ABSTRACT
Two of the three plays which Frantz Fanon wrote in 1947–48 have survived. Fanon's brother first showed Jean Khalfa a copy of the typescript in 2000, and after a while, the Fanon estate agreed to his publishing them in the volume of lost or unpublished texts by Frantz Fanon, which Jean Khalfa edited with Robert JC Young (La Découverte, 2015 and 2018; Bloomsbury, 2017 and 2020). François Maspero, Fanon's publisher, had written of their importance but was never able to publish them. The original typescripts were lost, and had to be reconstituted from partially faded-out copies. It turned out that these are extraordinary texts – both in their dramatic writing and in what they announce of Fanon's later political work .
In content, one could say that they stage the two ‘pathologies of freedom’ described by Günther Anders in a work Fanon read very early on and referred to regularly: a) nihilism and the contradictions involved in a desperate quest for absolute authenticity and b) compensation for the contingency of being through the quest for identity and political leadership. Each of these is a theme analysed in his later works (from a psychopathological point of view in Black Skin, White Masks, from a political one in The Wretched of the Earth). In style, the plays are indebted to the neo-surrealist theatre of Césaire and the plays of Sartre as well as Claudel. Fanon was passionate about theatre, and Khalfa documented the stagings of works by these authors which he is likely to have seen whilst writing them. But when Felicity Bromley-Hall worked on staging Fanon's plays, she realised that his disturbing dramatic techniques do not just develop characters but also aim to exhibit directly and, perhaps, induce the complexities of a turbulent mind within a historical situation. The plays’ language is not just ‘mere words’ but is embodied in the actors’ performances via a deeply and strangely affecting linguistic form – in his terms, words ‘strangled by life, bristling with life…. words the colour of pulsating flesh’. Fanon's staging is not conceived as just supplementary to the text, but crucial to it – using very specific directions for lighting and sound. In that, Fanon anticipates a theatre developed later in Europe, particularly under the influence of Artaud: a theatre which directly stages a complex composition of forces through physicality and the experience of the senses, reflected in its language.
So whilst it will present the necessary historical, philosophical and aesthetical background, this paper also seeks to be a useful tool for those wishing to stage the plays. It examines how, in transmission from page to stage, the director should consider Fanon's texts as embodied words within plots, staging a dramatic exploration of vision, whether freed or obscured.
