Armand Gatti: Multiplicity of Vision in Action Theatre

ARMAND GATTI: MULTIPLICITY OF VISION IN ACTION THEATRE FOR ARMAND GATTI, THE THEATRE IS NOT a form of amusement nor is it simply a pleasant distraction. It is a stimulant to action: a force designed to liberate audiences from established notions, enabling them, thereby, to acquire new insights and meaningful experiences. Gatti's theater is shorn of constricting theatrical conceptions inherent in the classical-psychological theater with its rational development of personalities , plots, and climaxes. It does not follow the lines of the avant-garde theater either which deals so heavily in personal symbolism and mythology. It is a thematic and socially oriented theater with roots in the work-a-day world. Gatti is intensely interested in dramatic structure. His views on this subject closely follow the patterns set by modern science and mathematics which have shattered former conceptions of space and time. Gatti, in his plays, has abolished clock-time by creating a non-linear drama with "multiple stage life." Characters not only live in several worlds at once (in various geographical areas), but simultaneously at different time sequences in the past, present, and future. Audiences are given a prismatic view of the spectacle unfolding before them. They see the protagonists through their own eyes; through the eye of the protagonists themselves during various phases of their existence; through the eyes of those who come into contact with the protagonists. Nothing is static in Gatti's theater. Everything merges and swirls, propelled by its own dynamism. Armand Gatti was born on January 26, 1924 in Monaco. He is of Italian and Russian extraction. His father was a street cleaner who died when his son was only fifteen years old. Though the young Gatti worked at all sorts of odd jobs when still very young, his one passion was the theater. Indeed, he formed his own small theatrical company when still in school. After passing his Baccalaureat, he began writing plays and adapted Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. In 1943, during the German occupation, Gatti joined the Maquis in the Correze. He was arrested and condemned to death, but because of his youth was deported ~o the Linderman work camp near Hamburg. There, he worked in diving bells two hundred meters beneath the surface. After a dramatic escape from the work camp, he made his way back to the Correze, left for England shortly thereafter, and joined the Special 57 58 MODERN DRAMA May Air Service as a parachutist. Gatti had already begun writing poems and tales during these painful years, trying all the while to exteriorise his feelings and inner experiences. After the war he became a journalist, traveled extensively through Asia, the United States, South, and Central America. He co-authored La Vie de Churchill (1954) (The Life of Churchill); an essay on China (1956); a work Siberie-Zero+L'Infini (1958) (Siberia-Zero+lnfinity); a play Le Crapaud-Buffie (1959) (The Bull-Frog). Jean Vilar and his Theatre National Populaire company produced The Bull-Frog to inaugurate the Theatre Recamier in Paris. But certain elements of the press reacted so violently against this play (a satire on dictat9rship, among other things), that it ended in failure. In 1962 when the Theatre of Marseille decided to give his play Le Voyage du Grand Tchou (The Grand Tchou's Voyage), a highly complicated work technically speaking, some people felt that Gatti had created it with the express desire of making it almost impossible to produce. However, the play was favorably reviewed and when Roger Planchon at the Theatre de la Cite in Villeurbane (Lyon) gave La Vieimaginaire de l'eboueur Auguste G (The Imaginary Life of the Street Cleaner Auguste G) later in 1962, Gatti won his reputation as a dramatist. From that time on his name was established in Franceand all over Europe. Although Gatti writes and directs filmsl as well as plays, his most creative contribution has been in the theater. Ignoring the usual concepts of time and space, as well as those of psychological development of character, he has created a theatrical universe of multiple and parallel realities: a confusing and exciting addition to the performing arts. Gatti's plays, though they are all different, usually follow...