Yale French Studies NUMBER 113
The Transparency of the Text: Contemporary Writing for the StageYale University Press
Copyright © 2007 Yale University
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-300-11819-3Contents
Editors' Preface: The Transparency of the Text DONIA MOUNSEF AND JOSETTE FRALI. Avant and Aprs Garde....................................................................................................7Whatever Happened to the Avant-Garde? TOM BISHOP...........................................................................14Speech in Tatters: The Interplay of Voices in Recent Dramatic Writing JEAN-PIERRE RYNGAERT.................................29Drama Out-of-Bounds: Theater of Totality BERNADETTE BOST...................................................................39Myth in Contemporary French Theater: A Negotiable Legacy ARIANE EISSEN.....................................................50Moving Across Languages JOSETTE FRALII. (Under)writing the Stage................................................................................................71Michel Vinaver and A la renverse: Between Writing and Staging DAVID BRADBY.................................................84The Desire for Language, the Language of Desire in the Theater of Bernard-Marie Kolts DONIA MOUNSEF.......................99Voix/Voie/Vie: The Voice in Contemporary French Theater CLARE FINBURGH.....................................................116L'art de l'crit s'incarnant: The Theater of Nolle Renaude MARY NOONANIII. Disputed Texualities...................................................................................................131Is There a Specifically Francophone African Stage Textuality? JUDITH G. MILLER.............................................145Contemporary Francophone Drama: Between Detours and Deviations SYLVIE CHALAYE..............................................157Lost in Translation, or Why French-language Plays Are Not Often Seen on American Stages PHILIPPA WEHLE
Chapter One
Avant and Aprs Garde
TOM BISHOP
Whatever Happened to the Avant-Garde?
So whatever did happen to the avant-garde? Not so long ago (at least for those of us who actually witnessed that extraordinary explosion of creative theatrical innovation in the 1950s), the very notion of the avantgarde, so much a part of the esthetics of French art in all its varied forms since the middle of the nineteenth century, finally triumphed in the theater with Eugne Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. La cantatrice chauve in 1950, followed immediately by Les chaises, En attendant Godot, and the dazzling theatricality of Genet's plays, and eventually numerous other dramatists writing in French and then throughout Europe and the Americas, radically changed theater, first in France and soon throughout the western world. This was an iconoclastic avant-garde that sought to change the rules of the game, to do away with what was left of realistic techniques after half a centuryofbrilliantanti-realistreactionsagainstthesuccessfulfourth-wall realist brainwashing initiated and exemplified by Andr Antoine and his Thtre Libre in the 1890s.
And it was an immensely successful avant-garde. Word went out from the little Left Bank playhouses that new concepts of theatricality were undermining some of the mainstays of even the best of the playwrights of the time-Sartre, Camus, Montherlant, Anouilh: plot, character, psychology, coherent stories. The new playwrights did not offer a common vision; what united them to some extent though was their opposition to the status quo. Soon they were being performed in larger, more important theaters, like the Odon and eventually the Comdie Franaise, and became the playwrights of the fifties and sixties. It is rare for an avant-garde to impose itself so thoroughly and for the experimentalists in revolt to become so quickly the established figures of an art form. But astonishingly, that is, what happened with what came to be known for better or for worse as the "theater of the absurd."
Serious playwrights could legitimately propose that after Beckett, after Ionesco, one could no longer write theater as before. Obviously, some dramatists did continue to write theater as before, just as many twentieth century novelists continued to produce good or bad nineteenth century novels as if Joyce, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Borges, and the nouveau roman had never existed. But for those who thought critically and creatively about the stage, the Parisian avantgarde of the 1950s had shattered the mold and made it impossible to go back to even the best of former models. But it also revealed a new, serious problem.
Ionesco, in a brilliant definition of the avant-garde, had pointed out that as soon as an avant-garde is so successful as to become the new establishment, it necessarily engenders its own opposition: another avant-garde which, in turn, seeks to destroy and replace it. However, following its fifteen or twenty years of undisputed triumph, the avant-garde of the absurd yielded not to new writing but rather to the reign of the director.
To write after Ionesco was difficult, after Beckett, impossible. The towering figures, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, remained; others faded or disappeared. A few important playwrights, like Fernando Arrabal and Michel Vinaver, have continued right to the present time creating absurdist-related yet highly idiosyncratic works. No powerful group emerged to take their place; some splendid writers did turn to the stage but at no point formed anything resembling an avant-garde movement. Among the best of these are Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Copi, Hlne Cixous, Valre Novarina, and somewhat later, Xavier Durringer, Bernard-Marie Kolts, Philippe Minyana, and Yasmina Reza.
The only "movement" to speak of was the brief period of success in the seventies and eighties of the thtre du quotidien. Influenced by several brilliant German and Austrian playwrights, notably Franz Xaver Kroetz, peter Handke, and Botho Strauss, a few French authors, especially Michel Deutsch and Jean-Pierre Wenzel, both working in Strasbourg, and later the very talented Parisian Tilly (no first name, like Brazilian soccer players) put a new focus, however briefly, on the text and with it, on the preeminence of the dramatist. They dealt with the things of everyday life, especially in the lives of simple, inarticulate people, implying a social critique though eschewing Brechtian didacticism. Most notably, the thtre du quotidien is the first important movement on the French stage since 1900 to go against the almost continuous, century-long reaction against theatrical realism. If this new movement, late in the century, did not revert to truly outmoded, nineteenth century forms of theatricality, it certainly did not point to a new, experimental direction and it did not incarnate some new avant-garde attitude.
But of course it is doubtful whether by the end of the twentieth century, a theatrical avant-garde was still even possible in France. Many important elements conspired against it. Strangely enough, one of these was the accession to the Ministry of Culture in 1981 of Jack Lang, a long-time enthusiast of the avant-garde in all its manifestations and especially in the theater. It had, after all, been Lang who had created the seminal Nancy Theater Festival of New Theater in the seventies. Lang obtained a commitment from President Franois Mitterand for an unheard-of 1% of the country's budget for his ministry. Culture, the arts, and especially theater had never had it so good!
Lang gave strong support to the growing list of state supported theaters in Paris and accelerated enormously the process of decentralization that brought important companies to the rest of France. To run these many enterprises, ranging in size and importance from modest provincial cities to the Comdie Franaise, Lang's Ministry of Culture selected talented, innovative directors like Antoine Vitez, Patrice Chreau, Jean-Pierre Vincent, Jean Jourdheuil, Jacques Lassalle, Marcel Marchal, Bernard Sobel, Jol Jouanneau, and Georges Lavaudant.
Together with other directors who had made their reputation earlier(Roger Planchon, Jean-Louis Barrault, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine) they brought a lively new spirit to the theaters of France. But institutionalizing innovative creators does not necessarily make for innovative institutions-if such a notion is even conceivable. Meanwhile important foreign influences had come to play crucial roles in introducing startling theatricality, almost always at the expense of text. Following the initial, powerful impact of Jerzy Grotowski and the Beck's Living Theater, the French public was much taken by the startling stage images of Tadeusz Kantor and Robert Wilson. Often there was little or no text and no real author. At its best, in the hands of a Wilson and a Kantor, the sheer visual impact of some of these works was not only stunning, it proved to be truly dramatic.
But not all directors possess the same power of imagination nor the same means to express it. The French directors of the eighties, on the whole, followed analogous paths, preferring classics to contemporary authors, little known works by famous authors to the best known ones, stage adaptations of works not written for the stage to existing dramatic texts. More and more theater-French theater, but not only French theater-lost one of its key components: a text, a play. Directors tended to compensate for this crucial loss by substituting other stage activity: dance, pantomime, movements of various sorts, organized or not, meaningful or not. "The writer for the theater today," wrote Jean-Pierre Thibaudat in 1994, "is the victim of the revolution that turned over power to the director. It left him in a position of subordination. And afterbeingputthroughthemillbythestaging,hisfrequentlyfragileplays are often reinterpreted, transformed, disfigured. The author is no longer God almighty. He is a worker, the specialized worker of the text." And, unsurprisingly, Thibaudat concludes that this state of things led to generally devitalized writing for the stage.
If the place of the author has not returned to its former position of primacy, it has improved recently as French directors seek perhaps a more equitable distribution of attention to the various components of the work on stage, including the text. Patrice Chreau, who acknowledges "crushing" the text to some extent in all of his stagings, announces his renewed interest in the text as the most important element of the theatrical activity.
But even a modest return to the role of the playwright, does not necessarily mean a revivified avant-garde. It all depends on what kind of writing, what kind of text, leading to what sort of theatricality. A Pirandello, a Genet, a Beckett expressed a radical theatricality that forced directors to provide innovative stagings required by the written work, inscribed in it. Today one looks in vain for such a need for experimentation.
At the start of the twenty-first century, dramatists are drawn to political and social content, ranging from French problems of immigration and integration to world-wide concerns with AIDS, terrorism, and American military domination. There is no reason why such matters cannot be expressed in theatrically experimental forms. In the sixties and seventies, the creative strength of the work of the Living Theater, Richard Schechner, Jean-Louis Barrault, notably in Rabelais (to name just a few) proved that the two presented no contradictions and made for a particularly dynamic avant-garde.
Now, the most theatrically stimulating works dealing with political and social concerns are undoubtedly those of the Thtre du Soleil (for example, Le dernier caravansrail by Ariane Mnouchkine), yet even their highly original stagings no longer qualify as "avant-garde." They are internationally recognized as part of the best, the most inventive of contemporary French theater. But if an avant-garde is, as Ionesco rightly claimed, a frontal attack on what is with the intent of destroying it and replacing it with a new, radical vision, not even Le Thtre du Soleil can be considered to be an avant garde in the twenty-first century.
One may well wonder then whether an avant-garde in the French theater today is even possible. The question came to a head at the 2005 edition of the Avignon Theater Festival, always a showcase for the new and the daring. Under the leadership of the "artiste associ" invited each year to give structure (and meaning?) to the selection of playwrights, directors, choreographers, and others-the Flemish mixedmedia artist Jan Fabre, selected by the Festival's directors, Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, to animate the festival, 2005 proved to be a catastrophe for public and critics alike. The co-directors and their "artiste associ" succeeded in alienating audiences with a polemical, vulgar, ultra-violent program that sought to shock-hardly a novelty in 2005 and not successful at that. After all, after nudity, after incest, after murder, rape, or cannibalism, how can you still shock a public that is force-fed the worst horrors daily on the evening news? Jan Fabre thought that urinating on stage, for instance, would be one way.
The intellectual and esthetic poverty of this strategy may have escaped the festivals' directors who claimed to want to question the limits of theater, but it did not escape the audiences. They were less shocked than irritated and bored. Theater was elsewhere. "It will undoubtedly take some time to begin to understand what really happened at this Festival," write Fabienne Darge and Brigitte Solino in their wrap-up for Le monde. "But one can already analyze certain elements.... This festival will have been an important moment in the history of Avignon, because it has been so revealing. It is evidence of a loss of ideological landmarks (through a brutal and meaningless reproduction of violence) and of esthetic ones (through a formal research that draws on the avant-garde of the years 1960-1970 without managing to bring it to life again)."
The fiasco of the 2005 Avignon festival was probably the high water mark of the irrelevancy of theater that scorns text. Yet if one might therefore now predict a gradual revalorization of the dramatic text, such a pendulum swing would probably not be a harbinger of some incipient avant-garde. The years of the revolutionary theater of the absurd followed by a period of directorial innovation shook up the establishment, as avant-gardes are intended to do. If an avant-garde has been successful (and these were) it then becomes absorbed and dominant, bringing on a new established form of theater. Eventually, this new establishment, once it becomes, in Ionesco's words, a new tyranny, will be brought down by some new avant-garde. But the French theater is not there yet. It is impossible to guess what such a new avant-garde might be; if it were imaginable it would already exist. But it does not.
A similar situation existed in the nineteen thirties. After several decades of radical reactions against the realism institutionalized by Antoine, led by such towering figures as Aurlien Lugn-Po, Jacques Copeau, Charales Dullin, the young Cocteau, the Surrealists, Gaston Baty, and Georges Pitoff, a period of assimilation led to Giraudoux, Montherlant, Anouilh, and Sartre. Who could have imagined while watching, say, Giraudoux's Intermezzo in 1933 that twenty years later, two tramps would wade through endless silences while waiting for Godot and that the Martins and the Smiths, interchangeable, two-dimensional pseudo English couples would hurl phrases, words, and syllables at one another while no soprano, bald or otherwise, made a promised appearance. Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and all the others had to write, to create, before their attack on the French theater establishment could as much as be envisaged. Only then could their avant-garde be detected, named, performed, analyzed.
Can we imagine that no new avant-garde will eventually rise against the current theater establishment in France? Not really. But what will it be? And will it be successful, as was the theater of the absurd, or relatively unsuccessful with no strong long-term traces (as was the case for instance of the expressionist theater of the twenties in France)? We will need to wait and see. But when it comes, it is likely to stem from unexpected sources and take unusual directions. The concerned theater critic awaits avidly.
JEAN-PIERRE RYNGAERT
Speech in Tatters: The Interplay of Voices in Recent Dramatic Writing
"But it's not theater." In 1993, in my book Lire le thtre contemporain, I noted that this remark, so often overheard upon leaving a theater, seemed to sum up the attitude, at once anxious and radically opposed, of spectators (and readers) who failed to recognize dramaturgy as they understood it on the basis of Aristotle and of nineteenth-century drama. Now, almost fifteen years later, the gap has widened even more between texts obeying the old rules (though these are still in the majority) and those, such as the ones I am about to discuss, that challenge the principles of absolute drama as theorized by Peter Szondi and defined by him as "an interpersonal event in the present."
Since the 1980s, French playwrights have regained a more important place in the theatrical landscape after a long period in the wilder- ness during the 1960s and 1970s, when one often heard it said that French writing for the stage was dead. Things changed thanks in part to the vigorous cultural policies initiated in 1981 by Jack Lang and Robert Abirached at the French Ministry of Culture. Grants, writers' residencies, subsidies for authors and producers, and workshops all helped. A certain new awareness among theater people in general has perhaps played a part, but changing attitudes are not of themselves a sufficient explanation. It is worth noting also that the almost worldwide acclaim for an author such as Bernard-Marie Kolts, and the kind of public infatuation that has surrounded Kolts's work in France, turned a bright spotlight on an area that usually receives little by way of media attention.
The number of productions may not be high enough to satisfy the writers, who still complain about being treated as mere experimenters, but, to judge by the immense growth of publication, public readings, various kinds of mise en espace (preliminary presentations or stagings), and specialized theaters and festivals, this sphere seems to be enjoying a distinct vogue.
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