The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage

By Laurence Senelick

It is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting. This “death spectacle” runs the gamut. From the Greek tragic stage which was highly selective in determining which deaths it (re)enacted to the elaborately stylized murders and suicides in the Kabuki to the lavish blood-letting of the Elizabethans to the deathbed visitations of the modern era, what was acceptable and/or enjoyable fluctuates wildly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839983948

Book preview

The Final Curtain

The Final Curtain

The Art of Dying on Stage

Laurence Senelick

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Laurence Senelick 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Senelick, Laurence, author.

Title: The final curtain : the art of dying on stage / Laurence Senelick.

Description: London UK; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2022. |

Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2022000106 | ISBN 9781839983924 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781839983948 (epub) | ISBN 9781839983931 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Stage death. | Death in literature. | Acting.

Classification: LCC PN2071. D43 S46 2022 | DDC 792.02/8–dc23/eng/20220215

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000106

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-392-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-392-2 (Hbk)

Cover image: By Adrien Barrere

This title is also available as an e-book.

For all my sons,

Kip, Rob, and Paul

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction

1.

Early Stages

2.

Murther Most Foul

3.

Death-Defying Exploits

4.

Sick unto Death

5.

Shadow and Substance

Epilogue: Post-Mortem

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

Unless otherwise indicated, illustrations are from the author’s collection.

1.1aAjax preparing the sword. Reproduction of black figure amphora by Exekias (520–525 BCE). Reproduction from City Museum, Boulogne-sur-Mer

1.1bAjax impaling himself. Etrurian red-figured calyx (c. 400–350 BCE)

1.2Bear attacking a venator or beast master in the arena. Nennig villa mosaic (third century CE)

1.3Jean Fouquet, The Martyrdom of St Apollonia (detail) (c. 1445). From The Hours of Étienne Chevalier, Musée Conti, Charente

1.4Max Reinhardt’s production of Jedermann, Salzburg Festival; Alexander Moissi as Everyman, Luis Rainer as Death

2.1Henry IV, Part I. Ralph Richardson as Falstaff and Laurence Olivier as Hotspur. Photograph by John Vickers. From The Old Vic in Photographs (London, 1947)

2.2Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, plate XVII, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Engraved by Caroline Watson

2.3Title page to The Maid’s Tragedy by Beaumont and Fletcher (1630)

2.4The Lamentable and Trve Tragedie of M. Arden of Faversham of Kent (1592). Woodcut frontispiece to the Quarto of 1633

2.5Maxa doing a good night’s work at the Grand-Guignol

3.1The death of Cato. Frontispiece to the first edition (1713)

3.2Edmund Kean as Richard III, casting a baleful glance at Richmond. Sketch by J. Harlow (1830), published by J. W. Gear

3.3Othello stifles Desdemona. Etching by Théodore Chassériau, from a set of 16 (1844)

3.4George Cruikshank, The Murder of Maria Marten. The Red-Barn Mystery (London, 1828)

3.5Coquelin as Cyrano in his last moment. Chromolithograph

3.6Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus and Anthony Nicolls as Aufidius, Royal Shakespeare Company (1985). Photograph by Angus McBean, Harvard Theatre Collection

4.1The Death of Uncle Tom and Little Eva’s Apotheosis, Act V. Chromolithographed trade card for Jarrett & Palmer’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

4.2Froufrou. Death scene from the silent film (1914), directed by Eugene Moore with Maude Fealey in the lead

4.3aEast Lynne. Death of LittleWillie. Poster for revival with Ada Gray (detail) (1894)

4.3bEast Lynne. Death of Lady Isabel. Lithographed trade card for the Ideal East Lynne Co. (c. 1889)

4.4Sarah Bernhardt dying as Rostand’s L’Aiglon. Chromolithographed postcard

4.5Sarah Bernhardt dying as Marguerite Gauthier. Photograph by Napoleon Sarony (1886)

5.1Lionello Balestiari, The Death of Mimi. Painting for The Victrola Book of the Opera (1917 edition)

5.2Eleonora Duse as Cleopatra (1887)

5.3The vision scene in Hanneles Himmelfahrt, designed and directed by A. Marc

5.4Stanislavsky as Ioann Grozny, The Death of Ioann the Terrible, Moscow Art Theatre (1899). Photograph by Scherer and Nabholz, Moscow

E.1The right and wrong way to die, from The Art of Coarse Acting

E.2Hospital scene in The Normal Heart, Public Theatre (1985) with Brad Davis, D. W. Moffat, Concetta Tomei, and Philip Richard Allen. Photo by Martha Swope

INTRODUCTION

Is dying hard, Daddy?

No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.

Ernest Hemingway¹

This is not a book about death. It is a book about dying or, more specifically, about the representation of dying in the theater. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. This cannot be discussed without attention to the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes toward death in their communities and cultures. Nevertheless, my emphasis is on the practice of acting.

In 1995 a British scholar noted that the subject of death has loomed increasingly large in much academic discourse and yet literary representations of death have only very recently begun to receive critical attention.² Twenty-five years later this no longer holds true, but the bulk of this discourse is content to explore literary representations, in other words, texts. Those studies that deal with the performance of death limit themselves to modern and contemporary theater. Generally neglected has been what a performer of the past actually did on stage. There exist more historical studies of audience reception than of what the audiences were receiving.

The obstacles to reconstructing bygone performances are obvious. As Richard Grant White wrote as far back as 1872, an actor can be judged only by the effect which he produces […] a result, the elements of which are his power on the one hand and the impressibility of his audience on the other.³ Lest this be considered a retrograde or Victorian attitude, we find it reiterated on the eve of the Great War by an apostle of the New Stagecraft. Huntly Carter, while proselytizing for Reinhardt, Meyerhold, and the cinema, suggested that modern innovations in stage directing and design were necessary and natural substitutes for the maximum intensity of acting.

Acting that falls below this intensity needs to be supplemented; otherwise the spectator is robbed of his full effect. By full effect I mean one that converts the spectator for the time being, not into the actor or the producer [i.e., director], but into the author. […] I will try to circulate the truth that the theatre stands for one thing, and one thing only. That thing is effect. Therefore the men of the theatre should make it a rule to take care of the dramatic effect, and the drama will take care of itself.⁴

In earlier periods, the responsibility for effect, suggests Carter, fell wholly on the actor. Modern acting is anemic in comparison. So if actors fail to deliver one hundred percent, ingenious staging, scenery, and lighting must cover for them so that the effect will be produced and felt.

For the theater historian, gaging effect has always posed an almost insuperable problem. It is difficult to judge the effect of a performance one has not experienced firsthand; even then memory is notoriously selective. How trustworthy are reports that serve as testimony to the distant past? Beginning in the eighteenth century, writers were sedulous in providing blow-by-blow accounts of what they had seen and heard in the theater. How Mrs. Siddons played Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene or how Edwin Booth recited To be or not to be can be reconstructed in painstaking detail from eyewitness accounts. However, these accounts themselves demand an analysis as to reliability, the reporter’s bias or angle of vision, the circumstances of the event, once again removing us from what the actor may have intended and how that intention was achieved. (Filmed, recorded, or videotaped performance entails other problems of direction, perception, and reception.)

When an actor is called on to enact (or, in Stanislavskian terms, reenact) emotion or experience, the effect is measured against a scale of responses. If the emotion is familiar to the spectator or part of the common range of human behavior, the achievement is often praised as verisimilitude (vraisemblance), credibility, realistic, or true to life. If the emotion is larger or more intense than the norm, its effect may be styled plausible, sublime, or picturesque. The former performance is judged by accuracy of observation and reproduction, the latter by imagination. In both, the actor has various, though, different resources and techniques on which to draw. In both cases, however, the actor is obliged to engage the spectator’s attention and emotions. Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief is a well-worn phrase, but it has retained its force for most traditional styles of performance. The audience needs to be complicit, open to accept the actor’s performance of human behavior.

Death is a special case. Hamlet calls it the bourn from which no traveler returns (although he himself is an unreliable reporter, having just encountered his father’s ghost). The actor, not having traveled to that bourn in the first place, cannot draw on personal knowledge of it. Unless the actor has been through a near-death experience, recourse to Stanislavsky’s perezhivanie (emotional reliving) is unavailable as a guide to the recreation of dying. Observation might inform a sedulous reconstruction, but since the moment of death in most cases occurs almost undetected, that may be useless for theatrical purposes. The theater is by nature selective and expansive in what it borrows from reality. Imagination has to be the ultimate determinant. How the imagination of a society or an era conceives of the moment of dying and how that is translated by and transmitted from the stage is the subject of this book.

Mimesis, like the human activity it copies, works primarily through movement and speech. Both are at a disadvantage in portraying the act of dying. In point of fact, a Victorian doctor writes, ninety-nine of every hundred human beings are unconscious for several hours before death comes to them; all the majesty of intellect, the tender beauty of thought or sympathy or charity, the very love for those for whom love has filled all waking thoughts, disappear.⁵ Physical movement is often imperceptible with the slow attrition of vitality. Watching at the bedside of his dying wife, an English playwright recorded, "At length, she no longer saw me, nor heard me, nor pressed my hand; she was mercifully spared, by the gracious Omnipotent, her so dreaded pang of separation. Every faculty dropped, leaf by leaf, away; she was no more; she was in my arms, dead.⁶ The domestic attendance at a deathbed made such a dissolution familiar and, by the late nineteenth century, prompted distaste for flamboyant portrayals of dying. To the fastidious it resembled the flopping of a haddock on a fishmonger’s slab. Dying on stage […] is probably as unlike actual [slow and gradual] dying as anything that can be conceived, declared the critic Percy Fitzgerald in the early years of the twentieth century, so that the exhibition of the abrupt agonies to which our actors are so partial are matters superfluous […] Such agonies displayed elaborately are out of place and repellent."⁷

Yet the grotesque and gruesome actions Fitzgerald deplored often do take place when death is occasioned by violent or painful means. In reality, when stabbed to the heart a victim might cough up bubbles of blood as precursors to a hemorrhage while the body jerks in involuntary reflex. Acting might have to employ conventional means to tone down these extreme reactions. Stabbed in the heart on stage, as Othello or Brutus were traditionally dispatched, a discreet actor would drop to the floor in a dignified heap. As to voicing last moments, the alternatives seem to be the rest is silence, inarticulate sounds, or Dutch Schultz’s hospital-bed ramblings. These are vocal surrogates for the cries, gurgles, and death rattle (râle) of moribund agony. Even when counterfeits of the body in extremis are moderated, an audience may respond with nervous laughter. Apprehension of their own eventual contortions and hiccups compels them to seek relief.

The dilemma is neatly summed up in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) by an exchange between a philosophic courtier and a professional actor. Guildenstern contemptuously asks the player, What do you know about death?

PLAYER. It’s what the actors do best. They have to exploit whatever talent is given to them, and their talent is dying. They can die heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly, disgustingly, charmingly, or from a great height.

Doggedly fixated on an existential dilemma, Guildenstern refuses to accept the theatrical simulacrum, preferring the performance to be a memento mori that will shake the audience to its core.

GUILDENSTERN. […] You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone—it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says—One day you are going to die. […] You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death?

PLAYER. On the contrary, it’s the only kind they do believe.

GUILDENSTERN. No, no […] you’ve got it all wrong […] you can’t act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen—it’s not gasps and blood and falling about—that isn’t what makes it death. It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all […] an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.⁸

The arguments are at cross-purposes: Guildenstern wants a theater audience to be confronted with the imminence of its own death, while the Player conceives death as an entertainment, diverting the viewers and arresting their attention not on their mortality but on the virtuosity of the entertainer.

This issue is paramount in Eugène Ionesco’s Jeux de massacre (1970), inspired by Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. In scene after scene, an entire town is mowed down by a mysterious epidemic; death cuts across all classes, professions, ages, and genders, until at last a purifying fire lays waste to what is left. The cumulative force of the episodes, each predictably ending in death, may evoke despair at the futility of human endeavor and the arbitrary nature of its end. However, given Ionesco’s penchant for absurdity, the cumulative effect of the toppling characters is to make them seem like literal fall guys, as the play’s title announces.⁹ Ultimately, the deaths express no more gravity than those in Alfred Jarry’s anarchic puppet play Ubu Roi. The inevitability of the end neutralizes empathy.

Guildenstern resumes his argument by making precisely this point:

I’m talking about death—and you’ve never experienced that. And you cannot act it. You die a thousand deaths—with none of that intensity which squeezes out life […] and no blood runs cold anywhere. Because even as you die you know that you will come back in a different hat. But no one gets up after death—there is no applause—there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that’s—death—.¹⁰

The courtier, defining death as loss, insists that its accurate representation demands absence, silence, a vacuum of individual personality. That is diametrically opposed to the histrionic view of death as an occasion for exhibition. Its material characteristics must be made blatantly conspicuous if they are to beguile an audience. Stoppard, of course, wrote as a post-Beckettian, well aware that the twentieth-century stage was adept at finding ways to present vacuity and nonbeing. The experiments of Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor were predicated on such a premise.

Before the nineteenth century, when both public and private deaths began to be confined behind closed doors, it was widely available as a spectacle. Death and the suffering that preceded it were in plain sight; no effort was made to hide the diseased and moribund. The absence of medical means of alleviating pain or of hygienic measures to avoid infection meant that the most distressing and abhorrent aspects of dying were out in the open. The contempt for human life shown by the law courts in demanding the death penalty for the slightest offense occasioned frequent and enthusiastically attended public executions. In addition, religion, in the person of the Church, generally hoped, through elaborate rites and ceremonies, both before and after death, to invest it with an edifying value that could be extended for the greater good.

Take the matter of a public execution on a scaffold, itself a trestle stage. Tyburn Tree in London and the Place de Grève in Paris become sites of popular spectacle when capital punishment is meted out there. Death, cruelly inflicted in a public space within a ceremony at once sacred (the passage to eternal life of a contrite sinner), social (punishment of a criminal), and aesthetic (the pleasure of watching another mortal suffer or a repentant good death) becomes critical in the performance of death in the theater; it will require the same effects, only now mediated by both the narrative and the body of the performer. The sacred and social ceremony makes a transition into a wholly aesthetic simulation, more congenial to a modern frame of mind.

Much theater demurs to accept that mimesis is a direct imitation of reality. Following in Aristotle’s footsteps, it defines mimesis as a form of representation, in other words, a relationship with the world that is refracted rather than reflected by the work of art (Shakespeare’s mirror up to nature thus hangs in a carnival funhouse). So, while producing fictions, acting pretends that they become real on the stage. Theater engages in what Stanislavsky would call the magic if¹¹ proper to dramatic practice by suppressing the distinction between pretend death and actual death. The simulacrum created by theatrical illusion is its own reality. Historically, the theater plays with the analogy mimic death=real death, compounding the ritual spectacle of death with that of the dramatic character, hoping to render the spectator incapable of discriminating the genuine act of dying from the stage death.

The varieties of this "mort-spectacle"¹² run the gamut. From the Greek tragic stage that was highly selective in determining which deaths it (re)enacted to the elaborately stylized murders and suicides in Kabuki, to the lavish bloodletting of the Elizabethans, to the deathbed visitations of the modern era, what was acceptable and/or enjoyable fluctuates wildly. Neoclassic decorum eschewed graphic display; and, after a heyday of spectacular dying on the nineteenth-century stage, critics again began to insist on moderation and understatement. This conformed to the growing emphasis on mental processes and psychological complexity. However, it runs counter, as Stoppard’s Player explains, to the theater’s need for high color, extreme situations, and fanciful invention. Denied houseroom in literary drama, these desiderata found a welcome haven in the various manifestations of performance art.

This survey of dying on stage therefore inquires into the manner specific to an era, seen against a background of what is felt emotionally and what is processed intellectually. As a French literary historian has remarked in reference to violence, we need to consider what caused striking images of dying to be played out on stages of the past and how they not only fascinated and moved spectators but may also have led them to reflect on what they had seen.¹³

Theater has evolved from two distinct strains. The first might be called professional: entertainers who made their living by diverting the public. Itinerant jugglers, wirewalkers, conjurers, all-purpose minstrels, traveling folk, or strollers unassociated with civic communities and often organized into dynastic troupes. Their activities, even when as highly organized as in the modern circus, have usually been sidelined by academics as popular entertainment. In their comic treatment of death, the dead regularly returned to life. Arlecchino’s blundering attempts at suicide, Gozzi’s Princess Turandot ordering Off with his head, or Dario Fo’s starving clown eating himself are set pieces within a commedia dell’arte frame, defying the spectator to take death seriously. The white-faced Pierrot developed by Deburau at the Théátre des Funambules in early nineteenth-century Paris was often given a mortuary aura, as manservant to Death, as murderer of an old-clo’ man who then haunts him, as a ghost who terrifies his rivals in love. Rubbing elbows with the Grim Reaper lent prestige to the traditional stooge. Pierrot’s literary revival in the second half of the century turned him explicitly into a whey-faced agent of Death. The titles reveal as much: Pierrot valet de la Mort; Pierrot Assassin; Pierrot assassin de sa femme; La fin de Pierrot; Le suicide de Pierrot; Pierrot Macabre.¹⁴ Still, for all the efforts to enlist the pantomime clown as a decadent, the dying in these works is mirth-raising, not hair-raising. As Stoppard’s Guildenstern complained, the audience has no doubt the puppets will revive for the next performance. Only Stravinsky, by means of music, succeeded in giving tragic resonance to the buffoon’s death in Pétrouchka.¹⁵

This study is, however, concerned with the other strain of theater, the so-called legitimate or dramatic, which has its roots in religious rituals, magical cults, blood sacrifices. These rites, navigating the dangerous zones that divide life and death and communicating with the divine, require expert handling, especially when summoning chthonic deities. Hence the rise of shamans, magicians, and hierophants to control spirit forces and channel communication between the earthly and the divine, the natural and the supernatural.

Over time, magical rites become metaphoric or simulated; actual sacrifices are replaced by emblematic facsimiles, and the officiant in direct and dangerous contact with the godhead is replaced by a professional performing the role, a proto-actor. This shift to simulation has been much recorded by ethnographers researching shamans and tribal witch doctors. The surrogate may go through the motions, but this priest or officiant does not possess the magical powers of the authentic thaumaturge.¹⁶ Whereas the shaman is put at risk by immediate encounter with the sacrosanct and may endanger his communicants as well, the surrogate acts out but does not consummate the perilous rites. Eventually the rite evolves into a show and the priest into a performer. Return from the dead, a potent element in such ceremonies, becomes the comic scenario of the St George folk play.

The exclusive employment of men as actors in the ancient Greek tragedies was seen by