SOURCE: Guérin, Jeanyves. “Is There Something Rotten in the State of French Theater?” In Myths and Realities of Contemporary French Theater: Comparative Views, edited by Patricia M. Hopkins and Wendell A. Aycock, pp. 13-35. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Guérin traces the development of French theater from the 1930s to the 1960s, noting that the non-establishment authors of the 1960s are now part of the established French literary scene and as such are focusing on experimentation that is based in realism and the use of traditional imagery.]

During the nineteenth century, the French theater went through a long period of decline. Musset, Labiche, and later Giraudoux are like giant oaks called upon to hide a stunted forest. Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello and others had no French counterparts of their stature. But renewal came from the professionals in the theater. Louis Becq de Fouquières published L'Art de la mise en scène in 1884, and three years later André Antoine founded the Théâtre libre. After 1914, Jacques Copeau, one of the founders of La Nouvelle Revue Française, and the “Cartel”—Gaston Baty, Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Georges Pitoeff—revived the classic repertory, introduced foreign masters to France, and encouraged poets to write for the theater. All of them relied on the intelligentsia and on an enlightened minority of the bourgeois audience, although most of the critics were hostile to them. Nevertheless these reformers were less radical than their German and Soviet contemporaries who were influenced by Expressionism. In 1945, in spite of Giraudoux, French drama lagged behind the novel, which enjoyed a particularly brilliant period between the two world wars, with Proust, Gide, Martin du Gard, Mauriac, Malraux, Bernanos, Giono and others. Competition with the cinema seemed to be fatal to the theater.

However, at the very moment when the leaders of the Cartel were dying off, there was an unexpected flourishing of authors. Philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel, Camus, and Sartre turned to the stage; to be sure, their plays have aged as quickly as the issues which they dealt with (although Caligula and Huis clos are still viable plays and the theme of Les Justes is as relevant today as it was then, for it questions the ideological roots of terrorism). Poets and/or novelists too began to write for the stage. While Claudel received belated but brilliant recognition, Francois Mauriac, Jean Genet, Jean Tardieu, Marcel Aymé, Audiberti, and Georges Schéhadé joined Montherlant whose La Reine morte made him a famous playwright. Lastly there was the Theater of the Absurd or “Anti-theater.” Three expatriots—Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov—were the instigators of the most creative adventure in the contemporary stage; they were totally unexpected.

It is with a certain nostalgia that veteran critics remember a time when theatergoers could see En attendant Godot, Les Chaises, Audiberti's Le mal court and La Hobereaute, Genet's Les Bonnes, Jean Vauthier's Capitaine Bada, as well as Montherlant's Port-Royal, Jean Anouilh's L'Alouette and Becket, and Marcel Aymé's La Tête des autres. At the same time, Bertolt Brecht was being discovered, and nearly all of Ghelderode's plays were being performed. The range of new works had never been so wide. At that time there was a great interest in presenting new plays. Jean-Marie Serreau produced Ionesco as well as Brecht.

During that period, which today seems to have been a Golden Age, the Comédie Française was presenting its classical, neoclassical, and pseudo-classical repertory in a miserly fashion. But Jean Vilar drew the crowds to his Théâtre National Populaire, and Jean-Louis Barrault inspired a brilliant period at the Théâtre Marigny where he produced a great variety of French and foreign plays of classic, modern, and contemporary authors. Thanks to him, the avant-garde authors enjoyed a great success in the sixties. Meanwhile, on the Left Bank, a few brave souls organized communal theater groups which, in dire circumstances, produced the first avant-garde plays.

Jean Vilar was a disciple of Jacques Copeau and the heir of the Cartel. He owed much to Firmin Gémier, Romain Rolland, and the Volksbühnen too. His ideas on the theater were based on three principles which could not be dissociated: the democratization of the audience, a high-quality repertory, and the redefinition of stage directing. Vilar, who was less a Marxist than a humanist republican of the left influenced by the Front Populaire, longed for a theater open to everyone without restriction and operating as a public service.¹ Neither the Comédie Française nor the commercial theater fit that category. He took his ideas from the gathering of the Greek city at Epidaurus and from the medieval mysteries played in front of the cathedrals.

The Théâtre National Populaire, under the direction of Vilar, featured Shakespeare, Corneille, and Molière. According to Vilar, the works of the great classic writers are universal: “des oeuvres-mères d'où tout peut et doit sortir et qui appartiennent à tous.”² Thirty years later, many people remember passionately how magnificent Gérard Philipe was as the Cid. Great masterpieces, Vilar said, are powerful enough to make any interpretative reading of them superfluous or redundant. The moral they state needs no commentary. His opinion that theater for the people is “le théâtre tout court”³ did not prevent him from giving preference to certain recurrent themes, which, according to one critic, were, in simple terms, power, money, war, and peace.⁴

No writer was to Vilar what Chekhov had been to Stanislavsky, Giraudoux to Jouvet, and Claudel to Barrault. Yet he often expressed his ambition of bringing back the great tragic theater and of helping to establish poets. But his audience did not understand him when he presented Henri Pichette's Nucléa in 1952. The resounding failure of this play obliged Vilar to temper his ambitions. When he later mounted plays of Boris Vian, René de Obaldia, and Robert Pinget, their success was distinctly less than that to which he had been accustomed. Two major aims were in conflict: the sociological broadening of the audience and the presentation of new works. The regular followers of the Théâtre National Populaire condemned Vilar's successor when he favored new plays at the expense of the classics. Vilar had the unconditional support of many people, but he never earned the support of the state. To protect his experiments, he had to use the classics as a shield. That Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kleist, and Büchner were to him more modern than Sartre and Armand Salacrou cannot be contested. That the plays of Anouilh, Montherlant, and Ghelderode seemed reactionary to him is more than probable; he nevertheless mounted Murder in the Cathedral and La Ville despite the fact that he did not appreciate Eliot's and Claudel's conservative views at all. But that this lover of beautiful language did not dare to present Audiberti's Le Cavalier seul remains a mystery to me.

After 1954, Vilar found himself to be outflanked on the left. During his first season at the Théâtre National Populaire, he had produced Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage. The coming of the Berliner Ensemble to the Théâtre des Nations was, for many people, the equivalent of a Copernican revolution. The review Théâtre populaire, which in the beginning had been as favorable to Vilar's point of view as the first N.R.F. had been to Copeau's, immediately turned into a Brechtian fortress. Roland Barthes played a decisive role at that moment. In the eighteenth issue of the journal, he formulated an essential premise of the new dogma, i.e., innovation is not simply a question of aesthetics but always implies a new consciousness of History. The concept of modernity is only pertinent if it is socially progressive. It was not enough for the theater to deal with politics, it had to be partisan.⁵

The first Théâtre populaire published Marlowe, Büchner, Kafka, Joyce, Ghelderode, and Audiberti and defended the avant-garde against its detractors. The second one published Sean O'Casey, Maxim Gorky, George Lukacs, Ernst Piscator, and, at great length, Brecht. Bernard Dort, key critic of the journal, sermonized to everyone, to Vilar as well as to the new playwrights. The critic, enlightened by Marx, knows; the writer, when non-Marxist, does not. One must reeducate simple people: every totalitarian state demands it. Few critics volunteer to do the job. “Nous voulons vous instruire,” said the Molièresque Bartholomeus who parodied Dort in Ionesco's L'Impromptu de l'Alma.⁶

Thus the utopia of the People's Theater as a public service moved towards Communist politics and Marxist ideology. Logically indeed Roland Barthes defended Sartre's most Stalinist play, Nekrassov. In short, a sectarian aesthetic took root, which was based on an ideology as rigid as steel. After 1960, Théâtre populaire influenced deeply the T.N.P. whose repertory became more and more political. They performed not only Brecht's Three Penny Opera, The Good Woman of Sezuan and Arturo Ui, but also mediocre plays of paracommunist writers such as Sean O'Casey and Michel Vinaver, whom the Brechtomaniacs adored.

If Brecht's influence was so strong, it was because there was a great demand for it. The epic theater of which he is the champion surely represents progress if compared with the progressionist repertory of the fifties. Sartre after 1952 was content to politicize Bernstein.⁷Le Colonel Foster plaidera coupable is pure Stalinist propaganda. We now know that Roger Vailland had submitted his manuscript to the central committee of the Communist Party.⁸ Brecht is not only a playwright but at the same time a writer, a theoretician, and a practitioner. He has no French counterpart. Furthermore, he is a Marxist. While the French Communist Party, which is by far the most Stalinist of the entire Western World, had lost many of its intellectuals between 1947 and 1956, the intelligentsia of the left became more and more involved in Marxism. One remembers Sartre's famous conversion to the Stalinist vulgate and Camus's isolation after L'Homme révolté. Raymond Aron resisted the collective movement but he was simply relegated to [his] readers of Le Figaro for his pains.

It is because French Marxist men of letters failed and were so deceptive that Brecht shone so brightly in contrast. His work was the only one that was able to unite ecumenically all sections of the left, i.e., orthodox Communists, fellow travelers, Marxists of every hue, and advanced socialists. Rare enough were those such as Eugène Ionesco and Audiberti whose voices did not enter into the Brechtian concert.⁹ Jean-Louis Barrault remained indifferent to the new fashion, but, as André Malraux had appointed him as the head of the Odéon, he was reduced to being the favorite of the Gaullist regime.

So in the sixties, Brechtomania tended to operate as a professional ideology. A power network was formed and spread throughout reviews, universities, and so on. A new generation of stage directors who had not seen the Cartel's productions came to the fore and continued the work of these pioneers. Brecht was their god, Bernard Dort their chief prophet, and Roger Planchon their pope. Dort went on judging contemporary drama and directing by the standards of epic realism. Between 1958 and 1968, two million people saw three thousand performances of Brecht's twenty-three plays. Most of them were produced in the style of the Berliner Ensemble. Rags and drab colors were de rigueur.

Brecht influenced critics and stage directors more than writers. The latter resisted the advisers of the review Théâtre populaire; Eugène Ionesco often told how Dort wanted to teach him how to write epic plays. The Brechtians of the Left Bank felt that Adamov could become the French Brecht. He was first linked with Artaud, then with Audiberti and Ionesco. Around 1955, he received Marxist illumination. Dort applauded Paolo Paoli for showing the author's rallying to a “réalisme historique supérieur.” Adamov, he wrote, converted a “causalité fétichiste” into a “dialectique historique.”¹⁰ In fact, the playwright was totally incapable of articulating his persecution complex and his political commitment—quite to the contrary.¹¹

The decentralized network of this People's Theater progressively closed the door to the authors of the avant-garde. If Beckett and even Ionesco were performed sometimes, Ghelderode, Audiberti, and Schéhadé endured a real political ostracism. Dort reproached them for not taking account of the audience. Their plays, he wrote, were “pur exercice littéraire,” “création verbale toute formelle.” Having accomplished their critical mission, they became simple “décorateurs de la scène bourgeoise,”¹² i.e., super-Anouilhs and super-Roussins. Now it was time, for them, to make the decisive choice, to give in or to give up. For the absurd is acceptable only if it is satirical, as it is with Max Frisch and Dürrenmatt. It must then be converted to socio-historical statements. If not, it is idealistic, metaphysical, and/or nihilist. In the same way that Sartre refused to antagonize Billancourt by criticizing Soviet totalitarianism, Antitheater, for Dort and company, had to be disposed of in the dustbin of literary history. Young playwrights were supposed to be more flexible. The “plaisir du jeu,” Dort wrote, prevailed in Philippe Adrien's La Baye. Be careful, “Guignol est désarmant.”¹³L'Agression was nothing but a moral play. Georges Michel, who was close to Sartre, did not apply the sacrosanct alienation effect: he could do better.¹⁴

The process expanded towards the end of the sixties. The merry month of May 1968 offered the rare show of an aborted revolution which was accompanied by a great party. Angry students took over the Odéon Théâtre de France and provoked Barrault's fall from grace. Almost all the theaters in France were on strike or were forced to close. Thirty directors of Maisons de la Culture and Centres Dramatiques Nationaux held a council in Villeurbanne, Planchon's bastion. They were seized with a frenzy of self-accusation: all they had done up until then was to pass on our culture to the happy few; the time had come to radicalize the general public. The conciliatory ideology of theater as a public service fell apart. Vilar himself confessed his failure. People did not appreciate his self-criticism. A host of hirsute protesters shouted him down in Avignon.

France entered the affluent society belatedly. A few intellectuals imagined they were still living in the China of the thirties and dreamed of stirring up class struggle which had grown soft with the years. Their reasoning was that if you explained that fact to the people, they would make the revolution themselves. So theater professionals, after 1968, chose to make the long march away from the institutions, which were perceived as being hypocritically repressive. Some of them went to the gates of factories and to working class suburbs where they questioned people and endlessly preached the revolutionary gospel to them.

Literature with a message generally appears in periods of pronounced political polarization, as in the thirties and during the Cold War. The paradox is that intellectuals and artists turned radical just after France had put an end to its colonial wars. Fortunately for them there remained the U.S. scapegoat: that meant their commitment was vicarious. So theater people addressed themselves principally to the faithful, i.e., to sects of subscribers to the same culture (“abonnés à la même culture qu'eux,” as Rene Kalisky wrote).¹⁵ They were convinced that, while discoursing eloquently about class struggle, they actually were taking part in it and were communicating to the real working class. Among the dramatic plots which were prevalent at the time, let us mention first the evolution of a character confronted with an event or a situation. The spectators were prompted to imitate this evolution when positive, and to reject it when negative. Another configuration: the antagonistic situation of which the prototype is the exemplary struggle between the valiant workers and their bad boss or between the heroic Viet Cong and the U.S. Army. Whether the good lose or win the battle is not important: the chosen people will win the war. “Ce n'est qu'un début, continuons le combat.”

The degradation of the Brechtian model is obvious. These kinds of voluntary plays or childish sketches existed only for the interpretative and pragmatic statements (i.e., injunctions to act well) with which the playwright had larded them. In brief, we returned to Proletkult and to the Cabaret rouge or better to Guild Drama. The guerrilla theater or the street theater was showing things not as they really are or were but as the prevailing ideological code wished them to be. René Kalisky sees frankly nothing but an “univers paranoïaque climatis锹⁶ in the Manichaean repertory that proliferated after 1968. Needless to say that Geronimo, Sarcelles-sur-mer, Douze mois de la vie de Michel T., Histoire, vieille taupe, tu as bien travaillé, La Bécane, La Pastorale de Fos, and other radical melodramas bombed pitifully. The simpler the thesis, the more perishable is the play (or the novel). One can see retrospectively how liberal the Democratic State was, which not only tolerated but often subsidized productions having openly subversive purposes. Malraux's successors, Edmond Michelet and Jacques Duhamel, defended young rebels whom the exasperated bourgeois elites longed to dismiss. The same institutions were, for some people, cultural supermarkets or museums and, for others, revolutionary centers. The main result of Brechtian dogmatism and of radical activism was that they weakened and discredited Vilar's work.

One would be wrong to view the Brechtian axiomatic as the exclusive doxa of the time. Bernard Dort himself admitted an impression of saturation. “Il est de fait,” he wrote, “que nous avons le sentiment d'avoir fait le tour de Brecht.”¹⁷ The poète maudit Antonin Artaud, who just escaped from literary purgatory, was the hero of the young generation. Few (among whom Adamov, Barrault, and Roger Blin) were acquainted with him—in fact, Le Théâtre et son double was not published in paperback until 1966. In the same way that the surrealist happening of May 1968 spoke the wooden Marxist language, although its spirit was profoundly libertarian, Artaud, who was the ultimate apolitical writer, was viewed as a radical guru of the same stature as Herbert Marcuse. People carried out his ideas more than they read his works. His scattered writings, which Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari had commented on, were received as opening a part-mystical, part-libertarian path which hairy rebels rushed down.

These writings are too illusive and contradictory to breed any orthodoxy. Their deconstruction is easy: everyone may choose what he likes. Le Théâtre et son double justifies all sorts of things: collective creation, psychodrama, improvisation, happenings, sexual liberation, confrontation theater, etc. Conversational drama was replaced by a vociferous and gesticulating theater. Howling and groveling became the signs and testimonies of creativity. Dort sniffed out the danger: “… ainsi ce théâtre de participation physique devient-il théâtre de communion métaphysique; spectateurs et acteurs sont passés du constat à l'effusion. Le politique a été placé comme entre parenthèses; il est devenu le moyen d'une sorte d'extase collective. Le théâtre-choc est un théâtre d'autosatisfaction.”¹⁸

The Living Theatre created a sensation and a scandal in Avignon. But Arrabal's “Théâtre panique” turned into commercial exhibitionism and the playwright reconverted himself into an antitotalitarian militant. Artaud's youngest adepts thought any institution had to be destroyed in order to free the creative and revolutionary energies that the actors' collectives contained. But nearly all self-managed communes failed in the seventies for want of professional competence. Fringe Theater became what Colette Godard called a “poubelle à ringards.”¹⁹ The Théâtre du Soleil and the Grand Magic Circus, from which the charismatic personalities of Ariane Mnouchkine and Jérôme Savary emerged, survived, for they had become institutions in themselves. The big loser after 1968 was the text. We shall come back to this point later.

The totemization of both Brecht and Artaud, like that of Marx and Freud, intensified their ideological competition, for syncretisms are always fragile. It ended in their mutual delegitimization. But if Brecht's decline was evident in the late seventies, it was mainly because his theoretical foundation had collapsed. The blows of the New Left destroyed the old Marxist paradigm and offered an alternative that combined libertarian anarchism and social democracy. The “new philosophers,” all former radicals, vulgarized the theses of the New Left. (Their mistake was to claim the role of gurus; having done their job, Bernard-Henri Lévy and company lost all their credibility.) The taboo of being anti-communist disappeared when the last illusions about the East were torn apart in Prague. Ten years later, the most influential thinkers are Michel Foucault, René Girard, Cornelius Castoriadis, Alain Touraine, and André Glucksmann, who care little for the Marxist vulgate. The criticism of totalitarianism is the doxa of the eighties. Repented Maoists have turned into libertarians if not into liberals or conservatives. The change is so spectacular that the socialist spokesman of the government may plead in favor of individualistic values.²⁰ The French Left sold off the laws of History, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the cult of the state, the revolutionary eschatology, the class struggle, the belief in progress, the theory of dominant ideology, etc. New socialists developed a culture of government the base of which is pragmatism. François Mitterrand nowadays calls people to cooperate between social classes as eloquently as he once preached class struggle. The key words of the political vocabulary have changed: “reform,” “contract,” “negotiation,” and “debate” have replaced “revolution,” “struggle,” “subversion,” and “violence.” The red flag and the brandished fist are today viewed as obsolete clichés. The intellectuals cherished them in the early seventies. The only Marx they now tolerate is called Groucho. So intellectuals and socialists on the one hand, the world of the theater on the other, have accomplished a long transmigration which has brought them from the Communist realm to the Socialist one. The real audience of the People's Theater, principally made up of white collars, teachers, and militants, made the same transmigration. Theater people fell into the spirit of the times, whether they liked it or not.

At the very moment when worn-out systems were falling apart, Brecht was the target of a violent frontal attack. When he was an eager young Stalinist, Guy Scarpetta published his inevitable article on Brecht and Artaud²¹ in a cultural journal of the Communist Party. A few years later, brusquely awakened from his dogmatic somnolence, he reproached the German playwright for his archaic ideology, his simplistic economism, his narrow-minded rationalism, his allergy to metaphysics and to the sacred, his totalitarian disdain of ethics, his fetishization of dialectics, his detestation of non-aligned writers, his incapacity to understand Nazi barbarism, his minimization of Hitlerian anti-Semitism. Brecht, he added, praised Lyssenko, approved the trials and took part in the campaign against what Soviet propaganda called cosmopolitanism. In short, while he wanted to be popular with the people, he was only an apologist of the totalitarianism that died in Cambodia and in the Kolyma.²² His discreet reservations in the fifties could not hide his stubborn approval of Stalinist crimes.

Eugène Ionesco had been saying these same things for twenty-five years, a voice crying in the wilderness. The main point is that Scarpetta, who had been Philippe Sollers's right-hand man since the sixties, spoke from an ultra-modernist position—Tel Quel, Art Press—where people viewed themselves as the authentic heirs and commentators of Joyce, Kafka, Artaud, and Beckett. Brecht, according to him, rejected the unconscious and what Georges Bataille called “la dépense improductive.” He brutally radicalized the classics and reduced the signifié to a message as well as the signifiant to a militant rhetoric. Brechtism operated like a steamroller, a “machine à refoulement,”²³ whose purpose was to liquidate all that was alive in the contemporary French Theater. Neither Beckett nor Genet owes anything to an author who was unable to face the tragic side of History. Scarpetta also denied that Brecht was a renovator of the stage. His sole contribution was to be found in his rehashing of technical tricks which were as old as the theater. All he did was to make the wearisome realism of the nineteenth century didactic. To Scarpetta, the Living Theatre, Bob Wilson, Meyerhold, Artaud of course, and even Claudel are more important than Brecht. The logic inherent in his work was that of the totalitarian state enslaving intellectuals and crushing free thought. Between socialist realism and epic realism there are only nuances of minor importance. In both, the function of communication prevails over the function of poetry. Ambiguity is politically execrable and decoding must be unequivocal.

In short, cultural archaism keeps pace with totalitarian hardening. Scarpetta's lampoon laid the stress on Brecht's theoretical and political writings rather than on his plays, and among those he chose the worst, for instance, Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe. It could not have been written and published before; it operated as a fruitful ideological analyzer despite the exaggerations due to the polemic genre. A capital event occurred around 1975: the separation of aesthetic modernity and advanced political doctrines. In other words, Marxism and the adventure of contemporary art proved to be definitively incompatible. “C'est bien à l'élaboration d'une théorie marxiste de l'art que Brecht n'a cessé de travailler.”²⁴ This argument of Bernard Dort is the boomerang that knocks down French Brechtians; the Marxist method, people think today, breeds a Marxist scholasticism which in turn breeds a Marxist academism. Those who kept insisting that Brecht's plays, theory, and professional practice could not be dissociated made it difficult to rescue their hero's work. The time was definitely over when Adamov claimed Brecht to be “de beaucoup le plus grand écrivain du XXe siècle.”²⁵ Solzhenitsyn—the anti-Brecht—is by now the major reference for many disillusioned French intellectuals. Pity he does not write plays any longer.

Brecht ou le soldat mort gained the support of several reputed playwrights. A text signed by Ionesco, Arrabal, Schéhadé, Weingarten, Robert Pinget, and Roland Dubillard bears testimony to an obvious overdose of Brecht. “La figure de Brecht,” they wrote, “sert chaque jour un peu plus d'emblème et d'alibi à tous ceux qui, sur le triple plan institutionnel, philosophique et esthétique, cherchent à freiner toute innovation formelle, toute aventure théâtrale non-conforme à leurs dogmes révolus.”²⁶ It is rather significant that Marcel Maréchal, who is not allergic to Brecht at all, also incriminated French Brechtians, but with other arguments. “Dans la crise des auteurs,” he declared, “il y a une sorte de terrorisme intellectuel qu'a exercé la classe brechtienne sur le théâtre … Les gens qui avaient une préoccupation politique donnaient une impression de grisaille, d'ennui, de stérilité, de didactisme … C'était vraiment la république des instituteurs.”²⁷

So Brecht at last is an ordinary playwright, no longer a demigod. In the seventies, Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti was even produced at the Comédie Française. While the haughtiest doctrinarians still cherished the Communist Bernard Sobel's serious productions, one could see less stilted, i.e., unorthodox shows. Baal, Drommeln in der Nacht, the expressionist plays of the younger Brecht, who was an anarchist, have been brought to light. Jean-Pierre Vincent and Jean Jourdheuil produced Die Kleinbürger Hochzeit sarcastically and without prohibiting the element of emotion. Others laid stress on Brecht's fascination with the lower depths, street punks, and hookers. His plays, to them, may be reworked as he himself did with Shakespeare's. Why not play Matti's pushiness and Puntila's homosexuality? Brecht is no longer totem and taboo.

Illumination henceforth came from elsewhere than grim East Germany. The demigods of the seventies were Grotowski, Peter Schulmann, Bob Wilson, Luca Ronconi, Peter Stein, and Richard Foreman, who are all stage directors. The review Théâtre populaire had been primarily concerned with texts; Travail théâtral, which took its place, favored the staging of plays. Parisian intellectuals remained ready to be dazzled and buoyantly rejected what they first applauded. On the other hand, Patrice Chéreau and Ariane Mnouchkine, the two star directors of the seventies, accomplished their own transmigration that brought them from politico-cultural radicalism to the direction of A.I.D.A. (Association Internationale de Défense des Artistes). Around 1968, everyone was obsessed with Vietnam. In 1982, A.I.D.A. called theater professionals to the aid of Vaclav Havel who was (and is) imprisoned in Prague; Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, Arthur Miller et al. sent texts. Even Antoine Vitez, who was formerly the favorite director of the Communist Party, recently produced a play by the dissenter Aksionov and appointed a well-known militant of Solidarnosc to play Peter Handke's Uber die Dörfer. The whole cultural landscape has been reshaped.

No dominant view characterizes the present time. Not for decades have we been able to see such diversity in theatrical ideologies and stagings. From sectarianism we have arrived at reassuring eclecticism. There are no more polarizations such as Aristotelian drama versus epic drama or entertainment versus political theater. There are no more authorities who set ideological and aesthetic norms. No critics have an influence comparable to that of the conservative Jean-Jacques Gautier (Le Figaro), the radical Gilles Sandier (Le Matin), the liberal Bertrand Poirot-Delpech (Le Monde), and especially Jacques Lemarchand (Combat, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Le Figaro littéraire). Besides, journalists have less impact on the general public whose voice they are supposed to express than university theoreticians on the professionals. But the academic debate (what Ionesco called “la Théâtrologie”) is more open than it was ten years ago.

The commercial theater just gets by. Small private enterprises envy state-subsidized companies. They put on hits; either they import international successes and adapt best sellers—the Théâtre Marigny entrusted Peter Shaffer's Amadeus to Roman Polanski and then mounted a stage version of Gone With the Wind; or they call on movie stars: in 1983-84, Isabelle Adjani was seen in Miss Julie, Jean-Claude Brialy in Sacha Guitry's Désiré, and Marcello Mastroianni in Tchin Tchin. The purveyors of commercial pap are still going strong. Yet no recent play of Marc Camoletti, Françoise Dorin, and Jean Poiret has scored the tremendous success of Boeing Boeing or La Cage aux folles. André Roussin seems to have retired. The aging Anouilh continues to harp on the same obsessions and resentments he nourished in the fifties. Sacha Guitry's comedies have been unearthed; when will Jean de Létraz's be? At the very moment when the Boulevard repertory was running out of steam, television was offering a mass audience its worn-out scripts of bourgeois adultery, social climbing, and the generation gap. The program “Au Théâtre ce soir” is one of the few whose success has been uninterrupted for years and years. In 1968, rebels wanted to move out of traditional proscenium theaters; TV installed its cameras in them. What if the general audience (Francis Jeanson's “non-public”) was principally made up of TV viewers? Realism was absent at the Villeurbanne meeting. The best proof of the change may be found in the fact that the libertarian Grand Magic Circus is playing triumphantly new-romantic Cyrano de Bergerac at the Théâtre Mogador. What would Copeau and Vilar have said?

The treasures of the classical repertory, which were so abused in 1968, are being explored again. For instance, the Comédie Française, without neglecting Cinna and L'Avare, recently presented old Tristan l'Hermite's La Mort de Sénèque, Corneille's Sertorius, Diderot's Est-il bon? est-il méchant?, Victor Hugo's Marie Tudor, and Henri Becque's Les Corbeaux. The New Wave directors have been asked to stage them; their productions, however, have been uneven. Antoine Vitez directed Robert Garnier's Hippolyte, a sixteenth-century tragedy, and Jean-Louis Barrault unearthed Angelo, a rarely performed melodrama of Victor Hugo. One could find many other examples.

The internationalization of the classical repertory appears to represent a return to the twenties and to the time of Vilar. It is a good thing to play Marlowe, Calderón, Gozzi, Kleist, and others at the Comédie Française, the Théâtre de la Ville and the Théâtre de l'Est Parisien, theaters which now carry on the tradition of the former Théâtre National Populaire. It was only in 1982 that the baroque Calderón entered the repertory of the Comédie Française, which is the temple of classicism. The twentieth-century classics such as Chekhov, Pirandello, Giraudoux have been restored to favor too. “No more Claudel,” the rebel students wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne. Ten years later, the most radical directors are competing to be the eleventh-hour Claudelians.²⁸L'Otage, Partage de midi, Tête d'or are now produced even in the Communist suburbs of Paris. The same thing with Ionesco and Beckett. It is a sign of the times that the Théâtre de l'Est Parisien directed by Guy Rétoré presented Tueur sans gages and Fin de partie in the eighties and that Roger Planchon himself has just produced Ionesco's autobiographical drama.

What about the place of Antitheater nowadays? Adamov's plays are buried with him. But Ionesco's obstinacy has overcome his enemies. Although he does not hide his unprogressive likes and dislikes, neither his person nor his work provokes hostility anymore. Today, in February 1984, Rhinocéros, Le Roi se meurt, La Cantatrice chauve, and La leçon are being played in Paris. Doubtless the rise of individualism detected by sociologists²⁹ favors his plays which are no longer provocative, if of uneven quality. Ionesco, who openly distrusts “les scénocrates,” likes to confide his works to stage directors such as Jacques Mauclair because he is sure they will respect his intentions. We should however mention two presentations which conform to the standards of the seventies: La Cantatrice chauve directed by Daniel Benoin and Le Roi se meurt by Jorge Lavelli.

Beckett is unanimously praised.³⁰Godot is like the rock on which the waves of fashion crash. People go to see Madeleine Renaud in Oh les beaux jours! as formerly their great-grandparents went to see Sarah Bernhardt in L'Aiglon. His plays are produced everywhere, from the Comédie Française to the popes' palace in Avignon, from the Cartoucherie de Vincennes to Communist drama centers. The Festival d'automne pays yearly homage to his polysemous work. Nobody deplores his metaphysical pessimism any longer. As a matter of fact, Godot is read as an antitotalitarian text by Czech and Polish audiences to whom it has taught more on alienation than the complete works of Marx. The Beckettian character became the twin of the Solzhetsynian zek in Catastrophe. The text is so bare that it is indestructible. Roger Blin played Fin de Partie as an aborted King Lear. Today it is no longer viewed as a wretched variation on the absurd and incommunicability. Marcel Maréchal, for instance, made a colorful clownshow of it, as he also did with King Lear. It is significant that such an open work has recently given opportunities for great productions to directors as different as Otomar Krejca and Alan Schneider. To play the great Sam one must be rigorous and humble. Narcissists should not apply and they do not.

So the Antitheater of the fifties has become classic. The axiological revisions which were initiated by Apollinaire, Jarry, Roger Vitrac, and Ghelderode for a century were made acceptable by Ionesco, Beckett, and poets such as Audiberti and Genet. These playwrights undermined the relationships between the stage and the world, reality and fiction, the actor and his performance. In fact, they reduced the gap between the theater and the other arts, drama and the novel, or painting. Their creative logic is coherent but different from that which prevailed before. With these lucid innovators the theater cultivates its difference as theater. The “hyperthéâtralit锳¹ of Antithéâtre, to quote Robert Abirached, relies on its subversive contestation of bourgeois theatricality, its quest for the sensorial shock, and the revival of former show traditions, all of which is not incompatible with a reaffirmed concern for the text—the text that is paradoxically based on connotation rather than on denotation. The writer remains “l'instigateur voire le maître de la théâtralité,”³² as Abirached wrote.

These authors belong to a generation whose creative capacity is now exhausted. Vauthier only translates Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Genet, Schéhadé, Aimé Césaire, and Weingarten seem to have abandoned the theater. Even in the sixties, Genet's Les Paravents, Roland Dubillard's Naïves hirondelles, Romain Weingarten's L'Eté, Obaldia's Du Vent dans les branches de sassafras, Marguerite Duras's Des Journées entières dans les arbres, Georges Michel's La Promenade du dimanche were presented. The new generation is regrettably deficient. Jean-Claude Grumberg (En revenant de l'Expo, Dreyfus), René Ehni (Que ferons nous en novembre?), Philippe Adrien (La Baye), Eric Westphal (Toi et tes nuages), René Kalisky (Pique-nique à Claretta, Dave au bord de mer), have not fulfilled the hopes raised by their first plays. Recently Jean-Christophe Bailly's Les Céphéides, Bernard Koltès's Combat de nègre et de chien, and especially Jean Audureau's Félicité, the first new play presented at the Comédie Française since 1966, flopped lamentably; their failures will probably discourage the search for new texts. Paris today imports Anglo-Saxon and German original plays. Where are the French Harold Pinters, Tom Stoppards, Edward Bonds, Peter Handkes, Botho Strausses, and Heiner Müllers?

If Brecht and occasionally his imitators are still produced, it is principally within the cultural empire of the Communist Party. A new realism appeared with the Théâtre du quotidien, the French equivalent of kitchen-sink drama. The process is to conduct a real investigation in the field, to hold a long dialogue with ordinary people, then to transcribe the collected materials. Works such as Jean-Paul Wenzel's Loin d'Hagondange, Jean-Pierre Vincent and others' Palais de justice, and Daniel Besnehard and others' Clair d'usine have no ideological bias that would lead to an insistent injunction to socio-political action. No more political centering, no more didactic commentary: mimesis prevails over diegesis. The microsociology of daily life relies on hyperrealism, i.e., on effects of reality. In fact, social subjects and history are dissociated.

These plays may be presented on proscenium stages without alienation effect nor stylization. In brief, they are a return to Antoine's “slice of life.” As Daniel Besnehard wrote recently, “revisited and criticized naturalism” (“le naturalisme revisité et critiqué”) may still be used as a style which carries theatricality (“un style porteur de Théâtralité”); a realism without ideological and political presupposition (“un réalisme sans présupposé idéologique et politique”) is conceivable.³³ The purists reproach this verist drama for being static and equivocal, for hiding the cause and effect of social relationships, for reifying ideology, in short for not making social change imperative, as if that were not the job of trade unions and leftist politicians.³⁴ The popular success gained by Clair d'usine is the best response to their dogmatic statements.

The lack of new playwrights would appear to be a catastrophe, but the situation is explainable. For years and years, the authors have been “les Cendrillons,”³⁵ “le Lumpen-prolétariat de l'entreprise théâtre.”³⁶ One does not ill-treat Sire le texte with impunity. Molière was his own stage director. Corneille and Racine participated in the staging of their plays. We have already seen that stage directing became an autonomous and meaningful art with Antoine. The professionals of the stage henceforth took part in the reflexion on theater that was up until then the monopoly of literary men such as Aristotle, d'Aubignac, Corneille, Diderot, Victor Hugo, etc. Jouvet, Dullin, Copeau, Vilar, Barrault and others wrote books and articles. Throughout the twentieth century, there has been an increasing competition between the writer and the stage director.

“Qui est le créateur,” Vilar asked, “l'auteur ou le metteur en scène?” He answered: “L'oeuvre du poète commande au metteur en scéne.”³⁷ For Charles Dullin, the stage director is the spiritual emissary of the author. From Copeau to Barrault, all directors were craftsmen who admitted the preeminence of the writers they respected profoundly. Their ideal was the collaboration between Giraudoux and Jouvet. Vilar denied stage directing as an end in itself. He rejected the show for the show's sake and what he called “la décoromanie.”³⁸ When he noticed that “les créateurs des trente dernières années ne sont pas les auteurs mais les metteurs en scéne,” he deplored the fact; for in his mind, “le créateur c'est l'auteur.”³⁹

For a long time, the bourgeois and scholarly worship of the text meant that the show aspect of the production was disdained. Symbolist poets were so obsessed with writing that they forgot to be playwrights. Textocentrism (or logocentrism, if you prefer), when combined with a stubborn monosemism and with an arthritic stage code, leads to simple academism. For decades, the Comédie Française softened the strongest works of its classical repertory. Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, and Antonin Artaud made the opposite choice. For the latter, the work took on meaning only when produced. His followers made a pretext of the text. When Roger Planchon demanded power for artists, he was not thinking about writers at all; he was making himself the spokesman of directors confronted with narrow-minded technocrats.

The stage directors who appeared in the sixties were often subintellectuals educated in the Drama Department of the Sorbonne and/or people so intimidated by the superintellectuals that they imitated their mannerisms. “Maintenant,” Marcel Maréchal declared sarcastically, “il naît tous les deux jours, à en croire la critique, des petits génies spontanés, généralement issus du mandarinat des profs.”⁴⁰ Daniel Mesguich finds his inspiration in Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and others. Most stage directors rely on philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts who hold the role of dramaturg (literary director). “Intellos du théâtre, maîtres à penser et / ou commissaires politiques,”⁴¹ as Colette Godard wrote, they acquired a considerable importance. The coherence (or the incoherence) that they introduce in the reading of the play is that of their ideology or of their sexual fantasies. They surely cleaned up the text but only to bury it under heavy commentaries. The thick dossiers sold to spectators are typical testimonies of their arrogance.⁴²

To improve Hamlet, Georges Lavaudant injected vitamins in the guise of quotations from Hélène Cixous and Jean-Luc Godard. Others used Marx, Lenin, Mao and, of course, all fashionable thinkers, Althusser, Lacan, and others. Collages and improvisation were de rigueur in the 70s. Everything was possible, everything was allowed. The text existed to be manipulated, adulterated, triturated. Phèdre took place in Galilee and Theseus spoke through a walkie-talkie. Dorine bit the hand of Tartuffe who was a Pasolinian punk. Alceste was an unknown mystic, etc. As Alfred Simon wrote, “on ne joue pas Hamlet mais le savoir moderne sur Hamlet,”⁴³ i.e., either the text and its story or the text and its various commentaries, or an immense intertext which includes several texts of the same author, or better of other authors, of which the coherence is thematic, didactic, or parodic. Daniel Mesguich wants to “show all the readings” (“montrer toutes les lectures”).⁴⁴ Since the text was superfluous, there was no need to make it audible. Actors were asked to hoot, to bark, to mew, to shriek, or to whisper it. Shakespeare, Molière, and Racine had no way to express their disapproval. Claudel's family protested against Mesguich's staging of Téte d'or. Living authors took precautions.

“Il est impossible,” Vauthier wrote, “que des parties d'une pièce soient laissées au bon gré d'un metteur en scène—ou sinon, il ne faut lui donner qu'un canevas et le charger d'écrire le texte aussi; le texte n'est d'ailleurs pas que dans les paroles. On n'a jamais vu que des moitiés de symphonies soient écrites par des exécutants.”⁴⁵ Twenty-five years later, Eugène Ionesco used the same metaphor to express his hostility to those whom he called “les scénocrates.” The stage director, he said, must be like an orchestra conductor, not like the composer.⁴⁶ His didascalia, which are addressed to the stage professionals, are more and more verbose and detailed. And so are those of Audiberti, Beckett, and Genet, as if these writers wanted not only to control the performance firmly, but also to prohibit any performance that would contradict their explicit will. We may notice that Jean Anouilh, Marguerite Duras, and Samuel Beckett are sometimes their own stage directors; they are more convincing as such than Roger Planchon is as a playwright.

We have jumped from a paranoiac over-politization to a schizophrenic depolitization. In 1968, people asserted the primacy of politics; ten years later, they wanted art above all. No more question of changing the world, society, life. Fanatics often turn into skeptics or cynics. Disillusioned stage directors became aesthetes. Since the end of the seventies, they have been interested in scenic display, in creating beautiful pictures. “L'image,” one said, “si elle est belle et forte, dépoussière la mémoire, déclenche des sensations, d'autres images. Elle fabrique un théâtre à soi, ni bon ni mauvais, unique. Un théâtre sans images est l'image de la mort.”⁴⁷ “La beauté,” another one added, “est chère, hors de prix. La création n'a pas de prix, même si elle a un budget. C'est l'assemblage du luxe qui fait un beau spectacle, réussi ou non. Pas nécessairement un beau texte dont, par lassitude, nous disons que nous n'avons rien à foutre.”⁴⁸ “L'image belle,” Colette Godard comments, “est la dernière affirmation de la dignité humaine.”⁴⁹

The set designer tends to overshadow the literary director. He installs luxurious and expensive settings. He uses smoke, heavy machinery, sumptuous costumes, refined sound effects, and sophisticated lighting. The time is remote when Copeau and Vilar were content with the bare stage. The contemporary scene is a baroque one. Expense, waste, display, ostentation, and excess are values in themselves. Luchino Visconti, Jorge Lavelli, Luca Ronconi prepared the way for Patrice Chéreau, Georges Lavaudant, and Jean-Marie Patte. The increasing use of visual and spectacular effects is the indication that theatricality is getting out of hand. It is not surprising that star directors—Lavelli, Chéreau, Mesguich, Ariane Mnouchkine, and others—have been turning to the cinema and to opera.

Around 1980, the text was rehabilitated. Back from Bayreuth, Patrice Chéreau said that it was time to play the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text; for the theater was also text, if it was not entirely text. “On a traversé une période où le texte fut à deux doigts d'être éliminé, déconsidéré. Il faut travailler à renverser la vapeur. Il faut cesser de mettre au crédit du metteur en scène ce qui appartient à l'auteur.”⁵⁰ The Chéreau who recently produced Peer Gynt and Les Paravents is no longer the one whose Dom Juan created a scandal. Having grown older, he is now a partisan of what Audiberti called the spoken opera,⁵¹ which combines an imaginative performance and a respect for the text. The time of works in progress is over. As Raymond Jean wrote, “le déploiement du spectacle baroque au théâtre est inséparable du déploiement des mots.”⁵² But would the Théâtre du Soleil have mounted Richard II as a magnificent Japanese nô if it had not previously performed the astonishing 1789 which nobody will probably play again?

Marcel Maréchal holds a particular place among contemporary French professionals. To begin with, he has changed little in twenty years. The Trissotins of dramaturgy never impressed him. Secondly, he understood from the beginning that, to be popular, theater must be theater, and give pleasure to the audience. Rather than handing culture down to the masses, he wants to relate theater to popular culture. That is the reason why he addressed Fracasse and Les Trois Mousquetaires to people addicted to TV serials, making French Westerns and swashbucklers of these popular classics. But he also presented Audiberti's Le Cavalier seul, Louis Guilloux's Cripure, and Jean Vauthier's Le Sang. For he loves and knows how to find juicy texts. “Ce qu'il faut,” he said, c'est mettre le texte à sa plus grande évidence. Le maître c'est le texte.”⁵³ Marcel Maréchal works nowadays in Marseilles. Plays recently performed in Paris have been rarely characterized by the quality of their texts.

People make a virtue of necessity. Despite the fact that the socialist government has more than doubled the budget for cultural affairs, public grants are not unlimited. The crisis imposes severe measures, “la rigueur.” The taxpayers refuse to subsidize arrogant narcissists whose productions would be played before empty houses. Put at the head of budget-greedy institutions, the angry young men of the seventies became, if not humble, at least pragmatic. They have to justify the money they receive and which the younger artists covet. The theatergoing public acts as an aware consumer. As we say in France, people vote with their feet: they boycott elitist or partisan productions.

There is an evident ebb of experimentation in the eighties. The same ebb can be found in fiction. The novelists of today turn their backs on the antinovel and rehabilitate readability, plot, characters, psychology, etc.⁵⁴ Not only the commercial theater but also an increasing part of subsidized theaters have chosen to be on the safe side. People favor well-made plays, especially when they are unsophisticatedly presented and played by intelligible actors. Success goes to whoever knows how to combine these ingredients, for instance Robert Hossein who, despite snobbish critics, filled the Palais des sports with his stage version of Notre-Dame-de-Paris.

There are no more certitudes. No ideological project, no aesthetic system is dominant. Bernard Dort's last book begins with a nostalgic variation on the theme “que sont mes amis devenus?” What happened to the Berliner Ensemble, the Living Theatre, the Bread and Puppet, Grotowski and Ronconi? Idols have fallen from their pedestals; gurus left without leaving their addresses. What we see is a counter-attack on tradition—but a tradition which is more diversified than it ever was. In the same way that our classic repertory has annexed works which originally appeared to be rebellious, for instance those of Beckett and Brecht, institutions have absorbed free-lance professionals, fringe directors, and wandering companies to whom they have offered houses, grants, and audiences. The choice was to perish or to become an institution.

The general relativization of models concerns theater too, and it is a good thing. Are there any risks of a cultural regression? To me, a swing back is less probable in the theater than in the novel. It is comforting to notice that the revision of values has been principally to Beckett's advantage, not to Françoise Dorin's. Some attainments are irreversible: decentralization, the diversification of the audience, the rehabilitation of the spectacle, the adaptation of theater architectures, an acute consciousness of techniques, the importance given to the mask, make-up, gestures, etc. You cannot put the clock back; you cannot return to the stage of 1920 or 1950.

The realm of creativity seems to be equitably divided nowadays. Between the skimpy monosemism of the writer and that of the scholarly tradition, between the maniacal monosemism of some literary directors and the delirious polysemism of others which, in fact, becomes asemism, there is ample room available for the elaboration of the meaning of the text. The text does not belong to the author alone. He provides its first meaning, then the stage crew—director, dramaturg, designers, actors, etc.—takes charge of it and works on it within conditions stricter than those of the recent past. Let us hope the text will no longer be tortured. That is the condition which is necessary to the advent of new authors.

Notes

1. Jean Vilar, Le théâtre, service public (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 46.

2. Jean Vilar, “Memorandum,” Théâtre populaire, No. 40 (1960), p. 9.

3. “Memorandum,” p. 5.

4. Guy Leclerc, Le T.N.P. de Jean Vilar (Paris: U.G.E. coll. 10/18, 1973), pp. 151-210. See also Philippa Wehle, Le Théâtre populaire selon Jean Vilar (Le Paradou, Actes Sud, 1981).

5. Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Le Seuil, 1981), pp. 80-83.

6. Eugène Ionesco, L'Impromptu de l'Alma (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1971), p. 112.

7. Alfred Simon, “Artaud chez Bernstein,” Esprit, (July-August 1980), pp. 35-38.

8. Roger Vailland, Ecrits intimes (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 319.

9. Jacques Audiberti, “Ecrans en vrac,” La Nouvelle N.R.F., 1 May 1957, 949-51; Ionesco, Notes et Contre-notes (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Idées, 1966), passim. See also Jeanyves Guérin, “Maîtres penseurs, maîtres censeurs, maîtres chanteurs,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 July 1978, pp. 102-110.

10. Bernard Dort, Théâtre public (Paris: Le Seuil, 1967), p. 262.

11. Jean Duvignaud and Jean Lagoutte, Le Théâtre contemporain: culture et contre-culture (Paris: Larousse, coll. Thèmes et textes, 1975), p. 49.

12. Dort, p. 244.

13. Bernard Dort, Théâtre réel (Paris: Le Seuil, 1971), p. 218.

14. Théâtre réel, p. 219.

15. René Kalisky, “Le théâtre climatisé,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, No. 77 (1971), p. 114.

16. Kalisky, p. 115.

17. Théâtre réel, p. 165.

18. Théâtre réel, p. 284.

19. Colette Godard, Le Théâtre depuis 1968 (Paris: Lattès, 1980), p. 25.

20. Max Gallo, La Troisième Alliance (Paris: Fayard, 1983). See Also Louis Dumont, Essai sur les individualismes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Serge Lipovetsky, L'Ere du vide (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Gérard Mendel, Cinquante-quatre millions d'individus sans importance (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1983).

21. Guy Scarpetta, “Brecht et Artaud,” La Nouvelle Critique (May 1969), pp. 60-68.

22. Scarpetta, Brecht ou le soldat mort (Paris: Grasset, 1979), p. 12.

23. Brecht ou le soldat mort, pp. 63, 75.

24. Dort, Théâtre réel, p. 140.

25. Arthur Adamov, Ici et maintenant (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 118.

26. “Ces intellectuels qui dénoncent un certain totalitarisme théâtral,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 15-21 November 1979, p. 28.

27. Marcel Maréchal, La Mise en théâtre (Paris: U.G.E. coll. 10/18, 1975), p. 62.

28. Jacqueline Veinstein, “Théâtrographie. Chronologie des créations dans l'oeuvre dramatique de Claudel,” Europe, No. 635 (March 1982), pp. 100-113.

29. Jean Duvignaud, La Planète des jeunes (Paris: Stock, 1975).

30. See Alfred Simon, Beckett (Paris: Belfond, 1983), and its review by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, “Job clergyman,” Le Monde, 8 July 1983, p. 17. See also Bernard Dort, “Beckett populaire,” Le Monde-Dimanche, 17 May 1981, p. xiv.

31. Robert Abirached, La Crise du personnage dans le théâtre français (Paris: Grasset, 1978), p. 417.

32. Abirached, p. 423.

33. Daniel Besnehard et al., “Notes sur une comédie ouvrière,” TEP-Actualité, No. 149 (October 1983), pp. 2-3.

34. Patrice Pavis, Dictionnaire du théâtre (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1979), p. 293.

35. Bernard Dort, Théâtre en jeu (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979), p. 293.

36. Alfred Simon, Le Théâtre à bout de souffle? (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979), p. 19.

37. Jean Vilar, De la Tradition théâtrale (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Idées, 1963), pp. 36, 38.

38. De la Tradition théâtrale, p. 42.

39. De la Tradition théâtrale, pp. 77, 65.

40. La Mise en théâtre, p. 54. See also Alfred Simon, “Par les villages,” Esprit (February 1984), pp. 171-172.

41. Le Théâtre depuis 1968, p. 11.

42. “Mettre en scène une pièce, c'est avant tout, et en fin de compte, produire un discours, et employer une part importante de l'argent à éditer ce discours. Discours savant, érudit, qui ne peut être saisi que par des lecteurs d'une technicité comparable. Conversation précieuse entre intimes, cependant que la quasi-totalité des spectateurs du théâtre, qui n'ont aucune pratique de ce langage, sont exclus du jeu. Il y a là quelque chose de réactionnaire, offensant,” Michel Cournot, “Lointaine gare d'Austerlitz!” Le Monde, 8 February 1984, p. 15.

43. Le Théâtre à bout de souffle?, p. 55.

44. Daniel Mesguich, Culture et communication (December 1979), quoted by Godard, Le Théâtre depuis 1968, p. 229.

45. Jean Vauthier, “Lettre de Bordeaux,” Théâtre populaire, No. 1 (1953), p. 52.

46. Eugène Ionesco, “Contre les metteurs en scène censeurs,” in Un Homme en question (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 169.

47. Le Théâtre depuis 1968, p. 198.

48. Le Théâtre depuis 1968, p. 199.

49. Le Théâtre depuis 1968, p. 173.

50. Quoted by the author in his review, “Le théâtre populaire à la croisée des chemins,” La Nouvelle Revue Française (March 1982), pp. 108-109.

51. Audiberti, Opéra parlé in Théâtre III (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). See the author's “La philologie mène au rire,” Travaux de linguistique et de littérature, XIX, 2 (1981), 219-231.

52. Raymond Jean, “Monsieur Molière et Monsieur Audiberti,” Sud, Nos. 34-35 (1980), p. 20.

53. La Mise en théâtre, p. 83.

54. See the journal Roman and the novels of its key figure, Catherine Rihoit.