ABSTRACT
In 1988 after the late Antoine Vitez had left to take up his appointment at the Comedie Fran\aise, the choice of his successor as director of the Theatre National de Chaillot, the old Theatre National Populaire of Jean Vilar and others, caused many eyebrows to be raised rather high. Jerome Savary was and still is the epitome of post-1968 subversion, a ringleader of the anti-establishment funand-games school. This brilliant but 'unsolid' enfant terrible of the psychedelic counter-culture was now apparently coming off the streets, stopping his hippy wanderings and taking charge of one of France's best-known institutions. To be fair, the great anarchie days of his Grand Magie Circus were effectively over weIl before 1988, but Savary had scarcely become 'respectable' for all that, and placing hirn in the vast and monumental Palais de Chaillot, with its marble solemnity, was most certainly controversial. For in Savary's theatre, however well-heeled and well-scrubbed it may have become recently, there still lurks, in the words of David Whitton, 'a theatre of greasepaint, false noses, trapeze artistes, percussion instruments and fireworks'.!
