This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ If there is an unstageable: a synchronic exploration Quigley, Karen Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 This electronic theses or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: If there is an unstageable: a synchronic exploration Author: Karen Quigley The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ You are free to: Share: to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. If there is an unstageable: a synchronic exploration. Karen Quigley This thesis is submitted for examination for the award of PhD. Department of English King’s College London August 2013 Abstract The contemporary theatrical and performative trope that anything is stageable is strengthened and supported as technology mounts, as genres and media expand and traverse each others’ boundaries, and as the question of what theatre is, what performance is, becomes an ever-widening gyre of possibility. My doctoral thesis reflects on this breadth of expansion and observes its counterpart, the unstageable. A study of this chimerical term presents a shifting terrain of language, time, and context, and situates itself tangentially to, though not within, discussions of concepts of failure and impossibility in theatre and performance studies. Focusing on three examples drawn from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries respectively, the thesis’ case studies begin to suggest an alternative view of the history of staging, a history which tends to focus upon what theatre has been able to stage, and rarely upon what it has not. Taking this synchronic route through recent theatre history, and illuminating points of unstageability with the theoretical aid of Jacques Rancière’s writing on the unrepresentable in response to Jean-François Lyotard’s discussion of the unpresentable, the thesis’ examples engage with the broad spectrum of the term’s history, without suggesting a diachronic evolution or overview of its position in the field. Invoking the world premiere of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in 1876, and the demise of the Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in 1962, the first two case studies in the thesis engage with the possibilities of the unstageable as they emerge in particular historical contexts. Returning to the twenty-first century, the recent work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio invites a dialogue regarding unstageability now, and the implications that this shifting signifier may continue to have for theatre and performance. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... 5 Introduction ................................................................................................. 6 From ancient Greek sublime to 21st century unstageable ..................................... 13 Ways of working ....................................................................................................... 23 What’s in a name? .................................................................................................... 30 Other unstageabilities ............................................................................................... 36 Resistance ............................................................................................................... 36 Censorship .............................................................................................................. 37 Medical unstageable ............................................................................................... 38 An ‘unstageable’ unstageable? ................................................................................ 40 The theatre as example ............................................................................................. 44 (Anti-) Theatrical struggles ...................................................................................... 49 Etymology: putting the ‘stage’ in ‘unstageable’ in the early twentieth century . 54 Jacques Rancière and further thoughts on a definition. ....................................... 59 Illustrating the possibilities of the unstageable. ..................................................... 67 Chapter One: Peer Gynt ........................................................................... 73 Peer Gynt .................................................................................................................... 75 Romanticism and Ibsen ............................................................................................ 78 Modernism ................................................................................................................. 86 Ibsen, Peer Gynt, and source material .................................................................... 92 A closet play, perhaps. ............................................................................................ 102 Writing Peer Gynt ................................................................................................... 108 The first production ................................................................................................ 116 Reviewing the first production .............................................................................. 130 Some conclusions .................................................................................................... 132 Chapter Two: The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol ................................... 139 Introducing the Grand-Guignol. ........................................................................... 140 Features of style ...................................................................................................... 145 Technical aspects and acting style ......................................................................... 147 Spectators ................................................................................................................ 151 Decline ...................................................................................................................... 156 Further possibilities of the unstageable. ............................................................... 168 Grand-Guignol during the Occupation and in the aftermath of WWII ................ 170 Grand-Guignol and the question of Naturalism. ................................................. 175 Grand-Guignol in the twenty-first century .......................................................... 179 Conclusions .............................................................................................................. 186 Chapter Three: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio ............................................ 189 The postmodern, the postdramatic ....................................................................... 192 Curation as context ................................................................................................. 194 Post-Holocaust representation and fragmenting the unstageable ...................... 198 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio ........................................................................................ 205 Tragedia Endogonidia: BR.#04 .............................................................................. 207 Purgatorio ...............................................................................................................