Contemporary French Theatre

Books in Review Contemporary French Theatre Lenora Champagne French Theatre Today. Gary O'Connor. Pitman Publishing, 118 pp., £1.95 (paperback). Mettre en scene au present. Raymonde Temkine. La Cite - L'Age d'Homme, 199 pp., Unpriced (paperback). Theater and Revolution in France Since 1968. Judith Graves Miller. French Forum, Publishers, 169 pp., $7.85 (paperback). Sub-Stance 18/19. Theater in France: Ten Years of Research. Edited by Josette Feral. Sub-Stance, Inc., 232 pp., $5.00 (paperback). Ten years since 1968, a watershed year for contestation and protest throughout the world, an apparently more temperate social climate prevails. In this period of relative calm - only the occasional eruption ofterrorism ruffles the ordinarily complacent surface of civil life - recalling that tumultuous and energetic time frequently assumes the character of a nostalgic gesture. The euphoria of May, though temporary, continued to affect various aspects oflife in France, among them the theatre, long after the restoration of "order" was accomplished. The enthusiasm expressed by some of the authors under discussion, for the ideas and practices in theatre which developed largely in response to May 1968, makes doubly disturbing the current despondency and lethargy among French theatre artists, mist ofwhom are suffering economically during the present period ol reaction. 70 After the leftist dream of coming to power was once again thwarted in the recent elections, artists with political commitment find it difficult to continue working in a society being programmed on all levels by a bureaucratic government in league with "developers ." (In fact, the French Communist Party does not offer a radical alternative to this situation, something of which theatre artists are well aware.) Last fall, theoretical books which had been circulating just prior to May, such as Guy Debord's La Soci&t du Spectacle, had been reprinted and were making a reappearance in anticipation of a victory by the left. Filmmakers and theatre directors were unable to work, as all subsidy allocations were awaiting the election results. There was grumbling on all sides; a general malaise was pervasive. The four books under review, taken in conjunction, offer explanations and illustrations ofthe highly political nature of French theatre - political even when not so by subject-or choice, because of the heavy government involvement in cultural programming and funding . Separately, they provide an inventory of the various directions in which theatre - and theatre criticism - has gone in the past ten years. Gary O'Connor's study of contemporary French theatre, published as part of the slim-volumed "Theatre Today" series, is essentially a work of drama criticism. In a book that claims to be about today's theatre, he emphasizes post-war dramatists such as Sartre, Ionesco and Beckett, while virtually ignoring collective creation. O'Connor's bias is so obviously a literary one that even when devoting a mere nine pages to directors (all but two of them very wellestablished at the time of his writing), he talks about Planchon's playwriting! He reveres Claudel, Montherlant and, above all, Barrault , whom he considers to be the single most important figure in French theatre. Occasionally, he will make a truly startling observation which reflects his Catholic background, such as "Marxism is usurping the Jesuit tradition in the theatre." To give O'Connor his due, he provides excellent thematic analyses ofthe plays he discusses. (Although, as always, it is fascinating to see how differently two people can see the same play: O'Connor is enormously enthusiastic about Rene Ehni's Queferez-vous en novembre?, performed shortly after the May 1968 uprising. He terms this "picture of revolutionary inertia . . . brilliant." Judith Miller, on the other hand, speaking essentially from the point of view ofthe French theatre artists who were profoundly touched by May, comments that Ehni's pessimism rendered his satire "barely palatable.") If one is interested primarily in the literature of the stage, O'Connor's overview is fine. It is well-organized, giving in71 formation on finances (though much of this was outdated even by publication in 1975), influences (he cites Claudel, Artaud and Brecht, the inclusion of Claudel being a debatable one),. and then devotes several chapters to authors, of whom there is a broad representation . But in a book that is ostensibly...