French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris, and Avignon by Edward Baron Turk (review)

During a full year’s sabbatical from July 2005 through August 2006, professor of French and film studies Edward Baron Turk attended nearly 150 stage pieces with the goal of ascertaining the current pulse, trends, and style of French theatre today. His French Theatre Today is an attempt to document and record his insightful reactions to the disparate array of theatre he found, ranging from revivals of the canonical plays by Racine and Molière to new work by internationally renowned playwrights and theatre collectives, circus, standup comedy, and small-scale festival entertainments. Both in structure and prose, Turk’s writing is something like an erudite travel guide that offers either for those who cannot visit France a lucid description of its vibrant theatrical life, or for those who plan on visiting the country a useful outline of the type of theatre they may expect to see or seek out while there. Consequently, this book is an excellent resource for the scholar curious about French theatre’s present climate, those who anticipate visiting France in the near future, and those developing a syllabus for a course on contemporary European drama. The volume is filled with attractive and evocative illustrations, and its annotated bibliography is an essential guide on relevant anthologies, journals, and criticism.

In his preface, Turk identifies himself as an amateur éclaire, an enlightened amateur, whose principal aim is to “supply the reader with pertinent aesthetic and intellectual perspectives on aspects of contemporary French theatre,” with an intended audience of theatre enthusiasts and Francophiles “who are curious about an aspect of French culture that is inadequately known in the United States” (xiii). Turk offers himself as a surrogate spectator to these theatrical events, reviewing a year’s worth of theatre in three geographical locations: New York, Paris, and Avignon. The book also provides an accessible and straightforward introduction to many French playwrights, directors, theatres, and venues. As a consequence, for those curious about contemporary French artists, Turk presents an excellent starting point beyond the all-too-familiar examples of Ariane Mnouchkine, Yasmina Reza, and Claude Régy (although he does discuss these figures as well).

The most noteworthy trend indicated by Turk is a growing movement in France toward the theatre of la parole, or theatre of the word. This concept provides a clear theoretical arc that connects a variety of artists and practitioners in the country. Turk states that before this rather recent movement, “the main artistic mark (and the prime attraction for much of the public) was typically that of the director, whose vision of stage design, performance style, and textual interpretation often diluted or disregarded altogether the inherent attributes of a writer’s voice,” but la parole “has helped decrease such lopsidedness” (62). Describing Gertrude Stein as a forerunner for many of these burgeoning playwrights—“her challenge to fixed genres; her release of language from the requirements of standard syntax, of telling a set story, of delineating sequential thinking” (70)—Turk says that the theatre of la parole evokes a “sensuous, pleasurable text,” attaining “the unspeakable bliss of a jouissance” (64). Theatre of la parole, then, seeks to evoke a corporeal theatre through the expression of language. Turk describes some of France’s most internationally renowned authors, such as Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, Jean-Marie Besset, and Yasmina Reza, under this umbrella, because these dramatists indicate ways in which contemporary French dramaturgy breaks from “the idolatry of a supposed belle langue” exhibited by figures commonly associated with French theatre, such as Corneille, Molière, and Anouilh.

Turk’s discussion also explores the voices of some of France’s major ethnic minorities, offering a multiplicity of voices like Koffi Kwahulé, Édouard Glissant, Nancy Huston, Dany Laferrière, Wajdi Mouawad, and Dai Sijie, who “publicly repudiate terms ‘francophone’ and ‘francophonie’ as patronizing vestiges of a defunct French colonizing mentality.” Instead, he argues, these “multinational authors” seek to evoke “the notion of a transnational world literature written...