{"id":833,"date":"2020-06-15T15:38:57","date_gmt":"2020-06-15T15:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/?p=833"},"modified":"2023-03-15T11:32:37","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T11:32:37","slug":"theatre-and-epidemics-an-age-old-link","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/theatre-and-epidemics-an-age-old-link\/","title":{"rendered":"Theatre and Epidemics: An Age-Old Link"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Maria Ristani<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

First of all we must recognize that the theatre, like the plague, is a delirium and is communicative<\/em>.
\u2014Antonin Artaud<\/em>, The Theatre and Its Double  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theatre and disease epidemics have always made an uneasy duet; the theatrical event\u2014physical, viral and communal at its roots\u2014stands in an ambivalent relationship with what essentially both mirrors and cancels its working logics. From the years of the Athenian plague, the Black Death outbreak, the yellow fever, polio and influenza epidemics to the more recent times of AIDS, Ebola, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, SARS and, of course, the newly emergent COVID-19 pandemic, theatre praxis has been both fueled and stalled by infectious disease outbreaks. The present analysis is an attempt to trace this age-old link, one that plots a sliding spectrum running from dread and anxiety to fascination and influence. For the theatre, disease spread has been an ever-looming threat to its very survival and existence, while it has also ambivalently served as a source of intrigue, a dramaturgical impetus and focus, as well as a \u201cnetwork of metaphors\u201d to address and describe the stage world\u2019s \u201cown modes of corporeal interaction\u201d (Garner 3). With these varying modes of intertwining in mind, I will attempt here to explore theatre in\/as\/of epidemics. Mutually cancelled and mutually fed, the two share a fascinating history of fits and breaks.
Keywords: <\/strong>theatre, epidemics, history, plague, Black Death, AIDS<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theatre of Epidemics<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The link between theatre and spreading disease goes as far back as Sophocles\u2019 Oedipus Rex<\/em>. The play opens on an outbreak narrative, tellingly voiced in the prologue by the Priest-representative of the afflicted community:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The god of plague and pyre \/ Raids like detestable lightning through the city, \/ And all the house of Kadmos is laid waste, \/ All emptied, and all darkened; Death alone \/ Battens upon the misery of Thebes (52).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The raiding plague evoked in these lines is not just an inert backdrop, against which dramatic action may unravel, but rather the actual framing logic and working spine of the play. Infectious disease in Oedipus<\/em> (nosos <\/em>or loimos<\/em>) forms an echoing verbal refrain[1]<\/sup><\/a> as well as a driving dramaturgical force; it is that which compels the plot\u2019s unfolding, propels the action forward, brings Oedipus center-stage and sets the wheels of the hero\u2019s peripeteia<\/em> running. Though the play seemingly moves away from the collective plight of the plague-stricken city and onto the private wound of Oedipus, it is also the latter that follows and mirrors the working logics of an epidemic. Oedipus\u2019 staged journey of self-discovery is as irreversible and rapidly overwhelming as the plague that \u201cburns on . . . pitiless\u201d (54)\u2014a \u201csurge of death\u201d (52) and an \u201cattack by fire\u201d (54).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Oscar Isaac in Theatre of War\u2019s The Oedipus Project<\/em> (live readings from Sophocles’ play during COVID-19 quarantine). Live Zoom theatrical production, May 7, 2020. Screenshot of online premiere. Photo: Theatre of War<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The epidemic disease described in the Sophoclean drama is less a fabricated device and more likely a factual reference to the actual plague that besieged Athens in 430 B.C.[2]<\/sup><\/a> In this light the play, which is dated around 426 or 425 B.C., is a plague-born drama marked by the lived experience of a raging epidemic. Sophocles crosses, as it were, into a taboo zone of painful reference, which might explain\u2014as several scholars have suggested (Mitchell-Boyask 65; Ringer 78)\u2014the second (punishment-like) place his play earned despite its admitted dramatic merit. The play, however, is not an exception in this respect; it seems, rather, that the epidemic experience fed and forged the theatrical imagination of most fifth-century theatre works, even if more latently so than the plague-ridden narrative of Oedipus\u2019 drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A disease landscape is often encountered in Sophocles, conjured up by his ailing, Oedipus-like protagonists (Ajax and Philoctetes are prominent examples). Trachiniae <\/em>is here a case in point in all its preoccupation with disease and waste of man\u2019s power. The drama focuses on Heracles\u2019 infected body (all-wrapped up in Deianira\u2019s poisonous gift), whose plight it extensively details in language and imagery that might as well have sprung from Thucydides\u2019 documentation of the Athenian plague (Mitchell-Boyask 75\u201387).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Euripides\u2019 Hippolytus <\/em>from 428 B.C., with characters joined in mutually transmitted nosos <\/em>and bent by its suffering, also appears as a theatrical response to the epidemic trigger even if its disease narrative of eros<\/em> affliction is of a more metaphorical nature; \u201cOh, the woes of mankind and their hateful diseases\u201d (132) laments Phaedra\u2019s Nurse at the sight of her ailing, eros-stricken mistress. The play relies heavily on medical language, and displays an increased awareness of and concern with infection (miasma<\/em>), fear of contagion, medical conditioning and, above all, nosos<\/em> in all its viral, inescapable motion and doom.[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Hippolytus and Phaedra. Front of a marble sarcophagus, ca. 290 A.D. Found in 1853 on the Chiarone riverbanks (Tuscany, Italy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Since ancient Greek drama, the long history of theatre making traces numerous plays that have been similarly crafted in the light of\u2014or even in actual response to\u2014an epidemic spread. Theatre, as Fintan Walsh writes with reference to Neil Bartlett\u2019s 2017 play The Plague<\/em>, is essentially \u201ca form in which destructive forces can be summoned for scrutiny, and epidemiology dramaturgically interpreted and modelled\u201d in less or more stage-explicit ways (4).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the broader dramaturgical repertoire, Elizabethan and Jacobean stage plays are perhaps the most prominent cases of epidemic-ridden dramaturgy, composed as they have been in years that suffered from repeated attacks of the bubonic plague.[4]<\/sup><\/a> The latter features as the subtle protagonist of this period\u2019s afflicted stage world\u2014a kind of unbanished specter evoked in the language used, in the characters\u2019 pathos or even in the events dramatized. If not an explicit reference (which it rarely is, given its traumatic resonances for a plague-afflicted public), it still \u201chovers menacingly in [the] margins, sometimes in ways that a modern audience may scarcely notice\u201d (Duncan-Jones 54).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare\u2019s plays\u2014as it has been well-documented[5]<\/sup><\/a>\u2014insistently draw on the metaphorics of communicable disease, or make direct allusions to the plague itself and its concomitant quarantine and self-isolation restrictions. It could not have been otherwise, as Katherine Duncan-Jones highlights, for \u201c[p]lague was a defining context for all Shakespeare\u2019s writing\u201d (54). Prospero in The Tempest<\/em> invokes the \u201cred plague\u201d upon Caliban (1.2.364), while King Lear describes his daughter Goneril as a \u201cplague-sore\u201d (2.4.225), and these are both \u201cmore than empty expletives\u201d (Duncan-Jones 55); Olivia \u201cpurge[s] the air of pestilence\u201d (1.1.19) for love-sick Orsino in Twelfth Night<\/em>, Lady Macbeth, in the famous sleepwalking scene, insists on wiping her hands clean off that \u201cdamned spot\u201d (5.1.31), and Friar John is found held in quarantine and thus unable to deliver the valuable letter that may have wrought a \u201chappily ever after\u201d change in Romeo and Juliet<\/em>.[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The list of plague-resonant examples from Shakespeare\u2019s stage universe could be endless, indexing how closely intertwined Elizabethan dramaturgy was with the epidemic narrative of its time.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video 1 <\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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