Behind the Masks and Metaphors
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
Behind the Masks and Metaphors MODERN FRENCH THEATRE By Jacques Guicharnaud Yale. 304 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by ALAN SCHNEIDER Director of "Krapp's Last Tape' and "Endgame"; and "The American...
...But no serious reader will fail to be haunted...
...Fortunately, it still does not cost as much to publish a book as it does to put on a play—and the reviews don't all come out on the same day...
...his specific theatrical techniques are probed and given perspective...
...It should be kept on the shelf within handy reach and dipped into again and again for the music of its particular spheres to be felt most hauntingly...
...It is merely a literate, detailed and generally fascinating account of the serious French theater between Giraudoux and Samuel Beckett, that is, between the 1928 production of Giraudoux's first play, Siegfried, and the latest work by the author of Waiting for Godot...
...Instead of productions of Bertold Brecht, we merely have articles on Brecht...
...his basic ideas and themes are analyzed and related to both past and future efforts...
...It deserves to be applauded...
...and while Michael de Ghelderode is little more than a name—the flow of books on the contemporary French theater has become a torrent...
...This, of course, is not a happy state of affairs, but so long as our theater remains a minor adjunct of the slot-machine industry, we're stuck with it...
...Half-mad, obsessed with his fiery vision of what life and the theater should be, Artaud tried vainly in his lifetime to demolish and then to reconstruct the temple of the theater...
...his concern is for the play as it comes alive on the stage—and in the minds and hearts of the audience...
...and few of his ultimate answers are left unquestioned...
...Thus, more and more we tend to read those plays which we are less and less likely to see...
...Included also is a penetrating, although brief, summary of the philosophy and influence of Antonin Artaud, author of The Theatre and its Double, and high-priest or at least prophet of the entire movement...
...He manages somehow to blend the literary scholar's perception with the know-how of the practical theater man...
...The second appendix is a compendium of premieres and significant revivals...
...His is not an easy book to read once—or all at once...
...At the same time, Guicharnaud is equally aware of modern French theater's basic progression and basic unity: against realism, for a true poetry of the theater, toward the questioning of all values and conventions—of the theater as well as of life...
...In death, his influence has been paramount in creating what he basically sought in life: "a shattering theater which not only deeply moves the spectator but disturbs his very being...
...It deals with those recent (and not so recent) developments in French playwriting and theatrical metaphysics which have begun to affect our own theater practice—if not yet our experience of actually seeing the plays produced...
...Each dramatist is carefully examined from a moral and philosophical—as well as theatrical— point of view...
...It is invaluable as a summary and general reference and, although brief in compass, it is as brilliant an appraisal as the body of the book...
...Guicharnaud's approach is always compassionate, always aware of ambiguities and paradoxes, evocative rather than limiting, and provocative even when one disagrees with his conclusions...
...Guicharnaud's book is not intended as a definitive or even a scholarly study...
...One lists and briefly discusses almost every significant production and director of the modern French theater before and since the work of the theorist and reformer, Jacques Copeau, who was the French theater's fountainhead...
...Equally valuable are two appendices...
...It even deserves some more productions...
...Guicharnaud gives Artaud due credit and clarity...
...while Jean Giradoux and Jean Anouilh remain only sporadically (and usually unsuccessfully) produced...
...What emerges is a strong sense of the special theatrical and philosophical world created by each playwright—from "the reincarnation of perfected essences" of Giraudoux's theater, through the differing "theaters of the supernatural" of Paul Claudel and Jean Cocteau, the "anguish" of Anouilh, the complexities of "man and his acts" in Sartre and Camus, to Eugene Ionesco's "mirror of the world as a nonsensical mechanism" and Beckett's idea of "life as a game a game which never stops ending...
...Jacques Guicharnaud's Modern French Theatre is the latest and one of the most durable additions to this assortment...
...For, through its subtle and sophisticated eloquence, through Guicharnaud's deeply fell search for essences and nuances, the reader may gradually come to comprehend—as well as it may be comprehended in English—how the French theater of the past halfcentury has managed its masks and metaphors, and how it has reached out behind the masks—"the masks behind which man was hiding the fact that he is a metaphysical and tragic being a being, if not without hope (for there's Claudel's salvation and Sartre's action), at least without illusion...
...Instead of productions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, we have new translations and new studies of the two French writers...
...Since this is the vision which has come increasingly to shape our theater and the theater of the Western world, this is no small achievement...
...and "The American Dream" As our theater-going opportunities steadily diminish in quantity and quality, our opportunities in theater reading continue to improve in both directions...
...While we have, for example, not seen such major works of the contemporary French theater as Sartre's Nekrassov or God and the Devil, Camus' adaptation of The Possessed, or Henri de Montherlant's recent play, Queen After Death...
Vol. 44 • October 1961 • No. 35
