ABSTRACT
The cover image of the January 1986 special issue of Théâtre/Public, “Dramaturgie,” offers a glimpse of what dramaturgy looked like to French theatre scholars and practitioners at the time: a photo of a hand lightly touching a single typewritten piece of paper on a desk, with other overturned pages nearby. It is dark. A small lamp illuminates the stack of paper; it is a script. In her preface to this issue, which proposed to assess the state of dramaturgy in France, Michèle Raoul-Davis made the distinction between the “literary side of the dramaturg, the person responsible for the programming and publications for productions” 1 and “the dramaturg that JeanMarie Piemme calls the ‘stage dramaturg.’” 2 Raoul-Davis asserted a mandate to dwell primarily on the latter, as “The utility [of the former] at least in the big theatres, seems evident.” 3 This distinction between stage dramaturg and literary dramaturg permeated the issue, conversations about dramaturgy at the time, and continues to do so today in definition, theory, and practice. This is amplified by the fact that in French, as in other romance languages, the word for dramaturg, dramaturge, has long meant “playwright.” In her “dramaturgically staged” 4 interview in Contemporary Theatre Review, in which she edits and arranges excerpts from interviews with several dramaturgs and one playwright, British scholar Clare Finburgh argues that the terms “dramaturgy” and “dramaturg” remain “diverse and unresolved” 5 in France in 2010. My purpose here is an examination of the evolution of French dramaturgy, to ask when and how French theatre developed its own unique practice of dramaturgy. Tracking the status of the French dramaturg is not only compelling for the story of dramaturgy in France, but also illuminates key moments in French theatre history.
