2026 Theses Doctoral

The Degenerates’ Stage: British Theatre at the Fin-de-Siècle

Clapié, Alice

This dissertation focuses on British theatre at the fin-de-siècle and reframes it in light of discourses about degeneration. Worries about decay and decline haunt the plays of this period. In the aftermath of the Second Boer War, as growing geopolitical competition began to erode confidence in Britain’s presumed ethnic and cultural superiority, concerns about moral, physical, and cultural degeneration escalated.

This dissertation examines how playwrights sought to (quite literally) revitalize British theatre and by extension its audience-nation at the fin-de-siècle. I study the reciprocal epistemics of theatre and scientific discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, investigating the connections between embodiment, theories of evolution, and spectacle. I look at these in relation to both the variety of scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses of the period, exploring the ways science and theatre worked together to co-create both knowledge and ways of knowing.

Relying on archival research, including correspondence, diaries, programs, reviews, annotated prompt books, photographs, and marketing, I argue that the fear that Britain might be deteriorating physically as well as geopolitically led playwrights to draw on biological and medical discourses, with which they aimed to make theatre a regenerative medium, one that could exert biopolitical power over the spectator. This pursuit of a socially significant theatre drew on what I call a physiological dramaturgy: London audiences were seen as a collective body whose intellectual edification depended on the physicality and physiological nature of the theatrical event.

This dissertation reexamines the New Drama and its role as a catalyst of modern drama, looking beyond the potential of theatre to disseminate ideas and social critique to its deeper physiological nature.