Theatre and medicine studies is a cross-disciplinary specialty currently attracting the attention of numerous performance historians; Theatre & Medicine by Stanton B. Garner Jr. and Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage by Roberta Barker are two representative works dealing with illness and performance. Stanton B. Garner Jr.'s Theatre & Medicine is the latest publication in the Theatre & series edited by Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato. The series comprises short works designed to be consumed “in one sitting” (x). Garner's central thesis states “that theatre and medicine converge on the somatic body,” and he sets out to consider “the discourses, technologies, practices and institutions that have historically described and treated it” (4). Garner organizes his theme into four chapters—“Bodies,” “Contagion,” “Practitioners and Patients,” and “Institutions”—each with three or four sections in which he examines the interrelations between theatre and medicine. Throughout the volume, Garner provides a brisk review of significant developments in medicine and their impact on the theatre from ancient times to the twenty-first century, offering examples of numerous dramatic productions incorporating particular medical themes. Garner is careful, in tracing these developments, to avoid slipping into previous historiographies of medicine, where physicians and medical triumphs were often glamorized. He might, however, have devoted some space to alternative medical systems, particularly in the nineteenth century, when there was considerable public opposition to harsh and often deadly orthodox medical treatments. Mesmerism is the classic case of nonconventional therapeutics, and numerous examples of its literary and theatrical applications are explored in Alison Winter's classic text Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998).
Thoroughly intriguing were Garner's extended remarks on coughing as a significant somatic factor in both medical and theatrical performance (9–12), appropriately citing Martin O'Brien's piece on coughing in the edited essay collection Performance and the Medical Body (2016). In the section “Bodies and Medical Technology” (19–25) Garner provides useful insight into medical appliances that penetrate the body's interior, connecting these with the ways in which theatre has employed its own bodily techniques and devices. While Garner correctly notes that theatre has “always been embedded in networks of circulation” where “[p]ractices, texts, genres, technologies, performers and ideas of theatre have crossed regions, societies and performance cultures” (42), we are not treated to any reference of the performative aspects of Latourian actor-network theory or Deleuze and Guattari's notions of agencement and reterritorialization as they apply to cultural formation and circulation in theatre and medicine. Due to space limitations Garners confesses he could not explore any sustained discussion of theatre and psychology, which he suggests deserves a separate volume (7). He does, though, refer to the clinical performances of female hysterics conducted by Jean-Martin Charcot (misnamed in the text as Jean-Marie Charcot, 60) at his famous fin-de-siècle Paris clinic. Garner also mentions hypnosis and hypnotized patients in reference to Charcot (60), and interested theatre scholars might wish to consult older publications (1950s–1980s) of the social performance psychologists Theodore R. Sarbin and Nicholas Spanos for additional insightful observations on the performative and theatrical nature of hypnotic enactments. In citing one of the standard volumes on hysteria, written by Mark S. Micale, it was surprising to see him misnamed as Michael S. Micale on three separate occasions. More disquieting was the historical error relating to Tony Kushner's two-part epic play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” (1991–2) where Garner identifies Roy Cohen [sic] as the chief counsel to the liberal 1960s U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy (39–40) instead of the conservative 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy, from whom the term McCarthyism is derived. These errors, however, do not detract from the coverage of the wide-ranging subject matter that readers will find useful in Garner's handy little volume.
Coughing fits and the emblematic blood-stained handkerchief are theatrical phenomena also explored by Roberta Barker in her substantial volume, Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage. These and other stage techniques portraying tuberculosis (historically known as consumption) form part of a performative ensemble she terms “symptomatic dramaturgy” (14). Throughout the three parts of the book—“Consumptive Poetics,” “Sentimental Transmissions,” and “The Sentimental Survival”—the multiple social and medical meanings of tuberculosis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are examined along with their dramatic enactments. This monograph has been well researched. Barker carefully covers all the relevant literature on the cultural history of tuberculosis and its manifestation in theatrical productions, particularly noting Meredith Conti's Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (2019), where tuberculosis is just one among many illnesses portrayed. Barker, however, is singularly focused on “stage consumptives created across a span of 150 years, beginning in Paris in the 1820s and ending in New York in the early 1970s” (8). Terminology is central to her work and the highly detailed index is a useful reference to any term's deployment in the text. Particularly illuminating is the notion of “consumptive repertoire” (17), an assemblage of “images, tropes, and connotations” (30) that “served as a locus for the articulation of national identity while also emerging as a vector for the transnational flow of theatrical practice” (17).
In Chapter 1 Barker lays the groundwork for her take on “consumptive poetics” by focusing on the paradigm-setting 1834 play Angèle by Alexandre Dumas père. In rendering the consumptive stage actor “interesting” (31) as opposed to disturbing or frightening, Dumas and other playwrights of the period laid “the foundations for the theatrical consumptive repertoire” (29). Chapter 2 opens with the final performance of Élisabeth Rachel Félix in Charleston, SC on 17 December 1855. A consumptive herself, Mlle. Rachel died from the disease just three years later. Barker positions Rachel alongside two other fictional heroines during Rachel's performing career of the 1840s and 1850s: Mimi in Barrière and Murger's La Vie de la Bohème (1849) and Marguerite in Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias (1852). These two characters are pivotal in defining theatrical consumptives, and Barker places them in the context of the period's medical thought, which regarded “heredity, nervous disorder, and unhappy passions as important causes of tubercular illness” (55). Barker deftly links the performative aspects of the handkerchief in these two plays to what she terms the “sentimental subtext,” which she describes as “tactics by which a performer could symptomatize the subjective truths and physical pathologies hidden behind the character's literal words and actions” (61).
In Chapter 4 “The Ills of the Parents,” Barker focuses on George C. Aiken's adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which featured six-year-old Cordelia Howard playing the consumptive Eva St. Clair, along with theatrical adaptations of Ellen Wood's East Lynne, with a child actor as the tubercular William Carlyle. With these two plays, she notes, French elements of the consumptive repertoire blended with particular characteristics of American social conditions, particularly slavery and white supremacy. Barker identifies these works and La Dame aux Camélias as the three great plays representing the century's “transatlantic consumptive repertoire” (118). In addition, the two American plays were characteristic of the “emotional drama” prevalent in the period's sentimental works that emphasized emotion and affect (118).
Titled “Ailing Nations,” Chapter 5 compares the performances of Sarah Bernhardt and Maude Adams in Edmond Rostand's L'Aiglon (1900), in which each actress portrays the Duc de Reichstadt, the only son of Napoléon Bonaparte. A small child when his father suffered defeat at Waterloo, the duke died a young man of twenty-one from tuberculosis in 1832 (145). Chapter 6 discusses the early twentieth-century problem play as it intersected with Robert Koch's 1882 discovery of the tubercle bacillus and the stage's engagement with the new science of bacteriology.
Each work reviewed here contributes in different ways to the vibrant field of theatre and medicine, and both belong on the shelves of theatre and performance scholars. Their contents reach beyond these disciplinary boundaries and should interest social scientists and cultural historians drawn to the embodied–enactive medical ecologies found on the stage and in the clinic.
