Translation of Arrabal's Text

Translation of Arrabal's Text LAURE RIESE • WHETHER IN CARACAS, Tokyo, New York or Moscow, the theatre is in the throes of transformation. In the past few months, I have travelled all over the world to see my plays in production, and everywhere I have encountered the same renaissance of the stage: crises are everywhere , it seems, except in the theatre. About the fifties in Paris, theatre renovates art. Ionesco's Lesson teaches us to speak neo-Spanish; with Beckett we wait for Godot, and Adamov conquers us with his large and small manoeuvres. These brilliant plays caused a tremendous surprise, although they were relegated to minuscule theatres, their productions were not subsidized, and were either ignored or disliked. Fortunately, Martin Esslin decided to gather the works of these three playwrights together with those of Pinter, Genet, Albee, and my own first plays under a title that was bound to succeed: theatre of the absurd. Time has passed, and curiously enough the expression "that's pure Ionesco" applies to a conversation where humour and confusion are properly mixed. People also say "that's straight out of Beckett" to describe perfectly a state of physical and mental misery. "Avant-garde" or "absurd" theatre is simply closer to reality than the theatre which preceded it, showing the secret side of our instincts and impulses (the hidden part of the iceberg) which had never before been brought out with such precision. In the late sixties, it is said-strangely enough-that the theatre "discovers the body." I attended several symposiums on that subject. What does it mean? A new manner of expression made up of image, gesture, and to some extent the body, replaces words and text, the 219 220 LAURA RIESE communication used by the absurd theatre. Those studying this new form are interested in plays of Grotowski's Living Theatre, and my own. It all begins with the ephemera of panic, with Peter Brook's U.S., with the American happenings of Jack Smith and Vaccaro; especially with the Living Theatre's Paradise Now and the Automobile Junk Yard staged by Victor Garcia, one witnessed two shock plays that would be epoch-making. In the midst of an affluent society, poet, author, and director feel themselves drawn towards destruction, and since they foresee that the world is doomed by over-production, over-population and repletion, they create a convulsive theatre fitting the times. At such a moment hysteria breaks loose, words die. Jack Smith best illustrates this tendency ; his mad creativity drives him to stage p_roductions owing nothing to public taste and known only to an enthusiastic minority (e.g., Fellini). Jack Smith's work leads in two directions: the mystic route taken by George Wilson's "autosacramental" mute of Le Regard du Sourd, and that taken by Vaccaro, creating anew a world theatre while stressing its downfall. Suddenly, in the last few months, it seems that the playwright has recovered his speech. How surprised I was in Tokyo when the writerdirector Terayama advised me to listen to the translation of his text. The same Terayama who had before produced spectacles of frenzied movement, is suddenly evoking his childhood in Cache cache pastoral, in which several poems are recited. In the same vein, Vaccaro, before staging my last play in New York, proposes to make of it a long peace poem. Bob Wilson, after his silent Regard du Sourd, writes a "spoken" opera. Peter Brook, after his Orgast, where destruction dominates, gives us a limpid Timon of Athens. . .. Such examples abound. Those who were champions of the theatre of gesture, of nudity, of silence or of derision, are now evolving a theatre of the imaginary where the lyrical power of language bursts forth. The Noh lesson Such an evolution cannot take place without creating confusion and problems. Some people wonder if "today's" actor can still recite a text. In the face of the phenomenon of the art of gesture which "discovered the body," after an initial reticence was overcome, an extraordinary change has taken place: the type of theatre formerly despised and maligned became "the thing to do." It may be feared that a certain class of actors and directors...