Review

Reviewed Work(s): ART, VISION, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY REALIST DRAMA: ACTS OF

SEEING. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series by Amy Holzapfel
Review by: NEVENA STOJANOVIC
Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 66, No. 3, SPECTATORSHIP (OCTOBER 2014), pp. 485-486
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24580370
Accessed: 16-04-2021 15:08 UTC

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 BOOK REVIEWS / 485

actors' features by her audience members. Yet, this provided the necessary basis "for the deeper and
objection should not take away from an appraisal more physiological interrogations of vision in the
of the book's merit: its combination of historical theatre of Émile Zola" (46). By identifying and illu
contextualization, material considerations, crisp minating
ar this link between the well-made play and
gumentation, and nuanced textual analysis makes later realist dramas, she provides us with a more
comprehensive view of the evolution of trends in
Distance, Theatre, and the Public Voice one of the most
compelling works about the Romantic theatre to thebenineteenth-century theatre.
published in recent years.
Underlining the influences of contemporane
JOHN ROBBINS ous photographic and scientific trends on Zola's
Tufts University naturalist technique, Holzapfel offers a new look
at the writer's dramatic innovation in chapter 2.
She argues that Zola uncovered invisible layers of
his characters' psyches and distilled and displayed
ART, VISION, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY them through his own sensibility, and sets a read
REALIST DRAMA: ACTS OF SEEING. By ing of the theatrical adaptation of his novel Thérèse
Amy Holzapfel. Routledge Advances in Raquin against Gaspard-Félix Tournachon's (aka
Theatre and Performance Studies series. Nadar's) provocative photographs of the Parisian
New York: Routledge, 2014; pp. 244. "catacombs" and "sewers" (47), Guillaume Duch
enne de Boulogne's photographed experiments in
which he "applied" electricity on his posers "to
In her new book, Amy Holzapfel challenges
produce specific expressions of emotions" (56), and
the simplistic though long-standing conception of
Claude Bernard's claims that "traditional hospital
theatrical realism as a "premodern" phenomenon
medicine" did not give significant results, since ex
that tended to present "an exact copy of life on the
periments were not conducted "under controlled
stage" (2). Grounding her impressive study of ma
conditions" (61). Noting that Zola chose a room
jor realist playwrights in discussions of eighteenth
reminiscent of a laboratory for the play's setting,
and nineteenth-century scientific works on vision,
made his neurotic protagonist Thérèse immersed
painting trends, and early photography, Holzapfel
in her own lethargy and not in objects, and used
argues that these playwrights "struggled to reveal
several incidents as electrical stimuli for showing
. . . that seeing—and, by extension, knowing—are
Thérèse's psychological states, Holzapfel asserts
relative processes governed by the forces of a body
that Zola introduced the concept of the naturalist
moving in space and time" (ibid.), presenting read artist "who is not merely a recorder of seen facts
ers with a thought-provoking book that combines . . . but rather an active manipulator of hidden
her compelling arguments with reproductions of truths" (77). Her emphasis on the role of the art
paintings and photographs that reveal connections ist as a seeing experimenter in the transformation
between the visual arts and theatre.
of reality is a significant aid in our understanding
In the first chapter, Holzapfel questions the widely of later explorations of vision by canonical realists
accepted view of the mid-nineteenth century that who experimented not only with different outside
the well-made plays by Eugène Scribe, Victorien Sar stimuli and controlled conditions, but with popular
optical instruments as well.
dou, and Alexandre Dürnasts were diametrically
different from the realist plays of the late 1800s, em
In chapters 3 and 4, Holzapfel introduces simi
phasizing these playwrights' preoccupations with larly fresh views to the canonical oeuvres of Henrik
the connection between "the body's experience of Ibsen and August Strindberg, respectively, arguing
sight" and "that of touch" (24). Holzapfel grounds that their dramatic crafts either challenge the pos
her analysis in an overview of eighteenth-century sibility of attaining fidelity through seeing (Ibsen),
genre painting and Denis Diderof s essays on paint or encourage an approach to seeing as a creation
ing and theatre, which saluted genre painters' con of multifaceted images (Strindberg). Particularly
centration on the middle class through their render compelling is Holzapfel's analysis of the impact of
ings of the quotidian objects that came to define the inventions of optical instruments such as the
this social stratum. Noting that Scribe and Sardou stereoscope on Ibsen's realist dramatic technique.
emphasized the characters' engagement with ob Reminding us that the stereoscope imitates "the
jects and rituals that involve them, and that Dumas way our eyes view the world from slightly different
revised the genre by highlighting the characters' positions to produce the impression of depth in the
"physiological" qualities and instincts in various brain" (79), she asserts that the stereoscopic method
mental states (43), Holzapfel vividly demonstrates is evident in Ibsen's A Doll's House, whose protago
how the focus of the well-made play on characters' nist is cast as a doll "costumed by others" and per
experiences of reality through seeing and touching ceived in different ways by different characters (89).

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486 / Theatre Journal

Similarly, she detects the influence of photographic
composites, or combinations of several negatives
into a single image, on Strindberg's theatrical style.
Holzapfel contends that in The Father, the protago
nist seeks the proof of his own "immortality" in
the photograph of his daughter (Strindberg, qtd. in
Holzapfel 138). Both chapters highlight these play
wrights' respective preoccupations with the issues
of visual unreliability and impossibility of viewing
a subject as clear-cut and monolithic.
Holzapfel ends her study with a provocative ex
amination of Gerhart Hauptmann's naturalism, ar
guing that his plays herald the modernist crisis of
the wavering sight. She asserts that Hauptmann's
style was shaped by the works of painter Peter Hen
ry Emerson, scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, and
philosopher Robert Vischer, whose common char
acteristic was the acknowledgment of "the physi
ological and kinesthetic embodiment of the artist"
(163), and by painter Max Liebermann's portrayals
of human subjects as tightly connected with their
surroundings. The most convincing proof of Haupt
mann's faltering vision lies in Holzapfel's analysis
of Before Daybreak, where she eloquently observes
that he stages the difference between seeing as a mere
perceptual activity and watching as an immersing
activity. Significantly, the chapter astutely identifies
Hauptmann's approach to the artist as an observer
whose naturalist strength lies in "lived perspective"
(184), which leads directly to modernist inquiries
into the unsteadiness of visual experience.
Holzapfel concludes that a realist play should
be considered "the attempt by a dramatist to make
visible onstage how the subjective eye perceives,
and, in the process, transforms reality" (185). This
approach enables scholars and students in the fields
of performance studies, studies in visual arts, liter
ary studies, and interdisciplinary studies in real
ism to see the development of theatrical styles as
more continuous, establish the connections between
seemingly disparate theatrical phenomena, and keep
investigating realist renderings of the potential and
constraints of seeing.
NEVENA STOJANOVIC
West Virginia University
THEATRE OF THE REAL. By Carol Martin.
Studies in International Performance series.
Martin expands her analysis to show how the real
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp.
216. can be altered through the theatrical, although the
Focusing on theatrical representations of the Holo
Carol Martin tackles the task of examining the caust, the author begins with an excellent analysis of
increasingly symbiotic relationship between the Leeny Sack's one-woman show The Survivor and The
theatrical and the reality beyond the walls of the
Translator, demonstrating how a familial memory/
theatre. Rather than offering a simple discussion
of the use of verbatim documentation, Martin sets
out to widen the definition of Theatre of the Real
by including different methods that "recycle real
ity" into performance (5). Martin had previously in
vestigated the concept of Theatre of the Real in her
edited collection Dramaturgy of the Real on the World
Stage, which combined essays with texts of various
performances, but this work adds new speculation
about the types of performances that use reality as
a guiding force for the theatrical world, a useful
tool for anyone analyzing performances that utilize
ever-expanding archival sources within a produc
tion or script.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for the volume through
a historiographical look at the intrusion of the real
into performance. While not a departure from Mar
tin's earlier work on the topic, this chapter gives an
efficient overview of the history of Theatre of the
Real and a taxonomy of these performances. She
asserts that technology and virtual performance
have caused a "sea change in archiving brought
on by digitization and the Internet" (ibid.). With
the wealth of digital archives and material on the
internet, she argues that Theatre of the Real has
evolved as the immediacy of real documents has
forced theatre artists to wrestle with the instant
quality of memory in artifacts like online videos,
blogs, and status updates.
The second and third chapters wrestle with dif
ferent ways of understanding memory as a com
ponent of Theatre of the Real through examples as
varied as Spalding Gray's Rumstick Road and Hotel
Modern's Kamp. This section grapples with another
of Martin's key assertions: "Theatre of the real both
acknowledges a positivist faith in empirical reality
and underscores an epistemological crisis in know
ing truth" (14). In tracing the ways that memory
both heightens the awareness of an event's reality
and simultaneously distances the spectator from
the event, she brings the work into conversation
with identity theory, Theatre for Social Change, and
the political and material undercurrents of theatre
production. Scholars working in these fields will
find these chapters particularly useful in illumi
nating the natural flow between memory and the
theatrical, even when the memory is social rather
than personal.
Building on her work with the concept of memory,
chapter's examples sometimes fall short of this goal.

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