#terry castle

[gothicseverance]

A haunted lover can do nothing, it seems, but haunt the haunts of the other.

—Gothic Death

[funeral]

‘The uncanny’ is first and foremost a sort of theme-index: an obsessional inventory of eerie fantasies, motifs, and effects, an itemized tropology of the weird. Doubles, dancing dolls and automata, waxwork figures, alter egos and 'mirror’ selves, spectral emanations, detached body parts ('a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet that dance by themselves’), the ghastly fantasy of being buried alive, omens, precognition, déjà vu...What makes them uncanny is precisely the way they subvert the distinction between the real and the phantasmic.

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer

[unpopularwiththepopulace]

The English premiere of Rebecca the Musical: navigating insatiability and treasure hunting musical lesbianism in the theatre

“The curiosity is insatiable, and the pursuit of such knowledge is a spiritual exercise, demeaning but also secretly ennobling.” The Queen’s

Propelled chiefly by last year’s London production, I have written a (rather) long form piece to do with Rebecca the Musical. Though focusing mainly on this eventual and heavily expectant premiere of the English production of the musical, discussion relates also to the original and other iterations of the show, and musicals more generally, too.

The piece is anchored by the central theme of insatiability while looking in turn at:

the process of tracing the evasive histories of character representations and theatrical productions over many decades – including also flickered and largely forgotten records of the play and opera forms of Rebecca, and the “apparitional”, equivocal lens that queer female sexuality is handled with across large spans of time

decoding evidence of sparse, if periodically rather dire, female queerness in theatrical, musical contexts – guided by the disciples of dykeish dissatisfaction in the musical’s character of Mrs Danvers or the story’s primary author of Daphne du Maurier herself

considering what it means to exist as an audience member responding in situ to (principally female) performers with thrilling voices, both in and outside an auditorium, and the delicate but frequently under-discussed predicament of queer female diva devotion.

Take a look if you're interested!

In further expansion of photographic documentation of each of the examined stage-based, theatrical iterations of Rebecca, more images are presented below.

Discussion originates from the existence of the 2023 English premiere production of Rebecca the Musical at the Charing Cross Theatre in London, where cast principals included Kara Lane as Mrs Danvers (alternated by Melanie Bright), Lauren Jones as I (the new Mrs de Winter), and Richard Carson as Maxim. Photos by myself.

The first stage production of Rebecca arose much earlier, concerning the 1939 play by the same name at the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue (now The Sondheim Theatre). Daphne du Maurier herself wrote its script. Margaret Rutherford played Mrs Danvers, Celia Johnson was the new Mrs de Winter, Owen Nares appeared as Maxim. The Queen’s Theatre was bombed in 1940 during WWII at the time of Rebecca’s occupancy, becoming the first theatre in London to be hit by a wartime bomb, and bringing to an immediate premature close the show’s successful run - and highlighting earlier associations of this story's connection to tumultuous tales and dramatic events in histories of it's staging, as the attempted primary stagings of the English musical iteration would later return to.

Photos from this first theatrical, London production include those by Angus McBean from a periodical spread entitled ‘Mystery and Murder in Stately Cornish Home - Dramatic Moments of Du Maurier’s “Rebecca.”’, published in The Sketch (vol. 190), May 1940.

The play also then appeared on the road in America, and subsequently on Broadway in 1945 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for a fleeting 20 performances; and of this entity, record remains even more scarce. Cast principals included: Florence Reed (Mrs Danvers), Diana Barrymore (the new Mrs de Winter), Bramwell Fletcher (Maxim).

The next and last distinct adaptation of Rebecca to appear on stage before the musical was the 1983 opera production devised for Opera North, with music by Wilfred Josephs and libretto by Edward Marsh. It toured the UK before being revived briefly in 1988 and never seen again. Cast principals included: Ann Howard as Mrs Danvers, with Gillian Sullivan and later Anne Williams-King as the new Mrs de Winter, and Peter Knapp as Maxim.

Finding these few, historic photographs in obscure newspapers or consulting original scripts and librettos, for instance, in libraries and archives during this effortful and active treasure-hunting felt special and rewarding. But possible reconstruction of these stage iterations in the present day is only incompletely possible, because of reduced ease of access to or apparent remaining visceral evidence of a visceral art form.

The frustration in trying to seek out these apparitional traces not only foregrounds the importance of maintaining accessible, comprehensive primary records within the theatre, but mirrors also the act of trying to seek out records of queer female sexuality across history in works of literature, cinema or theatre, as a process typified by a similarly effortful navigation of apparitional erasure. This facet connects with the notion that consideration around Rebecca entangles with a web of insatiability or dykeish dissatisfaction, a web that stretches from this erasure and liminality of representation, to character constructions within the work – including of its infamous housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, to contextual backgrounds like those of the story’s primary author itself, Daphne du Maurier.

The entity of Rebecca, then, across its many themes, productions and decades, is uniquely useful in the way it can in turn encompass and facilitate explorations of these many facets – being capable of simultaneously holding consideration of these expansive webs of documentation, erasure or dykeish dissatisfaction that can be found lurking in historical margins, as well as also the contrasting luminous energy that can be produced in the present in association with the musical, as physical audiences interact with and respond to the material of the show and its performers within theatres in real time. These considerations have transferrable applicability beyond this singular context of this particular show to more general notions of theatrical pieces and the practice of theatregoing, too, as they foreground the question of how audience members respond to, process, and interact with shows; and, as a matter of far less common discussion or scholarly writing on the subject of diva devotion, how female fans specifically navigate the complex predicament of queer, female, performance-driven high regard.

[mrsdallowayreads]

“She frequently suggested things she thought I should include: most interestingly, perhaps, her favorite steamy love scene from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price of Salt. As far as Sontag was concerned, Highsmith’s dykey little potboiler—published originally under a pseudonym—was right up there with Buddenbrooks and The Man Without Qualities. Something in the story about a gifted (yet insecure) young woman who moves to Manhattan in the early 1950s to become a theater designer and ends up falling rapturously in love with a glamorous, outré older woman must have once struck a chord; Sontag seemed to dote on it.”

—Terry Castle, Desperately Seeking Susan.

[vaivainthesky]

“The discomfort of the soul was marked in the vicissitudes of the body”

-Terry Castle about Lord Byron, review of The Flawed Angel (by Phyllis Grosskurth)

[darkmuseum]

A subterranean “lesbian” meaning may be present in odd and its derivatives--I would argue--as early as 1755. In the scandalous autobiography she published in that year, the transvestite English actress Charlotte Charke referred to herself as an “odd mortal” and repeatedly called attention to the “oddity” of her history, which included episodes of traveling about for long periods in male costume with a woman who posed as her wife. Anne Lister, writing in her diary in the 1820s, spoke of her sexual desire for other women as her “oddity” or “odd freak”: encountering a similarly inclined lady named Miss Pickford in 1823, she described feeling “oddish.” Later in the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth, the word inevitably crops up whenever female-female desire is hinted at--especially in fiction. Thus Basil Ransom, meeting Olive Chancellor for the first time in The Bostonians, finds himself thinking that “she was a very odd cousin of his, was this Boston cousin of his” (64). After the youthful Stephen Gordon refuses a male suitor in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, it is whispered of her (by her neighbors) “that she had always been odd, and now for some reason she seemed odder than ever” (107). Nor can it be altogether a coincidence, I think, that the word appears so often in the titles of lesbian-themed books. One need only think of Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out (1957) [ ... ] Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Odd Girl Out (1972) [ ... ] or, indeed, Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (1991), on the history of American lesbian life in the twentieth century.

Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture.

[tendaberry]

“However veiled, confessional impulses are always contagious, and as soon as the young author, thirty-one at the time of the essay’s publication, begins to list what things are ‘camp’ and what aren’t, I can’t help but feel [Sontag] wants to both reveal herself—the books she has read, the film’s she’s seen, the personalities she has encountered, what she thinks is funny, what she thinks is sexy, what she thinks is dumb, who she is, in other words—and to seduce her imaginary reader into some corresponding self-revelation.”

Terry Castle, “Some Notes on ‘Notes on Camp’”

[gothicseverance]

Doubles, dancing dolls and automata, waxwork figures, alter egos and ‘mirror’ selves, spectral emanations, detached body parts.

—Gothic Television

Gif by @shesnake 🖤