ABSTRACT
As Antoine Vitez would have us remember, ‘The stage director interprets the signs left on paper by people from bygone centuries (this is called the text), and also, or perhaps, above all, interprets the movements and intonations of the actors who are before him on the stage’ (1988: 26). Thus, the theatre is an arc stretching between the past and present, between the age of a text and the reality of a body that exists in the present; the theatre, ‘at the crossroads of the past and the present, unites a time-space continuum within itself ’ (Banu 1987: 13). To be sure, contemporary plays are performed, but Roger Planchon denies that true staging is involved here.1 In any event, whether we are happy about the fact or deplore it, twentieth-century theatre is primarily devoted to going over the Classics, to rereading these ‘broken structures’, these ‘sunken galleons’ as Vitez describes them in a very fine essay. In his opinion, the purpose of contemporary staging is not so much to restore, or to reconstitute, as to transform, ‘by using their parts to create something else.’ Our work, says Vitez, is ‘to show the fissures of time’ (1976: 9).
