‘Between the grave and the stars’: ghost plays of the interwar period, 1925-1936

This thesis considers representations of soldier ghosts as they appear on the British, American, and European stages between the years 1925 and 1936. Across four chapters, I explore the theatrical deployment of the figure of the soldier ghost in conjunction with the history of scientific occultism. The development of a wireless imagination, born in the late nineteenth-century, gave rise to new, technologically-minded forms of spiritualism and commemoration in the first half of the twentieth-century; the use of the wireless in commemorative practices invited fantasies of disembodiment and re-embodiment, rekindling spectral metaphors in literary depictions of the workings of collective memory. I argue that the inherent spectrality of theatre inspired playwrights to engage with the contradictions of commemoration and to propose memorial alternatives; through the mobilisation of the realm of memory in the guise of the ghost, all these works display an inherent memorial impulse that both complements and disrupts the traditions and rhetoric of institutional commemoration. I consider plays by neglected playwrights including Robins Millar and Joe Corrie, alongside obscure works of more well-known authors such as John van Druten, Irwin Shaw and Reginald Berkeley. These plays have enjoyed virtually no afterlife since their inception, and some also had limited success in their day: this idiosyncratic corpus allows me to unearth the discomfort that surrounded discourses about memorial and funerary practices in the aftermath of the First World War, while offering a fresh take on ghostly figures as they appear in both modernist and theatre studies. I take an interdisciplinary approach in this study which draws on aspects of performance theory, cultural history, and Gothic studies to propose that theatre is a vital tool to investigate the ways in which the memory of the First World War continues to haunt us to this day.