Les Voies de la Création Théâtrale ed. by Jean Jacquot and Denis Bablet (review)

BOOK REVIEWS LES VOlES DE LA CREA TION THEATRALE, edited by Jean Jacquot and Denis Bablet. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1970. 2 vols., 347; 349 pp. Since the mid-fifties, under the direction of Jean Jacquot, researchers at the National center of scientific research in Paris have brought out one volume after another of remarkable studies on the theater. Some have been historical; others have discussed specific questions pertaining to the stage. Increasingly the research has been oriented toward the study of the play's life on the stage; and increasingly the monograph or collection of separate individual essays has been superseded by cooperative teamwork. The two volumes published under the title "The paths of theatrical creation" are the result of three to four years of a collective investigation, bearing on a specific question: the modalties of the passage from script to stage, as it evolved in a number of specific, contemporary productions. Each volume approaches the question from a different angle. The first volume examines experimental theater groups which are directing their efforts to a renewal of the stage language itself: the actors' use of their body and voice; the organization of the spatial relation between actors and stage, spectators and stage; the relations of actors and spectators to the text. Not, as Mr. Jacquot points out in his "presentation " of the volume, that those techniques are examined as new. The researchers describe them in terms of the directors' concern: the exploration of their potentialities in the elaboration of a coherent stage language, a "style" coordinating all the resources of the medium. The process of elaboration of that language is then studied in careful detail. Lengthy descriptions of the various stages through which specific plays developed in the course of production are presented and the intent and effect of the separate choices made are emphasized in terms of the final total effect. Four experimental groups are studied in Volume I: Grotowski's Laboratory Theater in Wroclaw, and his production of Calderon's The Constant Prince; Eugene Barba's Odin Teatret in Holesbro and Kaspariana; The Living Theater and The Brig, Frankinstein, Antigone and Paradise Now; ChaIkin's Open Theater and its production of Van Ittalie's The Serpent. The volume ends on a briefer study of a free-lance director, the Argentinian Victor Garcia, and his production of Arrabal 's The Automobile Graveyard. In this volume the emphasis is placed on the language of the stage; the literary text-where it exists-is considered as one component of that language, and like the other elements, open to transformation, as the dynamic process of creating a spectacle develops. In an extreme form, this becomes clearly apparent in the Living Theater's resort to improvisation, the verbal element in the play eVOlving from the stage situation envisaged but not yet verbalized at the outset. The play in its totality is a collective creation. In contrast, still a collective creation, a playas envisaged by Grotowski, is a controlled language of fixed signs, a "partition" as it were. The emphasis in the second volume is different. The process of theatrical creation starts from an established text; the six studies included examine as exhaustively as possible the progressive series of steps that relate the written script to the production, and decipher these in terms of the director's understanding of 355 356 MODERN DRAMA December that text, but in relation to what he thinks a dramatic spectacle should be. Each option in the staging is significant. Of the two "modes of existence" of a play, as written text and as a production, it is the second that is stressed: "A theatrical spectacle is the deciphering by a group (director, stage designer, actors, etc.) of a dramatic work. It is itself proposed for deciphering to a public. The reaction of the public can never be other than the interpretation of an interpretation." The plays chosen are all socio-political in intent: Brecht's Mother Courage and Arturo Ui; Max Frisch's Andorra; Peter Weiss's The Investigation; Aime Cesaire's King Christopher and A Season in the Congo; and Death and Life Severine by the Brazilian poet Joao Cabral de...