Mary
Otis Hivnor
BARRAULT AND ARTAUD
The theater is the only institution in France which may
be said to have benefited from the war. Deprived of all else during
the occupation, people could still go to the theater at night, forget
their anxieties, and often find in the plays themselves a veiled ex–
pression of their unexpressed indignation towards the Germans.
It
was during this period that the Comedie
Fran~aise
seems to have
reached a peak with productions like Claudel's
Le Soulier de Satin
and Obey's
Noah,
and it is out of this period that Jean-Louis Bar–
rault developed, rebelling from the Comedie, and breaking away
to found his own theater. It is curious that France, devastated by
the war, should
be
fertile soil for an important young director with
a new convention. But perhaps the chief instigator of this convention
is a man who wrote before the war, and in a sense prophesied it,
Antonin Artaud.
Almost unknown outside of France, Artaud had a theater of
his own during the twenties, and wrote a book,
Le Theatre
et
son
Double
(published in 1938), which had great influence on a small
literary and theater world. The fact that he has been insane for the
last eight years is no dampener to his surrealist admirers who dmgged
him out of his asylum a while ago to give a lecture. But Artaud's most
valuable ideas, the ideas which have influenced playwrights and
directors, are all expressed in his book. It shows the importance of
drama in primitive society, its closeness to magic and ritual, and
the importance of symbolism in ritual theater. Artaud was fascinated
by Barrault's early mimes, since they seemed to be the very ex–
pression of his own conception of theater.
Barrault was originally known as a mime, and taught the
art
for several
years
at Charles Dullin's school. In the French film
Les
Enfants du Paradis
he gives excellent examples of both the fool
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