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CATZ RESEARCH
Kirsten Shepherd Barr
Fellow & Tutor in English
Lottie: “Are you evolving at present?”
Mervyn: “I hope so!”
Lottie: “It must be a dreadfully
uncomfortable process.”
Robert Buchanan, The Charlatan (1894)
I spent last year on a Leverhulme Research
Fellowship researching and writing a book on
theatre and evolution, a topic that developed
from my previous book Science on Stage:
From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen and
from my experience in organizing and chairing
a panel on ‘Darwin and the Theatre’ for the
Darwin Festival 2009 in Cambridge.
What can theatrical engagements with
evolution tell us about the cultural
embeddedness of science? I have found a
striking number of plays and performances
that have engaged with evolutionary theory
since the 1840s, when the bestselling
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
put ideas about the transmutation of species
into the public consciousness. Victorians
flocked to ‘missing link’ shows that purported
to display examples of intermediate species;
they attended human anomaly displays like
the Hottentot Venus; they descended on
the newly opened London Zoo to watch
‘ethnological exhibits’ in which commercially
displayed peoples (usually Zulus) went
about their routine business of life in their
native garb; and they saw evolutionary ideas
filtered through cabaret and vaudeville. But
it was not just the illegitimate theatre that
engaged with evolutionary ideas, and not
just the Victorians. My book project sets
these kinds of performances alongside the
work of playwrights like Ibsen, Pinero, Jones,
Buchanan, Shaw, Strindberg, Maeterlinck,
Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell, moving
to twentieth-century dramatists such as
Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, and Samuel
Beckett, and concluding with discussions
of recent evolution-inspired pieces such as
Catherine Trieschmann’s How the World
Began and Cirque du Soleil’s Totem, the latter
inspired as much by Haeckel and Lamarck as
by Darwin.
Non-Darwinian evolutionary theory has always
been very popular with playwrights and
directors. We see Lamarckism in Shaw with
the idea of progress and the will (inheritance
of acquired characters); we see saltation in
plays like Susan Glaspell’s The Verge. Yet
scientific accuracy has hardly been a priority
in many of the examples I have found.
Investigating these plays and performances
has revealed two main tendencies in theatre’s
engagement with evolution: contrarianism
and wrong-headedness. Far from merely
reflecting or conveying evolution, theatre has
tended to take a questioning, often hostile
stance, and it often gets the science wrong,
spectacularly, deliberately, and productively,
making theatrical engagements with evolution
clear examples of what Gillian Beer has called
‘creative misprisions’ as they transform the
very ideas at their core. Sometimes they
even prove prescient: one of the fascinating
developments I trace out is how the rise of
epigenetics has reclaimed Lamarckism, the
inspiration for many theatrical works that
engage evolution. n
Earlier this year, Kirsten’s book,
Science on Stage: From Dr Faustus
to Copenhagen was re-released in
paperback by Princeton University
Press, and was the subject of a Times
Higher Education article by Matthew
Reisz on 22 November 2012. The
Guardian’s PD Smith, reviewing the
book, praised it as a ‘well-researched
and illuminating study’ in an article on
16 October 2012.
ST CATHERINE’S COLLEGE 2012/55