French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris, and Avignon

4. From Dialogue to Parole

‘Theatre of la​parole’ The verbally and viscerally scorching performances of Isabelle Huppert in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (chapter 2) and of the six actresses in the staged reading of Koffi Kwahulé’s Misterioso-119 (chapter 3) were a tantalizing foretaste of what I would soon recognize as a distinctive tendency of current writing for the French stage. This style or mode of creation can perhaps best be referred to as theatre of la parole, or theatre of the word.The term derives in part from the title of a 1989 collection of theoretical essays, Le théâtre des paroles (The Theatre of Words), by Valère Novarina, one of the tendency’s most prominent exponents.1 In programming works by both Novarina (b. 1947) and the novelist-poet Olivier Cadiot (b. 1956), ACT FRENCH showcased a brand of French spectacle making in which actors are called upon less to play a prescribed character in a well-plotted story than to let their bodies function as musical instruments, actualizing texts construed by their authors primarily as scores for intensely embodied , hypersensual stage events. “Speech,” asserts Novarina in Le théâtre des paroles, “is something other than having to mutually transmit feelings or share ideas. . . . [S]peaking is breathing and play. Speaking negates words. Speaking is drama.”2 Pointing to the disruptive bodily force that both engenders his texts and determines how actors will perform them, Novarina specifies: “I write in the absence of myself, like a dance without dancing. Undone from my language, unmoored from my thoughts . . . I write by ear, I write backwards. I hear everything.”3 As our experience of 4.48 Psychosis and Misterioso-119 made clear, such theatre aims to touch audiences in an equally aberrant manner, jolting 3 French Voices . . . . . 4 From Dialogue to Parole . . . . . . . . .. 5 Edgy and Cool . . . . . . . . . . ​ N E W ​ Y O R K 62 our ears, eyes, brains, and guts from their conventional patterns of response. • • • Many of the French-language writers associated with this theatrical sensibility—Novarina, Cadiot, Kwahulé, Olivier Py, Michel Vinaver, Nathalie Sarraute, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Philippe Minyana, Jean-Luc Lagarce, Christophe Huysman, Noëlle Renaude, Joël Pommerat, among others—are also part of what is sometimes called a “return of the author” to French theatre. As noted at the end of chapter 2, the late 1960s brought to the fore an influential cluster of director-auteurs, such as Ariane Mnouchkine, Claude Régy, and Roger Planchon, whose personalized productions of established classics , of famous authors’ lesser-known works, or of collective creations based on nondramaturgic materials tended to reduce opportunities for new writers for the stage. This imbalance continued through much of the 1980s, when Jack Lang’s Ministry of Culture appointed a slightly younger generation of director-auteurs to head important state-supported theatres throughout France—including Patrice Chéreau , Jean-Pierre Vincent, Jacques Lassalle, Jean Jourdheuil, and Georges Lavaudant. Even when new writers did manage to get produced in such venues, 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.4 The advent of authors engaged in what we are calling theatre of la parole has helped to decrease such lopsidedness. In varying ways and to different degrees, these writers aim to inscribe into the very substance of their literary texts—their words on the printed page—a radical manner of performance, a reinvigorated theatrical sensibility, and a readily identifiable writerly voice. While reclaiming the word as theatre’s core component, these authors nonetheless conceive of their writing as inextricably tied to the work of an actor’s torso, limbs, and vocal and respiratory apparatus in performance. Also paramount for them is the design of the physical and acoustic space within which the actor operates and through which the actor exerts upon an audience the visceral, sensual, and cerebral impact called for by the text. Laurence Mayor, a veteran Novarinian actress, notes both the free- From​Dialogue​to​Parole 63 dom and responsibility that such a paradigm confers upon the performer : “When I realized that the actor does not have to transport herself toward some imaginary space intended as an escape from reality but, on the contrary, must discover both the abyss and the limitless power of...