In his earliest dramatic works, Jean Cocteau concerned himself almost exclusively with plastic and architectural aspects of the theatre as opposed to literary or psychological ones. The importance of the mise-en-scène cannot be overestimated for Parade, Le Boeuf sur le toit, and Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel. From the beginning, Cocteau classified all of his great variety of work as “poésie.” He considered these three theatrical experiments to be poetry as well, although overwhelming emphasis was placed on the physical elements of the sets. For Cocteau during this early period poetry was created by all the plastic elements of the mise-en-scène, not only by characters' speech. He envisaged in these three plays what he termed “une poésie du théâtre,” which he described in the Preface to Les Mariés of 1922: “L'action de ma pièce est imagée tandis que le texte ne l'est pas. J'essaie donc de substituer une “poésie du théâtre” à la “poésie au théâtre”. La poésie au théâtre est une dentelle délicate, impossible à voir de loin. La poésie du théâtre serait une grosse dentelle; une dentelle en cordages, un navire sur la mer. Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel peuvent avoir l'aspect terrible d'une goutte de poésie au microscope. Les scènes s'emboîtent comme les mots d'un poème.”¹ Cocteau was reacting against the “poésie au théâtre,” the verbal poetic theatre of playwrights such as Claudel and Rostand. In his view, such theatre was just an excuse for dramatized poetry. Consequently, it was a misuse of the physical properties of the stage, or rather, a waste of the great potential they contained for becoming poetic too. Poetry “in the theatre” is an excessively subtle lace, small and delicate, associated with literature. Cocteau wanted to overwhelm the spectator not with words but with image-filled, poetic architecture and action, a poetry “of the theatre.” The metaphors would be active, dynamic, dramatized—not simply spoken to the audience, but shown to the audience.²

Thus, for Cocteau, the term “poésie” had wide application, not necessarily corresponding to a traditional conception of poetry. The process of creating “poésie du théâtre” entailed a new alliance among all the elements of the mise-en-scène. The role of the actor as a human diminished and that of the set and stage objects increased until a veritable exchange of roles took place. Actor, stage, decor, costume, music, speech, and gesture functioned in an esthetically unified ensemble. The impact of “poésie du théâtre” was intended to be more visual than dramatic or literary.

The principal means of creating “poésie du théâtre” was what he called in Le Boeuf “décor qui bouge”—a living or moving set (Théâtre II, p. 597). The idea of a moving set was a new conception of dramatic art where the characters are an integral part of the set and where stage objects play as important a role as the actors. Cocteau's early theatre was a marvelous mixture of dance, pantomime, music, and masks. These together created an atmosphere where the fantastic nature of everyday life could astonish the audience in a poetic process.

Cocteau was particularly influenced by Pablo Picasso and Cubism in his early theatre. Picasso collaborated with him for the set design and production of Parade, the ballet which became the starting point for more radical experiments. One characteristic of Picasso's Cubism was the recombination of certain aspects of a familiar object so that the viewer could see it in a new and esthetically revealing way, almost as if seeing it for the first time.

At the time of the production of Parade, Picasso was doing experiments with sheet metal constructions. He and Cocteau believed their set should play a more active role than was traditionally given to it. So Picasso literally built it on the backs of the actors. Two of the Managers wore costumes three meters tall and moved around the stage like giant buildings, deprived of most of their human quality. Picasso said he wanted to play with the idea that these enormous superhuman structures could become more “real” to the audience than the dancers who played the part of the Crowd.³ The people in the Crowd would thus be reduced to the size and importance of small puppets despite their more human appearance.

In Parade, Le Boeuf sur le toit, and Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, Cocteau did not use actors, of course, in the proper sense of the word. The roles of the characters were played by professional dancers and clowns. He was more fascinated by the performance of a dancer than by the interpretation of an actor. The dancer is a set that moves on the stage. He uses his body as an instrument, to create a “poésie de mouvement.” Looking at a ballet, we do not necessarily concentrate on the dancer as a human being but rather on his body, movements, and gestures as esthetic objects. In traditional theatre exactly the converse is true. A particular actor's dramatic and psychological representation is often quite divorced from his physical appearance. The use and perception of the body as an object, or even a machine, was attractive to Cocteau. For the expression of his conception of theatre the dancer was a very natural medium to choose. Cocteau's esthetic vision—where characters became objects and stage objects became characters—was better fulfilled by a dancer than an actor. So Cocteau became associated with Diaghilev and the Ballets russes early on, and later with Rolf de Maré and the Ballets suédois.

To examine the phenomenon of “décor qui bouge,” we must reconstruct as many elements as possible of the mises-en-scène of these first three works. Let us start in 1917, with Parade. When Cocteau created the ballet Parade, he was under the direct influence of Picasso and Erik Satie. In the beginning he envisioned, to accompany the dance, a series of raw sounds in the “bruitiste” tradition of the Futurists. However, Picasso and Satie refused to agree to this. In the end Satie did incorporate into his score parts for typewriters, horns, helicopters, and other machines. Because of technical problems, few of these could be used in the actual performance (Melzer, p. 121). However, the idea of giving obvious importance to machines in the music was certainly there. They would alienate music from its human orientation and thus complement the dehumanized characters of the play.

Picasso rejected Cocteau's idea of making the characters speak through holes in the set. He was just as deaf to the objections of the dancers, who hated the restrictive costumes he had designed (Melzer, p. 121). According to the script, the Managers were supposed to be in front of their theatre booth, gesticulating at the Crowd to come inside and watch the show, and finally crumpling from exhaustion when no one listens to them. But two of the three Managers were nearly ten feet tall—more like buildings than human beings. The other Manager was a horse played by two dancers. Their dramatic interpretation was not easy under the circumstances.

In spite of this, all the dancers' movements were precisely choreographed. The main characters of Parade are stereotyped—the Little American Girl, the Chinese Juggler, and the Acrobats. They are in this sense bigger than life, more real than real. The Juggler and Acrobats perform typical music-hall numbers for the Crowd, and the Little American Girl cranks a car, takes a photograph, rides a bicycle, and imitates Charlie Chaplin. The whole effect of the ballet was one of a parade of visual surprises, a distortion of everyday reality à la cubiste. The Crowd is so fascinated by the actions of the three characters mentioned above that it pays no attention to the theatre Managers.

The audience at the first performance was outraged by Parade and provoked into a violent reaction against Cocteau, Picasso, and Satie. The reaction of the critics was hardly less violent. They blasted the performance right down to the typewriters in the orchestra (Melzer, p. 122). The spectacle of the “moving set,” the “décor qui bouge,” threatened the members of the audience. They were shocked by the dehumanized, quasi-architectural or blatantly stereotyped “characters.” Evidently Cocteau had proved himself a master of a variety of astonishing stage effects, taking an aspect of everyday life—such as the French idea of an American girl—and changing it into spectacle.

His second dramatic work, Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920), was for Cocteau a reaction to the critical reception of Parade. A few critics had labelled it a “farce” and Cocteau was very offended. He decided to give the Parisians a true farce which would satirize their poor taste. The characters of Le Boeuf sur le toit were inspired by the sterotyped image that the Frenchman had of speakeasies in the United States during Prohibition: “Entrent tour à tour: la dame décolletée, en robe rouge, très maniérée, très commune. La dame rousse, aux cheveux de papier, jolie, d'une allure masculine, un peu voûtée, les mains dan les poches. Le monsieur, en habit de moleskine, qui regarde son bracelet-montre et ne quitte pas son tabouret de bar jusqu'à sa sortie. Un bookmaker écarlate, aux dents d'or qui porte un melon gris et une cravate de chasse maintenue par une perle de la taille d'une boule de jardin” (Théâtre II, p. 598). Cocteau uses the stereotyped idea of violent American society as a support for the Guignolesque atmosphere of this pantomime, which is supposed to last only about fifteen minutes. The characters move around like automatons in a completely choreographed manner, as if in a dream. The Brothers Fratellini, famous European clowns, played the roles of the barman, the dame rousse, and the dame décolletée. Using clowns gave Cocteau the same advantages as did using dancers in Parade. They were already a “décor qui bouge,” a moving set. The characters were even more dehumanized by their costumes and the huge papiermâché masks they wore.

In Le Boeuf the characters do form a “décor qui bouge” as much by their appearance and their movements as by the way in which other objects or stage situations control them, like the different parts of a complex machine. Cocteau uses an associational logic to organize the action. The action can take on qualities of language, reflecting the way that certain words are always associated with certain other words. In Le Boeuf, this sort of association leads to a series of visual jokes. Because the pantomime is set in a New York speakeasy, naturally all the stock characters are represented. It is because there is a ceiling fan that the policeman is decapitated; because there is a severed head on the stage, the woman dances the triumphal dance of Salome with the head of John the Baptist. Cocteau uses the elements of the set to determine the plot. We see the same kind of visual wit or invention as in Parade.

The music for Le Boeuf sur le toit was composed by Darius Milhaud. He contributed lively Brazlian melodies which were played once before the curtain rose, then again during the performance. The music was to have no relation to what was happening on the stage. Its liveliness formed a jarring contrast to the somnambulant movements of the characters, separated from its normal function of complementing action.

Le Boeuf is an intentionally superficial work. In fact there is nothing but surface. The action is determined by stereotyped objects and situations that are immediately identifiable. We cannot predict the direction that the action will take, but this action is always understandable within the logic of the play. Even the characters have only surface, accessible to vision alone, deprived of human expression by huge masks. They are types, without psychological depth. Moreover, the music reveals nothing. Cocteau's audience was forced to stay on the surface—to look only.

Cocteau's intention to leave the audience there, to fascinate with visual aspects of the performance, is manifested differently in Le Mariés de la Tour Eiffel of 1921. The element of a text is added, opening the possibilities of language for his creative intentions. Language becomes a property of the set, not of the characters. Cocteau realized that he had at last achieved his esthetic goal of creating a “poésie du théâtre,” for which the other two plays had been experiments. Here he uses the idea that Picasso had rejected during the production of Parade. Rather than having the actors speak through holes in the set, he encloses the two Narrators in large stationary phonograph costumes and has them deliver their lines through the trumpets at each side of the stage.

Cocteau was fascinated as a boy by the carnival game in France in which the player tries to knock over moving figures representing a wedding party.⁴Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, a ballet and mime, contains the same characters and the same violent action. Jean Hugo's costumes were charming and quite elaborate, and they gave the dancers the air of large dolls. Hugo describes how he tackled the problem of designing them: “Le poète a voulu réhabiliter les lieux communs. J'ouvris donc le dictionnaire Larousse aux mots baigneuse, bottine, cycliste, marié, etc. J'y trouvai des baigneuses en jupons, des mariées à taille de guêpe, un lion semblable à celui des magasins du Louvre, une cycliste en culotte, des bottines à boutons, tout un style. …”⁵ Following Cocteau's intentions, Hugo tried to find the most banal representation possible for the characters, so that their extreme banality might bring the commonplace back to life for the audience.

All the actors' movements were choreographed to be automatic—they had to appear to be controlled by the speech of the two Phonographs. The Phonographs are really the only characters that talk (the Camera does talk once). They speak in turn “très fort, très vite, et prononcent distinctement chaque syllabe” (Théâtre I, p. 11). Their dehumanized voices recite the lines of all the characters in a monotone. They seem like automatic machines but they possess the power to control the action of the “human” characters.

Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel is, on one level, a satire of the bourgeois' sacred institutions. The characters represent all that is banal and ordinary; they “talk” to each other in a hilarious juxtaposition of clichés. At the same time, this play is an attempt to astonish with the potentially fantastic nature of everday life. The amazing world that comes into contact with the everyday one is the Photographer's Camera, which releases a whole series of strange and wonderful personnages. An Ostrich, a Bather, a Child, and a Lion come, and they disturb the guests since their logic does not correspond to that of the wedding party.

Language and object function together according to this unusual logic, belonging to two different worlds simultaneously and having different meanings in each one. They work together to control and limit the action. For example, when the Photographer says, “Regardez l'objectif; un oiseau va sortir,” this signals the Camera to produce another miraculous character. The General does not realize that by merely mentioning the tigers in Africa, a Lion will be produced and will eat him, but that is the way the logic works. The ambiguity of the word “balles” results directly in the massacre of the wedding party by little Justin. Ordinary logic no longer applies in this crazy world of linguistic associations. Cocteau no longer uses objects alone to control stage action, as in Parade, but extends the same whimsical determinism to language.

The playwright takes the idea of creating a wholly superficial, visual spectacle as far as possible at the end of this play. A complete exchange of roles has taken place between the set and the actors. The actors are almost totally immobile—only the set can act now. The wedding party freezes into a painting, a kind of backdrop, “created” by the conversation of the two Phonographs.

In Cocteau's dramatic vision, objects play roles like those of actors and vice versa. That which means “actor” is not necessarily an animate object or human being, and that which denotes “set” is not always an inanimate object. There is a kind of subjective/objective continuum through which all the elements of a mise-en-scène pass during any theatrical performance.⁶

It is essentially upon this phenomenon—this capacity for exchange—that Cocteau plays to create his “poésie du théâtre” using a “décor qui bouge.” Poetry, generally associated with language, a property of characters, becomes associated with the set. The set, traditionally associated with inanimate architecture and objects, is now “played” by people. In sum, the early dramatic works of Cocteau demonstrate the magic of theatre, which allows all these elements to be recombined into a spectacular esthetic ensemble.

Notes

1. Théâtre I (Paris: Grasset, 1957), p. 5.

2. E. Freeman, ed., Orphée: The Play and the Film, by Jean Cocteau (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. xvii.

3. Annabelle Melzer, Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1976), p. 121.

4. Milorad, “De La Noce Massacrée aux Mariés de la Tour Eiffel,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau 5 (1975), p. 30.

5. “Pages de Journal: Les Mariés,” Cahiers Jean Cocteau 5 (1975), p. 22.

6. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 15.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Professors Nancy Lane and Sandra Daniel for all their help in the writing of this article. L.D G