Theatre and the Macabre

Edited by Meredith Conti, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Publication date:

01 March 2022

Length of book:

288 pages

Publisher

University of Wales Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9781786838452

BOOK DESCRIPTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS

The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.

Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: I Made the Dance of Death - Meredith Conti Part I. Histories of the Macabre The Mortification of Harvey Leach: Humour and Horror in Nineteenth-Century Theatre of Disability - Michael M. Chemers The Horrors of the Great War on the London Stage: The Grand Guignol Season of 1915 - Helen E.M. Brooks Phantoms of the Stage: The History and Practice of Uncanny Apparitions - Richard J. Hand Part II. Dramaturgies of the Macabre Time and Punishment: Gothic Maternal Bodies on the Contemporary British Stage - Kelly Jones The Body Dismembered: Allegory and Modernity in German Trauerspiel - Magda Romanska Macabre Children on the Australian Stage: Angela Betzien’s Cycle of Crime Plays - Chris Hay and Stephen Carleton Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen: Justice and Guilt in Public and Private Acts of Hanging - Michelle C. Paull Fear of Death and Lyrical Flight: Mortality Salience Mediation in Fun Home - Christopher J. Staley Part III. Staging the Macabre The Severed Head on Stage - Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Dancing Haunted Legacies: Diana Szeinblum’s Alaska - Jeanmarie Higgins ‘To Die Over and Over Inside My Body’: Three Deaths in Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh - J. E. F. Ooi Part IV. The Immersive Macabre ‘Black and Deep Desires’: Sleep No More and the Immersive Macabre - Dan Venning The Dark Ride Immersive and the Danse Macabre - David Bisaha Liveness and Aliveness: Chasing the Uncanny in the Contemporary Haunt Industry - David Norris American Hells: Hell Houses, Abortion Frames, and Unsexed Women - Robyn Lee Horn Haunting the Stage: Macabre Tourism, Lieux de Mémoire, and the Immortal Death of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre - Meredith Conti Bibliography Index