Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538923
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica teatrales

Evolutionary theory made its stage debut as early as the 1840s, reflecting a scientific advancement that was fast changing the world. Tracing this development in dozens of mainstream European and American plays, as well as in circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and "missing link" performances, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times.

The stage proved to be no mere handmaiden to evolutionary science, though, often resisting and altering the ideas at its core. Many dramatists cast suspicion on the arguments of evolutionary theory and rejected its claims, even as they entertained its thrilling possibilities. Engaging directly with the relation of science and culture, this book considers the influence of not only Darwin but also Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, de Vries, and other evolutionists on 150 years of theater. It shares significant new insights into the work of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, and Beckett, and writes female playwrights, such as Susan Glaspell and Elizabeth Baker, into the theatrical record, unpacking their dramatic explorations of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the "cult of motherhood."

It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering the liveliness and immediacy of the theater and its reliance on a diverse community of spectators and the power that entails, this book is a key text for grasping the extent of the public's adaptation to the new theory and the legacy of its representation on the perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of scientific work.

1

“I’m Evolving!”

Birds, Beasts, and Parodies

Victorians lived in a cultural landscape in which “curiosity was a great leveler.”¹ Every type of theatrical performance was on offer, from melodramas (and their even more spectacular cousins, the equestrian melodramas) to pantomime to music hall to fairground shows, circus, tableux vivants, and public exhibitions. These shows cut across class divisions and catered to all kinds of audiences, a thriving theatrical eclecticism that lasted the entire century.² The combination of entertainment and education was a particularly potent one in an age of reform and progress. New spaces like zoos and museums were opening up all the time where the public could spectate biology to its hearts’ content. Spectating by its very nature implies a predominantly visual experience, and “Victorian audiences and scientific performers still regarded seeing as the paradigm of knowing.”³ Public lectures and scientific experiments that were so popular in the Victorian period presented science as something to gaze at and that can provoke admiration, awe, and wonder. Theatricality fed directly into the popularization of science; for example, Henry Neville Hutchinson wrote in Extinct Monsters (1892) that he was attempting to depict “the great earth-drama that has, from age to age, been enacted on the terrestrial stage, of which we behold the latest, but probably not the closing scenes.”⁴ Thus science, popular culture, and performance continually converged, from the crew of the Beagle giving “pantomime names” to the Fuegians whom Robert FitzRoy colonized in the 1830s (Fuegia Basket, York Minster, Jemmy Button, and Boat Memory) to the dramatic dissection of a lobster by Thomas H. Huxley in 1860 to show that adaptive modification had “unity of plan, diversity in execution.”⁵

Theatre had a decisive role to play in the public taste for biology. Plays about everything from the “birds and the beasts” to physiognomy and galvanism testify to the public appetite for biologically based entertainment.⁶ This extended well beyond Britain.⁷ The period saw a growing conceptualization of human life and interactions, origins and future, as “biologized.” Alfred Russel Wallace urged natural history museums “to design exhibits such as dioramas that would show the intricate relations between life forms in each region.”⁸ Peter Morton charts the impact of “the vital science” of biology on Victorian culture; Margot Norris explores “biocentrism” throughout the literature of the period; and Angelique Richardson notes the “increasingly biologized” discourse of the late nineteenth century around the maternal aspect of femininity.⁹ Highlighting this biocentric appetite can help to dismantle some of the myths about the Victorians. For example, in the enduring cliché of a society “obsessed with respectability and therefore gratifyingly shockable, fixed in an archaic worldview preached to them from the pulpits of every church,” we have sustained a “simplistic fiction” that obscures “the complex social and cultural dynamics” of the period.¹⁰ Looking at how theatre engaged with evolutionary ideas confirms this and helps to bring back some of those complex dynamics that have been obscured.

The key point about theatre’s engagement with evolution in this period is its extraordinary freedom, described by Jane Goodall as gleefully exploding the “parameters of enquiry” that science so strictly controlled and exploring scientific ideas “without a map, exercising the freedom to invent as well as observe,” showing an “eager receptiveness to new ideas from the realms of science, a fascination with their implications and an alertness to changing directions of speculation.”¹¹ Evolution was just one of many scientific domains that caught the popular imagination, including medicine, astronomy, physics, chemistry, microbiology, psychology, anthropology, and geology. But because of its particular relevance for human life and for the lives of animals as well, not to mention its questioning of religion, it went straight to the heart of concerns shared by many audience members across all sections of the theatre-going public. For example, many Victorian writers and artists worried about where Darwinian evolution left the individual will or effort and what happened to an overall sense of purpose. They often turned to a more comforting “Lamarckian auto-teleology operating at the level of the individual organism (shades of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, 1859), and some overriding principle or force to provide an assured and universal upward thrust.”¹² Even those writers and artists attracted to Charles Darwin’s ideas and accepting of natural selection had a difficult time with the often-“crass” nature of evolution “which gives no assurance that the worthiest shall survive.”¹³

This is the crux of the development of naturalism in the late nineteenth century, which profoundly influenced theatre as well as literary forms like the novel. Naturalism gave expression to the key concern raised by evolutionary thought: What shapes us as human beings? Is there anything we can do to push against the formative influences identified by the Positivists as race, milieu, and moment? Are we completely determined by our environment? In his seminal Le Naturalisme au theatre (1878), Emile Zola crystallized the assumptions of Positivism and called for theatre that would unflinchingly show the truth and reality of life. It was almost inevitable that this would make naturalism synonymous with the underbelly of life, dramatizing how the seamier, more primitive aspects of human nature always get the better of us, an idea epitomized in plays as various as August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888), Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise (1889) and The Weavers (1892), and Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1901). Theatre lent itself perfectly to this enterprise, capturing the shaping power of the environment on the individual by being, in effect, a controlled “experiment” (Zola’s own term for what he was trying to do in his stage adaptation in 1873 of Thérèse Raquin): presenting specially constructed environments and revealing their effects on a few individuals. His naturalist manifesto proclaims this desire to “bring the sweeping movements of truth and experimental science to the theatre,” building on the impetus given by “the new scientific methods . . . subjecting man and his actions to exact analysis, concerning itself with social circumstances, milieu and physiology.”¹⁴ This, combined with the rapidly developing field of psychology, led to a deep interest in depicting the darker forces unconsciously shaping our lives, impulses often beyond our control and with intensely theatrical potential for new depths of characterization.

Naturalism is thus of central importance to my explorations in this chapter of specific plays, playwrights, and scenography. But my discussion also builds on, and complements, the existing scholarship on performance modes outside mainstream theatre, such as freak shows and exhibits of commercially displayed peoples in the newly founded zoological gardens of cities like Paris, London, Berlin, and Copenhagen.¹⁵ These exhibits of exotic “natives” were often used by anthropologists to take biometric measurements that would taxonomize the different races, giving scientific credence to sometimes-spurious methodologies.¹⁶ Rae Beth Gordon notes that in 1877, Africans were installed in the Jardin d’acclimatation in “villages nègres,” exhibited behind a fence.¹⁷ Nigel Rothfels discusses the hugely popular exhibition of Fuegians in Paris and Berlin in 1881, quoting one contemporary’s observations about how the crowd of spectators responded to this practically naked group appearing in “such complete naturalness that they had first to be given bathing suits”: for the Parisians, “precisely this abundance of naturalness met with all the more approval. The draw there was . . . massive, and it was just as large in Berlin where the Fuegians came next, for there the public flattened the barricades and it was necessary to retain security guards to keep order.”¹⁸ The attendance figures for these shows are staggering; more than fifty thousand people visited the Paris exhibit on one Sunday, and a special stage had to be erected for the Berlin show to protect the Fuegians from the wild “rush of the public.”¹⁹ Yet what they came to see was ordinary domestic life, not drama. People seemed satisfied with “simply gazing” at these “primitive” people.²⁰

Consider this in relation to Darwin’s passing comment in his Autobiography that “the sight of a naked savage in his native land is an event which can never be forgotten.”²¹ This comment, made just a few years after such exhibits, contrasts the “real thing” with its tawdry imitation; although the people on display may be real, their environment is simulated, so the audience cannot possibly feel what the reality of those on display would actually be like. These hugely popular human exhibits of so-called savagery coincided with the development of theatrical naturalism ushered in by Zola and given fullest expression through André Antoine’s productions at the Théâtre Libre in the 1880s. Antoine’s production of Ghosts was in the same year as the Fuegians’ exhibit in Paris. Indeed, theatres themselves sometimes served as exhibition sites: in 1908, the Théâtre Antoine mounted an exhibit of skulls representing human evolution to coincide with the discovery of a new missing link.²²

In another performance-related development, the popularization of science through such diverse means as geological panoramas and the public lectures of Huxley and other scientists shows theatre and science borrowing from each other.²³ Peter J. Bowler points out that “by the 1870s, the reconstruction of life’s ancestry had become a major scientific industry, which in turn became the layperson’s image of what evolutionism is all about.”²⁴ The performing-science strand of theatrical engagements with evolution contrasts with the imaginative engagements of playwrights and directors and may indeed help to explain their contrariness, their outright hostility to science at times. These two developments are, I believe, closely connected, the one feeding into the other and radically changing the very concept of nature in the audience’s imagination.

As all these examples show, the public performance of science was overwhelmingly orchestrated and carried out by men. The scientist doing a public experiment or giving a lecture was “the face of the idealized Victorian public gentleman”; hence, Victorian audiences would have identified successful scientific performance as “unambiguously male.”²⁵ (Notable exceptions to this include Sonya Kovalevskaya and Clémence Royer, both of whom gave public lectures on science.) That scientific performances tended to be male reinforced the alignment of science with masculinity. By contrast, the actress became, in Goodall’s terms, the most provocative signifier of evolution by the sheer suggestive power of her body on stage, often questioning rather than reinforcing gender assumptions and roles. My discussion of nineteenth-century theatre and evolution therefore concludes, in chapter 2, with a brief look at the phenomenon of the female actor in relation to evolution. This is in illuminating contrast to the focus here on two key issues: the stage’s engagement with the abstract notion of geological “deep time” and concomitantly an increasing interest in the inner lives of animals.

Natural History, Deep Time, and Wild Nature on Stage

It was difficult to comprehend a gradualism that even scientists sometimes rendered in hundreds rather than millions of years.²⁶ If the stage could not literally show such slow processes, it could at least suggest them, and it seems reasonable to speculate that Victorian theatrical spectacle built on the new interest in geology brought about by Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in the 1830s, finding ways to suggest “deep time” through breathtaking landscapes and natural disasters.²⁷ Even before Lyell, one of earliest theatrical engagements with evolution was Lord (George Gordon) Byron’s Cain (1821), “the original paleontological drama,” which shows the influence of contemporary thinking about geology.²⁸ It is an important template for the kind of epic treatment of evolutionary history on stage that Thornton Wilder later attempts in The Skin of Our Teeth (discussed in chapter 7). Byron has Lucifer telling Cain that he will take him on a journey to show him “the history / Of past, and present, and of future worlds.”²⁹ This play was regarded as a closet drama and remains unperformed, despite developments in staging that could have enabled production. Large-scale venues and sophisticated machinery could display vast natural tableaux, registering an increasing curiosity about the natural world and the inherent drama of small humans pitted against great natural forces. Productions frequently re-created waterfalls, rivers, lakes, frozen ice floes (one of the hallmarks of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s), even watery caves ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “I’m Evolving!”: Birds, Beasts, and Parodies
• 2. Confronting the Serious Side
• 3. “On the Contrary!”: Ibsen’s Evolutionary Vision
• 4. “Ugly … but Irresistible”: Maternal Instinct on Stage
• 5. Edwardians and Eugenicists
• 6. Reproductive Issues
• 7. Midcentury American Engagements with Evolution
• 8. Beckett’s “Old Muckball”
• Epilogue: Staging the Anthropocene
• Notes
• Index