In Search of a Theater: Staging Byron's Cain

Abstract

It has long been known that closet dramas can be staged; nonetheless, a general perception remains that the closet and the stage are fundamentally opposed. Questions continue as to whether the closet has a place on stage, and if so, where exactly that place is. What are the best possible stage‐representations of closet dramas? Where and how do the most rewarding performances of closet dramas take place? Where in between page and stage are closet dramas located and how does this location translate into performance? By recounting specific aspects of the process of staging a dramatic reading of Lord Byron's Cain – A Mystery, and relating them to questions of theatrical performance, genre, and the audience's imagination, this article argues that the dramatic closet is in fact located on stage, and inhabits a place that lies outside of traditional theatrical performance – a place that can only be found in practice, by staging closet dramas.

Notes

1. In Byron's original text, Zillah is the one discovering Abel's dead body. However, her character was eliminated from my adaptation, and her lines in this scene were given to Eve.

2. Michael Simpson's criticism of the epilogue in the RSC's production is similar to my reasoning for not adding one. Simpson claims, “By putting the events of the play to bed through a finalizing gesture of narration, … the tragic pathos of Cain's final departure from his family and from us is diminished” (43).

3. I am aware that the word imagination is a laden term in the context of Romantic literature. In the context of this essay, however, it refers to the imaginary vision one creates of a play while reading it.

4. As Catherine Burroughs notes, “Mary Jacobus locates the male Romantic poets' bias against the stage in their distrust of “the inherent theatricality of the imagination itself” (10).

5. By adding a character and inventing lines for him, I arguably broke my self‐imposed rule of not adding any words to the dialogue. Including a narrator was, however, crucial for the success of the staged reading. He remains the only character into whose mouth I put my own words – all the other characters are speaking exclusively Byron's words.

6. I am very thankful for Jerry Wasserman's help in revising the narrator's lines. We spent a few hours after the first rehearsal going over them together.