Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality

Abstract

Ghosts are hard to escape in modern and contemporary culture: in film and television dramas, novels, poetry, fine art and installation — and, particularly, we argue in this book, in theatre. Much has been written about ghosts in relation to Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny,’ in which Freud describes feelings of dread and repulsion at a familiar object suddenly rendered full of alienating menace. 1 For Jo Collins and John Jervis, Freud’s uncanny suggests ‘a fundamental indecision , an obscurity or uncertainty, at the heart of our ontology, our sense of time, place and history, which is unsettling, potentially terrifying and intriguing.’ 2 The confrontation with the uncanny has been perceived as a fundamentally modern predicament: Collins and Jervis identify the uncanny as the ‘constitutive aspect of our experience of the modern,’ while Roger Luckhurst describes the uncanny as ‘a meta-concept for modernity itself.’ 3

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