Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality

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