ABSTRACT
An examination of the five complex novels behind Dodin’s ‘theatre of prose’ – Lord of the Flies being the simplest of them – shows just how remarkable their refashioning really was in his incisive and succinct productions. Even The Devils, whose length exceeds the normal working hours of a day, is an extraordinarily compact work. What is equally noteworthy is how seriously Dodin took upon himself the role of a chronicler of his times who, through his particular kind of immediate, cut-and-cull performance writing, treated the past as if it, too, were the present. The purpose was to remember history in the making. Moreover, the censorship of The Devils and Chevengur had played tricks with the past and cultural memory. The Devils, although available for some three decades, had not yet acquired the patina of a classic. Chevengur’s very recent appearance in 1989, after 60 years of suppression, made it a piece of new writing imperatively to be explored for the theatre by a theatre whose hallmark was its voice of the now.
