Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (review) Vassiliki Rapti

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In Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht, Olga Taxidou engages in a thought-provoking re-examination of Modernism through the lenses of modernist performance, located primarily in the conspicuous presence of the actor's body. In a simple and concise style, the author brings to the fore the predominant debates hovering over literary Modernism and the historical avant-garde making their conflation resurface. Thanks to her fresh and subversive look, Taxidou advocates for emphasis to be placed on the conjunction and, which is featured in the title of her book: "[T]he restoration of this linking wordand, in a constructivist manner, will bring out the similarities but also the differences, the contradictions and the rifts created by more than half a century of criticism that sees them as separate" (p. 213). This paratactic quality constitutes the main structuring force of this book, enhanced by the author's perspective as a scholar who has dealt with both the theory and the practice of the theater.

Demonstrating evidence of a thorough understanding of Modernism and modernity that builds upon her previous work as co-editor of two modernist anthologies, and author of Tragedy, Mourning and Modernity (Edinburgh University Press 2004), Taxidou is able to grasp some of the subtlest instances of controversy in the history of modernist performance. This is why this book is appealing to the informed reader while offering a great introduction to anyone interested in the complexities of Modernism in conjunction with issues of performance such as theatricality, new theories of acting based on the marionette/actor debate or the encounter with the theater of the Orient (Chinese and Japanese Noh theaters), the rise of the director, the role of the designer, and the autonomy of the work of art versus its political engagement.

The author traces a trajectory of Modernism and performance from the public debut of Ubu Roi in 1896 to Bertold Brecht's version of Sophocles's Antigonewith his Antigone-Model 1948. For Taxidou, both works conceptualize canonical texts (Macbeth and Antigone) while suggesting notions of avant-garde performance. Simply put, the issues raised by the Ubu phenomenon which led Yeats to claim, "[a]fter us the Savage God," are finalized by Brecht's method through a radical experimentation of the historical avant-garde.

The author begins with a brief introduction that highlights the centrality of performance for the modernist project. Whether as savage, prophet, robot, or revolutionary, the modernist performer, the author argues, emerges as the privileged site through whom modernist experimentation takes form. By the same line of thought, in the second chapter, entitled, "Puppets and Actors," Taxidou discusses the puppet as the most apt site for modernist experimentation in the theater and as the emblem of modernist anti-humanist experimentation in form. To puppetize the human form as in Ubu Roi's case, for instance, inevitably offers new ways of reconfiguring the human body.

Interestingly, in the third chapter, "The Playwright, the Director and the Actress," Taxidou examines Naturalism as part of the modernist movement itself. Within it, the figure of the new director as distinct from that of the playwright, is responsible for composing an artistic spectacle which has much to benefit from the rise of the female actress who embodies the "new woman" question, one that is constitutive of Naturalism and becomes a fixture of the Naturalist stage.

In the next chapter, Taxidou deals with the poetic drama witnessed mainly in works by W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. The very telling title, "'. . . as if the words themselves could sing and shine': Poetic Drama and Theatricality," focuses on the power of the written word of the aforementioned Anglophone high modernist corpus of dramatic works in conjunction with the writings of Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Bertold Brecht, thus opening up the category of "poetry" in the theater. The quest for poetry in, of, or through theater almost always involves a similar quest for a poetics of physicality and embodiment ultimately pointing to theories of acting.

In the following chapter, Taxidou deals with the ways the encounter with the theaters of Southeast Asia, Japan, and China is crucial for the reconceptualization and retheatricalization of the modernist...