ABSTRACT
IN THE 15TH APRIL issue of Revue d’Art Dramatique, your contributor M. Pierre Véber reported, with politely ironic neutrality, on the performance at the Théâtre d’Art, on Friday 27 March.1 He briefly refers to one of the aspects of what we attempted that evening, in The Girl with the Severed Hands: a complete simplification of the dramatic means. Please permit me a little space to set out in a little more detail and without obscurity the innovation in staging I attempted. Also, the mise en scène necessarily depends on the dramatic system adopted, and since there are symbols, the mise en scène is a sign and a symbol in itself. Nowhere is the inanity of Naturalism more clearly apparent than in the theatre. Think of the splendours of the Théâtre Libre. Time and time again, we’ve watched Monsieur Antoine die there with accomplished art (for want of a better word); men and women, whores and pimps have had the most banal conversations there and made the crudest remarks, just like in real life; each statement, on its own, was truthful and the author might have heard them from his caretaker, his lawyer, or from people passing on the street or any dull ordinary person you like. But this dialogue showed nothing whatever of how one character di»ered from his neighbour or what constitutes in him the quid proprium that distinguishes one monad from another. To create the complete illusion of life, it was thought clever to build scrupulously accurate sets, real fountains murmuring centre stage and meat dripping blood on the butcher’s stall.2 And yet, despite the meticulous care with which the whole exterior of things is represented, the drama was misplaced and unfathomable and the illusion entirely lacking. The truth is that Naturalism, by which I mean making use of specific facts, of trifling and arbitrary documents, is the very opposite of theatre. The whole of drama is above all a synthesis: Prometheus, Orestes, Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan are creatures of a general humanity, in whom a single-minded and commanding passion is embodied with extraordinary intensity. The poet has breathed supernatural life into them; he created them by force of language, and set them o» across the world, pilgrims in eternity. Dress them in tattered smocks and if Aeschylus or Shakespeare has crowned them, they will be kings, and their absent ermine robes will shine forth joyously, if they gleam in the verse. A universe unfolds around them, sadder or more magnificent than our own, and the grotesque backcloths of the travelling circus are the dream architecture that the poet places in the mind of the willing spectator. The word creates the set and everything else as well.
