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  • The Performance of Shakespeare in France since the Second World War
  • David Bradby
The Performance of Shakespeare in France since the Second World War. By Nicole Fayard. Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. iii + 616 pp. Hb £89. 95.

Amid all the cultural upheavals in France since the Second World War, Shakespeare's plays have never fallen out of fashion. Picking up the story where Jacquot left off in his Shakespeare en France (1964), Fayard attempts to unravel the reasons for this continuing phenomenon and the light it sheds on developments in mise en scène. Her opening two chapters deal fairly rapidly with the period before 1968; her real interest is in understanding how and why Shakespeare continued to be performed by the iconoclastic directors of the post-1968 period and then again by the postmodern directors of more recent times. Her study is based on some magnificently detailed documentation: pages 331-593 consist of a vast chronological table, starting in 1959 and concluding in 1998, which gives details of directors, performers, designers, and place(s) of performance for 808 different productions of plays by Shakespeare. She correctly notes that May 1968 did not bring about an institutional revolution in France's theatres: far from [End Page 110] being dethroned in the aftermath of 1968, Shakespeare was produced by both the young turks and the older revolutionaries, from Chéreau and Lavaudant to Sobel and Planchon. In fact, she writes, 'the context of intense experimentation that followed May 1968 proved invigorating for Shakespeare's theatre' (p. 118) as the pre-1968 concern with 'political' Shakespeare gave way to a postmodern deconstruction of the text and a fabulous proliferation of visionary theatre. Not being part of the French classical heritage, Shakespeare's texts seemed more readily available to cutting, rewriting, re-ordering and even to the interpolation of entirely different textual material. Not respecting the unities, they offered a more fertile ground for cultivating complex stage imagery, liable to sudden alterations or unexpected, dream-like visions. Moreover, the self-reflexive concerns of The Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream encouraged the solipsistic tendencies of many directors seeking to 'reinvent aesthetic and scenographic conventions' (p. 158). Even while they were pursuing their own aesthetic agendas, many directors found that Shakespeare's plays proved an excellent alibi, since they were seen as ideal exemplars of a 'true popular theatre', capable of speaking to men and women of all kinds and conditions. Every aesthetic tendency could find in Shakespeare what it needed, from those who, like Sobel, continued to see Shakespeare as the great commentator on political affairs, to those postmodernists such as Lavaudant who, in Léonardini's words 'lacèrent, décousent, écorchent, taillent, écartèlent, concassent, pulvérisent, mettent en charpie le grand Will' (p. 306). After a general overview of her historical period, Fayard provides three more detailed studies of individual directors noted for their innovative Shakepeare productions: Lavaudant, Mesguich and Braunschweig. This chapter is the most useful of the book: it goes into enormous detail to chronicle all the relevant data necessary for the reader to fully grasp the complexities at work in these productions. If the book still betrays its origins as a thesis, it is nonetheless a precious resource, and will be treasured by students of French theatre. [End Page 111]

David Bradby
Royal Holloway, University of London
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