“The New French Theatre: Artaud, Beckett, Genet, Ionesco,” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXVII, No. 4, October-December, 1959, pp. 643-57.

[In the following essay, Fowlie outlines Artaud's theory of theatrical ritual and dramatic cruelty, and analyzes his influence on Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco.]

Jacques Copeau's Vieux Colombier was the most famous and most fecund of the little theatres of the 20th century. All subsequent little theatres have continued the example of Le Vieux Colombier in opposing what Copeau called the double pest of the theatre: industrialization and cabotinage. The meaning of the first word is obvious. But the second word, which is purely French, is more difficult to define. It has to do with the art of the actor which in its lowest manifestation can equal a degrading kind of parody. The cabotin is vulgar and vain; he can even be ferocious. The weariness of rehearsals and backstage intrigues, gossip and desultoriness are able to sterilize the energies and moral character of an actor. Le cabotinage is a sickness which infects a good deal of the theatre—and the world outside the theatre: it is, fundamentally, the sickness of insincerity and falseness. The person suffering from cabotinage ceases to be authentic as a human being. He never recognizes the malady in himself. In his training, an actor risks the complete mechanization of his personality and the loss of much of his intelligence and spirituality. Copeau often spoke of the need for the actor of reaching a total simplicity: the opposite of cabotinage. This simplicity in the actor would give to the work of art, to the play, its maximum human quality, its power of pathos and poetry.

The little theatre movement was, for Copeau, precisely the means of reaching this simplicity. It was the teaching not so much of a new technique but of ways of feeling and living and reacting. Copeau wanted his actors to be human beings. That is why he welcomed non-professionals in his company. (For the same reason certain movie directors today, notably the Italians, use non-professional actors.) Copeau revindicated the place of the amateur in the theatre, the unaffected unpretentious actor who has not been subjected to the hardening experience of professionalism. He deplored the tendency to overtrain the professional actor, to separate him from the normal contacts of daily life, and to make him into a virtuoso, a star.

The little theatre is a corporation based upon a spirit of abnegation, of discipline and enthusiasm. It protects the dramatic masterpieces of the past and offers a place of refuge to the masterpieces of the future. It will not allow the over-elaborate pretentious mise-en-scène which, starting in Germany and spreading to other countries, has become today another form of cabotinage. The little theatre movement has always emphasized an almost rudimentary form of production because it is the richest in possibilities and because it is that kind which prevailed in ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Such a theatre will allow a new dramatic poet, when he arises, to impose his own mode of interpretation, his own dramatic form.

The emergence of the new experimental theatre in Paris is the consequence of the decline and death of le théâtre bourgeois. These plays bear almost no relationship to our world; when they are performed (and they still are performed much more often than the experimental plays), they seem apart from the tempo and the problems of the present. They can still appear as skillfully written plays and often serve as vehicles for stars: La Dame aux Camélias, for example, of Dumas fils. Two major wars within less than thirty years have changed many aspects of the social structure in France, and especially of the bourgeoisie. The majority of the Paris theatres continue to give plays from a repertory that has not evolved with the times. Those newer plays which reflect more faithfully the psychic and social problems of our day are still looked upon as experimental and are usually confined to the little theatres. Since the Liberation, fourteen years ago, several new and youthful companies, dedicated to the production of the new plays, have occupied the little theatres intermittently and usually for short runs.

The new playwrights are first those attracted to a poetic kind of play, lyric in tone but not written in verse: Ghelderode (a Belgian), Supervielle, Audiberti, Pichette and Shehadé; and a second group, more philosophical in intention: Adamov, Ionesco, Genet and Beckett. It may well be that the three most important new playwrights in France are Adamov (of Russian origin), Ionesco (of Rumanian origin) and the Irishman Samuel Beckett. What all these writers have in common is a scorn for the traditional form of play writing, for the well-made play which has flourished in France for almost one hundred years. In the work of these writers a new kind of play has finally come into prominence, twenty or thirty years after the same revolution was realized in poetry and painting. This is normal in the history of the theatre: its revolutions occur twenty or thirty years late.

For these new plays a new kind of production has been evolved. Poverty was the material condition of the younger theatrical companies: they had no money, no stage equipment and almost no stage. Jean Dasté has had a great influence in this domain. His famous sets for Les Frères Karamazov and Le Cercle de Craie of Brecht were reduced to bare essentials, but were as powerful and suggestive as the spectacular settings of the early 20th century. Jean Vilar has continued the use of this kind of set in his productions at the Théâtre National Populaire. To this theatre has come a new kind of public, from the large working class. Vilar first took his productions to them, to the populous outskirts of Paris, the banlieue, and to the provinces.

THE THEORIST: ANTONIN ARTAUD

Artaud's name is associated with a fundamental revolt against insincerity. His most cherished dream was to found a new kind of theatre in France which would be, not an artistic spectacle, but a communion between spectators and actors. As in primitive societies it would be a theatre of magic, a mass participation in which the entire culture would find its vitality and its truest expression. In January 1947, a year before his death, Artaud gave a lecture in Copeau's old theatre, Le Vieux Colombier. Among those present, and mingled with a youthful fervent audience, were such writers as Gide, Breton, Michaux, Camus. Artaud symbolized for all the generations in his audience an exceptional fidelity to a very great belief, a life devoted to a cause.

Artaud's greatest activity in the theatre fell between 1930 and 1935. They were productive years for the Paris theatres in general. Jouvet produced three new plays of Giraudoux: Electre, La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu and Ondine. Dullin was responsible for a fine production of Richard III. Pitoeff put on three plays of Tchekov: The Sea Gull, Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya. But even such repertories as these were unsatisfactory for Artaud. He wanted to go much farther in dramatic experimentation. He wanted for the theatre the same kind of frenzy and moving violence which he found in the paintings of Van Gogh. He claimed that a new kind of civilization was needed, one that would consummate a break with the sensitivity and the logical mentality of the 19th century. Thunderingly he denounced his age for having failed to understand the principal message of Arthur Rimbaud.

Artaud summarized the classical tradition of the French theatre, which he found still dominant, as that art which states a problem at the beginning of a play and solves it by the end, which presents a character as the beginning and then proceeds to analyze the character during the remainder of the play. Artaud asks, “Who says that the theatre was created to elucidate a character and to solve a conflict?” He sees the beginnings of a new kind of theatre, characterized by freedom, by the surreal and by mystery, in Mallarmé, in Maeterlinck and in Alfred Jarry, and finds an instance of it in Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias.

Artaud divides humanity into the primitive or prelogical group and the civilized or logical group. The roots of the real theatre are to be found in the first group. At the Colonial Exposition of 1931, where he saw the Indonesian or Balinese theatre, he was struck by the tremendous difference between those plays and our traditional Western play. He felt that the Balinese dramatic art must be comparable to the Orphic mysteries which interested Mallarmé. A dramatic presentation should be an act of initiation during which the spectator will be awed and even terrified—and to such a degree that he will lose control of his reason. During that experience of terror or frenzy, instigated by the dramatic action, the spectator will be in a position to understand a new set of truths, superhuman in quality.

The method Artaud proposes by which this will be brought about is to associate the theatre with danger and cruelty. “This will bring the demons to the surface,” he says. Words spoken on the stage will then have the power they possess in dreams. Language will become an incantation. Here again Artaud draws upon the poetic theory of Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Action will remain the center of the play, but its purpose is to reveal the presence of extraordinary forces in man. The metteur-en-scène becomes a kind of magician, a holy man, in a sense, because he calls to life themes which are not purely human. The principal tenet of Artaud's essay, Le Théâtre et son Double, is that reform in the modern theatre must begin with the production itself, with the mise-en-scène. Artaud looks upon it as something far more than a mere spectacle. It is a power able to move the spectator closer to the absolute. The theatre is not a direct copy of reality, it is another kind of dangerous reality where the principles of life are always just disappearing from beyond our vision, like dolphins who, as soon as they show their heads above the surface of the water, plunge down into the depths. This reality is beyond man, with his habits and character; it is “bloodthirsty and inhuman” (sanguinaire et inhumain). Artaud has acknowledged that in this conception of the theatre, he is calling uupon an elementary magical idea used by modern psychoanalysis wherein the patient is cured by making him take an exterior attitude of the very state which he should recover or discover. A play which contains the repressed forces of man will liberate him from them. By plastic graphic means, the stage production will appeal to the spectators, will even bewitch them and induce them into a kind of trance. Artaud would like to see stage gesticulations elevated to the rank of exorcisms. In keeping with the principal theories of surrealism, Artaud would claim that art is a real experience which goes far beyond human understanding and attempts to reach a metaphysical truth. The artist is always a man inspired who reveals a new aspect of the world.

THE PLAYWRIGHTS: BECKETT, GENET, IONESCO

From Mr. Beckett's first play, a phrase has passed into the French language, j'attends Godot, which means that what is going on now will continue to go on for an unidentifiable length of time. But if the phrase has reached an exceptional degree of popular consumption, the play itself still remains enigmatical. The public is held by it—Beckett is a skillful dramatist—but the after-effect is one of worry and wonderment.

The two tramps of Beckett, in their total dispossession and in their antics with hats and tight shoes, are reminiscent of Chaplin and the American burlesque comedy team. Pozzo and Lucky, the master and slave, are half vaudeville characters and half marionettes. The purely comic aspect of the play involves traditional routines which come from the entire history of farce, from the Romans and the Italians, and the red-nosed clown of the modern circus. The utter simplicity of the play, in the histrionic sense, places it in the classical tradition of French play writing. Its close adherence to the three unities is a clue to its dramaturgy. The unity of place is a muddy plateau with one tree, a kind of gallows which invites the tramps to consider hanging themselves. The unity of time is two days, but this might be any sequence of days in anyone's life. The act of waiting is never over, and yet it mysteriously starts up again each day. The action, in the same way, describes a circle. Each day is the return to the beginning. Nothing is completed because nothing can be completed. The despair in the play, which is never defined as such but which pervades all the lack of action and which gives the play its metaphysical color, is the fact that the two tramps cannot not wait for Godot, and the corollary fact that he cannot come.

Many ingenious theories have been advanced to provide satisfactory interpretations for the characters of Beckett's play. Religious or mythical interpretations prevail. The two tramps Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi) may be Everyman and his conscience. Estragon is the one who has trouble with his boots. He is less confident than his companion and at one moment is ready to hang himself. Vladimir is more hopeful, more even in temperament. One thinks of the mediaeval debate between the body and the soul, between the intellect and the nonrational in man. Certain of their speeches about Christ might substantiate the theory that they are the two crucified thieves. Pozzo would seem to be the evil master, the exploiter. But perhaps he is Godot, or an evil incarnation of Godot. The most obvious interpretation of Godot is that of God. As the name Pierrot comes from Pierre, so Godot may come from God. (One thinks also of the combination of God and Charlot, the name used by the French for Charlie Chaplin. … ) Mr. Beckett himself has repudiated all theories of a symbolic nature. But this does not necessarily mean that it is useless to search for such clues. The fundamental imagery of the play is Christian. Even the tree recalls the Tree of Knowledge and the Cross. The life of the tramps at many points in the text seems synonymous with the fallen state of man. Their strange relationship is a kind of marriage. The action of the play is a series of actions which are aborted and which give a despairing uniformity to the time of the action.

The new play, Fin de Partie, was finished in 1956 and produced in 1957. The title is a term used in chess to designate the third and final part of the game. (This technical meaning is not recognized by most of the French.) It was perhaps chosen for its indeterminateness, for its capacity to designate the end of many things, the end of life itself. The approach to “the end” is indeed one of the principal themes of all of Beckett's writings.

Two of the characters, Nagg and Nell, placed in ashcans, raise their covers from time to time and speak. But most of the dialogue is carried on between their son Hamm, who is a paralytic and blind and who is confined to a wheelchair, and his male attendant Clov. Throughout the action of Fin de Partie, Clov is constantly expressing a desire to leave. When Beckett was asked to summarize his new play, he stated that whereas in his first play, everyone expects the arrival of Godot, in the second play, they will be expecting the departure of Clov.

Whereas Godot was concerned with the theme of waiting, Fin de Partie is on the subject of leaving, on the necessity of reaching the door. We have the impression of watching the end of something, the end possibly of the human race. All movement has slowed down. Hamm is paralyzed and confined to his chair. Clov walks with difficulty. Nagg and Nell are legless and occupy little space in their ashcans. The setting vaguely resembles a womb and the ashcans are wombs within the womb. The two windows look out onto the sea and the earth, both without trace of mankind. The fundamental tragedy or hopelessness of the situation is offset by a fairly steady tone of burlesque and farce. The metaphysical conclusion of the play—and this is the same for Godot—belongs to each individual spectator who will interpret it in accord with his own sensibility and his own philosophy.

Concerning his play, Les Bonnes (The Maids), Jean Genet has said that it is a “tragedy of the confidants.” In a classical tragedy, the confidant listens to the hero discuss his loves and his exploits. The subject of M. Genet's play is the unfolding of the confidant's thought after he has left the stage. There are two confidants here, two maids who devotedly serve their mistress, and who gratefully receive Madame's cast-off dresses. Their life has been so reduced by this service, by the silence imposed upon them, that the only way they feel they can exist independently and truthfully is by committing a crime. But the planned murder of their mistress turns against them.

The sense of horror which this play creates seems almost more intense and more menacing than the horror generated in countless scenes of Genet's books. When performed on the stage, with living actors, such a story as Les Bonnes reveals a violence that is almost unbearable. This is an example of the theatre of cruelty Artaud speaks of. It is not the revelation of scandal which hastily written dramatic criticism has often called it. It is the revelation of a moral distress, able to turn human beings into sufferers whom we often live close to without recognizing. These sufferers often speak in words of sumptuous beauty because Jean Genet is a very great writer.

The action of Genet's second play, Haute Surveillance (Death Watch) transpires in a prison cell where a very precise and powerful hierarchy exists among three young men. Yeux-Verts (also called Paolo les Dents Fleuries) is the murderer of a girl. He expects in two months time to be guillotined: “D'un côté de la machine j'aurai ma tête, et mon corps de l'autre côté.” He dilates at such length on this situation of horror that it becomes something monstrous and fabulous. He loses himself in admiration over the magnitude of his own condemnation and fate. He is the maudit but without the romantic halo of rebel and apostle. He is the exalted criminal. By his prestige he dominates a second prisoner, who in his turn dominates a third prisoner, a mere thief. This is the hierarchy of the cell where seductiveness (essentially of a sexual nature) comes from the power of evil.

The heroes of Haute Surveillance walk back and forth in their close cell and provide thereby a picture of their obsessions from which they cannot escape. It is a self-contained world of damnation. Genet does not move outside of the world of the damned; he gives to it the inverted vocation of evil. His subject matter is that which is condemned by society and to it he gives, as an authentic playwright in Les Bonnes and Haute Surveillance, an infernal order, a presentation of evil conceived of in terms of a criminal hierarchy. Yeux-Verts, the protagonist of Haute Surveillance, has his own prestige and magnificence. He is the beneficiary of a perverted kind of grace and power.

In Sartre's critical work, Saint Genet comédien et martyr, he has meticulously pointed out the strong relationship between the two plays. In writing for the stage, Genet was unquestionably drawn by the artifice of the theatre, by its pretense and lie. In the text of Les Bonnes, he gives the formal direction that the two maids be played by adolescent boys in order to enhance even more drastically the ludicrousness of their appearance and the strangeness of their strategy. In the uniform structure of the two plays the important male figure is absent: the husband of the house in Les Bonnes, and the negro criminal Boule-de-Neige who obsesses the minds of all three prisoners in Haute Surveillance. There are three visible actors in each play. One of these actors, Madame in Les Bonnes, and Yeux-Verts in Haute Surveillance, serves as a kind of intermediary between the absent actor, whose power and authority have been somewhat transmitted to him, and the couple: the two maids in Les Bonnes and the other two prisoners Maurice and Lefranc in Haute Surveillance. In each play the couple is a weird pair of beings, who are simultaneously drawn to one another and hate one another, and who dream of committing a murder. One play ends with a suicide and the other with a murder.

Most men are able to play some kind of role in society. By feeling thus integrated with a social group, they justify their existence. Jean Genet is concerned in his two plays, as well as in all of his books, with the type of man who is alienated from society, who has been given a role outside of society and accepts it. Sartre can easily find in the writings of Genet examples of a gratuitous and absurd existence. The maids and the criminals in the two plays, in the acceptance of their alienation, have only one recourse. They have to play at being normal, at being integrated characters. So the maids play at being their mistress and the criminals form a hierarchical society in their cell. But the characters of Genet know what they are doing. They know they are counterfeiting society. They know that the actions which they invent will justify their existence. So in reality they are always playing their own alienated selves. We are therefore always watching simultaneously two actions in the plays of Genet: the invented actions of the characters playing at being something they are not, and the fatal drama of alienation.

In a new edition of The Maids (Les Bonnes et l'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti, L'Arbalète, 1958), Genet has published an important letter on his play and on the theatre in general. On the whole, he feels repulsed by the clichés and formulas of the Western theatre. In the tradition of our theatrical performances, the actor identifies himself with a character in the play, and this, for Genet, is basically exhibitionism. He claims that our Western plays are masquerades and not ceremonies: what transpires on the stage is always childish. Genet wrote Les Bonnes through vanity, he says, because he was asked to by a famous actor, but he was bored during the writing, depressed by his knowledge that it would be performed in accord with the conventions of the modern theatre where everything is visible on the stage, where the actions of men, and not of the gods, are depicted.

In a recent interview Eugène Ionesco pointed out the futility of wishing for a healthy, comfortable and comprehensive theatre. To achieve this kind of theatre would be equivalent to killing it. To be in a state of crisis is characteristic not only of the theatre, but of humanity itself. Ionesco reminds us once again that man is a sick animal, the only animal in the universe which is dissatisfied with its condition. But this is why man has a history. The function of art, literature and the theatre is to express the permanent crisis of man. M. Ionesco does not believe, for example, that an economic crisis really affects the theatre, since it lives by and through much more serious crises. There is no minority theatre, he claims, which cannot become a majority theatre. It was once said that Anouilh's plays were accessible only to a bourgeois public. This has been disproved. He has had success in the popular theatres where also the experimentalists Audiberti, Beckett, Ghelderode and Ionesco have been warmly received.

As is usually the case for a new playwright, the critics are divided over Ionesco in praise and blame. His admirers find in his writings the abstractions of a philosophy of language, and his detractors grant him no talent, no importance. At the performance of an Ionesco play, there is considerable laughter in the audience. The source of this laughter is as old as the theatre itself. It is man laughing at his own vacuity, his own emptiness, his own intimate triviality. This kind of laughter has been excessively exploited by the surrealists and by those close to surrealism, by Jarry in Ubu-Roi, by Cocteau in Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, by Desnos and Queneau and Michaux. It is language and miming which plunge the reader into the very heart of his own foibles and imbecilities.

The text of La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) is an example of the burlesque inventiveness of Ionesco, of the verbal fantasies he can create, but the laughter the text generates is not very pure. It covers up a rather serious worry of man, a malaise. It is a text made up of commonplaces very skillfully reconstructed, or placed just a bit out of context. We laugh because of the persistent disparity which lies between the words as they are said and the behavior of the characters speaking the words. The spectacle which transpires on the stage (and which in no wise resembles a plot or a story) is very close to the spectacle going on in us or around us almost all the time.

La Cantatrice Chauve, which Ionesco calls an “anti-play,” was first performed in May 1950. The roof over the stage leaked that night and the rain fell directly on the actors. This added to the confusion of a puzzling text and an absurd title, a bald soprano who never appeared. A few of the spectators enjoyed themselves, but most were furious with the conviction they were being made fun of. The theme of La Cantatrice Chauve, which occurs often enough in the other plays of Ionesco to be called his principal theme, is that of the aging couple, the husband and wife who have made a failure of living together, or at least suffer from some feeling of guilt. There are many Freudian aspects to his writing, but centrally this feeling of guilt which provides pathos as well as monotony. As the dialogue continues its clowning and the non-sensical answers are given back and forth, a pathos slowly emerges and the tragedy of the married couple is faintly sketched. It is not the young couple, in love with one another but quarrelling and misunderstanding one another, such as Molière, Marivaux and Goldoni gave us.

At this first play, when no bald soprano appeared, the public was first irritated and then resigned to the trick. So when the second play, La Leçon (The Lesson) was announced, the public knew there would be no lesson. They did not know that Ionesco was going to be unpredictable from one play to another. The play turned out to be an authentic private lesson given by a teacher to a rather stupid pupil, and this lesson lasts the full length of the play. The teacher is nervous and tense, and grows more irritable as he continues to teach his young pupil who is preparing the full doctorate (le doctorat total). At the end, the teacher kills his pupil.

Already La Leçon has become a kind of classic of the new French theatre throughout the world. It has been performed in England, America, Germany, Turkey, Japan. The first two plays are more simple than the subsequent ones, but they contain the essence of Ionesco's dramaturgy. They are filled with a ludicrous babbling and chattering. The speech of man seems unable to adapt itself to the sentiments and the truths which the language is attempting to express. The dialogue of Ionesco often resembles the monotonous whining of an animal unable to articulate the cause of its suffering, unable to make its suffering understood. The ritual of commonplaces can become so cruel that the laughter of the spectator is uncomfortable.

Ionesco published in La Nouvelle Revue Française of February 1958 an important article in which he describes his early dislike for the theatre. He attended the theatre rarely because everything about it disturbed him: the acting of the players, the arbitrariness of the so-called dramatic situation, the artificiallity and the trickiness of the productions. He found no magic in the theatre, but on the contrary an intricate system of tricks and deceptions and patterns. These he calls les ficelles. The living presence of men and women on the stage, playing parts foreign to their nature, was an unpleasant spectacle for him. He could not accept the art of the actor, as defined by Diderot and refined on by Jouvet and by Brecht, the art of the actor who is in full possession of the character he is playing. Ionesco remained attached to some of the great dramatic texts of the past: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare; but this was a literary attachment. The comedies of Molière bored him, and he found the greatness of Shakespeare's plays seriously diminished when they were performed. Ionesco was the opposite of what might be called an amateur of the theatre. His judgments on playwrights are briefly stated in this article, and they are negative. Corneille is tiresome, Marivaux frothy, Musset thin, Hugo laughable, Giraudoux already unplayable, Cocteau artificial, Pirandello outmoded. Only Racine escapes total condemnation when Ionesco claims that he is played today not because of his psychological understanding but because of his poetry. By comparison with music and painting, the art of play writing has accumulated very few masterpieces which have lasted: twenty or thirty, at the most. As a tentative theory to explain this paltry number of enduring successes, Ionesco wonders whether the playwright's habit of writing for his own time, of trying to remain close to his immediate audience, does not account for the dismally small number of dramatic masterpieces.

In M. Ionesco's early experimentations with play-writing and with the productions of the plays, he discovered that the essence of the theatre for him was in the exaggeration of its effects. Rather than trying to conceal the various artificialities and conventions of a performance (les ficelles), he believed that they should be made more visible. Playwright and director should go as far as possible in grotesqueness and caricature. Ionesco recalls theories of Antonin Artaud when he advocates a theatre of violence where the psychological study of characters will be replaced by metaphysical themes. He does not recognize any clearly marked distinction between the comic and the tragic. He deliberately calls his plays “comic dramas” or “tragic farces.” In Les Chaises he purposely disguised the tragic element by means of a comic treatment. The comic and tragic are not fused, for Ionesco; they coexist. Each stands as a criticism for the other.

No pre-determined plan, no pre-arranged set of ideas guides M. Ionesco in the writing of his plays. Artistic creation appears to him essentially spontaneous. Yet this creation of a possibly new theatre is associated in his mind with the coexistence of contradictory principles: tragedy and farce; the poetic and the prosaic; fantasy and realism; the familiar and the unusual. His texts would seem to indicate a belief that the playwright remains more separated from his characters than the novelist, and that he is therefore a more accurate observer of their lives. In his greater detachment, he can perhaps be a more authentic witness.