Writing and Rewriting: National Theatre Histories

S. E. Wilmer, ed., Writing and Rewriting: National Theatre Histories (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004) Defining ‘national’ theatre history involves the related and formidable tasks of identifying what is to be understood as ‘nation’; what range of performance forms are to be included as ‘theatre’; and the mutating outlines of historically specific nationalisms presently and formerly current in various locations. Undertaking the inscription of national histories of theatre thus involves astuteness and flexibility in the face of its many methodological challenges. The field is defined, along with some specific solutions, in Wilmer’s stimulating and useful collection of essays in the series ‘Studies in Theatre History and Culture’ from University of Iowa Press. Wilmer summarises these common problematics in his essay ‘On Writing National Theatre Histories’: basically, whether to define one’s object of study through geography, language, ethnicity or aesthetics. The contributors write on a selected range of ‘national’ regions spread over Europe and North America, with South Africa and Indonesia venturing south of the equator. This sampling produces sufficient variety of historical circumstances and heterogeneity of performance forms to pursue a complex host of problematics and productive examples. Although the focus of the collection is on techniques and philosophies of historiography, some of the contributions largely ignore this topic and produce instead accounts of theatre history in specific regions. The individual essays speak from the collection in a polyphonic dialogue, sometimes reaching each other and sometimes left in intriguing open contradiction. In the fortunes of the national theatre history, present options appears poised between the grand synoptic narratives of the late nineteenth century and the more pluralist, targeted and problem-based essay format of the later twentieth century. The latter typically seek to link local events, dramaturgy, structures and personnel with similar or identical manifestations across the fragile ‘national’ borders which theatre – that most cosmopolitan and promiscuously mutating of cultural forms – has ever largely ignored. One of the many valuable provocations to be identified in this richly argued collection is whether the moment may be at hand for a cautious, post-Hayden White rapprochement with the large-scale narrative. Erika Fischer-Lichte, in an initial essay ‘Some Critical Remarks on Theatre Historiography’, declares that the ‘totalising and Ideologically oriented constructions of history have long since become obsolete’ (4) and denounces most synoptic histories as suffering from an overdose of fact-laden historicism. Partial, problem-oriented studies are offered as the optimal way of organising the masses of empirical material typical of theatrical studies. On the other hand, Bruce McConachie’s chapter ‘Narrative Possibilities for US Theatre Histories’ discerns that the strategic and contextualised explorations of the essay approach need to be reintegrated with the historian’s fundamental technique of narrative. It will, of course, be a narrative highly critical of ‘the Herderian tradition of culturalist historiography’ whose features are ‘the search for origins, the claim of essential identity, and the ethical relativism of the volksgeist orientation’ (141). Alan Filewod, while highly suspicious of the notion of ‘national’ stories which too frequently are ‘not about Canadian theatre at all but rather about the genealogies of performance that have legitimized changing ideological projects of nationhood’ (108), still mounts a strong case for the retention of nation as a useful organising category. Theatre as art form and institution ‘operates in fields of cultural formation and policy that are formed by national experience and legislated by national states’ (123). Purged of such standard cultural-nationalist assumptions as ethnic or linguistic privilege, aesthetic hierarchising, boosting of the literary over the popular or the professional over the amateur, mythologies of origin, phobias about contamination by the foreign or the commercial, or the effacing of indigeneity and internal cultural differences, the national theatre history can still offer a credible vehicle for locating specific cultural phenomena while mapping international transactions.