Stage fright : modernism, anti-theatricality, and drama

Grounded equally in discussions of theatre history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's study explores the conflict between avant-garde theatre and modernism.

While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theatre, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead.

Defenders of the theatre dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more form of the old "anti-theatrical" prejudice.

But Puchner shows that modernism's ambivalence about the theatre was shared even by playwrights and directors and thus was a productive force responsible for some of the greatest achievements in dramatic literature and theatre.A reaction to the aggressive theatricality of Wagner and his followers, the modernist backlash against the theatre led to the peculiar genre of the closet drama - a theatrical piece intended to be read rather than staged - whose long-overlooked significance Puchner traces from the theatrical texts of Mallarme and Stein to the dramatic "Circe" chapter of Joyce's "Ulysses".

At times, then, the anti-theatrical impulse leads to a withdrawal from the theatre.

At other times, however, it returns to the stage, when Yeats blends lyric poetry with Japanese Noh dancers, when Brecht controls the stage with novelistic techniques, and when Beckett buries his actors in barrels and behind obsessive stage directions.

The modernist theatre thus owes much to the closet drama whose literary strategies it blends with a new "mise en scene".

While offering an alternative history of modernist theatre and literature, Puchner also provides an account of the contradictory forces within modernism.