Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett
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This project developed naturally from my book Science on Stage and from organizing a panel on Darwin and the Theatre for the international Darwin Festival in Cambridge in 2009. The book was originally going to be called Darwin and the Dramatists, a catchy title that paid homage to George Levine’s wonderful book Darwin and the Novelists. But it soon became clear that this title would never reflect the true subject of the book, as theatre’s engagement with evolution ranges far beyond “drama” (a too narrowly literary term) and far beyond “Darwin.” In fact, it is nearly the opposite—a story of how theatre in an astonishingly wide range of forms took up specifically non-Darwinian ideas and transformed them in playwriting and in performance. As I was finishing this book, an eminent novelist and critic whom I had just met remarked, on hearing what I was working on: “Ah well, all artists are Lamarckians at heart!” To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, wouldn’t it be nice if it were true. Instead, as I hope this book shows, theatre’s engagement with evolution tracks an astonishing range of ideas in which all kinds of thinkers contribute, from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Herbert Spencer to Ernst Haeckel and Charles Darwin to Hugo de Vries and Richard Dawkins, matched by an equally dazzling array of theatrical modes and performances. The title Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett builds on and complements the pioneering work of Jane Good-all in Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, expanding the scope of her work, which so brilliantly illuminated the ways in which nineteenth-century popular entertainment immediately engaged with evolutionary ideas. But, as Peter Allan Dale points out in his book In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture, it is not just about how scientific ideas are transformed in imaginative ways but about how art “discovers something rather than ‘exploits’ what others have discovered.”1Close
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