by Tim Rayborn
Later, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the producers of mystery plays got even more creative, pre-coating Christ’s whips and the crown of thorns with animal blood so that it would trickle down all over the actor’s face and body at the appropriate moment. They also used small animal bladders filled with blood that could be pierced by the nails during the crucifixion, giving the impression of Christ’s blood pouring out.
Even better, there were dummy substitutes for actors playing martyrs, so that when their grisly time came, said dummies could be abused appallingly, and would burst forth with animal blood, animal intestines, etc., to give a hideously realistic slant to their torturous deaths. These dummies could be burned (as many good martyrs were), and the odor of charred animal flesh would do a pretty good job of representing what human remains would smell like in similar circumstances. So medieval parents: take the kids to see a mystery play—it’ll be a great family day out!
The Renaissance: The use of gory special effects only increased with the rebirth of all things Classical. Humanism, scientific inquiry, and beautiful art, music, and sculpture abounded, so why not new ways of depicting terrible suffering? Well, that’s what the Elizabethans thought, anyway.
We have already discussed Kyd’s remarkably violent Spanish Tragedie from the 1580s, with its multiple onstage deaths, suicides, and other unpleasant activities. Remember Hieronimo, the fellow who bites off his own tongue to save Bel-Imperia’s reputation? You just know that the players were itching to show that one off! So how did they do it? It was pretty easy, really, and pretty gross. The actor playing Hieronimo hid a lamb’s tongue in his mouth, and possibly a small bit of bladder holding some fake blood. So when the appropriate moment came, he could bite down, spit out the tongue—which would flop and splat on stage—and drool a little blood for added emphasis. The effect would have been striking and revolting.
Elizabethan stage directions could be equally graphic. A prop list for Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine of 1587 specifically includes a pile of severed limbs. These could be made out of cloth and easily sewn together. They would not have looked terribly realistic, but the effect would have been enough to be shocking in displaying Tamburlaine’s cruelty. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus included such directions as “Enter a messenger, with two heads and a hand,” thrown out as casually as if he were instructed to carry a basket or a jug of wine.
Some scholars now doubt that these kinds of productions had gallons of blood onstage, animal, fake, or otherwise. It simply would not have been feasible to use real liquid, which would have stained clothing and been almost impossible to wash away, especially after every performance. Theatrical costumes were expensive and could not be discarded after only a few uses. Gushing wounds might instead have been simulated with red strips of cloth, while certain swords and knives might have been painted red and swapped out when killing scenes happened. Of course, none of this would have been as shocking as seeing red liquid spray everywhere, but it would have made certain tricks, such as the spitting out of a lamb’s tongue, all the more awful when they did happen.
One area where there seems to have been a real danger was in the use of guns and gunpowder. One English account from 1587 describes a play being given by the Admiral’s Men, and notes that an actor fired his musket at another, missed, and accidentally killed a child and a pregnant woman instead, and injured a man in the head. Aside from the tragedy itself, one has to wonder just what the hell they were thinking in firing live ammunition in an enclosed space, and even more, what were they expecting to happen if the musket’s shot had actually hit the intended actor? Maybe he was wearing some kind of breastplate under his costume, but it seems like an awful risk to take. Apparently, there were repercussions, and the Admiral’s Men were not invited to perform at court during the Christmas season that year. Well, I hope they learned their lesson!
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: After these bloodbaths, stage violence seemed to die down for a while, especially in France during the seventeenth century. Seriously, France fought in at least seven wars in less than eighty years: the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the Fronde (civil wars, 1648–1653), the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659), the War of Devolution (1667–1668), the Franco-Dutch war (1672–1678), the War of the Reunions (1683–1684), and the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Good lord! No wonder they had gone off watching people get hacked up in the theater; there was enough of that going on in real life. They turned instead to the silliness of the Commedia and Molière’s farces, among other diversions.
For its part, England had to contend with its own bloody civil war that ended with a king’s head being lopped off for real. As we saw, an entire religious and political movement, the Puritans, banned stage plays altogether in the 1640s and 1650s. After the restoration of Charles II, it was only natural that bawdy comedies would take some precedence. Interest in these began to wane with the arrival of the new century, and plays that were overtly political eventually ended up being the subject of a crackdown with the boring Licensing Act of 1737. English theater turned to tamer subjects for the next half century or so, and it was only with the arrival of the new “gothic” genre that darker themes began to be explored in literature and drama.
The Gothic Era: The first gothic novel is usually held to be Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764. Amusingly, Horace was the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the same chap who introduced the Licensing Act to censor plays … Let me explain, Dad! Subjects like a deep mystery, an old house with hidden secrets, a family beset by some generational curse, and other such themes would become staples of the genre. At the time, the Enlightenment was all the rage, with its emphasis on reason and science, so these new stories about superstitions, ghosts, and hidden dangers didn’t go over so well with some critics. But the style persisted and eventually found its way to the theaters, where it opened up new possibilities for onstage shocks.
One fine example was George Colman the Younger’s Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity!: A Dramatic Romance, which premiered in January 1798. It is a retelling of an existing story of a wealthy nobleman with a striking blue beard. He tells his new young wife that she may go anywhere in his castle except for one room. While he is away on business, he reminds her not to unlock the door. Of course, curiosity gets the better of her and she enters the forbidden passageway, only to discover that it leads to a chamber of horrors, containing the mutilated bodies of his former wives, who presumably also disobeyed him by coming down to satisfy their curiosity. When Bluebeard returns and discovers her disobedience, he tells her that she will suffer the same fate. Before he can kill her, however, her brothers arrive and kill him instead.
The play takes a different angle and adds a supernatural element—the ghosts of his former wives inhabit the room of death, called the Blue Chamber. One of the more striking scenes recalls some of the stage horrors of the Tudor period, while foreshadowing the imagery of the Grand Guignol (as we’ll see):
The door instantly sinks with a tremendous crash, and the Blue Chamber appears streaked with vivid streams of blood. The figures in the picture over the door change their position, and Abomelique [Bluebeard] is represented in the action of beheading the beauty he was before supplicating. The picture and devices of love change to subjects of horror and death. The interior apartment (which the sinking of the door discovers) exhibits various tombs in a sepulchral building, in the midst of which ghostly and supernatural forms are seen—some in motion, some fixed. In the centre is a large skeleton seated on a tomb (with a dart in his hand), and over his head in characters of blood is written “The Punishment of Curiosity.”
In the play’s climax, it is the skeleton of one of his victims who rises and stabs Bluebeard to death and drags him below the stage, while a chorus celebrates his defeat. This kind of ghoulish entertainment was devoured by audiences eager for the theater to push boundaries.
The nineteenth century: Such early Victorian potboiler plays were soon to have another
source of inspiration. By the 1840s, popular newspapers called “penny dreadfuls” circulated in London, with serialized stories of crime and lurid goings-on. One such publication, rather strangely called The People’s Periodical and Family Library, published a story in 1846 titled “The String of Pearls: A Romance,” in which one of the supporting characters was a barber who disposed of his customers with a sharp razor and turned them into tasty meat pies as a way of bringing in extra income. Manager, actor, and mostly-hack playwright George Dibdin Pitt (1795–1855) saw great potential in this freakish fellow and, in 1847, he brought out “The String of Pearls; or, The Fiend of Fleet Street,” a play performed at the Britannia Theatre in London. Set in the eighteenth century, it portrayed the crimes of one Sweeney Todd in lurid detail, and claimed in 1850 that they were based on a true story. This claim is debatable, and researchers have failed to come up with any records of a murderous barber being hanged for his cannibalistic crimes, but given the cesspool of criminal activity that certain parts of London were from the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth, the idea is not that far-fetched. Indeed, Dickens, in Martin Chuzzlewit (published only a few years before the penny dreadful tale), wrote of “dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many country legends as doing a lively retail business in the metropolis,” so the idea was already circulating in urban myth, if not in fact. The People’s Periodical often published fictionalized stories derived from true crimes, and the public had a seemingly insatiable appetite for reading about them, so the tale could easily have gotten around that Sweeney Todd was a real person.
Pitt was famous for this kind of violent melodrama, given the charming name of “bloodtubs” in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, citing the Licensing Act, would not permit some of his plays to be performed. Still, he wrote about two hundred and fifty such potboilers, which were rather like the pulp stories and dime novels of the early twentieth century. They included gothic themes such as symbolic dreams and nightmares, atmospheric settings, and family conflicts, as well as military and nautical adventures. Sweeney Todd’s exploits somehow passed the censors, and other adaptations of the tale followed over the rest of the century. Pitt’s production used a special tilting barber’s chair that disposed of the victim by dumping him below the stage. This allowed the actor (presumably falling into some padding) to make a hasty exit while also representing Todd’s method of transferring the corpses to the cellar where they were prepared for their special culinary future. The idea of using a prop razor to simulate the cutting of throats, allowing fake blood to spurt all over the stage (no doubt to gasps and screams), must have been irresistible to the various producers who kept bringing versions of the tale to Victorian audiences.
All of these examples provide some fascinating glimpses into the mindset of playwrights, theater owners, and producers, what they thought their audiences wanted, and how they could best go about showing it to them. The lure of gory drama has been with us for a long time, it seems. Companies did the best they could with the effects and technologies that they had, but even in the later nineteenth century, their efforts were nothing compared to what was about to follow, the infamous Grand Guignol!
The horrors of the Grand Guignol in Paris and London
Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (“The Theatre of the Great Puppet,” named for a French puppet, Guignol, who was used to make social commentary) was a fascinating experiment in horror and gore on the live stage, perhaps even more so because of the time in which it originated, the Belle Époque, which was characterized by its optimism, prosperity, and relative peace before the very real horrors of the first World War set in. The Grand Guignol ran from 1897 until 1962, and though situated in a small venue in Paris, it maintained its popularity for decades, only waning after World War II; it seems that two devastating conflicts in only twenty years brought enough of their own terror, violence, and evil, so Parisians no longer craved the fictional variety.
Set in a former neo-gothic church (appropriately enough), the show was the brainchild of novelist and playwright Oscar Méténier (1859–1913), whose work embraced realism, the idea of creating stories about everyday people and situations using straightforward storytelling. Initially the theater showed plays about classes of people that were considered “beneath” serious artistic attention or inappropriate for the stage: prostitutes, criminals of all kinds, beggars, and others that polite society preferred to pretend didn’t exist.
Playwright Max Maurey (1866–1947) took over as director in 1898 and began to shift the content of the plays to one more focused on horror and gothic themes. Fellow playwright André de Latour, Comte de Lorde (1869–1942), was brought in to create new dramas, and he reveled in the idea of telling stories of horror and mental illness, penning some one hundred and fifty plays. He was later dubbed “the Prince of Terror” by his colleagues.
De Lorde’s naturalistic focus was an important distinction from other genres of horror; the plays of the Grand Guignol were mostly not of the supernatural variety (i.e., involving ghosts, demons, or vampires). Rather, they looked at the terrible consequences of very human actions, which could include murder, torture, revenge, surgeries gone wrong, and other awful fates that could conceivably happen in the real world. Modern slasher and torture porn films are the latest version of this unsettling genre, and the plays certainly did not shy away from fake stage gore when necessary. The Grand Guignol exploited these stomach-churning visuals to maximum effect: fake severed heads that dropped to the stage, simulated crucifixions, animal eyeballs (bought from taxidermists) stuffed with fake blood for eye-gouging scenes, hoses filled with stage blood for entrails … the appalling list goes on and on. The blood was ascribed to a “secret recipe” and could apparently coagulate and form scabs.
Many of the theater’s ghoulish special effects came from the efforts of Camille Choisy, who was director from 1914 to 1930. During his time, the Grand Guignol reached its heights (or depths) and attracted its largest crowds, including royalty. Choisy hired the young actress Paula Maxa (1898–1970) in 1917, and she became a headlining star in the theater’s productions, later amusingly being referred to as “the most assassinated woman in the world.” The range of her appalling, simulated onstage deaths is staggering and includes: being shot, strangled, scalped, disemboweled, hanged, quartered, guillotined, poisoned, cut into multiple pieces, eaten by a puma, burned alive, squished by a steamroller, and any number of other awful fates. After her death in any given play, lighting and other effects were used to rapidly transform her appearance into that of a corpse, adding to the horror. She took her work very seriously and was noted for her professionalism. She once remarked, “Before I go to bed, I look under my bed with fear. I fear the dark, the storms, the sea, the unknown and my own darkness.”
Many in the audience had no idea what they were truly in for, despite the inevitable pre-show warnings. There are plenty of tales of people gasping, screaming, fainting, and even vomiting in reaction to the shows. The theater employed a house doctor to assist should anyone be too seriously affected, but apparently, one show was so intense that he also fainted during the performance! Still, Parisians and tourists came in droves, seeking the lure of the forbidden, a chance to confront uncomfortable fears, and maybe even a cathartic release. A grotesque escapism was on offer, and audiences could take comfort in the fact that it was all illusion.
The plays could definitely be quite shocking. A particular favorite—if you can call it that—was de Lorde’s Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations (“The Laboratory of Hallucinations”). In the story, a doctor discovers that his patient in the operating room is having an affair with his wife, so he proceeds to perform graphic brain surgery on the unfortunate fellow, rendering him insane from hallucinations and brain damage. But the terror does not stop there; the victim has enough sense remaining to rise up, grab a chisel, and drive it into the doctor’s head. The end.
Other plays include L’Horrib
le Passion (“The Horrible Passion”), about a young nanny who strangles the children that are in her care and L’Homme de la Nuit (“The Man of the Night”), the story of a necrophiliac that may have been based on the atrocities of an actual person from mid-nineteenth-century France. Clearly, these were not tales for the faint of heart. In an effort not to send crowds away feeling too unsettled, the shows also offered comedies as a palate-cleanser, a tradition that went right back to ancient Greece and its satyr plays.
An attempt was briefly made to bring a version of the show to London, and between the years 1920 and 1922, it did relatively well, enticing the same kinds of morbid curiosity in Londoners as it did in Parisians. But the shows fell afoul of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department and faced serious censorship under the ever-present Licensing Act. Ultimately, the production could not sustain itself and folded.
The show came to New York in October 1923, and ran for several weeks, but was not especially well-received. One critic humorously summed up a later American performance from 1927: “A noisy, violent sketch of a night in a French Consulate during the Boxer uprising…. Machine gun firing, shrieks, maniacal laughter are heard with terrible descriptions of torture—eyes gouged out, breasts torn off, nails plucked from fingers. One even saw one mutilated fellow run in with his hands cut off. Thereafter the play began to be disagreeable.” Many audiences and critics found the whole thing laughable rather than horrifying.
The French theater faced scrutiny and censorship more than once even in relatively tolerant Paris. By 1930, a new director, Jack Jouvin, decided to change the focus away from brutal gore and emphasize instead psychological thrillers and dramas. He fired Paula Maxa, which seems a ridiculously stupid thing to do, given her popularity. Jouvin had control issues and basically changed the Grand Guignol’s whole nature, but this proved to be unpopular and the theater started to decline. Later, the gore was brought back, but in the aftermath of World War II, the shocking displays of violence undoubtedly seemed distasteful to many, in view of the death and devastation that so many had suffered.