French Theatre

Presented at the French Graduate Seminar, All Souls’ College, University of Oxford, 8th March 2016.

My thesis research focuses on the theatrical works by French Caribbean women writers; Ina Césaire, Michèle Césaire and Suzanne Dracius, from Martinique; and Maryse Condé and Gerty Dambury, from Guadeloupe. Martinique and Guadeloupe are French départements, however the islands have produced many writers and theorists whose writings form the kernel of postcolonial and anticolonial thought. French Caribbean writers are often marginalized by metropolitan French literary and artistic culture, and have only become the focus of Francophone postcolonial studies over the past thirty years.

Theatre constitutes an under-researched domain within Francophone postcolonial studies, and I aim to demonstrate how the analysis of Caribbean performance cultures enhances our understanding of the fragmentary and multicultural socio-historical realities of the region.  The works of women writers in French theatre is even more under-researched, despite the exceptional concentration of female playwrights within the same generation, a phenomenon that demands more extensive study.

This paper will analyse the representation and exploration of gender constructs and relations in the plays Mémoires d’îles (1983) by Ina Césaire, Comme deux frères (2007) by Maryse Condé and Lettres indiennes (1993) by Gerty Dambury.The artificiality of theatre questions and problematizes gender signifiers and constructs, and offers multiple frames within which to explore gender relations in Antillean society. Using postcolonial, theatrical and spatial theories of gender, I shall analyse how the plays tackle issues of motherhood, domesticity and male-female relations.

Jean Racine (1639-1699), seguramente, é um dos grandes mestres do teatro moderno e, em conjunto com Shakespeare, com Corneille e com Molière, representa até hoje referência obrigatória para aqueles que desejam reconstituir a trajetória das artes dramáticas do ocidente.
Pouco ou quase nada se fala de sua habilidade em reciclar as obras da Antiguidade Clássica greco-latina em prol de uma nova arte dramática que surge a partir do renascimento e que se desenvolve até os dias de hoje. A capacidade de “reciclar” ou, simplesmente, “aludir” não é nova, como podem imaginar alguns que se debruçam, sistematicamente, sobre a tão propalada e reverenciada intertextualidade, pedra de toque da pós-modernidade.

During the Napoleonic period, in the Italian peninsula the pedagogical and civic role of the theatre, described by the philosophes, assumed also an imperialistic meaning. The article focuses on the competition created between an Italian theatrical company and a French one, in the départements réunis and the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. Napoleon introduced two French companies led by Madame Raucourt in order to propagate the French language and culture; while the Viceroy of Italy decided to finance an Italian company directed by Salvatore Fabbrichesi, to counterbalance the image given by the imposition of French theatre on Italian stages. This provoked a national rivalry between the two companies on repertoires, stages, the support of local administrators and the press. These tensions were presented by some Italian intellectuals in terms of national identity.

The article explores the metamorphosis of a vampire figure in the beginning of the 19th century, when it evolved from a mindless walking corpse, well-known from Slavic folklore, into a deadly dangerous seducer of aristocratic backgrounds. The thorough interpretation of "Le Vampire" by Charles Nodier, staged for the first time in Paris in 1820, uncovers a strong relation between the hegemony of melodrama in the 19th-century theatre and the vampire fever, which expanded from France to other European countries.

En 1937, Louis Jouvet publiait un article sur « L'apport de l'électricité dans la mise en scène au théâtre et au music-hall ». Il y livrait des vues pénétrantes sur la lumière au théâtre, sans dissocier technique, histoire et esthétique. C’est dans cette perspective « croisée » que veut s’inscrire le projet de dossier en en actualisant les données.
    En effet, depuis, bien sûr, des chercheurs ont approfondi l’histoire matérielle du théâtre et les créateurs exploité les techniques nouvelles. Bien plus, le concepteur lumière est devenu un créateur à part entière.
    La lumière au théâtre a été l’objet de nombreuses publications, mais qui forment une bibliographie dont les rubriques sont souvent disjointes. Par exemple, on trouve des études esthétiques faisant peu de place aux matériels et aux techniques et à l’inverse des traités précisément, mais purement techniques. Concernant la lumière dans l’ancien théâtre, l’esthétique moderne et contemporaine de l’éclairage, le lecteur se retrouve confronté à une multitude d’études monographiques pointues et dispersées. Beaucoup d’ouvrages intéressants existent, mais écrits en langue étrangère.
    Bref, il manque à l’honnête homme amateur de théâtre et à l’étudiant des arts du spectacle une synthèse accessible des recherches. C’est ce que veut offrir ce projet de numéro.

One of the important and widespread motifs in the French culture of the first half of the 18th century, from painting to literature, was that of imaginary voyages: voyages imaginaires. Marivaux makes frequent use of it in his work, most notably in his three comedies: L’île des Esclaves, L’île de la Raison, and La Nouvelle Colonie ou la Ligue des femmes (or Colonie, in its later version). All the three plays, set on islands, may be called comedies of manners, but we can find a conscious social reform proposal in them, too: Marivaux would thus be a proponent of abolishing slavery and of equal rights for women. And though such a reading should not dismissed, it seems more appropriate to analyse the works as exercises in imagination. They are utopias, from the point of view of Marivaux and his times, impossible to become a reality and thus belonging to a world of fantasy, which is not to say that they did not influence the consciousness of the 18th-century French. This “conceiving of the inconceivable” let the contemporaries go beyond their limits and break away from schematic thinking, perhaps contributing to political and social change more effectively than a rational critique would.

Research financed by Polish National Centre Science (KBN; DEC --2012/04/S/HS2/00161)

This PhD thesis aims to highlight the emergence of new ways to represent collectivity in the French and Francophone theatrical lanscapes from the early eighties until now. I hereby confront selected theatrical pieces written by Abla Farhoud and Marie Ndiaye to the concept of migrancy, nomadism and trans. This work focuses primarily on a careful examination of the theoretical notion of “écriture migrante” (migrant writing) as it was conceptualised by the Canadian poet Robert Berrouet-Oriol at the end of the seventies. It then questions its potential application to the French and francophone theatrical fields. This study is firmly rooted in a postcolonial and transcultural background and is based upon the work of Edward Saïd, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. To complete this theoretical frame, the analysis of the works of Marie Ndiaye and Abla Farhoud take into consideration the historical, cultural and literary contexts that brought them forth. I address the incorporative, interpretative and rewriting processes to which the figure of the migrant has been regularly submitted during the past thirty years. I also give careful consideration to the different meanings that French and Francophone contemporary theatres have assigned to this wandering figure. Through the detailed analysis of five plays written by A. Farhoud and five plays written by M. NDiaye, this thesis offers a reflexion upon how the figure of the migrant - the migrant being - is being constructed, represented and perceived in contemporary theatre. Finally, my work has been inspired by cross-cultural comparative studies of literary, philosophical and sociological obedience. It transposes these notions into the field of dramaturgical and theatrical studies in order to identify the dramaturgical strategies and modalities that create a culture of the hybrid on French and Francophone stages.

This volume rests upon two premises: 1) That collective creation is pivotal to the evolution of the modern theatre; and 2) That women have been central to the emergence and development of collective creation.
    Though written to be read as a self-contained work, Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance is in fact the third volume in an ongoing body of research into collective creation and devising practices from 1900 to the present. Our two previous studies, A History of Collective Creation and Collective 
Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), argued that modern collective theatre-making praxis may be best understood as an ongoing, resistant tradition emerging, in its European and North American contexts, circa 1900 and running throughout the twentieth century and on into present-day devising practices. Our goal at the inception of this body of work had been to contest the broadly accepted view of collective creation as a minor phenomenon peculiar to the New Left political theatre of the 1960s and ’70s, associated in the main with developments in the United States, Canada, Quebec, and England (and to a lesser extent, France).  Working in collaboration with an international team of scholars, we sought to elucidate the aesthetic, processual, and political links between theatrical devising in the contemporary period, collective creation practices of the ’60s and ’70s, and pre-war experiments in collaborative theatre-making—and to do so from an internationalist perspective.  In so doing, we worked to draw out both resemblances and divergences in collective practice, and in the aesthetic, social, and/or political impulses underpinning those practices, in their particular cultural and historical contexts.
    This new volume seeks to deepen that historicization, by investigating the centrality of women to the development of collective and devised theatre-making in the modern and contemporary period. Our project is two-fold: to historicize the enormous, ongoing contribution of women to collective creation; and to investigate questions about the relationship between gender and collaborative process, authority, authorship, and attribution.
    Women must be credited with a central, foundational, and continued role in the development and transmission of practices of collective and devised theatre-making since the start of the twentieth century.  A cursory scan of a few prominent names in North America and Europe hints at the consideration women demand in the history of collective performance praxis: directors such as Joan Littlewood, Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Elizabeth LeComte, Tina Landau, Anne Bogart, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lin Hixson, and Julia Varley; pioneering teachers such as Viola Spolin, Suzanne Bing, Rena Mirecka, and Roberta Carreri; companies and networks such as Lilith, WOW Cafe, At the Foot of the Mountain, Spiderwoman Theater, Guerilla Girls, Omaha Magic Theatre, Split Britches, SITI Company, Nightwood Theatre, Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, The Magdalena Project, FEMEN, and Pussy Riot; choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Aileen Passloff, Trisha Brown, and Mary Overlie; playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Helene Cixous, Deb Margolin, Muriel Miguel, and Megan Terry.  And yet, the deep engagement of women in collectively generated performance has been grossly under-historicized.
    This volume traces a sprawling lineage, revealing a hitherto unacknowledged web of transmission—connecting, by way of example, the educational play movement spearheaded by such reformers as Dr. Maria Montessori in Italy, Margaret Naumberg in New York, and Neva Boyd of Chicago’s Hull-House, to the theatrical devising pedagogies of Suzanne Bing in 1920s’ France and Viola Spolin in 1930s’ Chicago, to the collective practices of (among others) Théâtre du Soleil and the Living Theatre in the 1960s, to the nomadic performances of the women of the Odin Teatret in 1980s’ Europe, to Pussy Riot’s recent protests in Russia.  In doing so, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in our previous volumes, in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation are revealed as central, and women practitioners further revealed as primary progenitors, renovators, stewards, and disseminators of these practices.  The history of the modern theatre is a history of collaborative methods and the history of collaborative methods is a women’s history.

Brought on by the influence of the Oriental culture, and specifically from his encounter with Balinese Theatre, Artaud was very concerned about the usage of the idea of Duality with regard for the expression of the body.  He was interested in bringing together the likeness of the physical with the metaphysical by demanding that the audience of his ideal theatre would be confronted with the sensation of terror to snap one into the “reality” of pain and suffering.  For only through this discomfort and sensory overload will one discover their own horror and confront that horror with honesty and commitment.  For Artaud there was a profound element of communication between performer and observer of the performance that was most effective in its primal form. He felt that by exposing the weaknesses of the audience through shock, one would become changed for the good of the flesh.  In other words, his theatre would be the exposure of the true nature of human communication in the form of gesture, movement and sound.

In 19th century French very successful melodrama, discourse is seen as a powerful way to get attention. Criminals and traitors are masters of speech and seductive persuasion, but they never achieve their goals by the end of the play. On the other hand, the mute, humble and shy characters demonstrate that silence can convey values such as honesty, loyalty and show the audience that sensibility should be preferred to histrionic actor play.

Molière’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself is a three-act comic masterpiece influenced by farce and inspired by a fabliau from the Middle Ages. It was first performed in 1666 at the Palais-Royal in Paris and had a huge success but it is very rarely performed in England. As a parody of the medical profession, it provides a timeless depiction of quack doctors and their trusting patients and leads to laughs and self-reflection. Our aim is to create a powerful and enjoyable performance which makes the most of Molière's text.

This book focuses on the biographies and artistic activities of the actresses Elena Balletti Riccoboni, known as Flaminia (Ferrara 1686-Paris 1771) and Jeanne Benozzi Balletti, known as Silvia (Toulouse 1701-Paris 1758), two prima donnas of the Italian and French theatres. Representatives of artistic families active in the main Italian theatres and at the courts of central Europe, their story is linked to the city of Paris and assumes great importance in the evolution of the history of European entertainment between the end of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century. The essay, based on archival sources, traces the evolution of the role of the prima donna and her acting style. Elena Balletti was a dramatic actress, a talented improviser in the Commedia dell'Arte and a poet in Arcadia. She shared the stage with her husband Luigi Riccoboni and Scipione Maffei wrote the famous Merope for her. Jeanne Benozzi Balletti signalled the metamorphosis of the Italian comedienne into a modern, de facto French performer. She was the celebrated star of Marivaux's comedies and the first 'diva' of the Nouveau Théâtre Italien.

Cette intervention porte sur l’adaptation du roman de Zola, Germinal, créée au Théâtre National de Strasbourg en 1975. Somme panoramique que l’on pourrait penser particulièrement à même de porter le projet de mettre la totalité d’un monde sur la scène, le roman fait ici l’objet d’une réécriture textuelle et scénique qui donne délibérément à voir et à entendre la mise en échec d’une telle entreprise. Les ruptures qu’introduit le spectacle entre les paroles et les gestes contribuent à déconstruire la grande épopée du dix-neuvième siècle et à affirmer son éloignement. Conscients des réductionnismes scientistes et des projections fantasmatiques qui irriguent l’exposition naturaliste du spécimen ouvrier, Jean-Pierre Vincent et le collectif du TNS soulignent le caractère illusoire de toute saisie immédiate et transparente du réel et lui préfèrent une mise en regard de la vie quotidienne des mineurs et du récit qui en fraye l’accès. Ce sont donc les formes et les enjeux de cette adaptation hautement critique qu’il s’agit d’analyser, en tâchant d’inscrire celle-ci dans le cadre plus vaste d’un "théâtre-récit" qui assume complètement les tensions qui l’animent et qui cherche à mettre en scène à la fois plus et moins que le texte lui-même, à savoir le voyage qui mène vers lui.

"Authorship of a text seldom, if ever, rests solely in the authority and control of a single individual; to turn a phrase, it takes a village to raise a story.  Plays and productions perform within conversations and circumstances dictated by collective forces.  In “Teaching Tartuffe’s Dogma New Tricks,” I will utilize the Tartuffe controversy as a case study to illustrate how a group like the Company of the Holy Sacrament can generate and control a particular discourse which shapes the development and meaning of a text.  Despite their waning cultural influence, by 1664 the Company effectively banned Molière’s religious satire, an accomplishment which lasted for five years and two revisions of the play.  I intend to investigate and highlight how the presence of the evangelical impulses and doctrinal particularities of this “cabal of the devoted” wrote the controversy Molière responded to and rewrote the play which Molière had authored.  The banning, the discourse, the controversy, and even the alterations Molière made to Tartuffe’s characterization effectively served the Company’s ideological imperatives. 

The history is certainly a matter of social control; moreover though, the Company’s role in writing the controversy of Tartuffe manifests the group’s legacy in shaping the discourse informing how people perceived appropriate religious behaviors and performances of religion in seventeenth-century France.  In that vein, this case study offers insights into the nuanced meaning of “authorship” as a complicated negotiation among a collective of dynamic forces rather than as an autocratic ownership of creativity belonging to a single artist."

Marquée par le surgissement d’une parole jusqu’alors inouïe et inaudible, la révolution symbolique à laquelle De Certeau associe 1968 a conduit le théâtre à redéfinir ses missions et ses exigences. Comme en témoigne la déclaration de Villeurbanne, le souci de transmettre un patrimoine culturel déjà constitué auprès d’un auditoire élargi est considéré comme insuffisant et tendrait même à perpétuer l’expropriation des moyens d’expression dont est victime une partie de la population. La démocratisation du répertoire doit donc laisser place à des créations inédites où puisse enfin se reconnaître ce qu’on appelle alors le "non-public". C’est dans ce cadre qu’il convient d’inscrire les recherches menées dans les années 1970 par le théâtre dit "du quotidien". En se proposant comme objectif de "mettre en jeu la parole de ceux qui ne l’ont pas", les pièces de Michel Deutsch, Claudine Fiévet, Michèle Foucher et Jean-Paul Wenzel entendent remettre le théâtre en phase avec une réalité populaire trop longtemps interdite de représentation.

Un tel projet ne va pas toutefois pas sans tensions tant le geste qui consiste à s’ériger en "porte-parole" s’avère politiquement et esthétiquement problématique. Il faut souligner ici que ce théâtre issu de mai 68 en opère implicitement la critique en portant sur la scène ceux qui sont restés aux marges de l’événement et qui sont précisément privés des moyens linguistiques d’assurer leur libération. La parole s’impose alors comme un enjeu manifeste de pouvoir, de sorte que les dialogues laconiques et maladroits des personnages proposent un questionnement inquiet sur les conditions d’impossibilité d’une véritable transformation collective. Mais la place accordée à ces phénomènes de relégation linguistique n’échappe pas au soupçon du surplomb et du misérabilisme. Aussi est-il intéressant de s’attarder sur des spectacles qui ont précisément tenté d’éviter ces écueils en s’appuyant sur des entretiens : Dorénavant 1 de Wenzel et La Table de Foucher, tous deux créés en 1977 et fondés respectivement sur une année d’implantation dans la ville nouvelle de Bobigny et sur de nombreuses discussions avec des femmes.

Alors que nous fêterons le 250e anniversaire de sa première représentation cette année, Hirza ou les Illinois (25 mai 1767) de Sauvigny demeure une pièce relativement méconnue. Néanmoins, dans cette étude j’entends montrer que l’exploitation de la notion de patriotisme au sein de cette pièce a pu lui permettre d’être représentée à la Comédie Française, pour des raisons politiques d’abord, mais aussi afin d’expliquer la défaite française par une défection des alliés autochtones, un manque de patriotisme des colons, une mauvaise gestion des colonies par certains hommes d’Etat et, de manière plus surprenante, par une forme d’inéluctabilité du destin de ces colonies, vouées à se soulever contre leurs maîtres européens.

Pierre de Marivaux, Igrzysko miłości (Jeu de l’amour et du hasard), ed. by Piotr Olkusz

Jeu de I’amour et du hazard, the play considered by many to be Marivaux’s best, while using a well-known comedic motif of dressing up (employed, inter alia, in Les Précieuses ridicules byMolière) goes a step further by doubling the dressing up as not only gentlemen dress up as their servants but the servants dress up as well. Vesting a servant girl and a butler with powers of giving orders seems to herald revolutionary plays but in this case brings the comedy closer to the genre of utopian philosophical tales. It is all the more surprising that the play was put on at the magnate theatre in Dukla, probably without any relation to the same comedy, in another translation, being played at the public theatre in Warsaw. Included in a collection of plays translated for the stage at Dukla (dated 1777), it is an interesting example of adapting a foreign text to Polish circumstances even though the text itself resisted such attempts and was didactic in a very limited way.

Research financed by Polish National Centre Science (KBN; DEC --2012/04/S/HS2/00161)

The eponymous hero of this little-known play by Jean Anouilh is perceived by other protagonists as absent. Nevertheless, his presence is becoming more and more vivid with the development of the plot, which is illustrated by the analysis presented in the article. It shows the process in which the absent hero transforms into a character fully present in the text. The detailed analysis of the character’s presence in particular space-time dimensions, as well as the actant analysis prove that the main character pretends to be absent from the beginning of the play in order to achieve a definite goal.

The first history of acting theory in the West, from antiquity to the eighteenth century when the specific characteristics of the actor’s art were established. An account of the long cultural journey to understanding every aspect behind an actor’s on-stage transformation. 

Summary:

ACTING THEORY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Divine Possession. Alteration and Contagion. Development of Dramatic Forms. Acting as a Specialized Activity. Emotional Tension and Frenzy. Persistence of “Ion’s” Doctrine. Moderation and Self-Control. The Emergence of the Character. The New Form of Emotional Involvement. The Actor’s Art and the Orator’s. The Use of Emotion. Emotion and Expression. The Techniques of Identification. Control and Perfection of Expression. Possibility of an Anti-Emotional Theory.
FROM THE CHURCH FATHERS TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Theatre as a Source of Irrational Impulses. The Condemnation of Christian Authors. The New Image of Acting. The Humanist Ennobling of Theatre. Humanist Experiments and Court Performances. Professional Actors and the Commedia all’Improvviso. The Revival of Religious Opposition and the Actor’s New Status.
THE EARLY ITALIAN TREATISES AND THE THEORETICAL ACTING MODEL
The Academicians Establish the First Rules of Acting. Giraldi Cintio’s “Discorsi”. Angelo Ingegneri. Stage Characters as Reality Perfected. Leone de’ Sommi’s “Dialoghi” and Theory Based on Stage Experience. The Writings of Pier Maria Cecchini. The Theoretical Model of Acting. Flaminio Scala and the Decline of the Early Treatises.
THE WORLD OF ORATORY. PERRUCCI, GRIMAREST AND GILDON
The Theatre Controversy. The Horizons of Oratory. Recitation: the Mysterious Difference. The New Treatises. Andrea Perrucci, Recitation, Oratory and “Commedia all’Improvviso”. Experience, Rules and the Insufficiency of “Actio”. Grimarest. Gildon.
THE BIRTH OF EMOTIONALISM
The Dramaturgic Function of Recitation. Natural Recitation. The Beginnings of Emotionalism. Luigi Riccoboni. Acting by Improvisation. First Formulation of the Emotionalist Theory. Criticism of Riccoboni. Reform of the Code and Franz Lang’s Treatise. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos.
THE CRITIQUE OF ACTING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONALISM. D’AIGUEBERRE, CIBBER, AARON HILL AND RÉMOND DE SAINTE-ALBINE
D’Aigueberre and the Founding of the Critique of Acting. Cibber’s Autobiography and Garrick’s and Foote’s Essays. Aaron Hill. Rémond de Sainte-Albine’s Treatise. The Functions of Technique. The Problems of Emotionalism.
ANTIEMOTIONALISM. ANTOINE-FRANÇOIS RICCOBONI, LESSING, DIDEROT
English Versions of “Le Comédien”. Antoine-François Riccoboni’s “L’art du Théâtre”. Lessing’s project. Sticotti and Diderot. Artistic Creation. The “Paradoxe” and Its Reasoning. The Characteristics of Sensibility. Real Life-Theatre Difference. Actors and Characters. The Problems of the “Paradoxe”.
THE END OF CENTURY DEBATE. ENGEL, BOSWELL AND TOURON
The Late Eighteenth Century: a Profusion of Treatises. The Work of the Author, the Creation of the Actor. Performing the Part. Study, Observation and Imitation. The Function of Sentiment. Engel’s Treatise. Boswell and the Levels of Interiority. Touron. Epilogue.

The one-act play Villa for Sale by Sacha Guitri presents an early twentieth-century French social setting. The entire action takes place in the salon of a small villa near Nogent-sur-Marne “a stone’s throw from the French Hollywood Joinville.” Of the characters, Juliette, Jeanne, and the maid are French; Gaston is English; and Mrs. AL Smith is American. The interaction among these characters which represents a variety of behaviours and mentalities results in a powerful picture of a change taking place in the socio-cultural, economic, and demographic landscape of the early twentieth-century France; how the clever and cunning outdo the others in exploiting the opportunities it provides for material gain and financial success; and how the naïve and innocent become victims in the competition and continue their lives in dissatisfaction and dullness even without knowing they have been exploited and fooled.

ΑΠΟΣΠΑΣΜΑΤΑ ΘΕΑΤΡΙΚΩΝ ΕΡΓΩΝ
      των
( Carlo Goldoni, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Harold Pinter, Mystery Plays, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Sartre, Bernard Shaw, Paul Claudel, Pierre Corneille )
 
ΚΑΡΛΟ ΓΚΟΛΝΤΟΝΙ
ΜΟΥΣΤΑΦΑ ΜΑΧΜΟΥΝΤ
ΡΙΤΣΑΡΝΤ ΣΕΡΙΝΤΑΝ
ΧΑΡΟΛΝΤ ΠΙΝΤΕΡ
Ο ΠΕΙΡΑΣΜΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ ΚΑΙ Η ΜΟΙΧΑΛΙΔΑ (αγνώστου)
ΠΕΔΡΟ ΚΑΛΝΤΕΡΟΝ ΝΤΕ ΛΑ ΜΠΑΡΚΑ
ΣΑΡΤΡ
ΜΠΕΡΝΑΡΝΤ ΣΩ
ΠΩΛ ΚΛΩΝΤΕΛ
[ … ]
ΚΟΡΝΕΊΓ

The work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes, although phenomenally successful in continental Europe, has been staged less frequently in Anglo-American theatres; and a major feature on his work in NTQ49 in February 1997, and the publication by Methuen later in the same year of a collection of three of his plays in English translation, brought him only belated recognition in print. In this paper, first presented at a recent gathering in France to mark the tenth anniversary of Koltes's death, Maria Delgado and David Fancy trace the trajectory of a number of his plays through the space of translation, including Roberto Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cottonfields), Quai Ouest (Quay West), and Combat de negre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs). Koltes asserted in 1986 that 'I have always somewhat disliked the theatre because theatre is the opposite of life; but I always come back to it and love it because it is the one place where you can say: this is not life'; and the poetic specificity of his work has posed significant challenges for an Anglo-American theatre culture imbued with actors' identification with character. Relying on testimonials from a variety of directors, translators, and actors, as well as evidence from productions in the UK, Ireland, and the US, the authors, who are both Koltes translators, trace the challenges that have faced English-speaking artists wishing to stage this demanding writer.

Ce mémoire de maitrise vise à analyser les trois pièces suivantes de Bernard-Marie Koltès : Quai ouest (1985), Le retour au désert (1988) et Roberto Zucco (1990) en prenant pour point de départ les thèses développées par Jacques Rancière dans Le spectateur émancipé (2004) et par Roland Barthes dans Leçon (1978). Il propose de montrer comment les notions de l’ordre et du désordre prennent place dans ces trois oeuvres théâtrales et jouent esthétiquement et littérairement un rôle considérable.
L’ordre dont on parle dans cette étude est un système social qui se trouve dans l’intrigue des pièces. Il est mis en relief à travers la structure et les figures de style utilisées. La question à laquelle on tente de répondre dans ce travail est la suivante : comment Koltès, à travers son style d’écriture, met-il la dialectique de l’ordre et du désordre en place dans ses textes théâtraux et amène-t-il ainsi le spectateur à chercher les moyens de s’émanciper de l’ordre social présenté dans la pièce ?
Ce mémoire tente également de révéler les mécanismes dans le théâtre de Koltès qui ouvrent la possibilité d’émancipation intellectuelle pour le spectateur: les contrastes, le silence, le non-dit, les jeux des mots, les métaphores, etc.

À l'œuvre notamment dans le théâtre de Marguerite Duras et de Nathalie Sarraute, la répétition-variation fait de la parole le lieu exclusif du drame, entérinant la désertion de l'action au profit d'un dialogue ressassant qui porte l'accent sur les péripéties de l'énonciation. Or Jean-Luc Lagarce pousse ce geste à son paroxysme tant ses personnages ne cessent de se reprendre et de se corriger. Sous la forme spécifique de l'épanorthose, se joue en fait la singularité d'une écriture qui revient inlassablement sur ses pas, à l’échelle de la réplique, de la pièce et de l'œuvre tout entière. Tendue entre un début de phrase dont il est difficile d’assumer l'héritage et un point dont on peut se demander, à le voir sans cesse différé, s'il n'équivaut pas à une sentence de mort, l'épanorthose lagarcienne se livre comme une expérience vertigineuse du temps.

After experiencing trouble with Tartuffe, in 1665 Molière offered the French audience a “pièce à machines”, Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre, which was enthusiastically received on the opening night, only to be almost immediately withdrawn afterwards. Critics have long argued about the real reasons of such an awkward course of action. Some believe that the performances were discontinued largely because of the virulent Observations sur une comédie de Molière intitulée Le Festin de pierre, contained by a libellous booklet obscurely signed “sieur de Rochemont”. Others say Dom Juan itself is an attack aimed to the critics of Tartuffe. Is then Molière’s antihero masked as a real hero just a character on stage? Or is he conveying the author’s fierce response to earlier criticism?

Ouvrage désormais accessible sur CAIRN : https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-theatrales-2008-3.htm

Placée sous le signe du quotidien, une part importante de la production théâtrale des années 1970 est marquée par la volonté de faire accéder à la lumière ce qui en est habituellement exclu. Or ce geste s'avère doublement paradoxal : dramatiquement, parce qu'il promeut la vie ordinaire de gens sans histoire au rang d'objet théâtral digne d'être représenté ; politiquement, dans la mesure où, prenant le parti du plus grand éloignement par rapport aux lieux canoniques du pouvoir, il ne renonce pas pour autant à sa représentation mais s'attache au contraire à en révéler les modes imperceptibles de fonctionnement. Sans que nous ayons affaire à une École unitaire, ce geste s'offre comme le point de convergence des recherches menées durant la décennie par des auteurs tels que Kroetz, Sperr, Fassbinder, Deutsch, Wenzel ou Vinaver.

Comment rendre visible un pouvoir qui ne s'impose pas de l'extérieur à ses sujets ? Au prix de quels aménagements la forme dramatique peut-elle représenter les opérations de détail par lesquelles le pouvoir marque son empreinte sur les gestes et les discours ? Partant de la nouvelle économie de la visibilité des rapports de force sociaux diagnostiquée par Michel Foucault, cet essai analyse les modalités selon lesquelles les dramaturgies des années 1970 expérimentent la réalité sans corps du pouvoir contemporain. Engageant un changement d'échelle qui cherche à dessaisir le quotidien de sa familiarité, ces dramaturgies permettent d'interroger le devenir formel du drame. Mais c'est surtout la fonction critique du théâtre qu'elles invitent à questionner, dessinant, sous l'influence de Büchner, Horváth ou Fleisser, le territoire méconnu d'une scène alternative qui n'a cessé de repenser les pouvoirs de la représentation et ses rapports avec la réalité.