When you were younger did you ever try to walk back over your steps? Walking on top of your past foot prints? I did, and found wet feet straight from the bath or sodden shoes from jumping in an inviting looking puddle were best.
Try as we might, we can never mimic those steps exactly. Which is ironic really, seeing as we are walking over the past on a constant basis. Our future is built from the past. It effects, influences and shapes where we are going, but we can never reclaim it or re-enact it truthfully. We live in liveness. Constantly disappearing, ending and restarting as the earth turns. Blink and you’ve created a memory. The moment is over, living on only in recreations in our minds. Or re-told through stories.
All of our future actions are haunted by our past. I don’t just mean ‘our past’ here in a purely personal sense. It goes much further than a singular person. Its our cultural collective past, our language, spiritual and religious ideologies… These day to day hauntings are arguably best culminated in the theatre. Although “the physical theatre […] is not surprisingly among the most haunted of human cultural structures” (Carlson, 2003, 2), the ghosting surpasses the physical spaces which it inhabits and passes onto the actors, the performance, and even the words within that.
Perhaps taking it one step further than Carlson, as he states, “the dramatic text seems particularly […] haunted by its predecessors” (2003, 8) – when we hear a word or a statement we often re-create a past moment, recall a song or a line from a play. We are haunted not only by performance but by everyday language (perhaps because of performance).
An example;
Whenever I hear the word shadow, or indeed even think of the word, my mind transports itself back to my second year of University and our performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Puck’s famous closing speech.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend.
Even now I can type this from memory. And this is where the ghost live. Ghosting excites our memory, because after all, that is where it is created and roused.
Events; historical, fiction, imaginary, bizarre and fact are created and re-created on stages every day. They bring the dead back to life and have them parade for us, murder villains and innocents alike. But, when the curtain goes down (not always a physical curtain, but this gives the most visual representation) those characters killed, revived or indeed created stop.
The actors leave them there.
Titania doesn’t have a twenty-minute power nap before the third show of the day and Jack The Ripper doesn’t leave the stage doors and head home to his family. Their ghosts remain in the space, waiting to be picked up, shaken off and re-worn. Perhaps even re-dressed if the occasion calls for it. The theatre is so haunted because it is live. It’s disappearing before our eyes as we watch it, ghostlike in performance. Every subsequent performance will be haunted by its previous as the live-ness of the performance before can not be replicated exactly. A slight hand gesture different, or a hesitation . The audience is also different on each performance, and it is important to acknowledge that.
The performance is not just received by an audience, but it is created and edited by them too.
I want you to close your eyes and think of;
Hamlet.
Sherlock.
James Bond.
Professor Snape.
Mr Darcy.
Who did you think of?
I am conscious of the fact I didn’t ask for a description of what the character looks like.
These characters are now haunted.
Hamlet – David Tennant.
Sherlock – Benedict Cumberbatch.
James Bond – Daniel Craig.
Mr Darcy – Colin Firth.
The actors are haunted too. When watching Star Trek, I couldn’t help but compare, comment on and relate Benedict’s performance to that in Sherlock. For me, he is Sherlock Holmes. We “recall situations when the memory of an actor seen in a previous role or roles remained in the mind to haunt a subsequent performance” (Carlson, 2003, 10). Although amazing how this happens (the mind is a wonderful thing), it is also full of frustrations!
This ghosting is unavoidable. We make the unrelatable relateable by reaching for something that we have previously seen or experienced to give to context. To make it make sense. It almost feels as though our memories are jumping up and down saying “it’s this! I know! They’re the person from that thing! You know… the thing! Pick me! I know!”.
Like a slightly over excitable child our memories fill in blanks, or projects what we know onto what we’re seeing. This is both a helping hand and a hindrance. Experiencing moments almost second-hand, through a filter of preconceived ideas and previous performances, can alter our perception of what we’re spectating. We’re a culmination of our history and our language, a creation of biases, so when watching a performance, can we truly receive it how it was intended to be received?
“the spectators’ knowledge of the artistic language, which they bring into the theatre, contributes to their understanding and their judgement”
(Postlewait, 2009, 19)
The most interesting and terrifying notion of ghosting for me lies beyond the theatre. It creates it though; the characters, the worlds, the voices and the scripts.
The alphabet.
“every new work may also be seen as a new assemblage of material from old works”
(Carlson, 2003, 4)
Every word ever spoken (in the English language) is just a re-hash and re-ordering of the same 26 letters.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y and Z.
Everything I’ve written and rewritten, every sentence I’ve spoken aloud because it doesn’t read just right, is haunted. And that, my dear reader, is phenomenal.
References
Carlson, Marvin (2003) The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, University of Michigan Library: University of Michigan Press.
Postlewait, Thomas (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.