ABSTRACT
When I re-read these programme notes to Theater of the Ears, written over 15 years ago, I wonder at the implications of the Shakespearian query, ‘who’s there?’, an exclamation that conceals an entire philosophy. My discovery of the writings of Valère Novarina took place in the early 1990s. I specify writings, rather than theatre, for though I attended at that time several plays he staged and greatly admired the monologs performed by André Marcon, I especially relished Novarina’s writing for linguistic and literary reasons. His writings instantiate the state of maximal flux, mutation and transformation of the French language, much in the lineage of Rabelais and Artaud: in works such as Le drame de la vie (1984) and Discours aux animaux (1987), every parameter of the text-orthography, lexicon, grammar, syntax, narration-is reinvented; and his reflections on theatre, as in La lettre aux acteurs (1989), offer instructions as to how his words could be made flesh on stage.
