Horror of Horrors
The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Monkey’s Paw by W W Jacobs
Chester Gateway Theatre, 1997
The two plays that make up tonight’s programme come from the heyday of the Victorian shocker. These days we have become to desensitised by the in-your-face scar tactics of TV and cinema that it is perhaps hard to appreciate why the Victorians seemed so taken with such apparently over-the-top grand guignol. But the taste for such hokum might simply indicate that the Victorian audience, far from being more naïve, were simply more willing to suspend their disbelief, and who’s to say they didn’t get more out of their entertainment by doing so?
Not that tales of ghastly goings-on were exactly new. The first golden age of horror had come with the Jacobean revenge tragedies of John Webster, John Ford and their ilk. Violence, deception, betrayal, murder and madness were their principal themes, and it is perhaps no wonder that after forty blood-drenched years, all the theatres in the county were shut down in a Puritan backlash that lasted until the restoration of Charles II.
But sensation really took off in this country with the rise of the Gothic novel around the turn of the 19th century. In this highly unhealthy literary genre, bevies of innocent young maidens are endlessly pursued through nightmare landscapes by dastardly foreigners, gibbering lunatics, mad monks, wicked uncles, and myriad variations of same and thus the Victorian melodrama was born.
In fact, the term ‘melodrama’ had to change its meaning to incorporate this new subject matter. At first it had simply meant an entertainment which combined music and action – indeed, until the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, no theatre could stage a play which did not contain musical interludes, which was why even Shakespeare was frequently interrupted by singing and dancing simply to stay on the right side of the law. But once the new ground rules had been set, playwrights jumped gleefully onto the bandwagon.
The impact of their works was greatly enhanced by the thrilling and spectacular stage effects which quickly scaled new heights of craftsmanship and ingenuity. There was an illusion called the Ghost Glide, for instance, which enabled an actor to slide spookily into view from beneath the stage on a rising ramp through an invisible slit lined by bristles that silently closed behind him, giving the impression that he was materialising through a solid floor. So popular did the effect become that the enormous machinery needed to create it was installed in several theatres both here and in America, solely to facilitate performances of Dion Boucicault’s The Coriscan Brothers, the play for which it had been created.
Equally popular was an illusion called Pepper’s Ghost, which was the means by which a phantom apparition could be made to materialise on stage beside a live actor. It worked by exploiting the fact that glass can be both transparent and reflective depending on whether it is lit from in front or behind. The actor playing the ghost performed in the orchestra pit while his image was thrown up on stage, and Dickens enthusiastically incorporated it into his readings of The Haunted Man.
By the end of the century the flood of horror was in full spate. In 1897 a theatre actually called the Grand Guignol opened in Paris especially to cater for the genre, and that same year also saw the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, whose cult started immediately and has been growing ever since.
But eventually, the real-life horrors of the trenches were to put the fake fancies of the Victorian stage into perspective and the days of more realistic social dramas, genteel drawing-room comedies and the well-made play were upon us. The themes and style of the horror genre were taken up by the cinema, which was able to put more money into lavish and increasingly outlandish special effects, and year on year the emphasis gradually shifted from implicit suggestion to out-and-out gore. The pendulum has only just begun to swing back again after the over-the-top excesses of the video nasties, though it still has a long way to go before we get back to the good old days of plastic fangs and raspberry essence so beloved of the Hammer Studios.
Now as we approach the millennium the public’s fascination with horror has never been greater. From the psychologically chilling Hannibal Lecter to the downright weirdness of TV’s X Files and now Dark Skies, horror, whether its source be earthbound, extra-terrestrial, or simply conjured out of the depths of an over-stimulated imagination, is once again flavour of the month.
But while rubber monsters and shrieking females are all very ho-hum, there is something fundamentally unsettling about a fright that arises from the seemingly everyday. Bogeymen do not necessarily exist only in our wildest fantasies, and more disturbing by far are those horrors which lurk just beneath the surface of (apparent) normality. In this computer age we might be closer than we think to unravelling the mysteries of the unknown, but when we can no longer be certain quite how far machines can go or what they can do, how much less can we really know about what exists in the darkness beyond the light of human knowledge?
So perhaps it is no surprise that tonight’s entertainment goes back to tried and trusted sources. There is a safety there, a feeling of security in the folk memory of a collective fear that we can all – at one remove – enjoy. And the frisson we feel is no different in quality to that felt by our ancestors as they sat around the fire at night, swapping tales of the supernatural.
And the voice which tells the story is also a key factor. “Here is a story I heard from an old sailor… A friend of mine once told me a very curious tale… You might not believe what I’m about to tell you…” H G Wells’ The Time Machine, several of Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination, not to mention the recent West End hit The Woman in Black adapted from Susan Hill’s Victorian-pastiche novel, all use the convention of a narrator recounting a story he has either heard from another or lived through himself. The sheer sobriety and matter-of-factness of the tone encourages our credulity.
As a genre, the horror story on stage has noble antecedents and goes back a long way. But if you get too frightened tonight, just remember it’s only a play after all. Magic monkey’s paws don’t really exist, and although body snatchers did, none of them ever had the dreadful experiences you will vicariously witness tonight.
Or did they?
Have a safe journey home through the dark, silent streets won’t you?
PS
Of all the many dozens of articles I contributed to theatre programmes, this was the only one which some reader felt strongly enough about to write a rebuttal. I had, apparently, completely misrepresented the nature of Victorian schlock theatre, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for peddling such tripe to the innocent patrons.
They were probably right. I knew nothing about Victorian melodrama. And reading this piece through again, there does seem to be a distinct lack of focus, mainly because I didn’t really have much to write about. Sometimes you just have to produce stuff to fill the pages because that’s what the client has asked for.
I was familiar with The Monkey’s Paw, of course, ever since one of my junior school teachers had read it to us one afternoon. Indeed, so effective was it that I suspect that same teacher might well be urged to think twice about subjecting seven- or eight-year-olds to it these days in case they risk causing lifelong psychic trauma. But as for R L Stevenson, while I liked what little of him I had read, I was not familiar with The Body Snatcher. Perhaps the theatre had given us a précis of the play, or we were offered sight of the script; certainly the article suggests the eponymous criminal somehow ends up a victim rather than a protagonist. But as I say, I can no longer remember the details and, given the vitriol which dripped off the page from my indignant and apparently better-informed correspondent, I’m not that interested in trying to remember.
If I’d known of this person’s existence at the time, I might have tried to commission an article from them. But since I didn’t, and time was short, as editor, when all else fails, you simply have to close your eyes, jump into the breach, and trust to the inspiration of the moment. Sometimes inspiration fails. So, sorry, Gateway Theatre. Sorry, aggrieved audience member. Sorry, shades of W W Jacobs and R L Stevenson. It was nothing personal, just the pressure of the moment and my youthful ignorance-cum-arrogance.