Fifteen Eighty Four

Shuffling past the French Department noticeboard one day in my undergraduate first year, a small ad caught my eye. A week in Paris. All expenses paid. Was I dreaming? The small print, however, confirmed that there’s no such thing as a free déjeuner. I’d have to see a play every night and discuss it the next day with the cast and director. Groan.

Until that point I could count on one finger the number of times I’d been to the theatre: my mum, trying her best to give us what she imagined to be an educated British upbringing, once took us to a puppet show in the West End. She forgot the enormous Iranian picnic she’d prepared on the tube and from then on, I associated theatre with loss, tears and high drama, the latter not in a good way.

It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to string the beads scudding across the floor of life into a neat necklace. But I can trace a direct continuum between that trip to Paris and A New History of Theatre in France, which I’ve recently edited for CUP. That propitious week, the stars of the French stage aligned in such a once-in-a-millennium constellation that I saw Peter Brook’s The Tempest with a cast from his International Centre for Theatre Research including the Malian-Burkinabe Sotigui Kouyaté as Prospero, and the Malian Bakary Sangaré as Ariel. I spent the day watching preparations for, and the performance of an Indian kathakali-inspired production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy entitled Les Atrides at Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. I rolled in the aisles of Jérôme Deschamps’ and Macha Makeïeff’s screwball vaudeville Les Frères Zénith. And I marvelled at the Italian Nobel Laureate Dario Fo’s staging of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui, as it competed with the spectacle of gilt balconies and crystal chandeliers on display at France’s first national theatre, the Comédie-Française.

Whilst A New History of Theatre in France most certainly provides an excellent entry point for students, scholars and theatre enthusiasts unfamiliar with the top brass of French theatre like Molière, Racine or Corneille, it seeks in addition to change the terms of the debate by placing centre-stage the genders, ethnicities and classes that have had to wait in the wings both of theatres, and of theatre history. The clear-eyed analyses contained in, and across the chapters of A New History of Theatre in France, have begun to mine the seam of this new theatre history. As chapters in this collaborative volume illustrate, from the seventeenth century women began to earn themselves a place in theatre not only as actresses, but also as patrons, authors, directors and producers. Alongside Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, nineteenth-century women playwrights such as George Sand, Virginie Ancelot and Delphine de Girardin receive critical attention in the volume. Equally, A New History of Theatre in France contains chapters on decolonial playwrights Aimé Césaire and Kateb Yacine, postcolonial authors like Aristide Tarnagda and Gustave Akakpo, and migrant theatre-makers like Wajdi Mouawad.

A New History of Theatre in France bristles with French theatre’s sheer range and variety, which are perhaps unparalleled in the world. During the pre-modern period storytelling was accompanied by dance, acrobatics and notably, juggling. The fourteenth century witnessed the development of mysteries, passions, miracles, moralities, mystery-moralities, morality-farces, farces, sotties and dits. The early Renaissance gave rise to humanist tragedy, and the Wars of Religion spawned a ‘theatre of blood’. The much fêted Golden Age of the seventeenth century produced neoclassical tragedy and comedy as well as ballet de cour, alongside more popular forms like comic opera, mime and circus which sprang up in fairgrounds; and non-professional théâtre de société, hosted in private houses. Even though theatre was mainly associated with the Ancien Régime, the French revolutionaries nonetheless promoted it, over 90,000 performances taking place during the revolutionary decade in Paris alone. Outdoors, the vast revolutionary ‘fêtes’ might now be recognized as ‘live art’, immersive performance or participatory theatre. As fairground performances gradually went dark, indoor commercial theatre was amped up and by the middle of the nineteenth century Parisian theatres staged a vertiginous array of genres including melodrama, féeries and vaudeville. In the early twentieth century cabaret became a home for avant-garde performance, the high point of which was sound poetry, in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than being eclipsed by new technologies or arts, theatre has been quick to embrace them, examples including the diorama in the nineteenth century, tape recorder in the twentieth; and installation art in the twenty-first. Here, I name at least twenty different  theatre and performance genres covered in the book. This list, by no means exhaustive, testifies to the multitude of live performance forms produced in France over the centuries. Readers can look under the bonnet of a particular genre, and trace its evolution over the duration of a thousand years.

Modern drama is considered to have originated in France. The first in Europe to be written in the vernacular as opposed to Latin, medieval French theatre flourished around a millennium ago. Staged in churches, graveyards, town squares and taverns, theatre was integral to civic life. For a millennium theatre has been central to cultural life in France. A thousand years later it is only a slight exaggeration to say it’s harder to get tickets for Avignon, one of the world’s largest theatre festivals, than for the Rolling Stones’ farewell tour. In spite of predictions that first the radio, then television, then the Internet, along with various economic headwinds, would kill it off, theatre in France remains evergreen. ‘Auditoriums are still full’ in the words of Éric Ruf, interviewed in our book, who is director of the Comédie-Française, the world’s oldest continually performing theatre company.

Theatre is also a significant French export. It has provided the English language with the medieval word farce, the early modern word role, and the modern term mise-en-scène. Molière, one of the world’s most produced playwrights, is single-handedly responsible for launching European-style playwriting in North Africa and the Middle East, where he featured in the repertoire of Iran’s first national theatre. In the twentieth century the theories of Antonin Artaud transformed the course of theatre, profoundly impacting the work of the Living Theater, Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson in the United States, Marina Abramovic and Sarah Kane in Europe, Dieudonné Niangouna in Africa.

A New History of Theatre in France is the first history of French theatre to be published in over a decade and contains chapters by globally eminent theatre experts, many of whom will be read in English for the first time. Covering each century since the tenth, the book testifies to one of France’s most significant cultural outputs. It provides a comprehensive analysis of theatre spanning nearly an entire millennium, and enables readers to situate analyses of particular periods, movements or artists within a broad picture of theatre and history in France. Our collaborative history testifies to the central part theatre has played in French culture and in world cultures for over a thousand years, while re-centring individuals, groups or epochs hitherto neglected by both society and by theatre history.