Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage

Sarah Balkin’s Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage is a noteworthy addition to works emphasizing ghostliness, material presence, and genre connections between nineteenth-century melodrama and the modern dramatic repertory. The book follows along similar lines as Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage, Alice Rayner’s Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, Andrew Sofer’s Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance, and other books partaking in issues related to ipseity—how dramatic characters are susceptible to other people, the haunted past, and material things onstage—and also explores the reconfiguration of identity as it pertains to language and genre formation. Balkin analyzes the “apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture” (3). As a consequence, the qualities of dramatic characters “mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater” (3). Balkin’s introductory chapter explores the rise of Gothic melodrama and the occult during the late nineteenth century. Scenography and dramaturgy in notable plays such as J. R. Planché’s The Vampire, Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers, and Leopold David Lewis’s The Bells influenced the three luminaries of modern drama: Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg. These nineteenth-century plays and their stage technology, Balkin contends, “make visible what we might call the ‘material occult,’ a concept that emphasizes the materiality of supernatural and imaginary forces on the modern stage” (16). Balkin’s next four chapters examine those three playwrights (especially Strindberg), concluding with a final chapter on Jean Genet, Arthur Kopit, and Samuel Beckett—dramatists representing late modernist authors who “reinforce continuities among realism and modernism via shared bodies, dead matter, and generic hauntings” (25).