BARRAULT AND ARTAUD
and the harlequin. One generally thinks of mime in connection with
commedia dell'arte,
with the acrobatic activities of Arlecchino or
Zanni, or of Moliere's -5ganarelle, but Barrault uses it to a greater or
lesser extent in all his productions. His comparatively naturalistic
production of Salacrou's
Les Nuits de la Colere
depicts modern people
in
casual attitudes, but here there is a formality to the casualness,
a control, an awareness which never appears on a Broadway stage.
When Eddie Dowling makes a casual entrance in
The Glass Menag–
erie
the audience sits back and smiles; we are fond of "naturalness."
When Barrault makes a casual entrance there is a tension
in
the
audience hard to explain. Here there is a meaning to every step, a
force behind the casualness which suggests the violence of a ritual.
A good example is in the play within the play in his production of
his
own and Gide's adaptation of
Hamlet.
The fascination of the
spectacle makes it actually a "thing to catch the fancy." The queen's
stiff gestures of affection, the position of the king, lying down with
his
neck twisted and
his
ear up ready to receive the poison, and the
grotesque primitive steps of the brother are all done, to the accom–
paniment of Honegger's oriental-sounding music, as a kind of charm
suggesting the earliest origins of ritual: the killing of the old king at
the end of the old year. To revive the primitive power of theater, to
re-establish its importance at the core of human expression is to re–
discover the primordial power of symbols, rhythm, gesture, .and voice,
and to return to the basic qualities of ceremony.
Symbolism is practically unknown in the Western theater. The
Chinese theater in the Bowery is probably the only one
in
America
to use the language of the theater as such. Chinese actors, originally
imitators of marionettes, here still represent this sculptural quality in
broad, plastic movements. The decor is hypothetical. A chair can be
anything according to its position and the actors' relation to it. A
costume will signify a character's age, the color of his mask his
personality, and the size of
his
step his mood. The Balinese theater,
built like the Chinese on a vocabulary of symbols incomprehensible
to the Western world, is considered by Artaud to
be
"pure"
in
the
sense that it has no existence whatever off the stage.
The visual element in our theater has apparently degenerated
to the purely decorative. The tremendous number of plays easily
transcribed to radio suggest that the spectacle itself is merely an
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