ABSTRACT
Overlooked by French critics, despite the literary reputations of the “scribes” (as Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud define themselves in a postscriptum), Graal Théâtre is an original dramatic re-creation of “la matière de Bretagne,” that is the tales and epic poems that are more familiarly, if too narrowly, known in English as the Arthurian legends. Drawing on a rich medieval corpus of texts in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Welsh, English (notably Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and of course French (in which the Lancelot en prose and Chrétien de Troyes’s verse narratives stand out among anonymous fragmentary variants of the same stories of love, quest, battle, death, and miracle), Delay and Roubaud have produced vivid theatrical equivalents of the best-known tales as well as many little-known ones. If you read French and, like myself, are rather put off by the Arthurian stories—perhaps because of their fantastical denouements or imposing symbolism—then Graal Théâtre offers an excellent opportunity to give this medieval subject matter a new try. As far as I know, so much of the Matter of Britain has never appeared, in any language, in a dramatic form such as Delay and Roubaud have wittily and artfully forged for their Graal Théâtre.
