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Theatre and the Macabre

Editor(s) Meredith Conti,Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Paperback - £30

Language: English

Genre(s): Media, Film and Theatre

Series: Horror Studies

March 2022 · 288 pages ·216x138mm

· Paperback - 9781786838452
· eBook - pdf - 9781786838469
· eBook - epub - 9781786838476

About The Book

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

About the Editor(s)

Author(s): Meredith Conti

Meredith Conti is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and a historian of nineteenth-century performance and popular culture in the United States and Britain. She is the author of Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (2018) and of published essays exploring the intersections of theatre and medicine, gender and race in the Victorian period, and gun violence in theatre.

Author(s): Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is Professor of Theatre and director of the MFA program at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author, editor and co-editor of over two dozen books, including Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (2012), Eaters of the Dead: A Cultural History of Cannibal Monsters (2021), the Bram Stoker Award-nominated The Streaming of Hill House (2020), and numerous articles on horror theatre.