Abstract
This essay sets out to explore how Anglophone theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has tried to represent the spiritualist séance and how this often involves allusions to the performance conditions and contexts of spiritualism’s nineteenth-century heyday. In the last few years, the depiction of the séance has begun to move away from Gothic narratives of encounters with an unnameable evil, and back towards the séance’s show-business roots in commercial entertainment. Anglophone theatre has a legacy of séance plays to come to terms with whenever a medium is represented on stage, particularly in the form of Noël Coward’s classic comedy Blithe Spirit (1941). Therefore, the chapter argues, attempts by contemporary playwrights to write séance scenes and create spirit medium characters are haunted by the theatrical past, as much as by the past of their own narrative worlds.
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Poore, B. (2018). Staging the Séance: The Spirit Medium and the Gothic in Modern Theatre. In: Jones, K., Poore, B., Dean, R. (eds) Contemporary Gothic Drama. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95359-2_12
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