ABSTRACT
In the concluding remarks to his Stage Directors in Modern France, David Whitton expresses some reservations about the emerging trend of ‘uncompromising intellectualism’ in French theatre of the 1970s and early 1980s that ‘invites the reflection that its ideal audience would be composed entirely of Ph.D.s in performance theory’ (1987: 279-80). One of the directors Whitton identifies with the most extreme aspects of this trend is Daniel Mesguich. At the time, Mesguich was in the early years of his career, an iconoclastic provocateur, either lauded or reviled for his extravagantly poetic, aggressively theatricalist work with classic texts, especially those of Racine (Andromaque, 1975) and Shakespeare (Hamlet, 1977). Despite enjoying high visibility in the first decade of his career – his King Lear appeared on the main stage at the Avignon Festival in 1981 – he was still on the experimental margins of the French theatre when Whitton was writing his book in the mid-1980s. Today, however, more than thirty-five years after his first mise en scène (Kafka’s The Castle, 1972), Mesguich has been, since 2007, Director of the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique and very much a central figure in French theatre. While resistance to his ‘intellectualism’ has abated over the years, it remains, along with his often extravagantly overt theatricality, a signature feature of his work.
