What Happened to Theatrical Scandal?
"Is genuine theater scandal still possible?” asks TLS critic John Stokes, reviewing Theodore Ziolkowski’s book Scandal on Stage. In many recent examples of plays that have created a fuss, the cause has been more social than theatrical. Dodgy expenses, office affairs, and celebrity nudity are what pass now for a shocking night out. And how genuinely shocking are any of these now? Central to Scandal on Stage is the modern treatment of classic plays, the all-lesbian Hedda Gabler or The Wild Duck that is still without end after 12 hours on stage. The book is “as much a polemic against directorial imposition as it is a history of theatrical outrage, the link between the two being Ziolkowski’s belief that when directors stamp their own personal vision on a work in order to deliberately cause a sensation they are effectively pre-empting, or even counteracting, its innate provocations, denying rather than amplifying the writer’s wishes.” The analysis runs from the early 19th century with the weakening of aristocratic and clerical patronage, and the ensuing dependence of artists on the rise of a paying public. In order to serve that public, the artist must challenge or even insult its avowed standards—either by uncompromising engagement with unrepresented political issues (at one extreme agitprop) or, conversely, by refusing any social involvement whatsoever and serving “Art” alone. The “freedom” of the artist becomes a shibboleth. The public must continue to pay, Stokes concludes—and in more senses than one.
Old French Romances
The idea that a woman's love may cure a man's destructive passion is a commonplace of the romantic novel. In Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance, reviewed in the TLS this week by Carolyne Larrington, Laine Doggett draws the medical analogy back to the time when Romance had no necessary connection to “romance” in the modern sense at all. Looking closely at 12th-century romances, Doggett argues that the depiction of various noblewomen, notably Isolde and her mother from the Tristan legend, as possessing healing skills draws on historical practice: the tradition of unofficial healers, whom she calls “empirics,” whose knowledge of herbs and salves was passed down through the generations. The role of the romance heroine in healing the knight’s injuries overlaps with her granting him her love, so that at first healing and loving go hand in hand. "Only later, as medical knowledge becomes the preserve of university- educated men and female empirics are excluded from practice through professional regulation, does the idea that women literally cure their lovers dissolve into a metaphorical understanding of the beloved as healing the wounds made by Cupid?" Nor should we assume that magic is at work in the healing process; our modern distinction between magical remedies—or the love potion of Tristan and Isolde—and effective drugs would be very differently understood by the medieval audience.
Mavis Gallant’s Dispossessed Americans
The Cost of Living, the title given to the early and uncollected stories of Mavis Gallant, contains a number of stories with strong links to American dilemmas of today. As Alex Clark describes in the TLS, the well-to-do Connecticut hostess of the collection’s earliest story, “Madeline’s Birthday” (1951), claims never to have known an unhappy moment in her nicely appointed summertime house; instead, she imports unease in the form of a series of charity cases, including Polish war orphans, Bundles for Britain, and an unmarried mother. Her husband takes comfort in the relative peace afforded by an intake of troubled adolescents. “Unlike the unmarried mother,” he notes, “they did not leave suicide notes in the car.”
In “The Picnic,” American forces stationed in a provincial French town are prevailed on to organize an outing to demonstrate the Army’s good relations with their host community, all for the benefit of an American magazine. A long-suffering Army wife hard-boils eggs in the kitchen belonging to a French grande dame, while the magazine’s photographer, never seen, sends notes from his hotel commanding the major to orchestrate a display of folk dancing. “Baseball,” retorts the major grimly, “is as far as I’ll go.”
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Peter Stothard's latest book is On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy. He is also the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.
