Meredith Conti's new study of illness on the Victorian stage, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine, is particularly timely. It examines the connections between cultural conceptions or images of three major types of illness that plagued the Victorians, and the way in which these were portrayed in Victorian theatre. Conti examines tuberculosis, mental illness, and drug addiction. Each medical disorder is treated in its own part, with two chapters. These provide a medical and social history of the disease, its origins, symptoms, and treatment, along with case studies of popular stage roles and actors portraying each condition.

Conti's book shows the various ways in which given representations of an illness might either reflect or subvert social constructions of that illness. While her main thesis is relatively modest, she argues it with care and subtlety. Her case studies present interesting and persuasive evidence and arguments. And Conti's experience as a historian of medicine as well as of theatre is evident in her careful contextualization of her argument with scientific data and background. Her understanding of the etiology and symptomology of each illness type, as well as her interesting narrative of historical developments in science and medicine in the period, render this study of interest to all Victorian scholars, not only those specializing in theatre and drama.

Only a few short months ago, I might have said that the chapters on mental illness and drug addiction were the more relevant for today's reader. But in light of the coronavirus pandemic, Conti's discussion of the causes and spread of tuberculosis are particularly provocative. She traces how the scientific discovery of its true cause, the microbe Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and its communicability altered the popular myth that tuberculosis was a mysterious “romantic” disease that preyed primarily on those whose constitutions and characters were especially delicate, sensitive, or poetic in some way. This discovery, in turn, gradually altered the sentimentality and sanitization of portrayals of its sufferers, like the iconic consumptive heroine Marguerite Gautier.

Conti focuses primarily on variations in actors’ techniques and performance choices rather than on variations in texts. (The productions on which she draws include dramatic adaptations of novels [e.g., Dumas fil's La Dame aux Camélias], novellas [e.g., Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde], and stories [e.g., of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes].) As she does so, she also traces a spectrum of acting styles, from romanticism to naturalism—with changes in performance style paralleling changes in cultural attitudes toward the diseases, based on new scientific and medical discoveries.

Each part of the book is somewhat freestanding as a narrative of intertwining medical and aesthetic developments as exemplified by landmark theatrical performances. For instance, in Part I, “Performing Consumption,” Conti traces how actresses playing Marguerite (aka “Camille”) chose to represent T.B.'s symptomatology and physical effects. She discusses Eugénie Doche, who originated the role; Helena Modjeska, whose sentimental portrayal reified romantic myths of the wasting disease; and actresses Matilda Heron and Clara Morris, each of whom brought a greater degree of naturalism and graphic detail to the role. Finally, Conti devotes a chapter to the era's two most famous performances of Marguerite—those of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Conti cites critics who commend Duse for the subtlety, finesse, and believability of her performance of T.B.'s symptoms, as well as a few who found her unconvincing. Critics on both sides of the question supported their evaluations with personal experiences of having witnessed victims close to them die of the disease. Bernhardt, known for her effective and heart-wrenching death scenes, is considered by most historians to be the definitive Camille, and Conti argues that her effectiveness came partly from her ability to bridge two influences in playing the role: the romanticism of the mythological past (represented by the extremes of the sublime and grotesque in her performance) and the naturalism of the clinical present (seen in the detailed realism of her portrayal of symptoms such as the wracking cough, gasping for breath, weakness, and pallor).

In Part II, “Performing Drug Addiction,” Conti deals with two contrasting portrayals of the disease. Richard Mansfield's bestial and excessive embodiment of the monstrous Mr. Hyde in the 1887 stage adaptation Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde brings the Victorians’ worst fears to the stage, whereas William Gillette's elegant and restrained portrayal of the “controlled habituation” (116) exhibited by the genius detective Sherlock Holmes allays these concerns somewhat by showing that a moderate use of drugs might be little more than an aspect of an intellectual character's “bohemian aestheticism” (119). Mansfield's interpretation may have had more staying power, as it foreshadowed the popular culture image of the “drug fiend” in early twentieth-century culture.

Part III, “Performing Mental Illness,” focuses on the wealth of portrayals of “madness” presented onstage by actor-manager Henry Irving and his leading lady, Ellen Terry, at Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London during 1878–99. Conti effectively summarizes aspects of the Victorians’ obsession with female “hysterics,” the catchall term for women exhibiting unconventional, excessive, or unwomanly behaviors. She emphasizes cultural assumptions that hysteria was a feminine disease with distinctly theatrical symptomatology and details how this popular and specifically gendered construction of madness was exploited in several of Terry's stage roles, including Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Lucy Ashton in Ravenswood (after Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor). Particularly interesting is Conti's suggestion of how Victorians’ fears about the “unsexed” “New Woman” of the late nineteenth-century culture influenced Terry's popular performances and also foreshadowed the advent of Henrik Ibsen's female characters, who were soon to start appearing onstage. The chapter on male madness is based on discussion of Irving's famous portrayals of Hamlet, Lear, and Mathias from Leopold David Lewis's melodrama The Bells. Unlike the more broad and ambiguous notion of “female hysteria” evoked by Terry's performances, Conti argues that the illness roles of Irving illustrate different and distinct medical disorders.

Although the roles and performances Conti addresses are all relatively well known, and have been dealt with by previous theatre historians, Conti's recontextualization of the performances in the detailed medical and scientific reality of the time makes them newly interesting, and worth a second look.