Remembrance of Things Past: French Theater Praxis Today

Remembrance of Things Past: French Theater Praxis Today! An Interview with Bernard Dart on the Idea of Theater LAURENCE ROMERO L.R. In your opinion, Mr. Dart, has the dream of the 1950'S to establish a truly popular theater in France been realized or not? BERNARD DORT No, it has not. The dream has remained a dream. Ofcourse one has to understand the different meanings the term "theatre populaire" has had through time in France. At the tum of the century there was Romain Rolland's idea of a theater for the populace; then the concept of a proletarian theater advocated by certain theater professionals and theoreticians of the "Front populaire"; and then, more recently, Jean Vilar's concept oftheater as a public service, not unlike our public utilities. The dream of the 1950'S to have every segment ofthe population patronize the theater was not realized simply because it could not be. On the other hand, the myth of a broadly based popular theater did help to transform the structure of theater in France. The decentralization of theater, for example, had its source and impulsion in the myth of popular theater. L.R. Had Vilar foreseen that kind of popularization of the theater? BERNARD DORT What Vilar wanted and got, but only on the level of his own theater, the TNP (Theatre national populaire), was a completely open theater where, if not all classes, at least all ages of French society would come, including people who had not habitually frequented the theater, like whitecollar workers and young people. Ofcourse the composition ofthe audiences in Vilar's TNP was not typical of either the national or even the Paris population. Nevertheless, decentralization helped to establish theaters in provinces where before there were merely garages or small municipal theaters that played only roadshows to a very limited, local bourgeois public. These new decentralized theaters and "maisons de la culture" did increase the number of active theaters LAURENCE ROMERO and consequently enlarged the theatergoing public. But the actual composition of the theatergoing public was not substantially changed. For example, in none of these theaters did the percentage of workers in attendance ever exceed five percent, and five percent is the maximum figure. L.R. Yes, but wasn't Roger Planchon in the National Theater at Villeurbanne successful in drawing many factory workers to his theater, and in certain other provincial cities ... ? BERNARD DORT Yes, but even Planchon never got more than five or six percent attendance level from the workers. There were mostly white-collar employees, upper-level administrators, etc. In fact Planchon's audiences at the TNP were in general the same as audiences nowadays: career professionals and young people, especially at the beginning, around 1950.Getting the young, especially /ycee and university students, to come back to the theater was a very important development. They rediscovered the theater in those days; since then, they've drifted away again. L.R. So the theatergoing public has not changed radically in France since the 1950'S. BERNARD DORT It may have changed some, but not much. Of course, as Vilar said, it is not the theater that determines its audience but rather the opposite. And he added, give me a good society and I'll give you good theater. It seems to me that a substantial, global change in the theater can come only after a change in society. L.R. What about the aftermath of May 1968? BERNARD DORT No, there was no social change after May '68. There was an important movement in '68 that changed nothing at all. On the contrary. ... There was a dream ofchange, very brief, and then everything retumed to being the way it had been before, for better or for worse. The history of the relationship between the theater and May '68 should be written, or rewritten. Broadly speaking, the failure of the May '68 movement threw into question the decentralization of the theater in France. On the one hand, the May '68 "revolutionaries" - with that word purposely in quotation marks - charged the public sector of the decentralized theater system with having compromised itself with the power structure of the State. Then later there...