[In the following essay, Bradby discusses major French dramatists and directors of the 1970s, focusing on both playwriting and staging issues.]

In the course of the seventies, major changes have taken place in French playwriting which are still difficult to assess. In the excitement of the création collective experiments, during the early years of the decade, the traditional role of the playwright almost seemed to have disappeared: instead of starting with a text, theatre companies started from an idea, theme or situation; where playwrights were still employed, it was as literary advisers or adaptors, serving the interests of actors and directors. Among the factors contributing to this situation were: the emphasis on group responsibility; developments in literary theory; the questioning of established artistic methods; and the all-pervading ‘gauchisme’. Gauchisme was the pejorative name given to that brand of extreme intellectual left-wing attitude that proclaims the revolution now. Among actors, it led to the insistence that, as the ‘proletariat’ of the theatre, they had to be free to speak with their own voice. To speak a text written by someone else, especially if that someone was a professional writer (i.e. ‘bourgeois individualist’), was to accept an oppressive and authoritarian practice: all theatre texts had to be the result of a collective voice. It was the squabbles arising from just such a superficial approach that had made Gatti's Treize Soleils de la rue Saint Blaise so unsatisfactory (p. 161).

In places where such crude over-simplifications were avoided, the writer did not necessarily fare any better, because of the predominance of ‘directors' theatre’. The brilliant success of Planchon's methods had produced many imitators. The tendency towards a theatre of images had been further reinforced by the impact of Grotowski, the Living Theatre, Bread and Puppet, Bob Wilson and other similar foreign companies, whose work drew its power from images as much as from texts. Foreign influences of this kind continued to play an important role throughout the seventies, especially after the discovery of Tadeusz Kantor. It was these models that fired the imaginations of many of the new young directors and companies.

The power of the director was further reinforced by a change in the government's method of paying subsidies. Annual subsidies for a given theatre had always been paid to a named director rather than to an author or company, but extra money was available for the staging of new plays under the ‘Aide à la Première Pièce’ (originally established by Jeanne Laurent in 1947). After 1967 this was replaced by a ‘Commission d'Aide à la Création Dramatique’ (see Allen, 1981: 247). Under the new system, the director no longer had to find an unperformed playwright, but could claim the subsidy for a création collective or an adaptation of the kind discussed in the previous chapter.

The new playwrights of the forties and fifties had seen their work performed in the privately-owned Parisian ‘art’ theatres. During the sixties, the state-owned theatres had, to a large extent, taken over as the main presenters of new plays. But as the recession of the seventies began to make itself felt, the surviving Parisian theatres were no longer able to take risks and, as we shall see, the state theatres also ran into financial difficulties. The result was a sudden reduction in the number of outlets for new writing.

In this situation it became fashionable to declare that the era of the playwright was past. After all, had not writers of real quality, such as Gatti, chosen to abandon playwriting in search of new, collaborative forms of expression? This climate of ideas found its counterpart in structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory, which was proclaiming the ‘death of the author’. By this was meant that works of literature should no longer be viewed as if they were letters, written by one person to convey information to another. Rather, they should be seen as slabs of discourse, whose meanings are constructed as much by the different readers as by the author who first set them down. Moreover, the old-fashioned notion of meaning was itself called into question and the suggestion made that there is in fact no such thing as a stable meaning that can be located in a literary text (see for example Eagleton, 1983: 127-45). The impact of these theoretical developments contributed to the fashion for the production of adaptations rather than of play texts (see pp. 221-3). As the intentions and the authority of the author lost much of their traditional importance, so it became more frequent for directors to put together ‘colleges’ of texts drawn from many different literary periods and genres. The tradition of literary introspection was particularly favoured: texts that call into question the whole basis upon which we sum up and judge a human character. These preoccupations were to come to the fore in the work of certain playwrights, too, especially those playwrights known as le théâtre du quotidien. But, as we shall see, their writing was also fuelled by social considerations.

The crisis that faced playwrights in the early seventies also had straightforward economic causes: put simply, many of the larger decentralised theatres had become too expensive to run. By the middle seventies the large building programme begun by Malraux, and which had carried on under its own momentum, had resulted in the existence of fifteen Maisons de la Culture, four national theatres, eighteen Centres Dramatiques and a further two dozen or more theatre companies of some size, all competing for subsidies. During the seventies around 0.5٪ of the national budget was devoted to the arts (as against 0.3٪ in Britain), but as the increase in labour costs and the general rise in inflation made the theatre more expensive, it became apparent that most of the government subsidies were being spent on administrative and running costs. Simply to keep a large theatre or Maison open was absorbing so much of the money that the creative work, for which the whole structure was supposed to exist, was being starved of funds. Often the only solution seemed to be to abandon creative work altogether and simply open the theatre to touring productions. This practice became known as ‘garaging’.

The situation was aggravated by the suspicious attitude of successive Ministers of Culture towards the theatre. The ruling class had been profoundly shocked by the events of 1968. They were determined to do what they could to prevent state subsidy going to those whose professed aim was revolutionary socialism. On his appointment as Minister of Culture in 1973, Maurice Druon declared that he would not tolerate people who came to him with a begging bowl in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other. This inflammatory remark produced outraged response from theatre workers all over France, culminating in a massive demonstration by the Action pour le Jeune Théâtre. They claimed, with some justification, that it suited the Ministry very well to have a state-subsidised theatre so top-heavy with administrative costs that it could mount few new productions. Matters appeared to have reached an impasse during the last years of Giscard d'Estaing's presidency. Even the Association Technique pour l'Action Culturelle, which had performed a vital role in publishing regular news of activities throughout the decentralised theatres, was forced out of business. It became common to declare that ‘decentralisation was dead’.

Like most slogans, of course, this gave only a very one-sided view of the true picture. Despite a hostile financial climate, the period of the seventies was marked by a constant increase in the number of new young theatre groups springing up in the provinces. Moreover, many of the major theatres continued to perform original work, notably the T.N.P.-Villeurbanne, the Comédie de Caen and the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. The work of the Strasbourg theatre was particularly influential and provides a good example of the profound change that was taking place in the practice of French playwrights.

In 1975 Jean-Pierre Vincent was appointed director of the Strasbourg theatre. He had made his name with productions of Brecht, Büchner, Vyshnevsky, as well as modern French plays by Rezvani and Grumberg, and a very successful revival of La Cagnotte by Labiche. He was an admirer of Peter Stein and had worked in Germany. From his appointment in 1975 until his move to direct the Comédie Française in 1983, Vincent established a pattern of working practice modelled on that of the German civic theatres. He drew the Strasbourg acting school into close collaboration with the professional theatre company and appointed two ‘dramaturges’—Bernard Chartreux and Michel Deutsch. Their function was not just to act as literary advisers, but to write new material for performance by both the company and the students, mostly adaptations of non-dramatic work, such as Zola's Germinal, which formed the basis of the first production by Vincent at Strasbourg. The position of Chartreux and Deutsch typifies that of many playwrights in France today: they work from within a professional theatre company. This means that although they may write their own plays, they will also spend much of their time working on projects commissioned by the director, who thus reinforces his predominant role in the production of new theatre work.

In order to protect the interests of the independent author, an organisation called Théâtre Ouvert was established in 1970 by broadcaster and publisher Lucien Attoun. At first this consisted only of play-reading sessions at the Avignon festival, broadcasts on France-Culture and a special series of publications for Stock. But its activities have increased to include work at other times of the year and in other places. It now owns its own premises, at the Jardin d'Hiver in Paris, where it arranges for small-budget productions of new plays, usually directed by the author himself. The list of authors helped by Théâtre Ouvert during the seventies runs to nearly 200. It includes Gatti, Grumberg, Deutsch, Wenzel, Kalisky and Vinaver. It has shown that despite a changed intellectual climate and a reduction in the number of outlets for new work in the French theatre, plays of quality are still being written (see Jeffery 1984a).

The main casualty of the changes and cutbacks in the seventies was the particularly Parisian tradition of the lyrico-whimsical play, examples of which had featured in every Paris theatre season since the war. Its authors had resisted the polarisation into Brechtian or absurdist camps, combining sardonic social comment with humorous situations, often more or less ‘absurd’. This tradition included writers such as Schéhadé, Dubillard, Billetdoux, Félicien Marceau, as well as Audiberti and Vauthier, who had made the link between the avant-garde and the boulevard in Paris during the fifties before their rediscovery by Maréchal in the sixties. New authors of secondary importance, writing in a similar style, emerged in the course of the sixties, notably Romain Weingarten and René de Obaldia.

Weingarten's L'Eté was a big success in the Paris season of 1966/7. It depicts two talking cats and two children, through whose eyes the relationship of two lovers (never seen on stage) is observed. It sparkles with bons mots and insights into adolescent psychology. It also offers two very amusing acting parts for the cats (played by Nicholas Bataille and Weingarten himself). But it marked no significant new departure. Much the same can be said of Obaldia's plays, the first of which, Génousie, had been part of Vilar's 1960 season of new plays at the Récamier. His Le Satyre de la Villette was produced in 1963 by André Barsacq, who had produced so many of Anouilh's early plays. In 1965 Du vent dans les branches de sassafras provided the great comic actor Michel Simon with one of his last triumphs; the play is a spoof western, in which Simon took the part of an accident-prone cowboy. Obaldia's plays always present slightly unexpected characters in strange situations, but their verbal antics are neither so ‘absurd’ as those of Ionesco, nor so precocious as those of Arrabal, nor so cynical as those of Vian.

JEAN-CLAUDE GRUMBERG

This variety of whimsical writing, which had flourished in the fifties and sixties has almost entirely died out since the beginning of the seventies. The playwrights who now make the link between the boulevard and the avant-garde are those who have managed to combine the lessons of the New Theatre with the discoveries of the théâtre populaire movement and of Epic theatre. The outstanding example is Jean-Claude Grumberg. Grumberg was born in 1939 in Paris of immigrant Jewish parents. Soon afterwards, his father was deported during the purges of the Occupation. He never returned and so his mother went out to work as a seamstress in the clothing trade to support her children. Becoming first an apprentice tailor, then an actor, Jean-Claude only began to write for the stage in the middle sixties. His first plays, heavily influenced by the New Theatre, dealt with the themes of racism and intolerance through violent images of incomprehensible conflicts taking place in everyday circumstances. They aim to create a sense of the grotesque by introducing into conventional situations a language so violent and cruel that the spectator experiences the shock of seeing, in the open, the normally hidden or unconscious desires and drives of the characters.

This was also the style of writing employed in the play that gave Grumberg his first commercial success, Amorphe d'Ottenburg, published by Stock in 1970, and produced the following year by J.-P. Roussillon at the Odéon theatre on a set resembling an enormous spider's web. The play is a parable of Nazism, with the dumb Amorphe as Hitler, his parents as the establishment powers who encouraged him, Uncle Merle as the Pope and an evil hunchback who represents the finance and business houses which benefited from the Nazi régime and came out of it even stronger than before. Most of the time, the play works as a parody of gothic melodrama, and its force is to demystify the process through which high-sounding ideological motives are made to cover base instincts. Amorphe has an irresistible compulsion to stab in the back anyone who is old and helpless. This liquidation of the infirm is an enormous boon to the Ottenburg economy and so his crimes are covered up by his father, the Lord of Ottenburg. When Amorphe kills the ‘troubadour’ (in fact a neighbouring prince in disguise) it seems as though he has gone too far, but his father succeeds in winning back sympathy for him by a forceful speech about the parasitism of all artists and musicians.

There is a strong influence of Jarry in the cruelty, systematic distortion of truth, and general base egotism of most of the characters in the play. This influence is also visible in the language, especially in the use of archaic French for scurrilous purposes and in the names of the Lord of Ottenburg's opponents, Stanislas, Matolas and Pamolas, recalling the good King Wenceslas of Ubu Roi and his noble son Bougrelas. There is a grotesque quality to the language throughout, well exemplified by the play's running gag which is in the murderous but mute Amorphe's struggles to articulate his own name. He finally succeeds as he mounts the throne over the dead bodies of father and uncle and his stammering of his name is taken up by those around him as a battle cry: ‘A mort …’ (Death to … ; 167). Those opposed to Amorphe appear just as corrupt as he is, interested only in how they can keep their own peasantry down with less blatant methods than those used by Amorphe. After a prolonged war, they conquer Ottenburg and kill Amorphe, but the hunchback saves his skin by presenting the victors with his perfectly kept account books. The audience's horror is shifted from its focus on Amorphe himself to the evil financial genius and suddenly, at the final curtain, we see a whole line of hunchbacks, each holding account books.

As a black farce the play is successful; as a political allegory it is less so. This is because the generalised nature of the vaguely medieval setting prevents the author from treating the problems of the relationship between power and finance in any but the most schematic way. Rather than discovering anything new about Nazism, the spectator's pleasure is limited to the amusement of exerting his wits in the recognition of the models to which each character refers. The parallel with the history of the Third Reich only becomes clear as the play progresses, so that recognition dawns slowly. Grumberg attempted to give the play a more general significance by making each character speak and act in the name of ‘Gott’ but, once again, since the terms of the analysis are so vague, nothing significant is revealed about the causes or effects of religious persecution. The play is both entertaining and brilliantly theatrical but there is a certain incongruity between this and its subject-matter.

Grumberg's subsequent plays show him turning more towards real events and situations and drawing more on his own personal experience. They also show an increased, self-consciously critical attitude towards the problems of form. This is most clearly evident in Dreyfus, in which the problem of how to write and present a play about anti-semitism is the central concern of a group of Polish Jews who are themselves the victims of anti-semitism. Dreyfus was first produced by Jacques Rosner at the Théâtre du Lambrequin, Tourcoing, the new name given to the Centre Dramatique du Nord when Rosner became its director in 1971.

Its content is more specifically political and its setting is precisely identified in a Yiddish-speaking suburb of a Polish town, where an amateur theatre group is working on a play (by one of their members) about Dreyfus (see fig. 19). The time is around 1930 and the play dramatises the murderous incongruity of people struggling to understand the anti-semitism of a previous generation while failing to see the growth of the new, more brutal anti-semitism in their own time.

The play turns on two questions: how is it possible to understand anti-semitism? and how is it possible to represent it in such a way that the audience will learn something that they can use? The first question is not really answered. The central character, Maurice, the one who has written a play about Dreyfus, concludes that it can only be understood in the context of a large Marxist theory of history, but this intuition only emerges at the very end of the play in a letter sent by Maurice to his friends. Most of the characters in the play remain completely baffled by the hostility they face, clinging all the more strongly to their Jewish identity. They cannot understand Maurice's fascination with the fact that Dreyfus did not even consider himself as a Jew, but was first and foremost an officer, thinking of himself simply as a French soldier. This was why the accusation of treason hit him so hard: it created a difference of species that had not existed before.

It is in the discussions about Dreyfus' view of himself that the answer to the second question is developed: Maurice insists that their play must show that there is essentially no difference between Jew and Gentile, that indeed the supposed differences do not emerge until someone needs to find a victim to protect himself from blame. Maurice has to struggle for his understanding of these issues against the traditionalism and inflexibility of his colleagues. Arnold, for example, sees the whole subject in melodramatic terms and would like to perform the whole play as a piece of traditional Yiddish theatre with song and dance routines. Motel, the tailor, believes that the only important ingredient of the play will be the costumes. Michel, the actor playing Dreyfus, finds it quite impossible to understand his role until one night a rehearsal is broken up by a couple of violent anti-semitic drunks. Michel terrifies them by charging, in his officer's uniform and with drawn sword. By not adopting his usual apologetic, self-effacing posture, he has stepped outside himself, realized that he need not be imprisoned by ideas of racial groups. Maurice's play is never finally performed. He leaves for Warsaw, where he joins the communist party, explaining his discovery of the concept of direct action to his former friends by letter.

Grumberg's play is well constructed. It draws richly on the Yiddish tradition for some very funny and some very moving dialogue. It employs the device of the play within the play most effectively, unashamedly exploiting the stock devices such as the scene in which the young lovers enact a declaration of love that turns into the real thing. The general atmosphere of the small, protective Jewish community is depicted with warmth and affection. Above all, Grumberg conveys a kind of amazement that such a group of people can persist in an almost blind idealism in the face of a brutally hostile world. But as in the case of Amorphe d'Ottenburg, the play is too self-contained to really illuminate the historical themes upon which it touches—they become submerged beneath the brilliantly observed surface detail of the Jewish community, and the large questions raised by the play remain unanswered.

What links Dreyfus with En r'venant d'l'Expo (1975) is an element of self-consciousness about the formal devices employed. In Dreyfus we saw a theatre group struggling to put on a play. Here we are asked to consider the function of the cafés concerts in the period leading up to the First World War. Once again, the play is extremely well constructed, the opening scenes, at the Universal Exhibition of 1900, being a particularly successful piece of dramatic exposition. The idea of showing how la belle époque led up to the First World War had already been used by Adamov in Paolo Paoli. While Adamov exploited the hypocrisies of the bourgeois commerçants, Grumberg attempts to juxtapose the sincere idealism of the syndicalist movement with the frivolity of the cafés concerts.

This enables him to use the popular songs of the period to some effect, although the play rather disappointingly shows only the superficial or escapist aspects of popular songs, failing to show how they could also be subversive. Rather like Maurice in Dreyfus, the syndicalists of this play are great idealists, believing up until the last moment that war is impossible since the workers' International will simply call a universal strike to prevent it. As a piece of documentary drama about the period, it is fascinating; as a piece of political theatre it seldom goes beyond stating the obvious.

The attractions of the play are in its surface texture rather than in its overall coherence. The setting of the play's opening scenes in the Universal Exhibition is particularly successful, since an exhibition provides the ideal public meeting point where the social and political clichés of the period are rehearsed, but where more intimate family and sentimental relationships can also be developed. Everything that occurs amongst the imposing exhibits is superficial and meretricious, from the curé's homily on the value of colonial wars because of the glorious deaths they provide, to the invocation of Joan of Arc by the Anglophobe. The various bugbears of the period are introduced: the Jews, the revolutionaries, indiscipline of any kind; and the exposition of plot is achieved with great vitality, economy and humour of dialogue and character.

The remainder of the play alternates between the café concert and the workers' hall. The café concert revels in jingoistic songs designed to stir up militaristic fervour, while in the workers' hall the union meets to discuss the politics of peace. The link between the two worlds is Louis, son of a waiter who begins to make a hit as a singer at the café, but realises the destructive effects of his songs and so searches for an alternative. The difficulty is that the second half of the play tends to degenerate into a series of debates with little dramatic force—a tendency already evident in Dreyfus. There is a debate about whether popular songs should do more than ‘faire oublier’; there is a debate about pacifist politics. But in the end what is shown to matter is not these reasoned discussions, but the sheer emotional force of a militaristic song or the call to arms in 1914. In the end the pacifist workers have to admit their impotence in the face of the emotive power of nationalism, however false and short-sighted it may be.

The overall effect of the play is thus rather fatalistic. In the syndicalist scenes the writing expresses Grumberg's evident sympathy for their cause but the main emphasis of the action is on the disunity within the movement. Similarly, the author shows evident dislike of the chauvinistic traditions of the cafés-concerts, but stresses their attractions by including a number of examples of such songs. The message, that superficial passions and resentments are more powerful than reason, was emphasised most effectively by Jean-Claude Penchenat in his production of the play for the Théâtre du Campagnol (1979). The play was staged in a large arena which allowed the audience to feel they were part of the crowds at the exhibition or the clients at the café-concert. A last scene was added, in which the on-stage band played heroic military music while all the characters joined in a military parade. As they marched around the arena, their expressions and gestures became gradually more violent and hysterical until we were faced with a powerful, literal image of the lunacy and bestiality of war.

Grumberg's most recent play L'Atelier opened at the Odéon in 1979. It transferred to a boulevard theatre where it enjoyed a long run. It is a largely autobiographical story of Jewish survivors of the Nazi Occupation, and the pain of surviving when so many have died. It depicts the life of a small clothing workshop between 1945 and 1952. The action is entirely confined to the workshop so that everything the audience learns is filtered through the work process. This is treated entirely naturalistically. In the Odéon production (Grumberg both acting and helping to direct), the actresses playing the six seamstresses did not pretend to sew: they really did it and the audience saw whole suits take shape before their eyes as the evening progressed. To live through such a period was, the play suggests, a matter of survival. It was essential for the women to produce suits sufficiently fast and cheaply to stay ahead of the competition so that there would be a through-flow of cash enabling all who worked there to eat. The moments of crisis or movement on stage occurred when a consignment had been returned or deliveries were not going smoothly. At such points Léon, the owner, shouted and screamed at the women, who accepted it because they knew it was their survival as well as his that was at stake. This work was the most vital and most physically demanding thing in their lives and so had to be presented as such.

But the play does not develop a denunciation of the alienating effect on the women of having to sell their labour. Its mood remains broadly nostalgic, emphasising the simple contradiction that although the workshop was experienced as a treadmill, it also gave respite from the anguished loneliness of those who had survived the holocaust. Simone, the character based on Grumberg's mother, has to spend every waking hour that she is not in the workshop searching for news of her deported husband and caring for her children. The occasional moments of emotional depth occur when she is working late, alone in the workshop, and hears from Léon, or from the presser, about other men's experiences of deportation. The ending of the play comes with the collapse of Simone, exhausted from the years of privation and hard labour. The news that she has been taken to hospital is brought to the workshop by her son, aged about eleven. Grumberg, at this point, gives way completely to the sentimental tone as the women all kiss him and he announces that soon he will be old enough to do a man's work so that his mother need no longer go out to support him and his brother.

After flirting with the methods of the Absurd and the Epic, Grumberg here returns to the most traditional form of naturalism: he relies on reproducing, by means of set, costumes and actors' behaviour, an imitation of a real workshop so perfect that his audience will believe in its reality. So long as they are convinced by the imitation, they will experience the play's events through the eyes of the fictional characters, identifying with their sufferings and delights. Because the method has been well established for more than a century, an audience expects a story of high emotional voltage before it will allow itself to be convinced. The holocaust supplies the necessary power: suffering of such magnitude compels the submergence of one's own identity in awe-struck sympathy with the sufferings of the characters on stage. The final descent into sentimentality confirms our sense that although unquestionably a master of his craft, Grumberg has, for the time being, abandoned experiment with dramatic form for the well-tried formulae of the past.

GEORGES MICHEL

Another playwright whose early work brought the methods of the Absurd to bear on the real world was Georges Michel. Michel is a watchmaker who lives in Paris and who shares Grumberg's Jewish proletarian origins. He was adopted in the early sixties by Sartre, who published his first play, Les Jouets, in Les Temps Modernes in 1963 and also provided a preface for his play La Promenade du dimanche in 1967. Michel's plays employ the dramaturgical methods of literalisation that were so successfully used by the New Theatre playwrights, presenting grotesque concrete images of the fears and fantasies of social conformism. La Promenade du dimanche depicts a typical French bourgeois family on its Sunday afternoon stroll. The dialogue is composed almost entirely of clichés; the common clichés of family life which are used to train children to accept authority and which were employed to similar effect in Ionesco's Jacques ou la soumission. But in Ionesco's plays both language and the world may be transformed: the deep subjective needs of Jacques and Roberte can be expressed through the ecstatic evocation of the flaming horse (Ionesco, 1954: 122).

No such transformation occurs in Michel's plays. The only unexpected occurrences are incursions of sudden violence, as first the grandfather, then the grandmother, and finally the little boy are shot or knifed. But these acts of violence produce no change in the survivors, for whom the cliché has become an impenetrable defence. When the grandfather is killed the mother simply comments:

It's an unlucky day … it started badly … I could feel it. First of all the fuses went this morning, it was an omen … then the waste pipe was blocked in the bathroom. I've always said: it goes in threes … well, at least we shan't have any more today.

(1968a: 12)

She is wrong, as her own death is shortly to show. Every so often on their walk the family passes a scene of torture or brutality, but a cliché response is always to hand: ‘he's only doing his job’ or ‘it's not our business to interfere’. The consequences of blind acceptance of authority enshrined in such statements take literal shape before their eyes without ever altering their behaviour: as their son lies dead, the mother shouts,

Your father's right; come on, that's enough now, get up, get up, you hear me? All right, you'll have no pudding … no pudding, you hear?

(ibid.: 75)

The characters in most of Michel's plays behave, in similar fashion, like programmed automata. The only exceptions are children, who are presented as creatures with a certain naïve independence, still able to question the solidified clichés that have become the adults' stock responses to whatever experiences they encounter. Arbalètes et vieilles rapières (1969) contains one such child, who begins by questioning the need for war, but ends up indoctrinated with chauvinistic and militaristic propaganda, to the point where he is transformed into a bundle of senseless aggressive drives, ready to kill anything that crosses his path.

The violence in this play is not physical but verbal. The coagulated clichés of aggression and chauvinism are what drive the people to war, and the two opposing armies find that they, too, coagulate in the final scene, where, after hurling insults at one another, they freeze ‘in an arrogant warrior's pose such as may be seen in our war memorials’ (98), while the sound of bombs exploding fills the theatre. The merit of Michel's plays is that they do not remain at the level of cliché, but attempt to show how the reliance on pre-digested ideas and expressions places one entirely at the mercy of the dominant ideology and, ultimately, blinds one to the reality of violence. In Arbalètes et vieilles rapières the boy's family is incapable of seeing that the indoctrination they put him through is literally one of alienation: he ends up aliéné, i.e. mad. In L'Agression, produced by Wilson at the T.N.P. in 1967, a group of passers-by is equally incapable of understanding the revolt of a group of adolescents as they try to fight back against the subtly aggressive forces of the consumer society.

Un Petit Nid d'amour (1970) shows how the fears generated in people by the consumer society may be played on in order to create a hysteria of acquisition which also culminates in violence. It is a very simple story of a young couple falling in love and setting up house together. Michel cleverly exploits all the clichés of the Love Story variety to show how their ideological basis relies on the determination to feather one's own nest at the expense of others. The salesman, who is always near at hand, is able to persuade them to keep changing their house for one with thicker walls, first just to keep out the noise, later to defend themselves against enemies, real or imagined. In the end they acquire a nuclear bunker; the last scene of the play shows them shooting down someone who was asking for help and retiring into their bunker with the words:

HIM
Did you see how he insisted on coming in?
HER
Our little love-nest is not a dormitory, after all! They kiss.

(79-80)

In the aftermath of 1968 Michel wrote La Ruée vers l'ordre (a pun on the French translation of the goldrush: la ruée vers l'or). In this, for the first time, he attempted to treat public figures in the same manner as the couples and families of his early plays. It shows the President of France calming his panic-stricken cabinet, making a televised appeal to the nation, and winning an election campaign, after which the population is force-fed on the benefits of the consumer society. The play is a series of rather predictable left-wing images, although one or two of the scenes have considerable power, especially the preparation for the President's broadcast, in which we see just how the correct, reassuring image is constructed by the media men. There are also some good passages on the abuse of language in modern consumer societies, saturated by advertising, that compare with L'Aboyeuse et l'automate by Cousin and Off limits by Adamov. But the paradox of Michel's writing is that it has the greatest force when it is least applicable to a specific historical case. It is a style that aims to reveal the violence concealed behind familiar structures and, as such, must work with typical cases. As soon as it is applied to a precise set of circumstances, such as France in 1968, the results are bound to seem over-simplified. Its appeal lies not in historical investigation but in the intensely literal enactment of situations we all recognise to be real. Similar methods were to be employed by the writers of the théâtre du quotidien that flourished in the seventies.

LE THéâTRE DU QUOTIDIEN—KALISKY, DEUTSCH, WENZEL

This was the name given by critics to a school of playwrights influenced by the new authors and film makers of Germany and Austria. In the course of the seventies many translations from German were performed in France, especially at the Comédie de Caen, where Michel Dubois and Claude Yersin produced Handke (1972), Kroetz (1973) and Fassbinder (1975). In the work of these authors, audiences were confronted with fragmentary scenes showing ordinary, often inarticulate people in very ordinary situations, which were nevertheless presented in a style of heightened realism. Behind the ordinariness of the situations, the hidden violence of contemporary social structures emerged with great force.

The French writers we shall now examine employ similar dramatic methods: not linear plots, but a discontinuous structure of fragmented reality; not well-rounded characters in control of their language, but a demonstration of how language can control and articulate character. Together with Georges Michel, Kalisky, Deutsch and Wenzel all illustrate Vinaver's contention that modern man is ‘both crushed by a system but at the same time in perfect communion with it’ (see below pp. 246-7). Kalisky's cycling champion in Skandalon (1970) is a man who allows his life to be constructed entirely by the interests of others: the financial interests of his backers and trainers; the sexual interests of his friends and wives; the interest the journalists take in building up an idol and then destroying him again. He consents in the whole process, becoming pure object; as a subject he has no existence. When his second wife sees his status as champion on the decline, and tries to persuade him to give up racing, she is talking to an absence. He only exists as the champion; there is no longer any private individual ‘behind’ this public figure who could take an alternative path. He can only use the arguments of his backers that justify the brief glory of the racing cyclist: he articulates his own oppression.

The plays of Michel Deutsch exhibit characters who are similarly constructed from alien forms of discourse. Deutsch's work exemplifies the logical end-point of existentialist attitudes towards character which had been explored by Sartre in the fifties and Gatti in the sixties. In Deutsch's plays the idea of the character as a fixed entity has entirely vanished. Like Sartre, he sees human beings not as creations but as shapeless emergent existences. Sartre, however, used the dramatic situation to show the process through which these existences acquire an essence: he showed characters who, in choosing a course of action or a value, choose themselves. In this philosophy, a character can only be summed up after death, since every new moment of life presents new choices, and this is why Sartre needed the fiction of hell for Huis clos.

Deutsch reduces the scope of his enquiry, pinpointing not a whole life but particular moments. His characters are a collage of the many different types of behaviour of the different people they have encountered in their lives. They have copied a phrase here, an action there, and frequently these different elements contradict one another quite blatantly. As well as being shaped by other people, Deutsch's characters are constructed and deconstructed by the various public institutions that dominate their lives. Because his characters owe their reality to these other people and institutions outside themselves, the dividing lines that separate one character from another can never be established with absolute clarity. A recent play by Deutsch, Partage (1981), showed two of the Manson girls, after their murder of Sharon Tate, trying to make sense of their actions. In his programme note, Deutsch wrote ‘They tear one another apart, devour one another, tremble, become motionless, close their eyes … One becomes the other who becomes the one who is the other. The boundaries are uncertain, hazy. There is no exact dividing line between them.’ The play is a rite of attempted possession and expiation in which each girl tries to articulate her own character in an acceptable manner, projecting onto her companion those things she cannot face up to. Much more simply, one of Deutsch's earliest plays, Dimanche, published in 1974 and produced at Strasbourg in 1976, shows a girl whose personal reality is lost in her desire to become a perfect majorette. The alien, mechanical image of a long-legged American high-kicker imposes itself upon her to the point where she can live only for her training, submerges her subjective reality in the pursuit of this image, and dies of exhaustion.

A similar change in the subjective realities of two women is shown in Convoi (1980), set in the south-west of France during the German Occupation. Anne, a sixty-year-old peasant woman, takes in an eighteen-year-old Jewish refugee. She christens her Marie, treats her like a daughter, behaving as if the girl were a young cousin or niece who had lost her memory. For a while ‘Marie’ almost becomes Anne's daughter. But she cannot rid herself of the memory of the concentration camps or the columns of refugees being strafed by planes. Neither is she allowed to live in isolated exile, independent of Anne's family and neighbours. When the Germans invade the ‘free zone’ she is denounced, and the militia come to arrest both women. Jean-Pierre Vincent, who directed the play at Strasbourg in 1980, commented that the theme of the play was ‘exile, physical exile or interior exile, a certain reaction to misfortune’ (Deutsch, 1980: 109). He also suggested that all of Deutsch's characters could be summed up by a phrase from Ruines: ‘you are pierced with slices of text’ (vous êtes traversés par des pans de texte) (ibid.). They are martyred by their language, invaded and defined by it without wanting to be.

The outbursts of Marie in which she evokes her suffering have great lyrical force, but, outside of these passages, Marie seems inarticulate. Many of Deutsch's characters display this linguistic schizophrenia. The character named Jules in La Bonne Vie (produced by Vincent at Strasbourg in 1976) is a factory worker whose conversation consists of the most banal clichés interspersed with extraordinary, dream-like statements, e.g. ‘In the Bois de Boulogne, coming back from work the other night, I caught sight of a pterosaurus. It was gliding on the rising air currents in search of carrion’ (1975: 51). Jules' mind is filled with undigested chunks of unrelated text, or language. In order to improve himself he has been reading about evolutionary theory. He is also a devoted follower of ‘Boggy’—Humphrey Bogart. At the end of the play the Bogart language overwhelms him entirely and articulates his destruction, as he talks through what might be one of Bogart's last scenes in the role of the tough guy driven into a corner finally having no alternative but to shoot both himself and his girl. The characters have little or no control over these slices of language which appear and then disappear, like icebergs, occasionally colliding with one another.

Most of Deutsch's characters are drawn from the bottom rungs of the social scale, peasants or urban workers. He has explained that at first he believed that their speech must be recorded and copied. ‘That did not last long. I realized that the only thing that one could record was silence and the rhythm of that silence; the speech of these people escaped me’ (Sarrazac, 1976: 97). But, unlike Kroetz, he did not reproduce the silence of the inarticulate in his plays. This would have been to fall into the ‘ever-present threat’ of ‘reactionary naturalism’ (ibid.). Instead, he introduced other discourses struggling for supremacy: the slogans of advertising, the small-talk of the secretarial office, the glamourised dialogue of Hollywood westerns. The emotional force of his plays arises from his use of dramatic irony: the audience observes characters struggling for independent life who are so deeply alienated that they seize on just that language or behaviour that is the very instrument of their destruction.

Violence is a constant factor in Deutsch's work, and while he is alert to the danger of naturalism, he does not always avoid the opposite danger of melodrama. Sometimes he even seems to welcome it, as in L'Entraînement du champion avant la course, a bloody tale of a man who murders his mistress (a butcher), and is poisoned by his wife. But the violence is only an extreme aspect of both the language and the behaviour imposed on his characters by external forces. In order to achieve a contemporary realism, Deutsch feels that it is essential to see that ‘power relationships do not simply express themselves through state apparatus but they pierce us through completely, pierce through our bodies’ (Sarrazac, 1976: 95). Some of his plays present scenes of almost unbearable violence, like the penultimate scene of La Bonne Vie, when Marie finds herself miscarrying in the toilets of a café. But the violence is not presented aggressively. It is violence suffered, helplessly.

What prevents these plays most of the time from seeming melodramatic, inflated or superficial is the fragmentation of the action. In traditional melodrama the causes and effects are too easily explained: the stereotype wicked landlord oppresses the poor widow because he is a greedy monster with no pity. But in Deutsch's plays the stories are so disjointed that the audience is never allowed to supply simple explanations of this kind. Instead, they are confronted with the irreducible reality of suffering and alienation and encouraged to look for explanations that lie outside the fictive world of the play. This is achieved partly by questioning the familiar expressions of everyday experience. Sarrazac (1981: 72) points out the centrality of the table in many of Deutsch's plays as an expression of the woman's everyday experience of reality. On it she has to provide, share out, labour, sometimes even offer herself to be shared out as in the case of L'Entraînement, in which the table is a butcher's chopping block. Deutsch explodes the whole concept of the bourgeois interior as a location for meaningful action. The interiors in his plays are evacuators of meaning: they contain nothing but destructive forces and the harder a character tries to deny this, like the butcher in L'Entraînement, the more destructive is the final result.

Deutsch has said that his aim is to present moments of revolt since even in the most oppressive situations ‘there are always actions with a liberating content’ (Sarrazac, 1976: 97). He gives, as an example, the moment in L'Entraînement when Maurice's wife and his mistress meet and discover that by coming together they can find a comfort and strength that is not possible while they remain separated in the roles of wife or mistress. But this is a very brief, utopian moment in the depiction of an otherwise violent and sordid reality. Where Deutsch is most successful in provoking a prise de conscience is in his whole treatment of women. For although their character outlines may be blurred by shifting contradictions, their physical reality is presented with great feeling and truth. Released from the traditional imagery of saintly, maternal love, or devilish, sexy seduction, their immediate problems are all to do with the realities of physical existence.

Jean-Paul Wenzel was responsible for founding a company entitled ‘Le Théâtre du Quotidien’, which performed L'Entraînement in 1975 under his direction. He has also written a number of plays, the best known being Loin d'Hagondange. This shows an ordinary working class couple at the end of their lives. After an unremarkable working life in Hagondange, they have retired to a little love-nest in the country, where they quietly die of boredom. Like the couple in Georges Michel's Un Petit Nid d'amour, they have accepted the model of married bliss that fits the needs of consumer society: they have cut themselves off from community life and concentrated instead on acquisitions. All their energies have been directed towards the purchase of the ideal retirement house. Now that they are there, they have no mental or spiritual resources with which to fill it or give it meaning. Without the familiar clichés of the husband's workaday routine to fall back on, the couple have nothing to say to one another. The husband continues to go to work in his garden shed each day, as he had previously gone off to the steel-works, the wife continues to clean up a house that never gets dirty. Their words express the alienation that has been forced upon them in the course of a working life: nothing of passion or personal value is left. Their language simply reproduces the slogans and clichés with which they have been force-fed.

Loin d'Hagondange was a sudden success for Wenzel, particularly after its production by Patrice Chéreau (T.N.P. 1977), who set the couple's retirement house in a Surrealist desert landscape. Chéreau's production exploited to the full the quality that much of the théâtre du quotidien shares with Pinter: its use of silence. The emptiness of these two old people's lives, their unspoken desires and repressed longings were conveyed as much by the intervals between their words as by the words themselves. Wenzel's subsequent plays have tended to develop the theme of latent violence, rejecting the passivity of the old couple in Loin d'Hagondange: ‘I felt that the sentimentality of Loin d'Hagondange reassured and comforted too many people, that it veiled the violence of daily life that is contained in the play’ (1982: 12). In his next play, Marianne attend le mariage (1975), he showed this violence erupting openly in a working class family, where one of the daughters is made to feel so guilty about a minor shop-lifting incident that she commits suicide and provokes the disintegration of the family group.

The authors of le théâtre du quotidien are always in danger of belittling their working class characters, of emphasising their alienation and victimisation to the point of patronising or even scorning them. This is why Deutsch insists that he wishes to avoid ‘reactionary naturalism’, i.e. the mere stating of lamentable facts. In his best plays he escapes from this danger by an approach that is more questioning than stating: he probes at the very concept of character, calling into question the received ideas of fixed personality and conscious value choices. His most successful plays are those like Convoi, in which the interplay of public violence and private suffering is evoked by means of a precise historical situation. The result is not ‘reactionary naturalism’ but a surprising revelation of a situation that had at first seemed familiar. By contrast, the stereotyped characters of Georges Michel's plays seem excessively arid by the end of a performance, lacking the detail and complexity of lived experience.

The work of the authors I have been discussing is an attempt to come to terms with the fragmented reality of a daily life which can no longer be made sense of, where both the personal motivations of individuals and the behaviour of public bodies seem beyond control. Their authors see them as political plays, provoking a prise de conscience in their audiences, but eschewing the neat demonstration formulae of plays which try to show how to have a revolution. Where they succeed, it is by their use of contradiction and discontinuity. In this way they demonstrate rather than discuss the broken lives that they choose to dramatise. Because of this, they all rely heavily on the immediacy of performance. Where the drama is chiefly one of language, the different forms of discourse must be enacted, permitting the language to establish its own rhythms and to impose its own life (or death) on the characters. Frequently these dramatists leave considerable scope to the director and actors to fill the spaces in the text with appropriate actions that will challenge its claims to dominance. Attempts to define a new relationship between text and action in this fragmented world have led to impressive experiments in staging such as Chéreau's production of Loin d'Hagondange (see Burgess: 1977) or a montage of fragmented scenes from many different plays including extracts from Molière, Beckett, Büchner, Brecht, Handke, Kroetz, Deutsch and Wenzel at the Comédie de Caen entitled Le Désamour (1980). For this production a multiple set was constructed that used all the spaces in the theatre, representing a street and a three-storey block of flats with the front wall removed. The audience itself was fragmented, not sitting in a single block, but separated into male and female and placed on different sides of the structure so as to observe the different scenes from different points of view. To many critics, this production appeared to represent the culmination of a decade of experimentation in new writing and staging methods, because it had found a concrete form of expression for the drama of multiple viewpoint towards which writers of the théâtre du quotidien school had been reaching (see Loisir (Caen) 35, 1980).

In the work of authors such as Kalisky, Wenzel and Deutsch, we can see a fusion of the discoveries of both New and Epic theatre. From Epic theatre they have acquired a skill in presenting lived experience in such a way as to reveal its socially determining factors. From the New Theatre, they have borrowed what Kalisky calls ‘an interpenetration of space, of locality, of time, of consciousness, giving rise to new realities, ephemeral, unfixed’ (1978: 223). Kalisky's later plays demonstrate this ‘interpenetration’ at work. In Dave au bord de la mer (1978), we see the experiences of Saul, David and Jonathan from the Old Testament superimposed on the relationships of a group of modern Israelis facing the threat of terrorist attack. Or, rather, the surface of the twentieth century characters' reality is constantly disturbed by the eruption of the mythical archetypes. The result is a fascinating attempt to show how the violent lives of modern men and women are experienced through the reliving of subconscious mythical models. Kalisky presents a multiple view of his characters' reality, refusing to provide his audience with a single, authoritative interpretation.

MICHEL VINAVER

The outstanding playwright of the seventies, also employing a drama of multiple viewpoint, is Michel Vinaver. In fact Vinaver's early plays were written in the course of the fifties, but the experienced a long fallow period during the sixties, becoming identified with the théâtre du quotidien in the middle seventies. Vinaver's first play, Aujourd'hui ou les Coréens, had enjoyed some success two decades previously: it had been produced by Planchon at the Théâtre de la Comédie in 1956, by Jean-Marie Serreau at the Alliance Française in 1957, by Charles Joris with the company that was to become the Théâtre Populaire Romand in 1959 and by Gabriel Monnet at the Comédie de Saint Etienne in 1960. But Vinaver wrote only one other full-length play, Iphigénie Hotel, before Par-dessus bord, written at the end of the sixties.

The action of Aujourd'hui ou les Coréens alternates between half a dozen French soldiers in the Korean war who have lost contact with their company and a group of Korean villagers. One of the soldiers stumbles on the village, where he is accepted and becomes integrated into the village life. In the course of this process the fixed ideologies and labels that have hitherto structured his experience of life fall away and simply lose their use. In a perceptive review, Barthes noted that ‘Aujourd'hui, as its title indicates, offers the present as a material that is immediately structurable and contradicts the traditional dogma of Revolution as an essentially eschatological time span’ (1978: 59). Vinaver's original insistence on the immediate experience of the here and now as his basic dramatic material was to be the basis of his mature plays in the seventies. Both Les Coréens and Iphigénie Hotel are youthful plays in which he can be seen trying out a new form that would allow him to escape from the false alternative: either political theatre or absurdist theatre. The result is two plays concerning violent events but recounted, as it were, from a distance. In Les Coréens the villagers are awaiting the arrival of the liberation army, but the French forces fall back more quickly than expected, the army presses ahead and does not, after all, come to the village. In Iphigénie Hotel, the fall of the Fourth Republic is experienced by a group of tourists cut off in a hotel in Mycene, listening to unreliable radio reports. Instead of presenting historical events at first hand, these plays present history as experienced by the mass of people, having only partial information, feeling cut off from the centre of interest, yet discovering themselves in the seemingly unimportant details of everyday life.

In between Iphigénie Hotel and Par-dessus bord there was a period when his energies were fully absorbed by the multi-national corporation for which he worked. Moreover, he was unable to see how to bridge the gap between the cut-throat realities of a big international business concern and the fictions of theatre. He finally overcame this difficulty by writing Par-dessus bord, a work of enormous dimensions that would take at least eight hours to stage in its entirety, but in which melodrama is rigorously excluded by a style that is faithful to Vinaver's special feel for the everyday. Later, he explained that the centre of his creative life had always been located in the experience of ‘astonishment at being permitted the simplest of things, such as opening a door, running, stopping, etc … all my (literary) activity has been an attempt to penetrate this territory of the everyday, which was never given to me but which had to be discovered, forced open. In other words, for the writer that I am, nothing exists before writing; to write is to try to give consistency to the world and to myself within it’ (Vinaver, 1979: 73).

With this style of writing, the challenge was of course to avoid boredom, since ‘the everyday is what is both repetitive and flat. An alchemy must operate so that the most uninteresting magma is transmuted into an object of enjoyment and understanding’ (Vinaver, 1982: 132). The success of productions, both of Les Coréens in the late fifties and of his more recent plays, shows that in performance his texts do achieve this alchemical operation, and the fascination of Vinaver's theatre is to discover how this is done. The most striking feature of his plays is that they are not committed in the usual sense of the word, they do not take sides or present the pros and cons of an idea or situation. At first sight they are in fact more like stream of consciousness novels than plays. The text of Iphigénie Hotel seemed so undramatic that no director would take it on until Vitez produced it in 1977. As a director, Vitez likes to work by contradictions. Rather than construct a unified character, he encourages his actors to look for discontinuities, to show abrupt, even inexplicable changes of mood. He also encourages them to play against the text so that a tension emerges from, say, a suave piece of writing and a jerky delivery, or vice versa. He was attracted by the rather undramatic nature of Vinaver's work and appreciated his attempt to write ‘not so much for the theatre … but rather against the theatre’ (Vinaver, 1982: 294-5). Vinaver, in turn, appreciated Vitez's ‘rare virtue of considering a text for what it is, as a non-soluble element’ (ibid. 286). He considers that the best texts do not necessarily transfer easily to the stage but that ‘what is productive are the tensions caused by the meeting of text and performance’ (ibid. 151). The dialogue in his plays since Par-dessus bord is entirely devoid of punctuation except for the use of question marks. Sometimes the name of the speaker is not even specified. There is very little in the way of stage directions. The result is a verbal texture of great complexity and ambiguity. On the page it appears to be an unstructured copy of conversations that might be overheard in a great many everyday situations. But in performance the effect is more like that of exposing a cross-section of a human brain. On the bared surface are revealed mental or spiritual movements that range from the most superficial to the most profound, from those easily accounted for to those that are seemingly incomprehensible. Each page of text offers the possibility of many different interpretations because different kinds of statement jostle with one another quite unseparated by the verbal fabric, and leaving a permanent uncertainty about what the characters may be doing as they speak a given line.

One way of understanding Vinaver's writing is to compare it to painting. He is fond of such comparisons and has even written that he wishes he had been born with a talent for painting or composing rather than writing, carrying the ability to work simply with form, tone and rhythm (1979: 74). He claims that his work deals not so much with people, ideas, conditions, as with the relations between these things, just as Braque claimed that the important thing in his pictures was less the objects depicted than the space between them. This comparison is both accurate and helpful, for the discontinuities and contradictions of Vinaver's style are the marks of the first thoroughly successful drama of multiple viewpoint. Just like Picasso, Braque, Joyce, Eliot and the whole Modernist school of painters, poets and novelists, Vinaver's fragmented viewpoint is both statement and formal device. It states the impossibility of ever reaching the unified, coherent world view and asserts that only meanings not meaning can be found. It is not surprising that this drama of multiple viewpoint should have arrived in the theatre so slowly and so tentatively. The experience of theatre is immediate and cannot easily be interrupted or held at a distance like paintings, poems or novels. Vinaver wanted to find a way of combining the immediate experience with self-conscious reflection on the problems of fragmented vision. He could see that in some way the usual linear form of dramatic story-telling had to be changed, something new put in its place. That something, he describes as the very material of human intercourse, the texture of language itself (see 1982: 310).

In this way Vinaver is able to write plays that reflect both on society and on the means available to the theatre for depicting that society: his plays are both socially satirical and theatrically satirical. Par-dessus bord, written at the end of the sixties, employs elements of all the theatre styles fashionable at that time: total theatre, archaic myth, nudity, happenings, music theatre, dance theatre, etc. etc. It has a Rabelaisian quality; the subject is a toilet-paper manufacturing business and its attempts to change with the times: both from hard and crinkly to ‘soft strength’ and from the methods of an old-fashioned family firm to aggressive American marketing techniques. The story is commented on from within at different levels. The most obvious comments come from Passemar, who is both on the management staff of the firm and an autobiographical figure for Vinaver. His comments and interruptions have the same self-conscious ironic quality as those of Gide in Les Faux-Monnayeurs. Passemar gives us a running commentary on both theatrical and management techniques. Another commentator figure who intrudes is an old-school professor lecturing on Norse myths. Linked to his lectures is a group of dancers who want to use the myths for a mime and movement performance. The incomprehensible battles of the Norse gods provide an ironic counterpoint to the equally incomprehensible manoeuvres of the business world. There is also a group of jazz musicians who arrange ‘happenings’ in order to increase their popularity with a certain middle class public. This provides scope for the author to introduce discussion of the ultimate temptation in the happening: to create an event through other people's blood and suffering. The happenings of a tired avant-garde are contrasted with similar Aktionen inflicted by the Nazis on Jewish groups in Poland.

As well as this kind of comment, the social and economic function of a business like the toilet-paper firm is presented from a number of different viewpoints: that of the travelling salesman; of the secretaries; the various heads of department; the different members of the owning family; a banker; a Dominican father and the marketing consultants who come in to advise on plans for expansion; as well as the American president of the competing firm, who finally concedes defeat but buys them up as a profitable subsidiary. The play presents a kind of war of different languages: office jargon; franglais marketing jargon; old-fashioned academic language; new media slang; jazzmen's roughtalk; salesmen's smoothtalk; high-finance talk, etc. It is through the juxtaposition of these different languages that Vinaver scores his best ironic effects. For example, the story of the killing of Baldr, the visionary hero whose good judgements could never be put into practice, is enacted by the dancers immediately before the crushing analysis of the firm's management methods by Donohue and Frankfurter, the American marketing consultants. The two different ways of talking about the painful relinquishing of the old values reverberate against one another.

Many of the play's high points are achieved through Vinaver's sensitivity to the humorous possibilities inherent in displaying the place of linguistic manipulation in people's relations with one another and with their social conditions. Two scenes, one near the beginning and one near the end, depict the firm's annual office party. They are written like choral passages in Greek tragedy with no attribution of lines to speakers. The effect they create is of a group voice expressing a guarded loyalty towards the firm, a sense of outrage at the behaviour of fellow employees who have overstepped the unwritten rules of management, a grudging admiration for business success and a generalised feeling of being taken for a ride. These responses to the firm are interwoven with concerns of a more personal nature, so that the overall effect of the passage is to suggest how corporate life invades private life and vice versa. The choric device is used again for an outrageously comic ‘brainstorm’ session, in which the firm's executives get together to practise free association so as to produce a new name for their product. The final choice, ‘Mousse et Bruyère’ is only one of a list of some 200 similarly fatuous ideas, including such suggestions as ‘Gair Sourire’, ‘Doux Baiser’, ‘Chaud Baiser’ or ‘Toison d'Or’, ‘Mon Plaisir’, ‘Sable d'Or’, ‘Vigne Vierge’. More insidious, as John Burgess has pointed out, are the passages in which the marketing consultants are able to manipulate the glib commercial jargon and newspeak of international commerce to mask the sterility of the economic competition and the inhumanity of the procedures it dictates (1974b).

Out of this rich kaleidoscope, Vinaver thought, the material for several different productions could be extracted. In 1956 and 1957 he had felt that neither of the two productions by Planchon and Serreau conveyed the full Coréens, but that taken together they did. He allowed Planchon to rewrite his own version of Par-dessus bord in the hopes that other productions would follow. In fact Vinaver was disappointed. The situation had changed, Planchon was no longer an interesting young outsider but the acknowledged leader, and no other producer was ready to invite invidious comparisons. What had impressed Planchon about the play was its documentary accuracy (the development of the toilet-paper industry in the seventies was, in fact, almost exactly as predicted in the play). He admired Vinaver's unique insight into the business world, and his vivid sense of contemporary dialogue. But he could see no solution to staging it as written, since it calls for many of the different actions to overlap or take place simultaneously. He therefore looked for a solution that would achieve the effect of fragmenting the story and ironically undermining it, but by scenic rather than verbal means. He used a technique that he had perfected over a long period, introducing features of the American musical comedy form to undermine the American economic conquest of French business. He considered that seeing American advertising consultants moving like Gene Kelly while discussing submerged drives and sales psychology had just the right derisive effect. Many of the subsidiary actions were cut and the whole play treated in a highly theatrical manner (see fig. 20).

Planchon claimed that it was permissible to treat Vinaver's text in this way because it was so brilliantly exact about what life is like in business. He contrasted it with Paolo Paoli which, he said, had required a realistic production because Adamov did not really know business life from the inside, but ‘the truth of Vinaver's play is so strong, at the textual level, that everything can be transposed’ (1975b: 36). At the time, Vinaver accepted Planchon's manipulation of his text, but, in later comments, he regretted the fact that in Planchon's production the linear story-line had once again become predominant and he felt that a production reproducing more faithfully the texture of the original might have been possible. He was no doubt encouraged by the faithful production in 1980 by Jacques Lassalle of A la renverse, a second play about the fortunes of a French firm, this time a manufacturer of sun-tan cream. The play presented many of the same features as Par-dessus bord, including the use of choral passages, though it was a more manageable length for stage performance. In between these two major works, Vinaver had written four shorter plays: La Demande d'emploi (produced in Paris and Lausanne in 1973 and in Caen in 1975); Dissident, il va sans dire and Nina, c'est autre chose (T.E.P. 1978); and Les Travaux et les jours (Annecy 1980).

Les Travaux et les jours is a masterpiece. Its title is borrowed from Hesiod (with overtones of Proust's Les Plaisirs et les jours) and demonstrates Vinaver's tendency, like T. S. Eliot whom he admires, to fill his work with obscure references to the ancient world. By studying this play we can discover the quintessential Vinaver more easily than from Par-dessus bord because this play is so much more pared down. It has a cast of only five and is set in the after-sales office of a firm making coffee grinders. There are three secretaries who take phone calls from the customers and explain how and where to send the machines for repair. In addition, there is the office manager and one blue-collar worker with a workbench at which he repairs urgent or special cases.

The three women talk amongst themselves when they are not on the phone—and sometimes even in the middle of a call—revealing not only the development of the firm but the progress of their private lives as well. Theirs is a world in which people are supposed to give meaning to their lives through their work. It is also the world of immense technical improvements in communications equipment. Through this work that is supposed to satisfy, and this equipment that is supposed to improve communications, the five characters live out their frustrated and fragmented lives. The only language that any of them can speak with perfect fluency is the language of the firm's promotional publications. But the more thoroughly they have mastered it, the more of themselves they have invested in it, the more it lets them down in the end.

To a greater or lesser extent each character finds a way of preserving his or her personal integrity. It is easiest for the men because in the unwritten law of the office world they always dominate: Guillermo by virtue of his proletarian past, Jaudouard by virtue of his power as boss. Each of the three women finds herself in competition for the favours of one or both of these men. In addition they cannot help noticing that many of the people who ring up do so less because of their broken coffee grinders than because they need to talk to someone. Beside these demands on them, they struggle to establish some space for their own emotional needs but end up simply articulating their own oppression: the comforting phrases that they offer to one another when troubles come are the echo of those they offer to the customers. Vinaver's analysis of modern man is that he is ‘both crushed by a system but at the same time in perfect communion with it’ (1982: 286). This paradox had been exploited by Adamov, particularly in Le Ping-Pong, but without quite the same vividness of lived everyday reality: Le Ping-Pong was still to some extent a dream play. Vinaver's play follows rigorously the pattern of real life: the company is bought up, economies are discussed, the work force goes on strike. The girls cope heroically with increasing calls, explaining to anxious customers that repairs will continue—as soon as the situation is normal. But as soon as this is so, it transpires that the after-sales service will be a victim of the economies. There will be no one to talk to callers; instead a computer will be installed to send the customer one of a range of 64 standard replies drawn up in advance. In the end only the youngest of the three is kept on because she has made eyes at the appropriate director in the lift.

The story element has been reduced to a minimum and is fairly ordinary. The play's brilliance is in Vinaver's dialogues which are ambiguous and fragmentary, mixing up different streams of consciousness and sequences of ideas. Questions and answers do not correspond, they are interrupted by other lines of discussion, but through these shifting perspectives five different worlds are built up, each with a point of intersection in the office, but reaching beyond it, too, into the subconscious and emotional worlds of the characters. The method avoids all the usual traps of melodrama, sentimentality or didacticism by this subtle interweaving of themes and languages.

It is instructive to compare this play with Grumberg's L'Atelier (see above p. 232). Both plays present a group of women in their place of work dominated by structures of male authority. In L'Atelier, Grumberg skilfully arranges every event in a sequence that appears to be self-explanatory and gives the impression of reality. Vinaver, on the other hand, asks his audience to abandon this privileged perspective and to experience something of the confusions and ambiguities of the characters themselves. He makes it difficult for his audience to lose themselves in sympathy with the characters, because they are constantly having to re-assess the truth of those characters' situations. In Grumberg's play we are not invited to doubt or to question the veracity of the narrative. In Vinaver's we receive as many different versions of the events as there are characters on stage. All have a different understanding of what is happening to them and the play does not gradually reveal the falsehood of one view set against the truth of another: it obliges us to construct the reality of the situation as we go along from the patchwork of views, emotions and actions that appear before us. The play asks its audience, not to admire a particular behaviour pattern, but to work out what freedom of action is available to a given character in a given situation. Each slightly different image of the modern world that is presented carries an ethical and political value. The spectator must constantly accept or reject these values. In Vinaver's play the humour arises from the discrepancies and disjunctions between things that appear to the characters on stage to fit together but can be seen not to do so by the audience. They leave the theatre having had their emotions touched by an understanding of how we all love the system that destroys us—how easily we project human values onto an inhumane enterprise that serves only efficiency and profitability. In both plays the problems of a whole society are evoked through a microcosm. But Grumberg's microcosm is self-contained, specific to a particular class group. Vinaver's is at once more limited and more open. We do not receive the same sense of a homogeneous group. But we do see how everything hangs together—how a decision taken in an American boardroom may influence the emotional development of a French secretarial worker.

When Vinaver talks about his own writing, he emphasises the importance, in dramatic dialogue, of being able to set in relation one to another elements having, at the outset, nothing in common, so that ‘a line by a character who is not in any way part of the dramatic situation of the character who spoke the line before will nevertheless influence the situation in question’ (Vinaver, 1982: 288). What is offered to the spectator is a collage of fragments which generate meanings by collisions and reverberations. The meanings produced in this way tend to be ironic. Vinaver defines irony as: ‘brutal discrepancy between what is expected and what happens’ and maintains that its effect is like an electric shock in which a circuit is established and through which the current passes—‘a current of meaning’ (Vinaver, 1979: 74). These principles are particularly well illustrated in A la renverse, where the sun-tan cream firm is ruined because of a popular television programme in which the princess of Bourbon-Beaugency, dying of skin cancer, talks week by week of the progress of her illness and her former devotion to acquiring a sun-tan. For the 1980 production by Jacques Lassalle at the Chaillot theatre, a special television film was made, which was inserted into the stage performance using playback monitors. For the audience the experience was of two distinct discourses—the sentimentalised bravery of the dying princess and the desperate attempts to stimulate the market by the firm's executives—which completely failed to intersect but threw up richly comic ironies.

Because of their unusual form, the experience of watching these plays can at first be strange but it is not mystifying: ‘after a few minutes' acclimatisation’, wrote the critic Michel Cournot, ‘the spectator-listener has the feeling that he holds within his grasp the multiple series of causes and effects contributing to a given event, whereas classic linear dialogue reduces these series to a single thread. From this grasp there arises, in the audience, a profound emotion, stemming no doubt from the fact that life itself seems to be captured in the fullness of its flux and all its mystery’ (Le Monde 14 March 1980). Although all Vinaver's plays present moments of profound emotion, a mood of ironic humour is perhaps even more characteristic of them. In his view the role of the dramatist is to provoke cracks in the established order, to uncover the world in an unexpected light, and the method for doing this is ironic humour. He rejects the Romantic notion of the artist as a man with a mission, because if he presents a new vision he always ends up suppressed or censored by the established order. He claims instead the role of the fool, whose function is to say what nobody dares think and to confuse people's views (Vinaver, 1982: 316). His achievement is, as Sarrazac points out (1981), to have abandoned a theatre of stories for a theatre of possibilities which goes beyond the failure of the linear plot-line as explored, say, in En attendant Godot. In the fragmented structures of their plays in the sixties, writers such as Adamov and Gatti had already pointed towards this theatre of possibilities. Like Kalisky (see above p. 240), Gatti had invoked the need for different, parallel realities to be shown simultaneously on stage (Gatti, 1964: 15). Vinaver's plays represent a further refinement of similar ideas: he suggests that if it is impossible to make sense of our lives as linear sequences, then we must go back to each separate situation, and try out their possible combinations. In this way a new form of Epic theatre is created, opposed to the Aristotelian like Brecht's, and depending on the Modernist aesthetic of the tableau viewed kaleidoscopically from multiple viewpoints. Like Gatti and the other writers of the sixties, Vinaver and the writers of the théâtre du quotidien have been reaching for a new way of seeing; in so doing, they have helped to create a new dramatic form.