevolodsky-Gerngross, V., 54 Wagner, Anton: Canada’s Lost Plays series, 116 Wagner, Richard, 40 Wallace, Robert: Canadian Theatre Review, 118 Watergate, 139 Watt, David, 123 Wattermeier, Daniel: The History of North American Theatre, 22, 109, 127–28 wayang shadow theatre, 226–28 White, Hayden, 128 Wilde, Oscar, 19, 101 Willems, Serafijn, 91 Wilmer, S. E., 27n3, 27n5 Wilson, Garff, B.: Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bare and Ye Cubb to

Chorus Line, 131–32, 136–39, 140–41, 147. See also American theatre historians Wilson, Horace Hayman: Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, 204–09, 214, 219 Woodyard, George, Autores, 169 Worp, J.A.: Geschiedenis van het drama en van het tooneel in Nederland, 98 Worrall, Nick, 59 Yajnik, Ramanal Kanaiyalal: The Indian Theatre, 210–12 Yeats, William Butler, ix, 23, 111 Yediot Achronot, 183 Yugoslav National Theatre, 69, 72 Zabelin, I. E., 51 Zadek, Peter, 193 Zapata, Emiliano, 161–62 Zapatistas, 153, 161–62, 167–71 Zarrilli, Phillip B.: Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, 213–14, 216–17 Zhizhek, Slavoj, 86n27, 238

studies in theatre history and culture

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Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre By Freddie Rokem The Recurrence of Fate: Theatre and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia By Spencer Golub Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 By Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin By Eli Rozik Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage By Joel Berkowitz The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective By Erika Fischer-Lichte Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence Edited by Edward Pechter The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception By Willmar Sauter The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Performance Editions By Laurie E. Osborne Wandering Stars: Russian Emigré Theatre, 1905–1940 Edited by Laurence Senelick Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories Edited by S. E. Wilmer