Table Of ContentCONTEMPORARY
GOTHIC DRAMA
Attraction, Consummation
and Consumption on the
Modern British Stage
Edited by
Kelly Jones, Benjamin Poore
and Robert Dean
Palgrave Gothic
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
This series of Gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many
inter-related, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the
taste for the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for
terror and horror and how that taste became not only international (with
a huge fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the
sensibility of the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse
areas as the nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the con-
cept of the self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing
kept to a minimum and theory contextualised where possible. All the
books are readable by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general
reader interested in the subject.
Editorial Advisory Board
Dr. Ian Conrich, University of Vienna, Austria
Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK
Prof. Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA
Prof. Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK
Dr. Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK
Dr. Alison Peirse, University of York, UK
Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Prof. William Hughes, Bath Spa University, UK
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14698
Kelly Jones · Benjamin Poore
Robert Dean
Editors
Contemporary Gothic
Drama
Attraction, Consummation and Consumption on
the Modern British Stage
Editors
Kelly Jones Benjamin Poore
School of Fine and Performing Arts Department of Theatre, Film and
University of Lincoln Television
Lincoln, UK University of York
York, UK
Robert Dean
School of Fine and Performing Arts
University of Lincoln
Lincoln, UK
Palgrave Gothic
ISBN 978-1-349-95358-5 ISBN 978-1-349-95359-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95359-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943638
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This book is dedicated to Peter, Lydia and Harry.
F
oreword
Some thirty years ago, I submitted to a BBC TV regional drama depart-
ment (now defunct) a proposal for a film that I would write and direct,
as I had previously done there with White Lady. This time the setting was
to be an isolated village on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall. To this village
comes our protagonist, an unlovely young man, too well-off by far, and
‘unwritten-on’, in search of a weekend home. He is particularly drawn to
an ‘Old Rectory’ advertised for sale here. On the steep approach down
into the village, his bright red urban tractor inexplicably ‘dies’. So does
his state-of-the-art 1987 mobile phone. To seek help, and having to walk
the rest of the way, vexed and ill-tempered, he finds the village appar-
ently uninhabited. Passing the ‘Old Rectory’ itself, he peers in at its win-
dows into a discouragingly dismal kitchen. He knocks, calls, shouts. No
answer. Seeing a black-robed white-haired figure down on the shore, he
starts to pick his way toward him across the stranded seaweed and slip-
pery rocks. He teeters, loses his balance, falls, cracks his head, and loses
consciousness.
He comes to in a gloomy interior which we recognise—he does not—
as that same rectory kitchen, and being tended by a black-robed white-
haired old clergyman and his daughter. He has forgotten everything of
who he is, he does not recognise even his own name nor photograph
on his driving licence. Blacking out again, he wakes to find himself in an
old-fashioned bed. It seems night, but he hears and, looking through the
bedroom window, sees people arriving in the village—and out there it’s
daylight, of some hazy sort. Next morning, there is, and apparently has
vii
viii FOREWORD
been, no one. It seems the village is haunted, and the rectory besieged,
by vampires. But these vampires are people who come here only at
weekends—as he himself would have done.
It’s not rocket science to see, as bloodsuckers, weekend incomers
depopulating a village and disenfranchising its native community. But
within that narrative device there was also to be a deeper, existential pro-
cess under way. The central character is suddenly in a moment of evo-
lution, beginning to change, toward becoming a different and a better
man. And soon, in fact, the old rector’s daughter is convincing herself
that he is her husband, killed at sea in what seems the Falklands war,
returned to her from the dead…
A screenplay had already drafted itself. I had found the perfect loca-
tion for it; in fact, the village itself had suggested the story. Technically it
would be a challenging project for someone making only his second film,
but at that stage in my career I was ready for that. And the film would
have looked extraordinary. It was quite some reversal to me when my
proposal was rejected outright.
Rejections in themselves were nothing new to me; why I recount this
one in such detail, and why here, lies in the terms in which this particu-
lar rejection was expressed. The Script Editor ‘regretted’ that I had ‘yet
again had recourse to the Gothic’. (Or words to that effect.) To give the
Script Editor his due, he was now answerable to a new Head of Drama,
and was needing to sing a new tune. The new tune was to be the main-
stream tv ‘realist’ idiom. Metaphor was not welcome. Still less ‘Gothic’…
But, dismaying as was the rejection itself—and it proved in effect to
spell the end of my career in tv—was the surprise I felt, to encounter
myself perceived as a ‘Gothic’ author. It was like, in a hotel room or a
street, catching sight of oneself in a doubly reflecting mirror: a startling
glimpse of how we visually appear to the world. I hadn’t ever thought of
myself as ‘Gothic’.
In fact, as an author I had—and have—never thought of myself as
‘being’ particularly anything. A work evolves from an original germ—
often, in my case, a visual image, suddenly then persistently presenting
itself to my imagination—and the resulting piece is arrived at through
‘interrogating’ that image, teasing out its implications, uncovering an
existential process, resolving dramaturgical difficulties and negotiat-
ing potential polemical problems vis-à-vis a readership or audience: in
short, objectivising the original image. That process is what will deter-
mine the work’s ultimate imaginative stance, not a conscious choice to
FOREWORD ix
be ‘Gothic’—or ‘realist’, or anything else. If I press into service a con-
ventional Gothic trope—vampire, werewolf, sinister underground labora-
tory…—it’s to make visible some higher existential meaning. If a critic or
script editor labels the result ‘Gothic’, that’s their issue, not mine.
Yet, as a certain villainous princess once countered, Not altogether
so. There’s a moral here. Half a lifetime on from that ill-fated proposal
of mine, I’m equipped now to see a totally different pitch I could have
made, unimaginable to me then. I’m currently researching a major inter-
national music-theatre project on the life, teaching and afterlife of the
Buddha. My ‘Gothic’ film’s protagonist—a morally vacuous, exploita-
tive ‘yuppie’ (as he would have been dubbed then)—unexpectedly ‘dies’,
and wakes in a different and more difficult place, where he has to start
over again from nothing. As someone else. In Buddhist terms, he has to
work off what the Buddha in his own Pali language would call our man’s
kamma—the moral debt he has incurred in his previous life. If I had pre-
sented my synopsis as a Buddhist parable, to dismiss it might not have
seemed so slight a matter.
Dismiss. That’s the issue. For a work or author or artist to be labelled
‘Gothic’ is in effect to be relegated to some obscurely-sensed second-
ary division. So I personally welcome this collection of essays: first, as
possibly offering myself some guidance toward a working definition of
what Gothic in practice is—for in all honesty I am not fully sure I could
offer one; and second, more broadly, as possibly helping to provoke the
promotion of Gothic toward a more reckonable status in our critical dis-
course.
But… one cautionary final word—courtesy of Edward Bond, in con-
nection with his 1968 play Early Morning. (The play features Queen
Victoria and Florence Nightingale as lesbian partners, and a Heaven
where they eat people for breakfast.) Taxed by an exasperated critic who
asked the author how did he classify this play, Bond gave the elegant if
typically curt reply: Social Realism. It bears thinking about. Our label,
our classification, is not where our definition of a work’s attitude should
settle, but where our inquiry into it should begin.
Port Quin, Cornwall David Rudkin
January 2017
P
reFace
This collection of essays celebrates the extraordinary and continued prev-
alence and appeal of the Gothic in contemporary British theatre and per-
formance, an area that, inexplicably, has received scant critical attention,
with few exceptions, until this point. Chapters range from considerations
of the Gothic in musical theatre and literary adaptation, to explorations
of the Gothic’s power to haunt contemporary playwriting, macabre tour-
ism and site-specific performance. Whilst the focus of the collection falls
upon Gothic drama, the contents of the book aim for an interdisciplinary
appeal as homage to the Gothic’s own disregard for taxonomy and its
gleeful transgression of boundaries.
The editors would like to express their thanks to series editor, Clive
Bloom, for his generous advice and enthusiasm for the book; and to Karina
Jakupsdottir, Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman at Palgrave for their help with
formatting and troubleshooting. Thanks also to David Rudkin for his indus-
trious encouragement for the project and for kindly providing a foreword
for this collection. We would also like to acknowledge the support from col-
leagues in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University
of York, and at both the School of Fine and Performing Arts and the School
of English and Journalism, at the University of Lincoln, especially Dominic
Symonds, John Bull, Karen Savage, Lucie Armitt and Scott Brewster.
Lincoln, UK Kelly Jones
York, UK Benjamin Poore
Lincoln, UK Robert Dean
xi
