COLLECTED WORKS OF ANTONIN ARTAUD

VOLUME TWO
Previously published

VOLUME ONE

Correspondence with Jacques Riviere

Umbilical Limbo
Nerve Scales
Art and Death
Unpublished Prose and Poetry

THE CENCI

THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE

In preparation

VOLUME THREE

Scenarios
On the Cinema
Interviews
Letters

VOLUME FOUR

The Theatre and its Double

The Cenci
Documents on the Theatre and its Double
Documents on The Cenci
 ANTONIN ARTAUD

COLLECTED WORKS

VOLUME TWO

Translated by Victor Corti

THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

TWO STAGE SCENARIOS AND TWO PRODUCTION PLANS

REVIEWS

ON LITERATURE AND THE PLASTIC ARTS

CALDER & BOY ARS · LONDON

 First published in Great Britain in 1971
by Calder and Boyars Ltd
18 Brewer Street London W1

Originally published as
Antonin Artaud: Oeuvres Completes, Tome 11
by Editions Gallimard, Paris 1961

© Editions Gallimard, 1961

© This translation, Calder and Boyars Ltd, 1971

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISBN o 7145 0171 9 cloth edition

ISBN o 7145 0172 7 paper edition

Any paperback edition of this book whether published

simultaneously with, or subsequent to, the hard bound
edition is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise
disposed of, without the publishers' consent, in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is p ublished
.

Printed in Great Britain by

Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 7

THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

The Alfred Jarry Theatre ( 1 926)
The Alfred Jarry Theatre ( 1 926-2 7 season)
Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre
The Alfred Jarry Theatre ( 1 928 season)
The Alfred Jarry Theatre ( 1 929)
The Alfred Jarry Theatre and Public Hostility
Letter to Ida Mortemart alias Domenica
Letter to Ida Mortemart (Second Version)
Strindberg's A Dream Play : Programme Notes
A MIME PLAY AND A STAGE SYNOPSIS

The Philosopher's Stone 73

There is no more Firmament 79
"Suggested act in street . . . " 93
TWO PRODUCTION PLANS

Production plan for Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata 97

Production plan for Le Coup de Trafalgar, a middle-class
·

play in 4 Acts by Roger Vitrac 1 06

' ' I 19
NOTES ON THE TRICKSTERS BY STEVE PASSEUR

REVIEWS

At the Theatre de I' Oeuvre 127

Charles Dullin's I' Atelier 1 28
L'Atelier Theatre 1 30
Carmosine at I'Atelier 1 33
Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Comedic
des Champs-Elysees 1 34
The Secrets of Love, by Roger Vitrac 1 36
The Tricksters by Steve Passeur at I' Atelier 1 38
The Theatre Strike 1 42
Subway at Studio des Champs-Elysees 143
Le Coup de Trafalgar by Roger Vitrac at l'Atelier 1 44
Annabella at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees 147
Shakespeare's As rOU Like It at the Theatre des Champs-
Elysees 1 48
ABOUT A LOST PLAY

"With decentralisation as a goal . . . " 151

" . . . a portrait of the period . . "
. 1 53
"The Wrath of Heaven . . " . 1 54
ON LITERATURE AND THE PLASTIC ARTS

Big Stores and Little Taste I 59

A Profile of the Autumn Salon 16I
Expression at the Salon des Independ ants 1 64
A Pre-Dadaist's Remarks 1 69
Men and their Work I71
A Visit to Fraye the painter 1 72
Lugne-Poe and Painting 1 74
The Spring Salons 1 75
Maurice Magre and Enchantment 1 77
Pierre Mac Orlan and Adventure Stories 1 79
The XIVth Autumn Salon 181
Ungracious Elsa by Pierre Mac Orlan 1 84
Cynosure by Celine Arnauld 1 85
" In none of the Paris Galleries . . " . I 87
Letter from Paris I 89
Matha and the Enthusiast by Jean de Bosschere 1 90
Handji by Robert Poulet I 92
Magic in Ancient Egypt by Fran�ois Lexa 1 94
The Cup of Gold by Ludwig Tieck 1 96
A Curious Person's Copy Book by Lise Deharme 1 99
Satan the Obscure by Jean de Bosschere 200
Balthus Exhibition at the Galerie Pierre 20 1
Life, Love, Death, the Void and the Wind by Roger
Gilbert-Lecomte 203
Naumburg Church an album by Walter Hege and
Wilhelm Pinder 2 06
NOTES 211
 INTRODUCTION

After an all-out attack on literature during his Surrealist period,

Antonin Artaud then began a similar attack on dramatic
literature. With Alfred Jarry as mentor, he commenced a
systematic onslaught on theatre as it then stood, turning its
own illusion against it to attain his ends. Nothing was spared ;
living-room drama was mercilessly satirised, verse drama
ridiculed, the stage became a provocation, and Naturalism the
visual subconscious. Despite only eight performances by the
Jarry Theatre during the years 1927-29, he succeeded in
turning theatre upside down and the effects of this upheaval
have not ceased to be felt since. The productions recorded
below initiated the theatre of cruelty, substituted movement
and stylisation in place of static realism and led him to develop
the stage scenario as a replacement for dialogue plays, all three
ultimately developed in full in the author's famous Theatre
and its Double.
Even prior to 1926, Artaud had evolved certain ideas on the
need for theatre to portray the metaphysical side of human
nature. He considered this essential in order to re-establish a
subconscious link between actor and spectator. What he had
not discovered was how this might be achieved in terms of
expression, and it was his partner, Roger Vitrac, who provided
him with many of the answers. Vitrac had also been a Surrea­
list, like so many others he had quarrelled with Andre Breton,
and wished to make his career writing for the stage. He had
published his first play in 1925 , which Artaud had enthusiastic­
ally reviewed (The Secrets of Love). It was to have a greater
effect on the latter than he later admitted, for this was the first
modern play that reintroduced the concept of metaphysical
cruelty. It was written in a bitingly ironic style that was natural
to its author who inhabited the cafes and delighted in their
malicious, witty chat. Certainly Vitrac exploited this trait in
7
his next and more famous play, Victor or the Children are in
Power, where he practised mental cruelty on middle-class audi­
ences, and Artaud was also not slow in adopting this form of
cruelty as his own. But Vitrac did not take either principle as
seriously as Artaud and began to treat his partner as a figure
of fun, an extremist. He knew that having his plays produced
by the scabrous Jarry Theatre would render the chance of
transfers by commercial managements an impossibility, and in
contrast with Artaud, he had social and financial aspirations.
Thus although they continued to agree on what theatre should
present, their personalities were too much at variance and by
1930 their association ended. ·

The Secrets of Love used other expressive means later

incorporated by Artaud in his Theatre of Cruelty. One of these
was the use of all kinds of puppets, no doubt imitating Alfred
Jarry's puppet king Ubu, in this theatre named after him .
Artaud considered that the introduction of puppets would
induce the metaphysical fear produced by the inhuman repre­
sentations of Oriental dance drama. When speaking of the
Balinese theatre, he was to write : "And there is a striking
similarity between the truly terrifying look of their devil, prob­
ably of Thibetan origin, and a certain puppet with leafy
green nails, its hands distended with white gelatine, the finest
ornament of one of the first plays of the Alfred Jarry Theatre. "
This element of metaphysical terror was to be heightened by
portraying dismemberment. Even in Artaud's earliest play,
The Spurt of Blood, we find a succession of limbs raining down
on stage, followed by " feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades,
porticoes, temples and retorts. " Dismemberment was always
used by the Jarry Theatre to depict an underlying mental state
rather than bloodshed. From a practical sense, puppets, them­
selves the metaphysical element, could readily be dismembered,
thereby compounding both applications. Most often the sawing,
hacking and chopping of corpses described in Artaud's stage
directions is an expression of mental conflict or uncertainty, just
as the product of violence is often creation, albeit de-humanised.
Artaud added a third element to the above, de-identification.
8
Again this was not new but the Alfred Jarry Theatre was the
first to make it a main feature of their productions. The audi­
ence was never permitted to identify with any of the characters
in the plays, for once they were allowed to do so their senses
became lulled. In order fully to appreciate performances
spectators must be kept constantly on the alert so that they
remained receptive to the physical effects. At least, so Artaud
reasoned, but he only achieved his aims at the cost of a great
deal of incomprehension. So that any attempt to identify
became impossible, he rehearsed his actors in ultra-stylised,
often jerky and exaggerated moves. No doubt this partly
stemmed from his own acting style (he was nicknamed the
barbed-wire actor), but it also served to strip the action of any
Naturalism. The company spoke in strained and unnatural
voices, often to the accompaniment of musique concrete from
the orchestra, group movement was used to the fullest and
mime brought into play wherever appropriate. All theatre's
traditional and well-loved tricks were amplified (sometimes
coming dangerously close to parody) until stage illusion was
shattered, the reality of the plays then standing out as naked as
those puppets which featured in its productions.
All the factors mentioned above are present in the illustra­
tions that accompany this volume, along with a sense of
humour and a decided air of provocation. During the I 92 o's
many stage productions put on by young people were intended
as a deliberate provocation to their elders and the Alfred Jarry
Theatre was no exception to this, witness the Claudel incident
below. But provocation is a two-edged sword and it eventually­
tumed against Artaud to destroy his theatre. Writing in the
1 94o's, Jean-Louis Barrault remembered how during the show­
ing of Pudovkin's Mother the audience sat on the edge of their
seats in a state of nervous tension, but once the laughter and
barracking had begun it got so out of hand the evening ended
in chaos.
The Jarry Theatre hoped to perform three different types
of works : plays specifically written for it, adaptations of the
classics, and stage scenarios. Of the first category, Vitrac's
9
plays were the most outstanding, but there was also a contribu­
tion by Artaud entitled Acid Stomach and a provocation sketch
by Robert Aron, Gigogne. In her historic note, Yvonne Allendy
tells us of Aron's intervention as erstwhile business manager of
the Alfred Jarry Theatre. Reserved by nature, he wished to dis­
guise his association with his notorious partners, hence his pen­
name. Aron later became famous not only for his own philoso­
phy of Personalism, but also as the author of two fine works, on
the Vichy regime (1940-44) and the Liberation of France in
I 944. Lastly there was the first French performance of Strind­
berg's A Dream Play, which the author had translated into
French during his alchemist years in Paris. Even the Surrealist
riot at the performance of A Dream Play did not obscure the
fact that Artaud was the first director to treat Strindberg's plays
not as Naturalism, but in the manner we regard them today, as
the expression of subconscious states, and this is shown even
more clearly in the Production Plan for The Ghost Sonata.
The second type of works to be performed were to be adapta­
tions of the classics, particularly plays by the Elizabethan and
Metaphysical authors, the most often mentioned being The
Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Toumeur. This matter of adapta­
tions has raised the greatest controversy, for the verse plays,
some of them known by heart and loved by millions for their
text, were, according to Artaud, to be stripped of many of
their lines and the plots reorganised to suit the Jarry Theatre's
style. Since Charles Marowitz has recently begun adapting
Shakespeare in this manner, we are perhaps more familiar with
the method involved, but it should not be forgotten this was a
familiar process in the other arts between the World Wars.
Notable examples are reinterpretations of famous Renaissance
paintings by Picasso or Mir6. A look for instance at Mir6's
La Fornarina (after Raphael) reveals that the Catalan artist
wished to present what was still valid in the works of the old
masters and to reproduce them in a contemporary language.
But with the Metaphysical playwrights, Artaud's ambitions
went deeper, for these were the authors of the finest cruelty
scenarios then extant, while some of their lines fitted perfectly
IO
into the patterns of cruelty outlined above. The modern prac­
titioner who has followed Artaud's adaptational concepts most
faithfully is the Polish director, Jerzy Grotowski. He has taken
his own national classics, The Ancestors, Kordian and
Akropolis and has developed an acrobatic, de-identificatory
style closely modelled on the illustrations accompanying this
volume. No doubt following his example, this type of adapta­
tion will gain in popularity since it combines both traditional
theatre and modern expression.
For the future, however, the most important form at which
Artaud aimed was the co-operative scenario. He called these
"subjective manifesto plays written in collaboration," - not
just a political platform, but manifestos of the self, aimed at the
individual and not the mass. Materially, he was never able to
rehearse any group of actors long enough to produce such
scenarios, but he wrote some himself and two are given here,
The Philosopher's Stone and There is no more Firmament. The
first of these is a mime-play in which the miming depicts not
comedy but horror, in a way reminiscent of the last scene in
Kydd's Spanish Tragedy. The author has revealed the latent
cruelty in eroticism in the person of Isabelle, while the Doctor's
classic role is dismemberment. The evil self, the Double, enters,
the striking theme that became the foundation for Artaud's
subsequent work. Maybe The Philosopher's Stone was too re­
stricted a subject to permit sufficient expansion into full-scale
performance, but its mood certainly fits the intentions of the
Alfred Jarry Theatre.
There is no more Firmament is longer and more diffuse than
the direct cruelty scenarios,
The Philosopher's Stone and The
Conquest of Mexico. While it was not written with the co­
operation of a cast - Artaud calls it a stage synopsis - it is closer
to the subjective manifesto plays he wished to achieve. There
are fine examples here of the kind of uncertainty he tried to
produce in spectators in the vertiginous Movement IV, where
the scientist is poised over a technical carnival. Although speech
is used, it is often in form of statements or slogans, an orches­
trated chorus of individual remarks, never the deadly question/
II
answer of dialogue. The Great Pointer's chant in Movement
III exemplifies the robustness of Artaud's style, to which his
final poems testify. There is no more Firmament is similar to
the type of scenario produced by the Royal Shakespeare, US,
under the direction of Peter Brook. The British production
used one of the first co-operative scenarios ; it staged a self.
immolation (the Quaker, Norman Morrison), thereby unveiling
the spectator's subjective guilt in the same way as Artaud has
suggested in the police ballet below. US vindicated his claim
that only the scenario, as non-fiction and non-literature, could
affect the spectator so immediately with its current and often
highly controversial subjects.
But if the ideas outlined for the Alfred Jarry Theatre in this
volume are being put into practice now, what of their accept­
ance during its existence? It must be admitted that its four
productions went unnoticed, the very few reviews often being
such nonsense Artaud wove them into a very amusing scene
(Fourth Production - Victor). The incidents that insulted the
very distinguished gathering during the Strindberg production
did Artaud's reputation no good at all. From that time on all
other managements closed their doors to him, and there is
more than a hint of bitterness in his article on the profession's
attitudes towards his ideas (The Alfred Jarry Theatre and
Public Enmity). Vitrac went on to have his play produced by
others, such as Marcel Herrand (Lacenaire in Les En/ants du
Paradis), and although Artaud tried for two years to keep the
theatre going, by 1 93 1 he was forced to abandon the attempt.
Yet if his theatre seemed to sink without trace, its manifestos
remained and others have not ceased to learn from them. All
the intellectual successes and scandals of those years - the Dada
manifestations, Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel, Paul Claudel's
versifications and so many others - are now almost forgotten,
yet the Jarry Theatre is still actual. As it and the decade closed,
its producer turned to magic, to alchemy and the Cabala, like
Strindberg before him , and it is perhaps some of that magic
which keeps these pages alive today.
Victor Corti.
12
ALFRED JARRY THEATRE
 THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE1

(1926)

The theatre bears its share of the disrepute into which all
forms of art are successively falling. In the midst of the con­
fusion, the absence, the denaturation of all human values, in
the midst of this agonising uncertainty about the necessity or
value of a particular art, a particular form of mental activity,
in the midst of all this, the idea of theatre probably suffers most
of all. Among the scores of shows we see every day, we search
in vain for something that might even suggest the idea of abso­
lutely pure theatre.
If theatre is a game, too many serious problems clamour for
attention for us to be distracted from the tiniest part of them
by something as ephemeral as this game. If theatre is not a
game, if it is indeed a reality, the problem we must solve is
how we can restore its standing as reality and how to make
every show a kind of event.
We are so unable to believe, to delude ourselves. For us,
theatre ideas no longer have the brilliant, biting, unique, un­
heard of, whole quality that certain ideas in literature or art
still have. In initiating this idea of pure theatre, trying to give
it concrete form, one of the first questions we must ask ourselves
is whether we can find an audience capable of giving us the
necessary modicum of confidence and trust; in a word, whether
it is capable of joining forces with us. For, in contrast to writers
and painters, we cannot get along without an audience. An
audience, in fact, is an integral part of our efforts.

1 Superior figures refer to Notes on p. 211.

15
The theatre is the most impossible thing in the world to save.
Art that is totally dependent on a power of illusion it cannot
recapture might just as well disappear.
. . . . Words either are or are not able to create an illusion.
Each has its own importance. But stage sets, costumes,
gestures and cries will never replace the reality we are search­
ing for. !he serious thing is the formation of reality, a world
newly irrupting. The theatre must give us this ephemeral but
true world, this world in contact with real life. Either the
theatre will truly become this world or we will get along with­
out it.
What could be more despicable or perniciously terrible than
the sight of police going into action? Society recognises itself in
these productions, based on the equanimity with which it dis­
poses of life and liberty. A police raid suggests the steps of a
ballet. The policemen come and go. Mournful whistles rend
the air. All their movements give rise to a kind of distressing
solemnity. Little by little the noose tightens. We see the point of
these movements, at first seemingly pointless; little by little they
take shape, and we also see the point in space about which
they pivot. The door of an ordinary looking house suddenly
opens and a gaggle of women come out of the house, filing
along as though going towards the slaughter-house. The plot
thickens; the police net was not meant for a gang of shady
characters but merely for a pack of women. We are keyed right
up with astonishment. Never was a more elaborate setting
followed by such a denouement. We are surely as guilty as
these women, as cruel as these Policemen. This is really total
theatre. Well, this total theatre is the ideal. 2 This anxiety, this
guilt feeling, this victoriousness, this satisfaction, set the tone,
feelings and state of mind in which the audience should leave
our theatre, shaken and irritated by the inner dynamism of
the show. This dynamism bears a direct relation to the anxieties
and pre-occupations of their whole lives.
Illusion no longer depends on the probability or improb­
ability of the action, but on the communicative power and
reality of that action.
 Is our goal now clear? It is this: with every production we
are playing a very serious game and the significance of our
efforts lies in the very nature of this seriousness. We are not
appealing to the audience's mind or senses, but to their whole
existence. To theirs and ours. We stake our lives on the show
that is taking place on stage. If we did not have a very deep,
distinct feeling that part of our most intimate life was commit­
ted to that show, we would not think it necessary to pursue
this experiment further. Audiences coming to our theatre know
they are present at a real operation involving not only the mind
but also the very senses and flesh. From then on they will go to
the theatre as they would to a surgeon or dentist, in the same
frame of mind, knowing, of course, that they will not die, but
that all the same this is a serious business, and that they will not
come out unscathed. If we were not convinced we were going
to affect them as deeply as possible, we would think ourselves
unworthy of this, our highest task. They must be thoroughly
convinced we can make them cry out.

17
 THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

First Tear-1926-1927 Season8

Theatre conventions have had their day. As things stand now,

we are unable to accept theatre that tricks us. We need to be­
lieve in what we see. We can no longer subscribe to theatre
which repeats itself every night according to the same, ever
the same, identical rites. The show we are watching must be
unique and give us the impression of being as unexpected and
as incapable of being repeated as any act in life, any occurrence
whatsoever brought about by events.
In a word, with such theatre, we re-establish a connection
with life, instead of cutting ourselves off from it. We can only
take ourselves seriously and so can the audience if we have a
very distinct impression that a heartfelt part of our lives is
committed to a performance whose setting is the stage. Our
sort of style, whether in tragedy or comedy, is one that makes
you smile a rather sickly smile at a certain point. This is what
·

we have undertaken to do.

This is the human anxiety the audience must feel when they
come out. They will be shaken and irritated by the inner dyna­
mism of the production taking place before their eyes. This
dynamism will be directly related to the anxiety and the pre­
occupations of their entire lives.
Such is the inevitability we conjure up and the show will
consist of this very inevitability. The illusion we are seeking to
create has no bearing on the greater or lesser degree of veri­
similitude of the action, but on the power of communication
and reality of this action. By this very act, each show becomes
a sort of event. The audience must feel a scene in their lives is
being acted out in front of them, a truly vital scene.
In a word, we ask our audiences to join with us, inwardly,
18
deeply. Discussion is not in our line. With each production we
put on, we are in deadly earnest. If we were not determined
to see the consequences of our principles through to the end,
we would not consider them worth the trouble. Audiences who
come to our theatre know they are about to face a real operation
where not only their minds are at stake but their senses and
bodies as well. If we were not convinced this would affect them
as severely as possible, we would rate ourselves beneath this
most compelling task. They must be thoroughly convinced we
can make them cry out.
Finding ourselves so much in need of being true to life, as
alive as possible, gives some indication of the contempt we have
for so-called exclusively theatrical methods, everything which
makes up what is conventionally called production, such as
lighting, scenery, costume, etc. This scenic control is not what
we want to take pains over. It wouldn't take much for us to
revert to limelight. For us, theatre rests on something imponder­
able, and in no way does this strike a compromise with progress.
Most of the time, what gives the productions we put on their
real, manifest value, is due to an imperceptible discovery, able
to create the greatest illusion in the audience's mind. We need
say no more than as to production theory, we definitely
leave it to chance. In the theatre we want to create, chance is
our idol. We are not afraid of any failures or disasters. If we
did not believe a miracle was possible, we would not even
entertain such a risky course. But one miracle could repay us
for our pains and patience. We are counting on that miracle.
A producer who does not follow any rules but is guided by
his own inspiration, may or may not find what we need. De­
pending on what play he is putting on, he may or may not
discover anything, he may or may not make a strikingly clever
discovery, he may or may not find the necessary disturbing
element which is right to throw the audience into the sort of
uneasiness he is aiming at. Our success is wholly dependent on
these alternatives.
Still, it is quite clear we will work with actual scripts. The
plays we intend to perform are part of literature, of whatever
19
type. Yet how can we manage to reconcile our desire for free­
dom and independence with the need to conform to a certain
number of directions as laid down in the script?
The way we are trying to define theatre, only one thing
seems sure to us, only one thing seems real. The script. But the
script as a separate reality, existing as something self-sufficient
in its own right, not for its spirit, for we are little inclined to
respect that, but simply for the air breathed in enunciating it.
That's all.
For the thing which seems to us most basically embarrassing
in the theatre, and most basically destructible, is what distin­
guishes the art of theatre from the art of painting or literature,
all those hateful trappings which clutter up a written play and
turn it into a show, instead of it remaining within the limits of
words, impressions and abstractions.
These trappings, this visual display are what we want to cut
down to the bare minimum and reform from a serious aspect,
in the spirit of disturbing action�

THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

Programme for the 1926-1 927 Season

The Alfred Jarry Theatre will present at least four shows dur­
ing the 1926-1927 season. The first of these will open on 15
January 1927 at 3 p.m. at the Vieux-Columbier Theatre (21,
rue du Vieux-Columbier). It will consist of:

Fear is Love\ a Qialogue by Alfred Jarry (first performance).

The Old Man on the Mountaina, a schematic play in 5 acts
by Alfred Jarry (first performance).
The Secrets of Love, a play in 3 Acts by Roger Vitrac (first
performance).

Subsequent productions will include:

20
The Revenger's Tragedy, by Cyril Toumeur (first perform-
ance).
A Dream Play, by August Strindberg (first performance).
The Spurt of Blood, by Antonin Artaud (first performance).
Gigogne, by Max Robur6 (first performance).
A play by Savinio7•

21
 MANIFESTO FOR
AN ABORTIVE THEATRE8

In the confused period in which we live, a period full of blas­

phemy and the dull glow of endless denials, when artistic as well
as moral values seem to be disappearing into an abyss the like
of which has never been seen in any other intellectual period,
I was indulgent enough to think I could create a theatre, that
I could at least do the groundwork for an attempt at resuscitat­
ing theatre's universally scorned values. But the stupidity of
some people and the bad faith and low viciousness of others
have dissuaded me for ever.
The following Manifesto is all that remains of that attempt:

On - January 1 92 7, the A ... theatre will present its first

production. Its founders are very much aware of the kind of
despair launching such a theatre implies. And it was not with­
out a kind of remorse that they made up their minds to do it.
Let there be no mistake.The A ...Theatre is not a business;
that goes without saying.But, that aside, it is an enterprise on
which a certain number of individuals have staked everything.
We do not believe, we no longer believe there is anything in
the world that can be called theatre. We do not see how that
name fits any reality.A terrible confusion weighs down on our
lives. We are undoubtedly in a very critical period from the
spiritual point of view. We believe in all the threats of the
invisible. We are fighting the invisible itself. We are whole­
heartedly applying ourselves to unearthing a certain number of
secrets. And what we want to expose is this mass of desires,
dreams, illusions and beliefs which have resulted in this lie no
one believes in any longer, called, probably mockingly, the
theatre.We would like to manage to revive a certain number
of images--obvious, palpable images that are not tainted with
22
continual disillusionment. We are not creating a theatre so a.�

to present plays, but to succeed in showing the mind's obscure,

hidden and unrevealed aspects, by a sort of real, physical pro­
jection.We are not aiming to create an illusion of things which
do not exist, as was done heretofore, as has been done up to
now in the theatre.On the contrary, we aim to make a certain
number of scenes-indestructible, irrefutable images appealing
directly to the mind-appear on the stage. The very objects,
props and scenery on stage must be understood in an immediate
sense, without being transposed. They must not be taken for
what they represent, but for what they really are. Production
as such, the actors' movements, must be considered only as the
visible signs of an invisible or secret language. Not one theatrical
gesture must be void of the fatality of life and the mysterious
happenings that occur in dreams. Whatever has a prophetic
sense in life, is like an omen, is echoed in intuition, arises out
of a fertile error in the mind, will be found at any given
moment on our stage.
Our efforts will be understood to be all the more dangerous
in that they are bristling with ambition. But we are not afraid
of the void, and this idea must sink into people's heads. There
is no vacuum in nature we believe the human mind incapable
of filling, given the right moment. One can see what a terrible
task we have set ourselves.We are aiming at nothing less than
a return to the human or inhuman sources of the theatre,
thereby to resuscitate it completely.
What we would like to see sparkle and triumph on stage is
whatever is a part of the mystery and magnetic fascination of
dreams, the dark layers of consciousness, all that obsesses us
within our minds. And we are prepared to sink in the effort, to
expose ourselves to the ridicule of a colossal failure. Nor are we
afraid of the kind of tendency our efforts represent.
We consider theatre to be a true work of magic.We do not
intend to appeal to the eyes, nor to the direct emotions of
"soul". What we are attempting to create are psychological
emotions of a certain sort, where the heart's most secret move­
ments will be exposed.
 We do not think life in itself can be represented on stage, or
that one should risk this.
We are groping blindly towards this ideal theatre. We
partly know what we want to do and how we can accomplish
this physically, but we believe that chance, a miracle, will
occur and reveal to us all that we still do not know, that it will
contribute all its profundly superior life to this poor matter we
insist on moulding.
Aside from 'the degree of success of our shows, those who
come to our theatre must understand they are participating in
attempts at mysticism, through which an important part of
the mind and consciousness may finally be saved or lost.
Antonin Artaud

r 3 November r 926

P.S. These bog-paper revolutionaries would like to make us

believe that to create a theatre today (as if literature were
worth while, as if it were of any importance, as if we hadn't
always decided our lives elsewhere), these dirty swine would
therefore like to make us believe that to produce theatre today
is a counter-revolutionary endeavour, as if Revolution were
taboo and we were forbidden to tamper with it for ever.
Well, I do not accept taboos.
I personally feel there are several ways of looking at the
Revolution and among these Communism seems to me much
the worst, the most restricting. A lazy man's revolution. I say it
out loud, I don't care whether power passes out of the hands
of the middle-classes into those of the workers. This is not the
Revolution for me, just transferring power. A revolution
which has put the need for greater production as a matter of
prime concern, because it insists on stressing mechanisation as
the means of easing working conditions, seems to me to be a
eunuch's revolution. I don't get any nourishment from that
sort of pabulum. On the contrary, I find one of the main
reasons for the sickness we are suffering from is sheer external-
24
isation and out-and-out proliferation of power. It also lies in
the abnormal freedom of exchange of ideas now current be­
tween men, since this doesn't leave thought time to take root.
We are driven to despair by mechanisation at all levels of con­
templation. But the true roots of these ills go deeper and one
would need a whole volume to analyse them. For the moment,
let us simply say the most urgently needed revolution is a sort
of retro-action in time. We ought to return to the state of mind,
or simply even the practises of the Middle Ages, but genuinely,
by a form of essential metamorphosis. Then I would consider
we would have brought about the only revolution worth dis­
cussing.
Bombs need to be thrown, but they need to be thrown at the
root of the majority of present-day habits of thought, whether
European or not. I can assure you, those gentlemen, the
Surrealists, are far more affected by such habits than I, and the
best proof of this is their respect for certain fetishes made man,
along with their bowing down to Communism.
One can be sure that had I succeeded in creating a theatre,
what I would have done would have had as little relationship
to what is commonly called theatre, as an obscene performance
resembles an ancient religious mystery.
A.A.

8 January 19279

25
 THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

(1928 Season)10

The Alfred Jarry Theatre is intended for all those people who
do not see theatre as a goal but as ways and means, for all
those who are disturbed and anxious about the reality of which
theatre is only a symbol. The Alfred Jarry Theatre will en­
deavour to rediscover this at random through its produc­
tions.
Starting with the Alfred Jarry Theatre, theatre will no
longer be a straight-jacketed thing, imprisoned in the restricted
area of the stage, but will really aim at becoming action, sub­
ject to all the attractions and distortions of events, over which
random happenings resume their rights. A production, a play;
will always be unconfirmed or liable to revision in such a way
that different audiences on different evenings would never see
the same show in front of them. The Alfred Jarry Theatre will
therefore make a break with theatre but, in addition, it will
obey an inner need where the mind plays the main part. Not
only are theatre's limitations now done away with, but so is
its principle justification. A Jarry Theatre production will be
as thrilling as a game, like a card game with the whole audience
taking part.
The Jarry Theatre will endeavour to express what life has
forgotten, has hidden, or is incapable of stating.
Everything which stems from the mind's fertile delusions, its
sensory illusions, encounters between things and sensations
which strike us primarily by their physical density, will be
shown from an extraordinary angle, with the stench and the
excreta of unadulterated cruelty, just as they appear to the
mind, just as the mind remembered them.
Everything which cannot be depicted as it is, or needs the
26
illusion of artificial colouring, all this will be kept off the
boards. Everything which appears on our stage will be taken
in a direct, literal sense; nothing will look like a set in any sense
whatsoever.
The Jarry Theatre does not cheat, does not ape life, does
not portray it. It aims to extend it, to be a sort of magical
operation, open to any development, and in this it answers
a mental need audiences feel hidden deep down within them­
selves. This is not the place to lecture on present-day or
practical magic, yet in fact we are dealing with magic.
How can a play be a magical operation, how can it answer
needs which go beyond it, how can the deepest part of the
audience's soul be involved? This is what people will see if they
trust us.
In any case, our aspirations alone would distinguish us.
Our existence matters to all people who are concerned with
mental anguish, who are sensitive to everything in the mood
of today, who want to take part in the Revolutions that are
afoot. They are the ones who will provide us with the means
to stay alive. We are counting on them for it.

Besides, our programme exists and reveals what we intend to

do better than any theories.
Last year we put on The Secrets of Love by Roger Vitrac.
Among the plays to be presented this year, first mention should
go to The Children are in Power, by the same author, Roger
Vitrac.
Before applying himself to ideas, Roger Vitrac, like any
good dramatist, keeps the stage before him in his mind, while
sticking to his own line of thought. This is the very thing that
distinguishes him. In the least of his expressions we feel his
mind, his grey matter, at work.
In The Children are in Power, the pot has reached boiling­
point. The title alone indicates a basic lack of respect for
established values. This play expresses the disintegration of
modern thought in scathing and at the same time rigid actions,
27
as well as its replacement by . . . by what? In any case, roughly
speaking, here is the problem the play corresponds to: What do
we think with? What's left? There are no longer any common
yardsticks or scales of value. What remains? All this is expressed
in a lively, tangible, but not at all philosophical way, as thrilling
as a horse-race or a game of chess or Briand's hush-hush deal
with the Church.
Second, The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur. We
are not philosophers or rebuilders. We are men trying to make
our souls vibrate and to make the souls of others vibrate in
harmony with them. We may no longer believe in theatre as
entertainment, or a diversion, as swinishness or idiocy, but we
do believe in that sort of catharsis, that heightened level on to
which the theatre carries life as much as thought. We believe
that after a crucible of a play like The Children are in Power
in which an era is melted down and recombined, a great, noisy,
grand, exalted engine like The Revenger's Tragedy, besides
being a recognised masterpiece, completely agrees with what
we mean and want to be. Therefore we will put it on.
All works are timeless. There are no specifically modern or
classic plays, or else they are failures. The Revenger's Tragedy
is very close to our angst, our rebelliousness, our aspirations.
In the third place, after an individual play by one man
where he expresses his own ideas which, in this case, happen
to be fairly universal and important, after a scathing, objective
play where a certain idea of show will have been satisfied,
there will be what we might call an impersonal play, a sub­
jective manifesto-play, written in collaboration, where each
person leaves his strictly personal point of view aside to put
himself in step with the times, to attain a sort of universality
suitable to the needs of the times, where each person will put
his own self aside enough to voice the greatest possible
number of aspirations, in which all subjects will be broached.
A play which would synthesise all desires and all agony,
like a crucible of rebellion, combining iii terms of theatre
maximum expressiveness with maximum daring and demon­
strating every possible method of production,
28
 concentrating the greatest number of situations in the mini­
mum time and space,
where face to face with one another, three thoughts would
try to rediscover the common denominator of thought,
where the different aspects of the same dramatic situation
would appear under their most manifestly objective aspect,
where we would attempt to make all the features of theatre
known in one play, that is, theatre as we conceive it,
where we will see what a production which rejects artifici­
ality can bt;. like, rediscovering reality more real than real life,
by the straightforward use of objects and symbols.

The Alfred Jarry Theatre was formed to practise theatre, not

to promote it. The writers associated with it have no respect
either for authors or texts. They do not mean to keep to them,
at any price or in any way.
If they receive any plays which are, originally and in the
finality of their subject matter, significant of the state of mind
they are seeking to express, these will be welcome in preference
to others.
But if none show up, too bad for any Shakespeare, Hugo or
even Cyril Tourneur that comes their way or falls into their
clutches.
 THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE11

( 1929)

The Alfred Jarry Theatre was formed in Spring, 1927. Its first
production was The Secrets of Love by Roger Vitrac, per­
formed on2 and 3 June of that year at the Theatre de Grenelle.
The second production was at The Comedie des Champs­
Elysees, on 15 January 1928. It comprised Act III of Le
Partage de Midi by Paul Claude!, rehearsed in the greatest
secrecy and performed without the author's permission. With
it was Pudovkin's film The Mother, its first showing in Paris.
In June 1928 Strindberg's A Dream Play was performed.
Finally in December 1928, Victor or the Children are in
Power by Roger Vitrac (3 performances).
The difficulties the Alfred Jarry Theatre has had to contend
with since it was formed are not widely enough known. Each
new play constituted a feat of willpower, a miracle of perse­
verance. Not to mention the positive outbursts of hatred and
envy these performances unleashed.
The Secrets of Love had only one rehearsal on stage, the
night before the performance. A Dream Play had only one
rehearsal using costume and scenery. Le Partage de Midi was
only seen once on the boards, the morning before the show.
As to The Children are in Power, things were even worse.
We had no chance to see a run-through of the play on stage
before the preview:
All these difficulties stemmed from the fact that the Alfred
Jarry Theatre never had either a company or a locale. But
these continuously repeated obstacles can only end up by ruin­
ing its efforts and simplest attempts. It can not undertake more
than one play at a time and must rid itself of the horrible
difficulties which, up to now, have stood between it and com­
plete success. To do this, it needs the security of its own premises
30
and a company freely placed at its disposal, even for one single
play. It needs these premises and this company for two months,
that is, a month for rehearsals, then the premises and the com­
pany booked for a run of thirty performances.12 This is the
minimum needed to allow it to progress and develop its
success, if any, commercially.
In the course of this year the Alfred Jarry Theatre will stage
a performance of Ubu Roi adapted to present-day circum­
stances and acted without being stylised.18 It will alsoH present
a new play by Roger Vitrac entitled Arcade15, which does not
mince matters.
The Alfred Jarry Theatre was founded as a reaction against
theatre, as well as to restore to theatre all the freedom that
music, poetry, or painting have and from which it has been
strangely cut off up to now.
What we want to do is to make a break with theatre re­
garded as a separate entity and bring back the old idea which,
after all, was never put into effect, that of integral theatre.
Without, of course, it being mistaken at any time for music,
mime or dancing, and especially literature.
At a time when words are being substituted for pictures, in
the form of talkies, alienating the best audiences from an art
which has become a hybrid, there cannot help but be a revival
of interest in the total theatre formula.
We steadfastly refuse to regard theatre as a museum for
masterpieces, however fine and human they may be. Any work
which does not obey the principle of actuality will be of no use
to us whatsoever, or, we believe, to theatre either. Actuality of
feelings and concerns, more than of events. Life taking shape
anew through present-day sensitivity. Sensitivity to time as well
as place. We will always maintain that any work is worthless
if it does not belong to a certain localised state of mind, chosen
not because of its virtues or defects, but purely16 because of its
relativity. We do not want art or beauty. What we are looking
for, are ENGAGED emotions. A certain combustible power
associated with words and gestures. Reality seen from both
sides. Hallucination selected as the main dramatic method.
31
 THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

is directed by

Messrs. ANTONIN ARTAUD and

ROGER VITRAC

Please address all correspondence concerning

PU BLICITY
A ND
BRO CHU RES

to

M. ROGER VITRAC
35,Rue de Seine, Paris (6")

And all business concerning

PRODUCTIONS
PROPER,
AND MANU S CRI P T S

to

M. ANTONIN ARTAUD
178, Quai d'Auteuil, Paris (16")

Cover of brochure

32
 THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE
AND PUBLIC HOSTILITY

The Alfred Jarry Theatre in 193011

STATEMENT
The Alfred Jarry Theatre, conscious of theatre's collapse before
the encroaching development of world-wide motion picture
techniques, intends to contribute to the downfall of theatre as
it exists in France today by specifically theatrical means,
dragging all the literary and artistic ideas down with it in this
destruction, along with the psychological conventions, all the
plastic artificiality, etc., on which this theatre was built, by
reconciling the idea of theatre, at least provisionally, with
whatever is most feverish in life today.

HISTORY
From 1927 to 1930, despite enormous difficulties, The Alfred
Jarry Theatre put on four productions:

I The first production was staged at the Theatre de Grenelle,

1and2 June 1927 (evenings). It consisted of:

1. Acid Stomach or the Mad Mother18 a musical sketch by

Antonin Artaud. A lyrical piece, a comic exposition of the
clash between theatre and the cinema.

2. The Secrets of Love19 (three scent:s) by Roger Vitrac. An

ironic play, physically staging the misgivings, dual isolation,
eroticism and criminal thoughts lurking in the minds of
lovers. A real dream brought into being for the first time on
stage.
33
 3 . Gigogne, a scene by Max Robur. Written and produced
with the deliberate aim of needling people.

II The second show was put on at the Comedic des Champs­

Elysees on 1 4 January 1 92 8 (matinee). It consisted of :

l . One act of Le Partage de Midi20 by Paul Claudel, acted

against the author's wishes. This act was performed by
virtue of the axiom that any published work is public pro­
perty.

2. The Mother, adapted from Gorki, a revolutionary film

by Pudovkin which the censor had banned. It was shown
primarily for the ideas in it, secondly for its own merits and
finally as a protest against censorship.

III The third show was staged at the Theatre de l'Avenue, 2

and 9 June 1 92 8 (matinee). It consisted of :

A Dream Play by August Strindberg. This play was per­

formed because of its exceptional nature, because dreams
play a major part in it, because no one in Paris dared to put
it on, because Strindberg had translated it into French him­
self, because of the diffi culties involved in such an
undertaking, and finally to apply a full-scale development
of the production techniques characteristic of The Alfred
Jarry Theatre.

IV The fourth show was staged at the Comedic des Champs­

Elysees, 24 and 29 December 1 9 2 8 and 5 January 1 92 9
(matinee). It consisted of :

Victor or the Children are in Power, a middle-class play in

three acts by Roger Vitrac. This play, lyrical at times, ironic,
even outspoken at others, was aimed at the middle-class
family unit. It featured adultery, incest, scatology, anger,
Surrealist poetry, patriotism, madness, shame and death.
34
PUBLIC HOSTILITY
Free, candid undertakings of the Alfred Jarry Theatre's sort
run up against all types of difficulties listed under this heading.
These are : raising capital, choosing the right location, difficul­
ties over a company, censorship, the police, organised sabotage,
competition, audiences and critics.

Raising Capital. Money is hard to find. Although enough may

be found for one production, this is insufficient, since spas­
modic undertakings are not properly speaking a going concern
and do not benefit from the advantages of regular business
exploitation. On the contrary they are bled by all sorts of
suppliers who, not content with charging high prices, put them
up as high as they can, reckoning it is fair to levy a surcharge
on such snob entertainment.
The upshot is that all the subscriptions, subsidies and every­
thing else are rapidly swallowed up, and despite the attempt,
and the stir caused by the show, it has to close down after the
second or third performance, that is, at the very moment when
it could prove how effective it is.
The Alfred Jarry Theatre will do its utmost from now on to
give regular evening performances.

Choosing the right location. It is just about impossible to

perform in the evening with very little money. Either you have
to be satisfied with a rudimentary, unequipped stage (lecture
rooms, banqueting halls, etc.) or resign yourself to playing to
matinees and only on slack days, or else during the off-season.
In any case, the conditions are deplorable and are made worse
by the fact that theatre managers categorically refuse, for
reasons given below, to rent their theatres, or only at exhorbi­
tant rates.
Once again, therefore, the Alfred Jarry Theatre has found
itself obliged to put its productions on at the end of the season.

Difficulties over a company. Actors cannot be found, since

most of them have regular engagements which obviously
35
prevent them working elsewhere in the evening. Furthermore,
for a variety of reasons, theatre managers overstep their author­
ity and stop actors joining up with the Alfred Jarry Theatre.
Worse, they often grant permission then withdraw it later,
thereby interrupting rehearsals and forcing us to look for a new
cast. Not to mention the ill-will prevalent among junior staff
at some theatres, over whom others, needless to say, are in
charge.
But we must pay tribute to those performers who have taken
part in our venture. They have all showed the utmost unselfish­
ness and the greatest devotion, despite provocation and sniping.
So much was this true that we always constituted a real en­
semble, despite rehearsals carried on under preposterous
conditions, and everyone acknowledged this homogeneity.
There is a complete list of the actors elsewhere. We are cer­
tainly counting on them for our forthcoming productions.

Censorship. We got around this problem by screening Gorki's

The Mother at a private showing by invitation only. Touch
wood, there is no theatre censorship yet. But we know the Chief
of Police can insist on the show being cut as a result of a series
of disturbances, or purely and simply suppress the show, or
close the theatre. Unfortunately we have never had a long
enough run to provoke such action. Nonetheless, long live
freedom.

The police. As for the police, they always automatically step

in with productions of this sort. Everyone knows this, even the
right-wing Surrealists. For example, when S. M. Eisenstein
delivered his lecture at the Sorbonne, there were a hundred or
so policemen scattered about the building, not counting the
Chief of Police. You can't do anything about that. You have
to blame the Government.

Organised sabotage. This is generally the handiwork of mali­

cious people or pranksters who methodically provoke the police
to act against them, and in consequence against the audience
36
and show as well. Without them the police would quietly re­
main at the door. Having carried out their coup, these agents
provocateurs have only to accuse the Alfred Jarry Theatre of
being in league with the police and they've done the trick. They
kill two birds with one stone. They stop the show and throw
discredit on its promoters. Luckily, even if their little game
sometimes comes off, the trick's played out now and does not
hoodwink anyone any more. 21

Competition. It is only natural that all. the " avant-garde"

specialists, either established ones or those on the way up, dis­
trust us and sabotage us on the quiet. It is a healthy conflict if
not healthy friendship. The Alfred Jarry Theatre must take it
into account. It is enough to mention it here.

Audiences. Here, we are only dealing with a prejudiced audi­

ence of the I was there or flippant sort. Those who find it
disgraceful, or those who are full of very amusing jokes, for
example imitating the sound of running water or a rooster
crowing or declaring in a thunderous voice that M. Alfred
Jarry invited him and he is at home here. In short, what is
normally called a typically French audience. This is the very
reason why we put comedies on and the audience's farcical
reactions are something extra on the programme which an­
other audience knows enough to appreciate.

Critics. Oh, the critics ! First, let us thank them, then say no
more about them. Rather, we refer the reader to the closing
pages of this brochure.

THE NEED FOR THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

If the Alfred Jarry Theatre only acted so as to emphasise and
intensify as it were the publicised clash between the concepts
of freedom and independence it claims to defend, and the
hostile powers opposing them, then its existence would at least
be justified. But besides the opposition it incurs through ridi­
cule, it claims, assuming once more that the game of theatre is
37
possible, to stage straight-forward, candid, constructive mani­
festations by the rational use of established, proven factors. In
order on the one hand to invalidate modern, false, hackneyed
values, and on the other hand to discover and exhibit genuine,
authentic events concerning the present state of the French
people. It being clearly understood the latter designation
includes the years just passed and those immediately to
come.

'
THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE S STAND
Since productions are only intended for French audiences and
everyone in the world who can be counted as an ally of France,
these will be clear and restrained. Normal speech will be used
and none of the normal factors which go to make a hit will be
left out. Picturesque lyricism, philosophical tirades, mystifica­
tion, learned allusions, etc., will all be carefully avoided. On
the contrary, quick-fire dialogue, stock characters, swift move­
ment, stereotyped attitudes, proverbial expressions, comic songs,
grand opera, etc., will occur in our productions in proportion
to their place in French life.
Humour will be the only red or green signal to light the
plays and to indicate to the audience if the road is clear,
whether they can shout out or shut up, laugh out loud or on
the quiet. The Alfred Jarry Theatre reckons to become a
theatre for all sorts of humour.
To sum up, we intend our subject matter to be ; actuality
understood in every sense of the word. Our means : humour in
all forms. Our aims : total laughter, laughter extending from
paralysed slavvering to convulsed, side-holding sobbing.
Let us hasten to say that by humour we mean the develop­
ment of ironic ideas (German irony) which distinguishes a
certain evolution of the modern mind. It is still difficult to
define it exactly. The Alfred Jarry Theatre, in facing up to
comic or tragic values, etc., that is, considered in their own
right or by their corresponding reactions, is aiming precisely
to make this idea of humour experimentally explicit. Suffice
to say that the statements which follow with reference to hum-
38
our have some of the characteristics of this state of mind and
we would be wrong to judge them logically.

SOME OBJECTIVE S OF THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

Any self-respecting theatre knows how to make the most of
eroticism. We are familiar with skilful doses of this in entertain­
ment theatre, music-halls and films. The Alfred Jarry Theatre
will go as far as it is allowed to in this direction. It promises
to reach greater heights using means it believes better to keep
secret. Furthermore, besides the feelings it will arouse, either
directly or antithetically, such as joy, fear, love, patriotism, the
taste for crime, etc, etc., it will specialise in feelings no police
in the world can touch, namely shame, the last and deadliest
obstacle to freedom.
The Alfred Jarry Theatre repudiates any ways or means
dealing either directly or indirectly with superstition, such as ;
religious, patriotic, magic or poetic sentiments, unless to cen­
sure or fight against them. It accepts only the poetry of facts,
the wonder of mankind, that is to say free from any religious,
mythical or legendary ties, and humour, the only attitude
compatible with the dignity of man, for whom comedy and
tragedy have become a see-saw.
The subconscious will not play any true role on stage. We've
had enough of the confusion engendered between author and
audience through the medium of producers and actors. Too
bad for analysts, students of the soul and Surrealists. So much
the better for everyone else. We are determined to safeguard
the plays we put on against any secret commentary. That won't
put a stop to it, you might say. Our answer to that is, it exempts
us from answering.
To be more explicit, we might add that we don't intend to
exploit the unconscious for itself and under no circumstances
could it become the exclusive goal of our efforts. By taking the
positive gains in this field into account, we would retain its
rigorously objective nature, but only on the scale of the role it
plays in everyday Zife.

39
 .
DECLARED TRADITIONS OF THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE
The Alfred Jarry Theatre has foregone listing all the fragmen­
tary influences it may have been subject to (like Elizabethan
theatre, Chekhov, Strindberg, Feydeau, etc.), retaining only
those irrefutable examples which, from the point of view of
their sought-after national effectiveness, the Chinese, American­
Negro and Soviet theatres provide us with.
As to a dominant influence, it shares U bu Roi' s incom­
parable humorous lessons and the strictly matter-of-fact manner
of Raymond Roussel.
It is also worth adding that this admission should be
considered rather as a tribute.

PRODUCTION
The scenery and props will be real and tangible, as before.
These will be made up of objects and elements borrowed from
everything about us. Their arrangements will aim at creating
new forms. The lighting, by taking on a life of its own, will
contribute towards retaining the essentially theatrical nature
of this original exhibition of objects.
The characters will regularly tend towards stock figures. We
will give a new idea of theatre character. Each actor will make
up a facial type of his own. He may even assume the appearance
of known personalities. Each one will have his own special
voice, varying in intensity between a normal tone and the most
jarring artificiality. Using this new theatre tone, we intend to
emphasise and even disclose further, unknown feelings.
The acting moves will correspond or clash with the lines, in
accordance with the meaning to be enhanced. This new sort of
mime-play can be carried on outside the action in general,
drawing away from it, then nearer to it, or merging with it in
accordance with the strict mechanics called for by the inter­
pretation. This method has nothing pointlessly artistic about
it, since it is meant to reveal unaccomplished actions, omissions,
distractions, etc., in a word, all the ways in which personality
betrays itself, thus rendering choruses, asides, monologues, etc.,
useless. (Here we have an example of the objectification of the
40
subconscious which we stated in an earlier paragraph we
would not present as such.)
Even the most vulgar means will be used to contribute to­
wards shocking the audience : trumpets, fireworks, explosions,
spotlights, etc.
In the isolable sensory field, we are trying to find every sort
of hallucination capable of being objectivised. All the technical
means which can be used on stage will be put into play to
produce the equivalent of vertigo in the mind or senses. Echoes,
reflections, apparitions, dummies, arpeggios, cuts, pain, sur­
prise, etc. We reckon we can rediscover fear and its accessories
by these means.
Furthermore, the plays will have full sound effects, including
during the interval, when the public address system will main­
tain the mood of the play to a haunting degree.
The ensemble and all the details of the play, orchestrated
in this way and obeying a chosen rhythm, will unfold like a
perforated music-roll in a pianola, without any dialogue breaks
or vague gestures. It will give the audience the impression of the
most precise inevitability and determinism. Furthermore, a
show staged like this will work without worrying about audience
reaction.

PUBLIC APPEAL
The Alfred Jarry Theatre, by bringing the above statements
to the attention of the public, allows itself the liberty of solicit­
ing whatever help it can. It will personally get in touch with all
those who are kind enough to show any interest, in one way
or another, in its activities. It will answer any suggestions made.
It will read all plays submitted and here and now undertakes
as means permit to put any on that correspond with its esta­
blished platform.
Furthermore, we propose to draw up a list with the names
of those who support us in general while requesting them, when
writing, to indicate their rank their name and address, so that
we may, if they will permit, take that into account, or simply
keep them informed of our venture.
41
 Illustrations*

The illustrations in this brochure are not production photo­

graphs properly speaking. We would rather they were regarded
as a story without words in eight living pictures, of the state of
mind we are endeavouring to maintain. We wanted to
adorn a brochure with pictures, so we preferred inventing
photographs that answered this purpose, rather than repro­
ducing real productions. We have seen and will see the latter
on stage.
The spirit of these illustrations is shared by both Antonin
Artaud and Roger Vitrac, who made them up in close collabora­
tion, acting in them themselves with Mlle. Josette Lusson. The
positioning and grouping were arranged by Antonin Artaud,
while M. Eli Lotar photographed them and made up the
montages.
The cover is by the artist, Gaston-Louis Roux.

A Lecture and A Reading

Mr Roger Vitrac will give a lecture on Theatre on 1 5 May

1 930 to the Sorbonne Philosophic and Scientific Study Group
for the Examination of New Trends. This will be followed by
a reading by Antonin Artaud of the first act of Le Coup de
Trafalgar.
 A ctors with The Alfred Jarry Theatre

MLLES.
Genica Athanasiou Elizabeth Lannay
Tania Balachova Ghita Luchaire
Jeanne Bernard Germaine Ozier
Domenica Blazy Alexandra Pecker
Edith Farnese Yvonne Save
Gilles Yvonne Vibert
J acqueline Hopstein

MM.
Edmond Beauchamp Max Joly
Andre Berley Rene Lefevre
Auguste Boverio Robert Le Flon
Rene Bruyez Jean Mamy
Henri Cremieux Raymond Rouleau
Max Dalban Sarantidis
Dalle Ulric Straram
Marc Darnault Geymond Vital
Etienne Decroux De Vos
Maxime Fabert Laurent Zacharie

* Following p. 48.

43
 The Critics and
The Alfred Jarry Theatre

First Production

A cid Stomach or The Mad Mother by Antonin Artaud

Gigogne by Max Robur
The Secrets of Love by Roger Vitrac

" I don't know what's going on in there, " said the little assistant
at the tobacco shop, 53 rue Croix-Nivert, yesterday, " but
whatever it is there must be money in it. Never seen so many
posh limousines at the Grenelle. "

MARCEL SAUVAGE . In there (meaning the Theatre Grenelle)

the Alfred Jarry Theatre is giving its first show.

FORTUNAT STROWSKI. Member of the Institut. A strange

show we could philosophise about endlessly.

FRAN<)OIS IM PARTIAL. Bah ! All this dates from I 896, from

Ubu Roi. But the organisors would never admit this since they
are Surrealists and by definition would not accept being sub­
ject to any order, even a chronological one.

MARCEL SAUVAGE. Unfortunately, Old Man Ubu's spirit was

missing from the festivities.

FRAN<)OI S IMPARTIAL. Now let me say something about A cid

Stomach or The Mad Mother by Antonin Artaud. This play
showed a young man in almost complete darkness, moving
a chair forward then back, utering mysterious phrases as he did
so. He died, then a Queen passed by who died in turn and other
characters, who also died. The author did not condescend to
provide us with the key to this problem.
44
 MARCEL SAUVAGE. How wrong you are ! A cid Stomach is an
" artistic" play for Grand Guignol fans. A violet spot from the
wings suddenly vitriolised the actors. The terrifying plot was
accompanied by the rolling drums of M. Maxime Jacob's
music.

BENJAMIN CRE MIEUX. Believe me, Acid Stomach is more a

short hallucination without any (or hardly any) dialogue, the
author having crammed a synthesis of life and death into it,
leaving us with a much stronger and more lasting impression
of strangeness than Roger Vitrac's The Secrets of Love. For the
piece de resistance of this first production was a play by M.
Roger Vitrac, The Secrets of Love.

FORTUNAT STROWSKI, Member of the Institut. In fact, the

set piece was entitled The Secrets of Love, in three scenes, pro­
duced by Antonin Artaud.

FRANQOIS IMPARTIAL. The title was clear: The Secrets of

Love, and it contained not less than three acts.

BENJAMIN CRE MIEUX. This play has already been published,

and on reading it, we come across some striking epitomes.

MARCEL SAUVAGE. I read M. Roger Vitrac's play in book

form, a curious patchwork of the greatest interest.

BENJAMIN CRE MIEUX. M. Vitrac has put all the ideas the
word love suggests into the play, juxtaposing them without
linking them together with a plot.

MARCEL SAUVAGE. In short, this is an attempt at mentally

photographing the havoc wreaked since Adam and Eve.

BENJAMIN CRE M IEUX. We see a man beating a woman, ador­

ing her ; she is unfaithful to him, he dreams of killing her, or
being killed by her . . .
45
MARCEL SAUVAGE. Yes, yes, we love, kill one another, come to
life again, fight, have children.

BENJAMIN CRE MIEUX. • • • that he adores his children and that

he kills them.

MARCEL SAUVAGE. Yes, yes . . . we love them, we kill them.

They come to life again, fight, and the earth spins round under
the blindfolded eyes of a chubby child : Love.

BENJAMIN C RE MIEUX. But wait ! We see the mother-in-law,

the father-in-law, we see the life of a couple under all its guises.

FORTUNAT STROWSKI, Member of the Institut. Hey ! Ho !

Do you remember those lines of Musset's :
Thus Nassan was naked,
naked as a hand,
naked as a silver plate . . .

BENJAMIN CRE MIEUX. Allow me ! I admit there may be quite

a spicy poetic parody here, but hardly anything was left of it
in the performance.

MARCEL SAUVAGE. I must say we were no further forward at

the end than at the beginning. On stage, all this produces, if I
may phrase it thus, a hodge-podge stemming from films,
variety and undergraduate farce.

FORTUNAT STROWSKI. Let me interrupt you, young man. The

authors and producers of this show are not so stupid, far from
it. Among them I found some very brilliant Sorbonne students
and some excellent Humanists. They may complain that my
interference simplifies their new " language " .

FRAN<_;:OIS IMPARTIAL. You draw conclusions but don't even

describe the play. If I describe it for you, you will understand.
46
FORTUNAT STROWSKI. It is no use trying to understand it­
at least not in the usual way. Personally, I wouldn't describe
anything and wouldn't even try to put a definite opinion into
words. I would have to see the play several times.

FRANQOIS IMPARTIAL. None the less, listen to what I have to

say. The Secrets of Love has three acts. Nothing memorable
happened in Act I. In Act II, a character had a dream permit­
ting us to see a coffin, then a dummy, whose head was cut off
by the character. In Act III, this character was in bed with his
wife. A butcher's boy enters then leaves annoyed . . . at what?
Then the wife went off and came back with a child she had just
given birth to in the wings. The child was placed on the mantle­
piece " to take the place of a work of art ! " It fell and broke.
A policeman ran up and asked questions. The answer was,
" That's my son. He fell off the mantlepiece because he had
measles. " Get it?

FORTUNAT STROWSKI, Member of the Institut. In his diction­

ary, old Furetiere defined comprehension as conceiving, which
is almost exactly the same thing : " to put together ", to " possess
in common " . Now this new art is the exact antithesis of such
practice. To apply the unifying proce�s of the intellect to it
would be the same as applying an Aristotelian syllogism to
Pascal's Pensees.

BENJAMIN CRE MIEUX. Let's stick to theatre. In theatre, a

continuous undercurrent must carry things along, but the
fragmentation of the visions offered by M. Roger Vitrac lacks
just such a continuous undercurrent, plot or mood.

FRANQOIS IMPARTIAL. No doubt. However, M. Roger Vitrac

contends theatre does not exist. He wrote this play to prove his
point. He states that the whole of dramatic art consists in pro­
ducing a certain state of tension in the audience. The moment
the audience think they understand, show them the opposite.
47
FORTUNAT STROWSKI. Personally, I would just like to pay
tribute to the Alfred Jarry Theatre by taking it seriously. It
seems to me it is unhackneyed, has ingenuity, variety, even at
times a novel depth.

MARCEL SAUVAGE. Yes, overall, the first production is not

devoid of interest, although produced with stereotyped effects
which are not worth much more than those in Rep. Unfortun­
ately-as I said before--Old Man Ubu's spirit was missing
from the festivities. The forced humour soon became painful,
the more so because it had moral pretensions, and the other
evening the audience came out of the Theatre de Grenelle
neither laughing or crying.

BENJAMIN CRE MIEUX. What particularly struck me about this

show was its lack of novelty. But M. Artaud's productions were
what seemed to me most worthwhile.

FORTUNAT STROWSKI, Member of the lnstitut. A rocket­

lauching pad . . .

Second Production

Le Partage de Midi by Paul Claudel (Act Ill)

Mother by V. I. Pudovkin

To Mr. Jean Prevost

The Editor,
Nouvelle Revue Franfaise.
3, rue de Grenelle, Paris.

Dear Sir,
Who are these youngsters who advertise that they are going
to present Le Partage de Midi by Paul Claudel, yet who only
put on Act III?
ridiculous--such ridicule could close a lot of doors to me,
especially the Conservatoire, which I hope to enter next year.
I am working towards this all day and every day, and if I am
successful it will gratify my dearest wishes.

PIERRE LAZAREFF. I congratulate you, Mademoiselle Alex­

andra Pecker on preferring to become a student of M. Georges
Le Roy's, rather than the emulator of that side-show artist of
the singular faculties, whose picturesque profile Mlle Yvette
Guilbert recreated in a recent book.

PAUL REBOUX. The only things that appeared natural to me

in this preposterous work were the posterior sounds the author
made the heroine utter each time she was in the grip of emotion.
I can assure you the confusion which seems to reign in M.
Roger Vitrac's mind has something contagious about it.

MONSIEUR LELOUP. Of course. Besides, why give off these

stinking puffs? The lines were enough.

MONSIEUR L ' AMI DU PEUPLE. They were just a stage effect.

ANTONIN ARTAUD. Sir, you are the third person to make that
stupid insinuation. As if I would amuse myself by using all the
means likely to drive audiences away. Would you be so kind
as to publish my denial and resign yourself to believing I was
victimised by a gang of practical jokers.

MONSIEUR L ' AMI DU PEUPLE. Whether any stinking puffs

were let loose or not is of minor importance. This makes no
difference to how second-rate the show is. But none the less it
proves one must not indulge in practical joking too much-you
are a practical joker-and that talking about it gives it an
importance it does not have and the best thing to do is just to
forget about it. There are better things to do than spend one's
time on incompetent and untalented oddities. I will never dis­
cuss any further performances by the Alfred Jarry Theatre.
53
 Third Production

A Dream Play, by Strindberg

To the Rt. Hon. Swedish

Minister in Paris

Dear Sir,
In future, when you want to bribe me, allowing me to put
on A Dream Play so lavishly, for goodness' sake don't cry it
from the rooftops. Whisper it in Mr. G. Sadoul's ear28 instead,
he's a safe informer. He won't talk.
I remain, my dear Sir, yours faithfully,
Antonin Artaud

P.S. Exactly how much did you give me, or promise me, or
have someone promise you would give me?

To the Police Superintendent,

Quartier du Roule.

Dear Sir,
Did I by any chance contact you a few days before the
second performance of A Dream Play to arrange to have
Messrs. Andre Breton, Sadoul, U nik and others of their friends
arrested ?24 If this didn't happen in your precinct, then where
was it ?
I am entirely at your disposal regarding an inquiry into this
matter.
I remain, my dear Sir, yours very respectfully,
Antonin Artaud

To M. Paul Claudel,
French Ambassador to the United States

50
Dear Sir,
How the Dream Play scandal must have made your old
heart thrill with pleasure. It was only fair.
You were well and truly avenged.
I remain, my dear Sir, fraternally yours.
Antonin Artaud

To M. Titin,
Restaurateur, 56, rue la Bruyere, Paris.

Dear Sir,
I will always remember you in white tie and tails, at the
bottom of the steps of the Central Hotel, the day after the second
performance of A Dream Play, catching in your arms Mr P.U.
who had come down the steps a little too fast. Was that when
he dreamed I cried out for my mother? Perhaps you could
corroborate this. 26
Cordially yours,
Antonin Artaud

To M. Andre Breton,
Editor of La Revolution Surrealiste,
42 , rue Fontaine, Paris

1 . Was it really not you who phoned me on Friday 1 June

1 9 2 8 about 9 p.m. offering not to attend the matinee dress
rehearsal of A Dream Play the next day at the Theatre de
l'Avenue? If it wasn't you, then who was the impostor who
imitated your voice and manner less than 24 hours later?
2 . What were you doing at my place uttering threats at
about 7 o'clock on the evening of 7 June ( 1 9 2 8), two days
before the second performance of A Dream Play? Was it really
not you who threatened to hurl all your cohorts at me if I
defied your grotesque ban? What meaning could police inter-
51
vention, in which you acted as an AGENT PRO VOCATEUR,
have after that?
3 . How many cops were there at the Surrealist Exhibition
in the rue de Seine in October I g 2 5 ? You ought to put Tony
Lumpkin in a straightjacket, not Pecksniff .* It would suit him
much better !
Antonin Artaud

Fourth Production

Victor or The Children are in Power by Roger Vitrac

MONSIEUR LELOUP. Taking advantage of the Christmas

festivities, a Surrealist poet and a Surrealist actor-poet­
producer-dramatist have brought forth a play in three acts,
deeming that sarcasm and low humour would shock honest
people. The heroine of these lucubrations appeared before the
audience in the same embarrassing plight as the God Crepitus,
thus setting the tone for the whole play.

PIERRE LAZAREFF. Did you know that the Queen of Music

Hall, Mlle Anita Pecker, was initially asked by M. Antonin
Artaud to play the part M. Roger Vitrac wanted to make
" symbolic of comedy interfused with tragedy " . (Yes !) Mlle
Anita Pecker, who had at first accepted the part, later turned it
down.

MADEMOISELLE ANITA PECKER. First of all my name is not

Anita, it is Alexandra. Second, I did not accept the part then
turn it down lightly, without getting to know it. I accepted be­
cause I like avant-garde theatre and especially Antonin
Artaud's. I turned it down later because I looked beyond
immediate gain to the considerable harm which could come
from people remembering a part that might make me look

* Resp ectively "Gribouille" and "Tartufe" in the original. Tr.

52
ridiculous--such ridicule could close a lot of doors to me,
especially the Conservatoire, which I hope to enter next year.
I am working towards this all day and every day, and if I am
successful it will gratify my dearest wishes.

PIERRE LAZAREFF. I congratulate you, Mademoiselle Alex­

andra Pecker on preferring to become a student of M. Georges
Le Roy's, rather than the emulator of that side-show artist of
the singular faculties, whose picturesque profile Mlle Yvette
Guilbert recreated in a recent book.

PAUL REBOUX. The only things that appeared natural to me

in this preposterous work were the posterior sounds the author
made the heroine utter each time she was in the grip of emotion.
I can assure you the confusion which seems to reign in M.
Roger Vitrac's mind has something contagious about it.

MONSIEUR LELOUP. Of course. Besides, why give off these

stinking puffs? The lines were enough.

MONSIEUR L ' AMI DU PEUPLE. They were just a stage effect.

ANTONIN ARTAUD. Sir, you are the third person to make that
stupid insinuation. As if I would amuse myself by using all the
means likely to drive audiences away. Would you be so kind
as to publish my denial and resign yourself to believing I was
victimised by a gang of practical jokers.

MONSIEUR L ' AMI DU PEUPLE. Whether any stinking puffs

were let loose or not is of minor importance. This makes no
difference to how second-rate the show is. But none the less it
proves one must not indulge in practical joking too much-you
are a practical joker-and that talking about it gives it an
importance it does not have and the best thing to do is just to
forget about it. There are better things to do than spend one's
time on incompetent and untalented oddities. I will never dis­
cuss any further performances by the Alfred Jarry Theatre.
53
OLD MAN UBU. That's nothing to us.

BROTHER IGNORAMU S . And the great Q is formed from this.

OLD MAN UBU. Oh ! oh ! that concerns us very much !

PAUL REBOUX. Notwithstanding, I am going to give you an

account of the play presented at the Comedie des Champs­
Elysees, after the manner of Surrealist critics :
" The cockatoo escaped astride Mistress Discipline after hav­
ing given birth to the geometer. The buckskin pants passed
through a portrait (a poor likeness), for it was useless to milk
the rays of the green, frock-coated lamp.
" Moreover, the clock was apeish, holding forth on the
theorum of the Legion of Honour and inciting the palm-tree
to cut out the virtues of the French Army. In this way it trans­
figured the prodigious roadworker into an honest Republican,
the embodyment of vice and virtue, on his third birthday. The
logical consequence of this was that Hector chucked his ticket
to the drummer of the carniverous guard, in order to crunch
the almonds hanging from the chandelier of congeniality.
" Attention ! Salute ! The clock goes and does its business in
letter W of the Larousse Dictionary. ' '
There now, I think I have put you in the picture . . .

OLD MAN UBU. The brilliant author of Les Drapauds is clearly

recognisable in this by his tone and vocabulary.

RENE PICK-ARJAN. Let us speak plainly. Convinced that it is

very good form to hold opinions and even better to flaunt them
as Revolutionary, the author manifests his antimilitarism and
excercises his irony on the old general brought to life from the
" reserve ". No doubt he hoped to arouse our indignation but,
on the contrary, we are delighted to find such ideas in their
proper place amid such insane chaos.

NOZI ERE. Sure enough , the author never misses a chance to

54
attack the Anny . He puts a ridiculous general on stage who is
nonetheless not so dangerous as General Bown. M. Roger
Vitrac does not have the lightness of touch and is a less formid­
able ironist that Meilhac and Halevy were. Under Napoleon
III these only poked fun at the weaknesses of the High Com­
mand. M. Roger Vitrac wants to attack patriotism. The mad­
man hangs himself from his balcony under the impression he is
a flag.

OLD MAN UBU. What, that again !

PAUL BLOCK, of The Berliner Tageblatt. I am surprised that

in a French theatre no protest was raised.

PIERRE LAZAREFF. What do you expect? Several days before,

at one of their morning councils of war at the Radio Tavern,
the Surrealists had decided not to attend the Alfred Jarry
Theatre in order not to cause another incident like that at A
Dream Play. Thus the strict public control system operated by
the box office was all in vain.

MONSIEUR LELOUP. The promoters received their just deserts.

We listened attentively, sadly, not without jealousy towards
these vague Bolshevists who can find the money to amuse
themselves in this way. After all . . . we could tell a few home
truths about them.

OLD MAN UBU . It's already happened. Poor I d a Mortemart !

NOZIE RE. Ida Mortemart ! Strange, symbolic creature. Alas !

such a noble, solemn, haughty woman, cursed with a ridicul­
ously noisy indisposition. Here the author should call on noises
off.

RENE PICK-ARJAN. Ah, yes ! What a find ! Do you remember

that passage in Casanova's Memoirs where he tells how he met
55
a woman so indisposed (your words). The author found the
story too good to pass up.

PAUL REBOUX. Apparently this rank, embarrassing debility

was indispensible to the play.

NOZIERE. In the child's eyes Ida Mortemart represents the

greatness and baseness of human nature.

PAUL BLOCK. After all, she is but one virtue the more.

LUCIEN DESCAVE S . Apparently we were " in the midst of

magic, in the midst of human decay " . Granted. We were
warned.

OLD MAN UBU. I'll stamp on your toes.

NOZIERE. Hey ! King Ubu, the author didn't forget your

favourite condiment. He kept on recalling it. In ·the last act,
didn't M. Paumelle get out of the conjugal bed and go and
squat in the garden, and what about Victor who writhes about
with colic until he dies? Even his father and mother are struck
down by it.

A MEMBER OF THE COM E DIE FRAN 9AI SE. Allow me to express

aloud my indignation.

PIERRE LAZAREFF. No, M. Antonin Artaud has not found a

second Ubu Roi, only a slightly crazy imitation of Purging
Baby, minus Georges Feydeau's verve.

LUCIEN DESCAVE S. Did you notice that the main characters,

Victor, aged nine and Esther, aged six, were played by actors
who stopped growing long ago, which is funny for a start.

RENE PICK-ARJAN. That is true. With a kid of nine as the

56
hero, they took good care to cast a fully-grown man in the
part.

J EAN-MARIE DE FONTAUBERT. Well ! This rascally child

frankly says and does everything we used to say and do as
children when we were out of earshot of our parents. But don't
take the children along, this is not for them. From " Bas-aine "
to " puss, puss, curly puss " there is a lot of risky stuff in it.

LEON BARANGER. Excuse me, gentlemen, permit me to

acquaint you with the ideas the performance seemed to suggest
to me and which I intend to publish in Autocar magazine under
the title " THE SON'S EYE " . For, although this show does not
mention sport, we may still profit by it.
The author brings together a certain number of characters
under the scrutiny of Victor, aged nine. They are deplorable
but true instances of the sort of humanity we are always close
to. Their moral ugliness explains the spite Victor displays
against them. The latter mocks the grand airs his father gives
himself and yet, like the author in his day, dreams of nothing
but being able to break the last five commandments of God. It
is sad more than anything else, although it is presented as an
attempt to be desperately funny. Still, we do laugh at times,
and the audience say to themselves self-complacently, " At
least I'm not like that ! "
But ugliness and physical dirtiness are expressions of the
hideousness of our souls. The stupid but hollow cliches of
angry conversation call to mind physical movement in useless
gymnasti cs. Moreover, Victor's father, however much he may
throw out his chest, has a flabby stomach and weak knees. One
can go on drawing parallels of this sort for ever and came back
full circle to oneself :
" Come now, I am a father, have I always set my children
an example of real (not just verbal) energy? Have I really kept
my body in good shape? This pipe, this glass of whisky, are
they a good example, despite my temporising speeches? While
extolling the joys of physical duty, haven't I too often been full
57
 of pretexts for not getting up on wintery Sunday mornings,
where, after a stiff ordeal, the joy of a renewal of youth in the
brisk air of Saint Cloud awaited me? And finally, didn't I in­
cite my children to do everything I allowed myself in denying
it to them ? "
" So, " growled the old sluggard in me who sleeps with one
eye open, " so, we ought to deprive ourselves of everything we
like, ostensibly because it may give children perverted ideas?
Then there are the neighbours as well, the caretaker and my
friend's wives, who never understand anything. We won't be
able to say or do anything, that's obvious. "
At the time I didn't know where to draw the line. To keep
things secret, or to deprive oneself purely because one is
obliged to, smacks of hypocrisy. A son's eyes always trained on
his father's life is all very well, provided this makes us think and
better ourselves continually and freely, this being the only
worthwhile thing.
In short, the child's aim should not be to do what his father,
overtly or not, does and yet forbids him to do, but to continue
his father's actions as he is able, because they seem to him fine
and befitting a man.
In the field of physical culture, a father should therefore live
soberly, always avoiding excess, and follow a good, moderate
diet, interrupted now and again during the year with periods
of strict observance, real training, whose result should be
apparent in a test (whether public or private makes little differ­
ence). Thus the child will be able to ascertain for himself that
depriving oneself of tobacco and sweets and obliging oneself
to take regular exercise as a strict rule brings results and is not
just a devotional gesture to a mute idol. He will be able to read
clearly his father's life, without any ambiguity, dark corners or
patently transparent images. Ridicule, which can never be
completely avoided, will never become hateful.
Thus in a physical order, the rule of " Unicat " will be redis­
covered, that indefinable religion Victor dies for on the evening
of his ninth birthday, bringing about the suicide of his parents,
who are as loving as they are criminally idiotic.
58
 As the fruit of their incessant watching, our children should
pick up the desire not to die but to live longer, and to live as
cleanly as their fathers.

MONSIEUR WEINER. Of course, we could speak at length

about what this play means to us today, and determining its
relationship with the past. I must particularly stress the leit­
motif of this middle-class tragedy, which, seems to me to be
the theme of man's miserable condition, incapable as he is of
going through the most sacred or pathetic moments chastely,
without being obliged to yield and be subject to matter.

MONSIEUR CANCER. Yes, Victor dissects all our existing institu­

tions as well as the present state of middle-class society. This is
biting, merciless . . .

PAUL REBoux. Yes, yes . . . but we listen to all this in silence,

with a rather sad, pitying smile, the sort one would wear in the
Medical Superintendant's office at a mental hospital when
looking over the lucubratory diagrams of the incurably mad.

ANDRE GIDE. Is that the way we are going? Then so much

the better.

MONSIEUR PICK-ARJAN. Interested as I am in mental path­

ology, I cannot make out such a favourable case for universal
madness and social contamination.

OLD MAN UBU . But that's already been said, my boy.

MONSIEUR PICK-ARJAN. Voltaire held that man invented

asylums . . .

OLD MAN UBU. What, again ! You're repeating yourself, boy !

MON SIEUR PICK-ARJAN. After that, can one doubt the exist­
ence of mass madness ?
59
OLD MAN UBU. Re-read the Second Surrealist Manifesto,
where I say a plague on you with my occult rod.

JEAN cAs s ou . I personally find there is more explosive power

in the spirit of this play than in statements in papers and at
public meetings. But why does Victor from time to time speak
on a note of inspired delirium that reminds one of Surrealist
poetry?

THE AUTHOR. By Roger Bacon,. by Harry Price,* I swear this

is definitely the last time.

JEAN CAs sou. Now you are being reasonable. No, Victor is
not a poet because he starts delivering conventionalities from
time to time but-and this is how I interpret your meaning­
because he represents a new view of the world, an indignant,
disruptive view, because he deploys a secret, corrosive energy
which invests real life with a second meaning and discloses
bizarre, shocking, stirring and remarkable relationships.

THE AUTHOR. With all this fuss, you are going to end up hav­
ing me Jocked up by my own Myrmidons.

JEAN CAs sou. The term poetry is synonymous with rebellion.

Substituting one social system for another and elevating one
thing at another's expense amounts to very little.

FRAN<;Ois VITRY. All the same, the play is a bitter criticism

of middle-class life and everything which is ridiculous and
stupid about it : society, the family, the Republic, the
Army . . .

THE AUTHOR. No, no, officer, I assure you they are exagger­
ating. Besides, I take back " middle-class drama ". I am only
a poor playwright, a simple man of the theatre.
* Respectively "Nicolas Flamel'' and "l'abbe Bremond" in the
original. Tr.
60
OLD MAN UBU. You are a guttersnipe of ideas. Poor devil !

J EAN PRE VO ST. Old Man Ubu, I assure you this play shows
true emancipation.

CONSTANTIN LEBRIQUE. And Antonin Artaud's production

emphasised the author's meaning wonderfully by the extra­
ordinary mood emanating from the stage action and the light­
ing. In the first act, the empty picture-frames hanging from
the flies, towards the audience, re-create the fourth wall,
making explicit the audience's role as voyeurs of these family
matters.

PICK-ARJAN. And that lofty palm tree stuck in the lounge.

LUCIEN DESCAVE S . I too realised that these empty picture

frames hanging from the flies were meant to amuse us.

PAUL REBOUX. Well then, what about those people who make
love on stage, those pistol shots, those drum rolls, those mad
scenes . . . pity the poor actors who had been hired.

MONSIEUR J .L. They faithfully obeyed their producer-that

was the real trouble.

LUCIEN DES CAVE S . And anyhow, why is this play performed

in the name of Alfred Jarry? Why not in the name of DouaniC'r
Rousseau, or M. Raymond Roussel?

NOZIERE . The reason is that M. Raymond Roussel is not

alone. He has rivals. Victor could be compared with
Impressions of Africa. And, after all, it is really a continuation
ofUbu Roi. If Ubu Roi is a masterpiece as some people never
stop proclaiming, why not consider M. Raymond Roussel's
plays as masterpieces as well as Victor or the Children are in
Power?
61
OLD MAN UBU. Yes, why not?

PAUL BLOCK, of The Berliner Tageblatt. This was the most

curious stage production I have been privileged to see during
the eight years of my new post-war life in Paris. Paul Reboux
maintains the author wanted to shock the audience. I don't
think so . . . The audience's comments were a much more dis­
cerning appraisal than that of the most informed critics.

PAUL REBOUX. Yes, well, Roger Vitrac, who flattered himself

he was " having us on " , can now console himself with the
disappointment he must have felt when he found out he hadn't
" had us on" .

OLD MAN UBU. We haven't had them on either-we are them.

PAUL REBOUX. Did I miss the end?

OLD MAN UBU. Oh, my fanny ! I'll shut up ! I won't say an­
other word ! Go on, Madame Apparition.

IDA MORTEMART. I can't ! I can't !

She farts.

Note. All the answers in this little game were furnished by

press cuttings from L' Argus.

During the early part of 1 930, The Alfred Jarry Theatre will
present Le Coup de Trafalgar, a French play in four acts by
Roger Vitrac, produced by Antonin Artaud.
 LETTER TO IDA MORTEMART
ALIAS DOMENICA26

Madame,
You asked me what I expect of this disgraceful, daring
play. Well, I simply expect everything. As matters stand, this
play is everything. It clears up a painful situation. It strikes at
the heart of a truth which is not quite appalling enough to
make us despair of being alive. This is exactly the spirit of my
production. I am as sure of it as I would be of a clockwork
mechanism making its explosive charge go off at the right time.
As if it were something more than a stage work, it is like the
truth of life itself, if one considers its incisiveness .
There is undeniable perverseness in this play, but it is no
worse than any of us in this respect. Everything dirty or filthy
has some meaning and should never be taken literally. Here,
we are in the heart of magic, in the midst of human decay.
Its reality is expressed from its most acute angle, but
also from its most oblique and indirect angle. The very
meaning of things arises from their ruthlessness , a sort of per­
fect nakedness where the mind cb.oses a life of thought in its
most spontaneous emotional aspect. In this play we tried to
exhaust the quivering, crumbling aspect, not only of the feelings
but also of human thought. To bring to light the deep, eternal
antithesis between the bondage of our condition and our
physical faculties, and our capacity as pure intellect and pure
mind.
One character above all, yours, represents this antithesis,
and her appearance is the highlight of the play. This is why
Ida Mortemart owed it to herself to appear as a ghost, but a
ghost from certain aspects only, or rather from one cruelly real
aspect and one alone. This ghost from the beyond has retained
all the intelligence and superiority of the other world. We feel
63
this in the implications she attaches WITHOUT RESPITE
to everything she says. Everything is a pretext for profundity,
a pretext she clutches at, as if trembling with fear not to go on
living. In any case, she represents the worst aspects of moral
pain and physical poisoning. Her ghostly condition, as of a
spiritually crucified woman, gives her the lucidity of clair­
voyance. This is what explains the augural and powerfully
sententious tone with which she emphasises her seemingly
harmless rejoinders, which must be understood in their fullest
sense. All it would need would be for her to allow herself to
become disheartened by what she does. You can see the aw­
fully embarrassing, almost inadmiss able horror of her situation,
all the more stifling and imposing for being inadmissible.
You must understand that this infirmity and this infirmity
alone could make her position in life so fatally unbearable, in
a word, so significant and expressive. To cut it out would
change the spirit of the play, robbing it of the most appalling
and really most powerful aspect of the PUNGENCY of the
lesson ensuing from it.
I believe a person's spirit, of whatever sort, should never
allow itself to be disheartened by anything. There are no excep­
tions to freedom. And I am sure life does not hold any obstacles
for you, at least no fundamentally moral or social ones.
I hope that, at the matinee of 24 December next, you will
become that truly fabulous character, Ida Mortemart herself.
Yours sincerely,

Antonin Artaud
 LETTER TO IDA MORTEMART

' ( Second Version)27

Maclain,
You asked me what I expect from this play. Well, I simply
expect everything in all possible fields. I will go even further :
I am sure of what I am doing by putting it on. I run as sure of
it as I would be of a clockwork mechanism making its explosive
charge go off at the right time. This play contains its own
proof and dependability. In the saine way as it is set in time,
beginning at a certain time and ending at an equally certain
time (it so happens this time is the usual one audiences come
and sit in theatres, leaving two or three hours later, the play
being altogether ended) . It is also set within a certain spatial
reality in which all the anxieties, as well as all the moral con­
vulsions, and the most imperative problems of the day come
face to face. But here, anxiety has a direct connection, I mean
it is tangible, it contains its own outcome, and ends in the
general carnage at the finale, where everything is wound up
because, the play having reached a climax and the characters
having played their parts, there is no reason why the play
should go on, or leave the characters alive after it. All the
characters are the expression of a certainty. I mean everything
they say has a bearing on the widest possible scale, whether
they are conscious of it themselves or whether the author is
conscious of it for them. In this play there is a terrible desire to
be truthful, a spotlight trained on the foulest lower depths of
man's unconscious. I beg you not to regard this as an excessive
liking for shocking the public or an unnecessary wish to rebel
or astonish. It is undeniably perverse, but no more than any
of us in this sense . The author did not wallow in filth, in ugly
65
or disgusting things. Everything dirty or filthy has a meaning
and must not be taken literally. Here we are at the very heart
of magic, the heart of human alchemy. The author wanted to
express real life from the most acute angle, but also from the
most oblique and indirect angle. All this is deliberately brought
out, ruthlessly heightened. He wanted to exhaust the quivering
crumbling aspect, not only of the feelings but also of human
thought, to bring to light the deep, eternal antithesis between
the bondage of our condition and our physical faculties, our
capacity as spirit and pure mind. One character above all
represents this antithesis. Her appearance is the highlight of
the play. This is why Ida Mortemart owed it to herself to appear
as a ghost, but a ghost from certain aspects only, or rather
from one cruelly real aspect and one alone. This ghost from
the beyond has retained all the intelligence and superiority of
the other world. We feel this in her tone of voice and the impli­
cations she attaches without respite to everything she says.
Everything is a pretext for profundity, a pretext she clutches
at as if at her last gasp, afraid not to go on living. Everyone of
her words has a double or even triple meaning. In any case, she
represents the worst aspects of moral pain and physical poison­
ing. Her ghostly condition, as a spiritually crucified woman,
gives her the lucidity of clairvoyance. This is what explains
the augural and powerfully sententious tone whereby she
emphasises her seemingly harmless rejoinders, which must be
understood in their fullest sense. All it would need would be for
her to allow herself to become disheartened by what she does.
You can see the awfully embarrassing, almost inadmissible
horror of her situation, all the more stifling and imposing for
being inadmissible.
You must understand that this infirmity and this infirmity
alone could make her position in life so fatally unbearable, in
a word, so significant and expressive. To cut it out would
change the spirit of the play, robbing it of the most appalling
and really most powerful aspect of the PUNGENCY of the
lesson ensuing from it.
What I have just written will make you understand just
66
how sincere the author has been, how far he was guided by
the absolute need to go as far as possible.
Even if the truth were embarrassing.
No need to tell you I value this filthy, reviled part more
than any other. Personally, I find it the finest in the play and
this is why I would like to see it played by a first-rate actress.
Only an actress of such calibre could sustain it and make it
b elievable by sincerity stemming from the highest intellectual
level. I need not tell you this would be a wonderful chance for
you to attract attention, even at the cost of scandal. I feel only
real cretins could be scandalised in the presence of a character
of this sort.
I swear there is nothing in this world (even that) which can­
not be saved by deep sincerity. Only I need really emancipated
people around me, really free minds. I believe a person's spirit,
whatever it may be, can never allow itself to be disheartened
by anything. Now I found FREE minds around me who none
the less thought the situation was such as to be exceptional. I
don't believe there are any exceptions to freedom, provided a
deeply human sense arises from it, and that art, and especially
theatre, saves everything.
I have a feeling life does not hold any obstacles for you, at
least no falsely moral, social or conventional ones, or that you
would let yourself be stopped by prejudice, especially one based
on social conventions.
Nothing human can be dirty, if the situation in which the
thing takes place is exciting. And this, as you see, is very
much the case. I hope that on 24 December you will become
the fabulous character of Ida Mortemart herself.
Yours sincerely,

Antonin Artaud
 STRINDBERG'S A DREAM PLA r :
PROGRAMME NOTES

Strindberg's A Dream Play28 has a place in the repertoire of an

ideal theatre as one of those model plays whose production is
a producer's crowning achievement. An infinite compass of
feelings are brought together and expressed in it. At the same
time, we find in it both the outer and inner aspects of manifold,
vibrant thought. The loftiest questions are dealt with and
evoked in a form that is at once concrete and mysterious. The
magnetic vibration of the universality of life and the mind are
presented to us and impress themselves on us in a precisely and
fruitfully human sense. The success of such a production vir­
tually consecrates a producer or director. The Jarry Theatre
owed it to itself to produce such a play. The object and theories
of this new company are well known. The Jarry Theatre wants
to re-introduce into theatre not a sense of life but certain truths
situated deep down in the mind. There is a certain interplay
of associations in the mind between a real and dream existence,
certain relations between acts, and events expressible as actions,
which makes up just the sort of theatrical reality the Jarry
Theatre has decided to revive. The feeling of the true reality
of theatre has been lost. The idea of theatre has been blotted
out of men's minds. Yet it exists halfway between reality and
dreams. But as long as it has not yet been re-discovered in its
fullest and most fruitful entirety, the theatre will never stop
being in jeopardy. Theatre today portrays life. More or less
realistic sets and lighting attempt to restore the ordinary truths
of life or else cultivate illusion-and that is the worst of all.
Nothing is less likely to produce an illusion than the illusion of
unreal props, flats and painted canvas drops the modem stage
offers us. We must chose sides, not fight life. Just by showing
real objects from real life, by their arrangement, their associa-
68
tions, the relation between the human voice and lighting, there
is a whole self-sufficient reality which does not need any other
to live. This false reality is theatre and that is what we must
cultivate.
Producing A Dream Play, therefore, fulfils this need to
present nothing which, in the public's eyes, cannot be immedi­
ately used as such by the actors. Three-dimensional characters
seen moving among props and objects, among a completely
real, also three-dimensional world. The false amid the real is
the ideal definition of such a production. A meaning, a practi­
cality of a new mental order is given to the ordinary objects
and things of life. 29

69
 A M I ME PLAY
AND
A STA GE SYN O P S I S
 THE
PHILOSOPHER'S
STONE30

SET
A recess cut into a great black frame. The recess measures
almost the full height of the stage.
A great red curtain, which hangs down to the floor and rolls
out in huge tufts, fills all the back of the recess from top to
bottom. The curtain is set diagonally and is left-(seen from
front of house).
Downstage, a table with great solid legs, and a high wooden
chair.
The curtain, harshly lit from above and below-is cut down
the middle ; and when drawn aside a great red light can be
seen :
in there is the operating theatre.

CHARACTERS
Doctor Pale.
Isabelle : small town girl, bored. She cannot imagine love
assuming any other form than this frigid doctor-and love
leaves her unsatisfied.
Her desires, unconscious yearnings, are conveyed by vague
sighs, whimpers and moans.

PLOT
In one comer of the house is the doctor's experimental labora­
tory.
Harlequin, who noticed Isabelle long ago and desires her,
will enter the house by means of one of these experiments-­
ostensibly to be used by the doctor for a more or less sadistic
experiment.
73
 The latter is searching for the philosopher's stone .
Isabelle has a sort of dream during which Harlequin appears
to her, but she is separated from him by the very wall of un­
reality through which she seemed to see him.
We watch one of the doctor's experiments on stage in which
Harlequin loses his arms and legs one by one, in front of the
terrified Isabelle. In her, horror is mingled with the first attrac­
tions of love. Harlequin, left alone for a moment with Isabelle,
makes her with child, but surprised by the doctor in the midst
of their erotic labours, parallel with the doctor's sadistic labours
and experiments, they hurry to produce the child and bring
it out from under Isabelle's dress. It is a perfect, scaled-down
dummy of Dr Pale, who cannot doubt his parenthood when
he sees himself reproduced thus in his wife's child.

DEVELOPMENT
Dr Pale is in the midst of a veritable massacre of dummies in
one comer of the set, chopping them up with an axe, like a
woodcutter or a butcher. Isabelle, at a table downstage, starts,
writhes and despairs. Each blow echoes deep in her nerves. Her
convulsions and shudders occur in total silence : she opens her
mouth as if to cry out but we hear nothing. From time to time,
however, one of her yawns ends in a sort of drawn out hoot.
Having finished his diabolical task, the doctor appears down­
stage holding a stump which he examines ; at one point he
seems to test its non-existent pulse ; then he tosses it aside, rubs
his hands, shakes himself, snorts, dusts himself off, raises his
head and sniffs. A sort of mechanical smile relaxes his features
and distends his face : he turns to his wife who is upstage,
imitating his movements like a vague, barely suggested, distant
echo. When the doctor smiles, so does she (always a silent echo),
she gets up, moves towards him. A long erotic labour begins.
Having nothing else but the doctor to batten on, she draws on
him for her happiness. The actress must show a mixture of
disgust and resignation in the impulse of her movement towards
him. Behind her coaxings, her flirtations, she shows silent rage,
her caresses end in slaps, in scratches. She pulls his moustache
74
with sudden, unexpected movements-rains blows on his
stomach, steps on his toes as she stands to kiss his lips.
Towards the end of this sadistic love scene, a sort of period
military march bursts out-a man enters facing upstage,
seeming to introduce someone else, who is in fact none other
than himself. While he stands facing upstage, he talks and
makes a short introductory speech. Seen from the front, this
character is dumb, as the result of an experiment. But in him­
self, this character is two-sided :
-one side, a sort of bandy-legged monster, a hunchback,
squinting, one-eyed cripple, who trembles in all his limbs as
he walks.
-the other, Harlequin, a fine lad who straightens up from
time to time and throws out his chest when Dr Pale is not
looking.
A horribly high-pitched and grating voice in the wings com­
ments on all the main situations. At the start of the play, when
Isabelle uttered her desperate hoots, this voice was heard as if
it came out of the doctor's mouth, and we saw the doctor
spring on stage for a moment and mime the following words,
mouthing them and making the appropriate gestures :
" HAVE YOU FINI SHED INTERRUPTING MY
WORK ? SHE IS COM ING ! "
then return to his all-red room .
Harlequin says the following words when he introduces
himself :
" I HAVE COME TO HAVE THE PHILOSOPHER'S
STONE TAKEN OUT OF ME. "
Increasing the length of pause after each part of the sentence,
in a quavering, accented voice.
A short pause after "I have come "; long after "stone ";
longer still and indicated by a stop in movement on "of me " .
In a hoarse tone o f voice, delivered from the back of the
throat but at the same time high-pitched: the voice of a hoarse
eunuch.
When the doctor and Isabelle see (and hear) this, they let
go of one another slowly.
75
 The doctor all tensed in a grotesque attitude of scientific
curiosity, like a giraffe or heron, his chin exaggeratedly cran­
ing forward.
On the other hand, Isabelle, who is dazzled by the appear­
ance of Harlequin, assumes the form and pose of a weeping
willow : she mimes a sort of dance of ecstacy and astonishment ;
sits, brings her hands together, holds them in front of her with
timidly charming and moving gestures.
This scene could be played in slow motion with a sudden
lighting change. Harlequin, monstrous and bandy-legged,
trembles (slowly) in all his limbs, the doctor advances (slowly)
towards him, mad with joy and scientific curiosity, seizes
Harlequin by the scruff of the neck and pushes him into the
wings towards his experimental laboratory-while Isabelle,
who, with sudden rapture, has felt all the wonders of true love,
slowly faints.
A few moments pass after which we see the doctor push the
real Harlequin on stage ; we sense he has discovered the ruse ;
he amuses himself by chopping off his legs, arms and head with
an axe. Isabelle stands terrified in one corner of the set, loses
consciousness, and the use of her limbs as well, but she does not
fall.
Then the doctor, dead-tired, falls asleep. Harlequin, who
has fallen to the floor, finds his arms, his legs and his head
and, crawling, advances towards Isabelle.
The doctor is slumped on the table and has partly hidden
himself behind the red curtain, with only his head showing
and his dangling feet. He snores loudly. A violently erotic
scene ensues between Isabelle and Harlequin, in which Harle­
quin lifts up Isabelle's dress (she has finally sat down centre
stage) and slides his hand towards that part called in the posters
of the period : " THE MUFF " .
The gesture is only begun, for the doctor wakes up, sees
them, and a tremendous roar, " OMPH " , bursts from the wings,
a monosyllable which the doctor utters each time he is in the
grip of violent emotion.
Harlequin and Isabelle hurry to produce the child and as the
76
doctor, now completely awake, approaches, they show him a
dummy of himself-which Isabelle has just pulled out from
under her dress. He cannot believe his eyes, but faced with
the child's likeness, he gives in, and, while Harlequin hides
behind Isabelle, the scene ends with the married couple
embracing.

When they are hurrying to produce the child, they do it with

many gestures, while shaking each other like sieves.
Harlequin's limping entrance is done to music, using limp­
ing, halting period music (a military march, if so desired,
played on wind instruments : trombone, bagpipe, clarinet, etc.) .

When they pull out the child, a cry is whispered in the wings :
" THERE SHE IS ! "
A deafening whistle could by substituted for this cry, some­
thing like the noise made by a trench torpedo, ending in an
enormous explosion.
An intense light strikes the dummy at this instant, as if to
make it catch fire.

The doctor's " OMPH " is a sort of roar of joy, the roar of an
ogre. Its direction and volume could be made different for each
of his entrances.

The sentence : " HAVE YOU FINISHED INTERRUPTING

MY WORK ? " etc., must be spoken with quivering exaspera­
tion, building tremendously on the last syllable of the word
" work ", like a frantic man who is excessively worked up.

When they are making the child the two players must go
through a period of madness while they take hold of each
77
other's head, heart, stomach, loins, in turn and rhythmically,
then put their hands on each other's heads and hearts, hold
each other's shoulders as if each one wanted the other to wit­
ness what is happening to him-and finally they make one
another jump in the air, using their stomachs as if they were
trampolines and shaking themselves in the air like sieves in a
gesture copied from the act of love.
 THERE IS NO MORE FIRMAMENT81

Movement I

Darkness. Explosions in the dark. Harmonies cut short. Raw

sounds. 32 Sound blurring.
The music gives the impression of a far-off cataclysm ; it
envelops the theatre, falling88 as if from a vertiginous height.
Chords are struck in the sky ; they dissipate, going from one
extreme to the other. Sounds fall as if from a great height, stop
short and spread out in arcs, forming vaults and parasols.
Tiered sounds.
Beginnings of glimmers that change continually, passing from
red to harsh pink, from silver to green, turn white ; suddenly
boundless, opaque, yellow light, the colour of dirty fog or the
Simoon.
No pure colours. Every shade must be complex and agonis­
ingly multi-shaded.
The sounds and lights break up into fits and starts, jerkily,
like magnified Morse, but this will be to Morse code what the
music of the spheres heard by Bach is to Massenet's Clair de
Lune.
Stage lights come up.
Sound and lighting become the din and lights of a modern
street intersection at dusk.
People pass by in all directions but only shadow trams,
undergrounds and cars appear projected on the vast white
wall. Moving groups form, and patterns appear in these groups ;
varied and contradictory movements like an ant-hill seen from
high up.
Street cries. Various voices. An infernal racket.
When one sound stands out, the others fade into the back­
ground accordingly.
79
VOICE S
" Wines ! Window-glass ! "
" Beer ! Iceman ! "
" Platinum, my dear . . . blue blond . . . sun and skin, eh ! "
"Just one finger, just lift a finger ! "
" That letter, I want that letter. "
" With a freckled face, chum. "
" Dirty bastard ! "
" A picture of sickness. "
" Astronomers say the spots . . . "
" I've never seen the sun so huge. "
" Like the 1 g 1 2 eclipse. "
" Wheat's going up, gold's going down. "
" Dust over everything. "84

All these lines cut by passages where cries, noise, tornadoes

of sound cover everything. A prodigious,35 haunting voice pro­
claims something we don't understand.
It rises higher and higher.
It seems to be saying :

" I am announcing ! . . .
Informing you . . . .
My anouncement concerns . . . .
A great, great, great, very very great . . . " 8 6

This is heard as8 7 a great, full voice, drawn out, but as in a

dream, and this is constantly repeated until the end of the
scene.
Soon, on a suitable rhythm which will have to be worked out
on stage, the voices, noises and cries become strangely blurred,
the light fades, as if a waterspout had sucked everything up
into the sky : sound, lights, voices, all to a dizzy height, to the
limit.
A woman waves her arms, a man falls, another with his nose
in the air as if scenting ; a dwarf,88 now downstage, runs about
light as a feather.
80
 A hysterical woman wails, makes as if to undress. A child
cries with huge, terrible sobs.

" Mummy. "

" Oh ! I'm suffocating. "
" What's happening to me? "
" Bally maniac ! "
" Layabout, layabout, dirty brute, murder ! "
" Oh ! He's undressing me. Help, he's ripping my dress
off. I'll be naked ! "
" Come on, come on, take me, in the street, yes, yes, here, in
the street . . . I'm crazy . . . I've had enough. "
" There, take that, and that, and that too, sadist, sadist,
dirty sadist. "
" Oh ! dear, dear ! Oh ! dear, dear ! My heart, my throat,
my lungs ! "
" I'm afraid, I'm on fire, I'm burning, I'm going to
jump ! "a9

Myriad tramplings, a whirlwind starts.

The people crying out are alone.
No one touches them.
Enormous gesticulation.
Sudden stop. Everything starts again. Everyone takes his
place again as if nothing had happened.
The intersection comes to life again.

Movement II

The stage is filled with people running, pointing up at the sky.

" There, there, what's that, then? "

" No, not there. There. I tell you it's there. "
" That spot. Look, look at that spot. I mean just look at
that spot. ' 0 4 0
81
 An old man brandishes a stick and shouts in stentorian
tones, as if apoplectic with rage at too impudent a trick :41

" It's ten o'clock at night, is that the sun or the moon up
there? Is that the sun or the moon ? "
A LAYABOUT. " That's the moon, fat-head, ain't you ever seen
a homed moon? ' 042
A CHILD . " Mummy, if the light goes out, will you be blind? "

A policeman makes traffic signs. Nobody stops.

A woman comes up to him :
" Officer, if there is a war or the plague, will they requisi­
tion my dog? "

A scuffle. People fighting for a look, 48 successive groups of

them climbing the steps at the side of the stage.

" Look there, you idiot, it's there. "

" It's in the sky, the cataclysm is in the sky. "
" The moon's falling. I tell you, the moon falling. Look,
look there, it's coming loose, it's falling. "
" Let it fall, let everything go to hell. "
" Tell them where my love comes from, Augustus Oldus. "
" It must be44 all about love ; the azure vault is falling. "
" Hey ! look here you, the dramatic poet over there. "
" Shut up ! Enough dramatics. Calm down. Bunch of
dreamers. Back to kip. "

The people in tiers form into two columns on each side of the
stage.

Centre stage blacked out when all the people climbed up

amid the shouts, complaints, protests and calls.

" Can't you stop pushing back there, I'll fall down. "
" What? fall down ! Who do you think you are, the sky? "
" Not so fast ! You're too heavy. "
" Oh ! Good God, it's true, so it's true. "
82
 Newsvendors spread out in the blacked-out centre stage,45
waving their news-sheets.
These vendors assume the former, great, incomprehensible
dream voice :

" GREAT DISCOVERY. GET YOUR GREAT DIS­

COVERY. OFFICIAL. SCIENCE BEWILDERED.
OFFICIAL. NO MORE FIRMAMENT.48 NO MORE
FIRMAMENT. "

" What are they saying. Oh ! what are they saying, what
are they talking about? "

" NO MORE PYRENEES. NO MORE PYRENEES.

NO MORE FIRMAMENT. OFFICIAL. SENSA­
TIONAL DISCOVERY. SCIENCE BEWILDERED.
FAMOUS SCIENTIST'S DISCLOSURE. NO MORE
FIRMAMENT. "

A calm patch, then very far off other voices take up the
chorus with a fresh invasion of news-boys. The word Sirius is
heard in every tone of voice and on every pitch in the scale,
getting louder as they go up.

" SIRIUS . . . SIRIUS . . . SIRIUS, etc. IBE GOVERN­

MENT URGES YOU TO KEEP CALM. " 4 7

" Back to kip, bunch of dreamers. Bunch of dreamers,

back to kip. "
" But I don't understand what's going on.0 I'm afraid,
I've had enough, I'm burning. "
" Oh ! Mummy, it's happened, it's happened, I can see
it falling. "
" Read what it says in the paper, dear. I don't understand
a thing. What's going on? "
83
 " THE GOVERNMENT URGES YOU TO KEEP
CALM. "

A man with a newspaper in his hand rushes downstage.

" Here. Here, look here, I know, listen. This is the Truth. "

Silence falls.49 He tries to read. But shouts, yapping and

trampling start up again in an upstage corner, like people who
have just arrived and don't know what's going on, not having
heard.

" But it's not normal, is it, something50 is not normal. "
" I'm cold, I'm falling. "
" Look, it's starting again . . . what's up? "

Silence.
A body is carried past on a stretcher. People rush forward to
have a look.
A man follows the body. A woman stops him.

" Doctor, is it the plague? "

" No, of course not, it's . . . "

The Doctor's reply is drowned in a gale of voices and shouts.

" What are they getting so worked up about? "

" I saw it, chum, it didn't fall, it was a magnetic pheno­
menon. "
" No, no, of course not, it's the tail of a comet. "
" Nonsense, it's thunder without lightning. "
" No, it isn't, its lightning without a charge. "
" Idiot. "

Silence. The man with the newspaper in his hand moves

further downstage.
Silence.
 The man begins to speak. 5 1 But the groups of people hide him
from view, screen him . All turn their backs to the audience
and watch something upstage.
The public-address system blots everything out :

" STUPENDOUS DISCOVERY. SKY PHYSICALLY

ABOLISHED. EARTH ONLY A MINUTE AWAY
FROM SIRIUS. NO MORE FIRMAMENT. CELES­
TIAL TELEGRAPHY BORN. INTERPLANETARY
LANGUAGE ESTABLISHED. "

The crowd is glad.52 All breathe a sigh of relief. Laughter

coalesces. The crowd disperses. The men return to their little
games. They pinch women, who utter little shrieks.
One man's solitary voice :

" None the less, I don't understand. Anyway, what the hell
does it matter to us? Is that any reason for us to crack up? "

The man exits.

Only a few people out for a stroll are left. Lovers swarm all
over each other. A pedlar. A hurdy-gurdy man.

VOICES
" There, you understand, it is based on . . . "
" Well, chum, releasing collosal energy. "
" Not energy. Volatilisation. "
" What . . . ? "
" Decomposition of matter. "
" It's the end of the world. You don't release energy like
that. They are two worlds ramming one another.38 As if
the earth had blown up in the sky. "
(This last as an explanation.)

A man becomes excited as he speaks.

Loafers hardly even pause. H
He looks like a Hyde Park clap-trap sermoniser.
85
 " It's love, eh, you become someone dse and that's all
there is to it. You become a star, that's how it is. That's
what language is about. You don't speak, but it's all
there. You understand, everything is there before you say
it. Star and fire. You are fire. "55
At this, a distant revolutionary song begins. This is :

Movement III

While the song swells, gallows-bird characters appear, a few at

a time, and mingle with the groups of idlers and bourgeois.
Isolated arguments break out.

" Piss off out of it, you. "

" Come over here and take that. "

Blows exchanged. Women shoved about. Slaps ring out.

We seem to hear the Internationale.
Two tom-toms join the uproar. One deep, the other very
high-pitched and dissonant.
A tremendous chorus, growing in volume, saying to the
rhythm of the tom-toms :

" Whoever rises will be humbled.

Whoever rises will be humbled. "

People run by, women in a panic, running.

" It's happened, they're coming. "

"Again ! "
" Oh ! It isn't over yet (twice). "
" There, you see, it was the Revolution. "
" No, come on, what about Sirius? "
" Sirius? I tell you, they are up in arms, so there. "

Terrific whistle blasts. Mad chases. The din increases.

86
 Policemen go by, running. Only backwards, as if hard pressed.
The songs and racket become terrific. But bit by bit, the
stage is filled with a grim populace : beggars, convicts, tramps,
whores, cut-throats, pimps, all the underworld. The women's
blouses hang open, unkempt, singing louder than anyone else
in raucous tones, they bell at anything.
Little by little, a lurid forest of torches fills the stage, absorb­
ing all darkness and all other light.
A space opens up amid the tough, impressive groups.
Little by little, a strange drum sound obliterates everything,
an almost human sound which starts shrill and ends muffled.
A woman with a huge belly enters ; two men beat the sides of it
alternately with drumsticks. She advances processionally.
Now the fleeing middle-classes return by the front of the
stage and the sides and climb in groups of four up the side
tiers.
The chorus and Revolutionary song reach a titanic pitch,
grow in volume and strength and depth, responding like a
litany to the sound of the beaten belly.

THE CHORU S , accenting its words on a hurrying rhythm :

" Pointer. What do you see, Pointer? "
" I see the mugs scared stiff and their lilly livers. "
" Pointer, what do you hear, Pointer? "
" Thunder, and the earth cracking as it falls apart. "
" Pointer, what do you see, Pointer? "
" Death, robbery, sickness, blood, muck, fire. "
" Pointer, what do you see, Pointer?"
" Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness and the propertied
classes in full flight. "

After a slow incursion, the stage is transformed into a real

beggar's alley. Hideously deformed creatures steal on, oozing
on at first, as if breathed up out of the lower depths. Yellow,
green, cadaverous, over-large or over-long faces appear scat­
tered, then suddenly the stage is full of them. A wild mob,
wave after wave of them breaking out, each wave bringing on
87
a new stratum of terror. A parade of horror. The faces grow
larger and larger and more menacing, marked by stigmata,
every vice and sickness symbolically characterised in the gross
artificial features.
Every spasm, every belch of the dark chorus brings on a
new wave of faces.
The bodies, with huge arms and wrists like rams, come
forward, while centre stage the figure of the Great Pointer
makes his entrance, triumphantly carried in by a dozen strong
men anned with hooks.
His nose is enormous and he leans it on his right fist, appear-
ing to rise above it.
Suddenly he stands alone and we notice he is on stilts.
He speaks in a nasal, rising, very high-pitched voice.
The gigantic, twisted faces of his escort, with horribly
threatening expressions, teem and sway around him in all
directions, forming a circle around him like hideous body­
guards.
The Great Pointer makes a speech, but the end of each
phrase echoes on, ending in choruses which themselves end in
unbearable yelps.
While he is speaking the mob presses in, becoming more and
more tightly packed. It seems these words of rebellion magically
give rise to Revolutionary imagery ; groups of people enter
bearing banners, then masts of ships and wrought-iron gates,
arched doorways, even masonry walls.
The light from the torches seems to seethe, revolve, become
transformed, then begins marching forward.
Aeroplane motors hidden in the wings blow tremendous
slipstreams across the stage.

THE GREAT POINTER. My opinion it stinks, kids, my opinion

it stinks.
CHORU S . It stinks.
THE GREAT POINTER. It stinks and its cracking up among
society's mugs,
88
 now if it stinks and its cracking up
that's the stuff for King Mob !
CHORU S . That's the stuff for King Mob !
THE GREAT POINTER. We don't give a damn about sky and
earth.
What do we know about science?
Forward the great take-over.
Bread in Christian bellies.
CHORU S . Bread in Christian bellies.
THE GREAT POINTER . Come on, hunger is growing sharp,
Seeing them shit in their holes.
When everything goes to pieces,
Our turn has come.
CHORU S . Our tum has come.

The song dissolves, sweeps the words away ; a chorus of

shouts is uttered in which we feel hunger, cold and fury, shot
through with ideas of passion, unsatisfied feelings and regrets,
where sobs, brutish death rattles, and animal cries arise, while
during this chorus the whole crowd moves off, exiting while
the stage little by little returns to vocal, instrumental, luminous
night.

Movement IV

Lights come up again on another part of the stage, high up

over a gigantic metal bridge built out, overhanging the stage.
A man walks back and forth with heavy steps resounding
like diver's boots on a sort of recessed platform.
This is the Scientist. On a table in front of him, strange
apparatus, lit up by explosions. Lights come up on these
explosions and flashes.
Beneath the platform, lower down, a long green table.
The sound of muffled, lowered voices, as if in a Sacristy on
a religious holiday or at a funeral.
Groups of scientists enter, spread about the room, gesticu-
89
lating a great deal, leaning on one another, whispering,
catching hold of each other by the lapels.
The inventor above them seems to be unaware of them and
continues to pace to and fro.
Further groups enter. Nearly all the men have faces that
match every degree of nonsense and bureaucratic mediocrity.
They are caricatures, but without being overdone. In their
midst, men with quite ordinary human faces walk about but
say nothing.
Soon everyone is speaking, making a general racket, but this
does not rise above the pitch of normal conversation, with
vocal outbursts only here and there, intellectual castrati and
scientific basses. All of this gives an impression of deliberation
and sickening eminence.
Some of these scholars climb up to the platform and approach
the Inventor, as if asking him a question.
A conversation in sign language, full of denials, begins up
there.
The conversation down below also livens up. Silence settles
over certain groups, while there are heated words in others.
A different tone from one group to the next, fluctuating,
changing accentuation, pitch and speed, etc., etc.
From the moment the scientists climbed up to the platform,
the words become clear :

" Still, my dear fellow, we are afraid, afraid . "

" Personally I don't believe it. "
" But one cannot travel faster than light. "
" Dr. So and So from the University of . . . maintains
that . . . "
" Come now, look here, explain it to us. "
(From one group to another.)

The scientist climbs down from the platform and walks

among the groups. He speaks, gesticulates. The audience can­
not hear what he is saying, but the other scientists answer him,
putting forward their objections.
go
 " Come now, we are millions of light years away from
Sirius. "
" But, you'll upset everything. "
" . . . in any case, remarkably interesting, scientifically
speaking. "
" Yes, but the human concern in all this. "
" In short, you have done away with space. "
" . . . untold industrial uses . . . "
" It isn't science any more, it's immoral. "
" I'll wait until I see proof. "

A Scientist shouts in a deaf colleague's ear, saying he has

done away with space and gravitation.

" In any case, we had a reply from Sirius. "

" But that way lies the end of the world. "
"Jettisoning forms like that upsets everything. It's a crime
a crime, and it has already begun. "
" He says he doesn't care. Science comes before every­
thing else. "
" Rest assured it's all bluff, we haven't got that far. "
" Yes, yes, luckily we haven't got that far. The end of the
world is pure fiction. We won't see the Antichrist yet. "
" Then my dear fellow, have you considered that the cal­
culations . . . "
" He's dreaming. Pure Utopia. "
" He claims to have discovered instantaneous radiation. "
" That's not scientific. "
" Instantaneous radiation means the end of the universe. "
" If you have discovered that, you ought to be arrested,
they ought to run you in immediately. "
" Precisely, the end of the universe. "
(At times, the scientists' voices whistle like jays on tele­
phone wires; at other times they caw like crows, or bay56
like bullocks or puff like hippopotami in a cave.)

THE SCIENTIST. The Molecular grouping in Sirius is every-

91
 thing. These two forces, ours and theirs, had to be put in
touch with one another. I have already begun signalling.
There you are.
He rushes over to his apparatus.
Night comes on as the curtain falls.
The rumble of air savagely thrust back begins to well up.
Sounds rush forward, made up of the blast of several sirens at
their highest point. Violent percussions intermingled.
Cold light reigns everywhere.
Everythings stops.

Movement VD1

92
 Suggested act in street,
will police allow it, will police allow it,
I must say the atmosphere of modern streets is not theatrical,
therefore must,
find my environment, environment,
inclement weather, inclement weather
mobile theatre,
anyway you don't rehearse in the street,
anyway everything based on money, and money or lack of it
prevent everything,
one must be able to intimate materials do not cost anything :
timber, canvas, food and actors,
they can be got without money, or bartered, a commodity
co-operative can be re-established.

In short, what is needed?

One can act in a public square (if)58 the weather is fine, as
one needs room,
or else in a hanger, a factory, or a garage,
but one must rehearse.
I am ready to show I don't need money and can do without
it,
give me a place to live,
some food,
let worldly people cut and sew fine gowns,
a Society within society,
a State within the state.

93
 TWO
PROD U C T I ON
PLANS
 PRODUCTION PLAN FOR
STRINDBERG'S
THE GHOST SONA TA59

In contrast to Le Coup de Trafalgar, this play arouses all

kinds of prejudice. It gives the feeling of something which is a
part of a certain inner reality, without it being either super­
natural or inhuman. And that is its attraction. It shows nothing
but what is known, although hidden and out of the way. In
this play the real and unreal merge, as they do in the mind of
someone falling asleep, or someone suddenly waking up under a
false illusion.
We have lived and dreamed everything this play reveals, but
we have forgotten it.

PRODUCTION
The production should be governed by a sort of two-fold cur­
rent running between imaginary reality and whatever has
briefly come into contact with life, abandoning it almost at
once.
This slipping away of reality, this constant denaturation in
appearances, lead to the greatest freedom :
voices changing tone arbitrarily, overlapping one another,
sudden stiffening of attitudes and gestures, lighting changed,
decomposed, unusual importance suddenly given to a small
detail, characters morally fading away, leaving the noises and
music dominant, and being replaced by inert doubles, in the
form of dummies, for example, which suddenly take their
place.

THEME
Act I. The haunting figure of an old man dominates this
97
phantasmagoria. Few plays convey as this one does the way
language communicates with the invisible reality which it is
supposed to express. This old man is present as a symbol of all
sorts of conscious and unconscious ideas ; revenge, hatred, des­
pair, love and regret. At the same time he lives a very concrete,
real life. This old man, who is there for some mysterious task
of revenge, takes everyone and everything into his many care­
ful plans, but fate finally takes him into its own. For that matter
the entire play is controlled by fate, which is visible in every­
thing. The characters always seem on the point of disappear­
ing, to be replaced by their own symbols.
A transparent house serves as the play's centre of attraction.
This open house reveals its many secrets. Thus a sort of round
drawing-room on the ground floor takes on a magic meaning.
Several characters rove around this house like dead people
attracted by their mortal remains. This feeling of compulsive
attraction, of spells and magic, is oppressive and overwhelming.
Minor characters appear :
the milkmaid,
the gentleman,
the lady,
crystallising the mood of nostalgia and regret, defining a
scattered feeling, pin-pointing an idea, like the low, lasting
notes of a chord.
The house is described, along with its habits, its inhabitants
and their obsessions. One gets the feeling the destinies of all
these people are inter-related, inextricably linked, like those
of people who are marooned on a lost vessel. The whole
play is like a closed world around which the circle of life is
suddenly stopped short.
The characters speak to ghosts, and the ghosts answer them.
But each person seems to have his own ghost. And sometimes
a character, sensing the invisible world all around him, seems
set on becoming as invisible as the others, and his own ghosts
come forth and appear just in time, pronouncing physical
words that have a strange relevance to all the play's tangible
sections.
98
 Act 1 ends in sudden, concentrated terror, suggesting the
drama that will reach its climax in the next Act.

Act 11. We are in the mysterious round drawing-room. This

is the courtroom of the mistress of the house who takes the
form of a mummy in a cupboard.
She was vaguely the old man's mistress long ago, but that is
no longer of any importance.
She brings to mind folk tales in which the most oblivious,
maddest person is really the most lucid, the one who can
unravel everything, like fate itself.
Through the actions of the mummy, the horrible old man
shrivels up and dissolves until he becomes a creaking figure, a
sort of brainless automaton. In this act we watch a magic
metamorphosis in which everything changes ; things, souls and
people.
The student who wanted to enter the house will meet the
girl who waited for him without telling him, even in fact spum­
ing him.

Act Ill. The student and the girl are face to face. But every­
thing keeps them apart still-all the inconveniences of life, all
the little household tasks, above all eating and drinking, in
short the bodily carcass, the weight of things, the shock of solid
matter, the attraction of weight, the general gravitation of
matter. Deliverance only comes with death.
The play finishes on this Buddhist thought, and that is one of
its faults. But it may also clarify the play for those in the audi­
ence who would be frightened by the purely unconscious.
Besides, the production can minimise the religious sense of
the ending, through insisting on the density and contrast of the
rest.

ACT I.
Decor. Diagonally left, the open fa($ade of a house whose top
disappears in the flies.
All details specified by Strindberg will be thrown into relief,
99
with some of them receiving special emphasis, particularly the
" spy ", who from the beginning calls attention to himself by a
luminous halo.
Most of the details will be larger than life.
On the right, part of the fountain in relief, may even have
real running water. The paved street, also in relief as in a
motion picture set, climbs up towards the back until it is cut
off by a sharp line. At the top of the climbing street a few
house fa�ades may be seen. Below the sharp line we sense
running water.
The back of the set opens onto a blue-green sky, giving an
impression of the sea, of infinity.

Sound. A constant noise of water is heard, gradually growing

louder, to the point of obsession. The sound of waves breaking
in the sea, the fountain flowing.
The sound of the organ and the church-bells mentioned by
Strindberg will emphasis the entrance of certain ghosts, filling
the silences.
In addition, the noise of wind, murmuring gusts very high in
the air, giving a curious sensation of solemnity, but without
howling, rather as if the atmosphere were being powerfully
jarred.
The old man's return with the beggars is accompanied by a
great din.
The old man begins his invocations from very far off, and the
beggars answer him in several stages. At each call the crutches
are heard knocking rhythmically, sometimes on the ground,
sometimes against the walls, in a very distinct cadence. Their
cries and the tap of the crutches are punctuated towards the
end by a bizarre sound, as if a monstrous tongue were violently
slapping against the teeth.
This sound is neither pointless nor haphazard ; it will be
sought for until the desired sound is found.
Finally, when silence returns, two beggars forcibly seize the
old man's wheel-chair and suddenly bring it down stage.
(Act I, p. 45 Stock Edition, 1926)
1 00
Lighting. Violent, blinding lighting, focused on one comer
of the fa�ade, on one part of the fountain, and centre stage, on
the street. False lights illuminate the upper rooms which seem
to have their own light. Backlighting ; grey-green, wan, trans­
parent.

ACT II
Decor. As described by Strindberg, this set is the house in
Act I, seen from inside.
The walls are open, cut away, transparent, allowing us to
see the sky, the air and the light outside which remains distinct
from the light inside.
Certain objects mentioned by Strindberg-the curtain and
screen-take on disproportionate importance. They grow much
larger than life. The inside walls are indicated only by their
edges, by their incomplete outlines.

Sound. The characters' footsteps echo loudly as they enter.

The wind outside sometimes becomes mingled with the dia­
logue, making a bizarre, inexplicable sound.
The sound of the old man's crutches striking the table re­
sounds everywhere.
All these sounds must be carefully created so they are per­
fectly distinct, so as to emphasise their fantastic aspect when
necessary, leaving everything on a banal, pedestrian level
where it belongs, thus bringing the rest out by contrast.
A certain stillness of gesture and attitudes, accompanied by
machine-noise, creaking ending in a melody, especially at the
moment of metamorphosis, when the mummy changes the old
man, and the milkmaid appears to him, yet is invisible to the
others. At this moment other scenic devices are introduced, as
indicated in the sections on lighting and acting.

Lighting. The front room is to be evenly lit, although the

colour should be slightly unnatural, a little heavier than normal,
without being projected by coloured lights.
IOI
 The green room at the back is to be lit from above, as in some
Musee Grevin decor, but the lighting in the room is uneven.
This light should be a very soft green, almost white.
Marginally, on the left part of the screen, down right, leav­
ing the left and back of the room relatively shadowy.
The light outside captures the detail of a tower, a roof, or a
spire in the distance.
At the moment of metamorphosis,. the light outside becomes
blinding, pouring in through the windows, through the trans­
parent walls, seeming to drive out the lighting in the two rooms.
That light shines in with an atrocious, vibratory sound,
amplified till it is excrutiating. The sound only lasts a few
seconds, but every effort must be made to give it exactly the
required amplification and pitch.
From the beginning of this act the " spy' s " halo starts growing
bigger than in the preceding act, taking on all the darker parts
of the spectrum.
Sound and light suddenly cease, and beside each character
appears a sort of double dressed like him . All these doubles
are disturbingly motionless, at least some of them being
represented by dummies. They slowly disappear, limping, while
all the characters shake themselves as though awakening from
deep sleep. All this takes about one minute.

ACT Ill
Decor. This decor is based on the lighting, which is unreal
without suggesting anything conventionally fairylike.
Downstage, a kind of Hindu pavilion with transparent
columns, perhaps glass or some other substance, but completely
translucent.
Real or artificial plants, but not painted ones, fill all the
corners. Lights hidden in the leaves, mostly playing from
below.
The decor slants from right to left, and from down to up­
stage. Upstage, the little round drawing-room, separated from
downstage by a large pane of glass like a store window, so that
everything seen behind it is flat and distorted as though seen
I 02
through water, and no sound is heard from that part of the
stage. Upstage right, the decor is left open. And the entire
decor occupies no more than the downstage area.

Lighting. The lighting of the round room is even, yellowish

over everything. From the start of the Act, the downstage
lighting is focused in a circle, and at the edges everything is
distorted as though seen through a prism, and in the centre
there is a gap through which the round room is visible.
This circle takes up the entire stage, from up to down stage
and left to right.
At the end of the Act all this lighting disappears, making
way for the backstage lighting, and above it is seen a reflection
of The Isle of the Dead.
The Isle of the Dead appears as follows :
In front of a mirror suspended upstage, under bright light­
ing, stands a relief model of Bocklin's Isle of the Dead. This
area is lower than the rest of the stage.
And, following a system much in use in the past, the image
of the model is reflected in the mirror hung several feet above
the real model, so that it may be seen on stage, and is clearly
visible to the audience.
The lift rises very slowly so as to project The Isle of the
Dead above it.
One might add an image of a woman in wax, stretched out
on a large red bed, under a kind of glass bell, or a dummy of an
old man on crutches moving in the darkness, if the dummy can
be controlled with the necessary precision and finesse.
Aside from the reflections of The Isle in the darkness, there
is no lighting, except a mobile spot playing on a part of the
moving dummy.

Sound. No audible sound.

Muffled steps. Voices seem to rise out of mist.
No sound other than the music at the end, played on care­
fully chosen instruments ; viola, etc.
1 03
ACTING
The acting follows the variations in the play. Always clear,
precise enunciation, never degenerating into sing-song, which
doesn't mean it is not lyrical, on the contrary.
Shifts from reality to unreality indicated either by a gradual
slipping away or a sudden jump. The characters suddenly
change tone, pitch, sometimes even voice.
From the beginning to the end of the play, the student acts
like a man who is not entirely awake, and when he touches
solid matter (either literally or emotionally) he does so like a
man acting by proxy.
The old man must avoid the usual old man's theatre tricks­
trembling, bleating, speaking in a grating, throaty voice.
On the contrary, his voice is clear, although a little higher
than normal, indicating his self-assurance, his awareness of
speaking in-the-name-of-what-inspires-him.
The mummy's shifts in tone are very sudden. But a few
moments before the metamorphosis, her voice takes on a
strange reminder of sweetness and youth.
The girl always speaks with great sweetness, with a kind of
resignation. Her voice, never sing-song, enunciates everything,
yet is disturbed at times. She listens to herself more than the
other characters.
On the whole a rather slow acting pace, although well-knit
and varied so as to avoid monotony. Monotony avoided by
overall contrast, absence of business between the dialogue
except when absolutely necessary, but then such an interlude
is indicated, emphasised. Sometimes the acting produces a
slow-motion effect, especially certain characters whose move­
ments are scarcely perceptible, and yet they will arrive on
stage without anyone having noticed it. Great efforts must be
made to attain harmony of gesture and movement ; even more
than in Le Coup de Trafalgar, these must be controlled and
regulated as in a well-oiled machine.
The character of the cook is played by a dummy, her lines
delivered by a monstrous, monotonous voice amplified by
several loudspeakers so no one can tell its exact source.
104
 When the metamorphosis occurs, all the characters remain
absolutely still for several seconds.
In the last Act, the actors scarcely move. They seem to be
groping for their words and gestures ; they appear to be retrac­
ing their steps, like people who have lost their memory.
Only at the end, in order to deliver his invocation to death,
does the actor rediscover his strength, his consistency and a
living voice.
 PRODUCTION PLAN FOR

LE CO UP DE TRAFALGAR
A Middle-class play in 4 Acts

BY

ROGER VITRAC

THE PLAY
General Characteristics. Although it is called a middle-class
play, this play is only middle-class because of the characters in
it, their ideas, their petty schemes, their tawdry desires, etc.,
and owing to its structure,
but at every moment circumstances disturb the settled order,
upset these little lives, introduce a period touch, and open a
door on History and Life.
Furthermore, the characters' actions and the events they
are mixed up in are shown from several angles and in every
sense. Each character follows his own train of thought and his
own impulses through to the end. In this way they attain that
universal truth which is the real aim of theatre, while remain­
ing extremely typical and moulded by their period. The play's
language is strong, direct and terribly frank, being as careful as
possible not to omit the most secret, the most hidden truths. The
characters sometimes really enter like ghosts. They act just as
their whims dictate to them. They do not know how to deny
themselves anything.

Theme. The escapades of a crook through contemporary

upheavals :
Pre-war,
War-time,
Post-war.
1 06
 The play opens in a caretaker's lodge ; a procession of the
most typical stock figures of the lower classes of the period
passes through it.
The crook stands as a sort of magnetic figure around which
all the characters in the play revolve ; the women, first the
young ones, then the others and, as a result, their men-friends.
This movement of moral gravitation can be sensed in the
general tone of the play, in its mood, action, rhythm, etc. The
characters are infused, as if full of a strange magnetism, living
artificial lives superimposed on their own, but basking in an
artificial glow very proper to theatre's ephemeral illusions and
phantasmagoria. When the crook is arrested and withdrawn
from circulation, these characters collapse, sink down ; the
boredom of life and the feeling of fate weighing down on them
overclouds all else.
The characters who develop are :
the crook,
his mother, a rich bourgeoise whom everything throws into
a panic, who cannot strike a happy mean between laughter
and tears.
the caretaker,
her daughter, drawn by the handsome sharpster's magnetism,
a young midwife,
a prostitute,
the caretaker's husband, a gentle, haunted character,
the handwriting expert, a specialist in forgery.
But as the scenes unfold the characters ebb and flow, renew­
ing themselves ; they all shine from an utterly disconcerting
psychological angle.
All the women, the women in particular, are led up the
garden path, jilted or betrayed by the crook. His mother is his
chief victim. At the end of the play, after all her disappoint­
ments during the war, we find she has moved into the care­
taker's lodge, having become caretaker in turn .

DECOR
A ct I. Act I takes place in a caretaker's lodge, with a staircase
1 07
 in the background disappearing up into the flies. A certain
number of characters are introduced in the course of it, and it
sets the period of the play : on the eve of war.
Several moments of drama stand out in this Act, until the
last moment of drama at the curtain, when the handwriting
expert announces war has begun.

Act II. At the crook's mother's.

A typical middle-class lounge. Outside, the Fourteenth of
July is in full swing. Night. Incessant fireworks and firecrackers.
This entire scene is punctuated with songs, shouts, music,
bands and dancing. Bengal fires light up the room repeatedly,
giving the stage more depth, showing the whole expanse of the
night outside, disclosing lightning glimpses of roofs, housefronts
outlined, windows lit-up, even streets winding up into the flies.
The crook holds out bright prospects of Tut-Ank-Amon's
treasure61 to his dupes (this treasure was as yet undiscovered
at the time). He makes a date to meet the caretaker's daughter
at the Gare de Lyon that evening. We get the feeling he will
betray her. In the background, through glass doors, we see the
dining room lit for the family meal.
Act II, Scene 2-the family meal. Each character extern­
alises his own personality. A very oppressive mood. The meal
gives us a feeling of leaving-taking, of departure (The Giron­
dins' farewell dinner ! ! ! ) The crook's sister, having burnt half
her hair, suddenly enters wearing a turban. Irritation and a
sort of anxious feeling are generated by this gratuitous act, a
solemn air and a generally oppressive feeling cause the conver­
sation to dry up and put a damper on the gestures. Silence
comes and goes in gusts.

Act Ill. War-time. In the cellars of the house during a Gotha

raid. The characters are brought face to face with their fears.
Inexplicable breathing is heard at times, assuming excessive
importance. The entire scene is punctuated by the Gotha raid,
the ebb and flow of the crowds in the street. Up above, moan-
1 08
ing sirens, fire bells, exploding bombs, and the flames seen
through the vents.
At the end of the scene, a woman no one had noticed appears
from a dark corner. This is the crook ; (he has deserted and
disguised himself as a woman) he was asleep in a corner of the
cellar.

Act IV. Act IV starts with a moment of drama. A nonde­

script hotel room. As the Act opens, the Police break into the
room and arrest the crook. All the other characters now begin
to fall apart. They return to their trivial pre-occupations ; they
seem to dissolve. The play ends on a booming note, after sud­
den, final, action. The curtain falls abruptly.
This play is modern because of the special way emphasis is
laid on the characters,
because of its insistance on their piercing, floating, penetrat­
ing psychological aspect.
It is also modem because it puts forward a certain number
of present-day questions in such a way as to emphasise their
most threatening, incendiary aspects :
" Patriotism, the middle-class, the workers, Revolution, free­
dom, desertion in time of war, etc., etc. "
This manifold currency
of thought,
of form,
of facts,
could make performing it a real event.
It could mark a date in the evolution of French theatre.
More especially as the characters don't mince matters ; all
the ideas currently raised in the midst of our utterly confused,
decaying society are expressed in an unbiased way on stage,
without the author taking sides.
It could create the most lively, contradictory movements in
the audience. Preventing them from remaining indifferent to
the ideas expressed, through the characters who personify
them, yet taking care not to overstep the mark, avoiding split­
ting the audience into two camps.
1 09
 This is the play, more or less, not only as it is, but as I see it,
and how it will be produced with my own way of accentuating
it.
The following are the physical means of production.

ACT I
Decor. A typical caretaker's lodge. Downstage left, a window
onto the street. Upstage left, a sort of very narrow alcove or
recess with a wooden bed and a great red eiderdown on it.
In the middle, slightly downstage from the alcove, a fire­
place with mirrors. Upstage right, in an oblique wall section, a
glass partition with doors out onto the entrance hall of the
house. Downstage right, any sort of piece of .furniture, a side­
board or cupboard, seen from behind, indicating that there is
a wall there.
In fact the whole decor, without slipping into the unreality
of that for The Ghost Sonata, is as if carved out of an immense
wall. The set will appear in a section of the wall, which is not
painted but exposes its true thickness on one of its edges, like
in certain film sets.
In the hall of the house we can see the beginning of a wide
staircase, but the lodge ceiling does not reach the level of the
flies. And upstage, the staircase can be seen continuing up­
wards showing above the decor as far as the first landing, which
is indicated by a platform, with the staircase going up again to
lose itself in the flies.

Lighting. This set is lit by three different kinds of lighting

simultaneously :
1 . Upstage, diffuse, pitch-dark, overhead lighting on the
staircase, catching the edge of the railing and the steps. Greyish,
ashen, straight down.
2 . Hard, pale, vaguely blueish lighting coming from the
street, catching all the entrance ; inverted lighting as if the door
of the building were front of house.
This lighting does not shine into the caretaker's lodge.
3 . It is lit solely from the window, left. The lighting suggests
I IO
the end of the day, late afternoon, about sundown. Towards
the end of the Act, the light breaks up, turns green and assumes
a storm-laden intensity, when the light, masked for some time,

spills out like a gust of wind under a huge cloud.

The three lighting patterns are broken up by screens in such
a way that they do not mix.
Each has its own place until the fusion at the end of the Act,
when the storm lighting from the street predominates, pene­
trates everywhere.
Sound. From the beginning of the Act, a background noise
must be found, to try and indicate the constant presence of life
outside. In a general way, one of the aims of this production
is to break through theatre's arbitrary silence.
All the noise of a moderately busy street is there, the more
significant being chosen and sited at certain points, although
nothing of this sort is indicated by the author in the script.
Along with street noises, a few household sounds, (a piano,
a door closing, footfalls on the stairs, a tap running, a bucket
banged down on the ground, a miaowing cat, a squalling
child, people arguing, scales, arpeggios, etc . . . ) as and when
required.
ACT II
Scene I. An ordinary middle-class lounge, a window upstage
left. Right, a bay window. Downstage right, the door to the
staircase offstage and part of the staircase.
Here all the decor is set outside rather than inside. The
lounge is nondescript, all the life and show comes from the
street.
Street sounds of the Fourteenth of July rconstructed with
infinite care, even more than in the previous Act. This continual
background sound is what theatre lacks most and makes shouts
and noises off seem ridiculously thin and grotesque. More than
thin : dry, disjointed, unrelated, starting and stopping with
ludicrous abruptness. This is precisely what I would like to
avoid in general in theatre, starting with this production.
Sounds will be selected to fill the relevant silences. They will
III
have their own rhythm. They will be pre-arranged : each voice,
each noise will have a place and importance of its own, as an
integral part of the whole.
Furthermore these sounds will always have the necessary
volume. We won't try to reproduce the noise of a crowd of ten
thousand people with ten.
To this purpose, we intend to use real, recorded sound whose
pitch and volume can be adjusted at will by means of loud­
speakers and amplifiers sited all over the stage and front of
house.
Using records has the advantage of producing sound that is
always adjusted, always comes in at the place indicated and
does not count on the enthusiasm (or lack of it) of supers, or
the whims of stage-hands. Besides this, the noises off are always
regulated and written out like an actual musical score, in such
a way as to stop the risk of mis-cueing, yet losing nothing either
in precision or volume through the course of any number of
performances.
As in the previous decor, the lounge ceiling does not extend
up to the flies, allowing us to see part of the street decor above,
revealing a view of houses and streets built up in perspective,
but two-dimensionally, like a film set. The decor shows part of
a street, an iron bridge and house scaffolding in the manner of
certain primitive paintings. The whole thing worked out to
give an impression of distance and true perspective.
At the end of the scene the characters leave the lounge and
enter the dining room.
The scene change is done without a curtain, with the aid of
firework explosions filling the stage with glare and smoke.
When the characters have moved and are seated in the up­
stage set, this lifts into the flies, moves downstage and is lowered
downstage fully set, with the characters seated, laughing, as if
getting over a shock. For example, some are grouped around a
woman they are fanning. The explosions outside have made
her faint, half with fright and half with laughter.
The lifting and lowering of sets is done naturally, openly,
otherwise it is pointless.
1 12
Scene 2. Act II, Scene 2 , the family in the middle of dinner.
The street noises have grown fainter. The laughter indoors
rings hollow. Here everything depends on mood ! Certain
objective details stress the abatement of noises off and the
growing importance of sound indoors, indicating their pur­
pose.
This is the scene where the woman with a turban suddenly
enters and sits at the table. Her entrance is quite normal ; that
is, a woman has burnt half her hair and as luck would have it,
her head seems to be divided exactly into two halves, so she
has made up a turban to hide the ravages caused by the burn.
The symbolic meaning of her arrival will be brought out with
all the discretion (yet without over-emphasising it) with all the
importance needed, by pauses, by a sort of silence, by the
guests' awkward movements and by the sound of cutlery scrap­
ing on plates or glass.

ACT III
There is only one scene in Act I I I .
The set represents a cellar, like any other. It has vents right
and left, higher up. The set is angled. Upstage is a comer. But
this comer is obscured by projecting walls formed by the
building's foundations. Between these walls and the upstage
corner is a sort of nook, hidden in tum by crates and barrels
covered with a curtain.
The walls zig-zag down on both sides of the stage, showing
how thick they are.
The cellar roof is not all the same height. A part of it is just
the height of a man's head. Another part forces the people
sheltering there to lie down.
Above the cellar roof and facing one way on the set, upstage
centre, building fronts rise in tiers on both sides of the street.
Each exploding bomb reveals panic-stricken people crossing the
street, running, scattering into the air on both sides ! !

Sound. In this decor as in the others, the sound effects will be

arranged with the greatest attention to detail, in such a manner
1 13
as to obtain the maximum range and exactness desired, with­
out changing from one performance to the next.
Recordings and speakers are probably still needed, except
for bomb explosions.
The sound of voices, footsteps, cries, panic-stricken tramp­
ling, exploding bombs, sirens, fire bells, flashing searchlights,
smoke, sudden wind ; everything WRITTEN DOWN, con­
trolled like a piece of music.
In the cellar we get a sensation of intense excitement. People
eat, speak, call to one another, groups of them laugh and cry.
The stage will be lit by candles and lanterns, with only the
gloomy, diffuse street lighting coming from above through
the vents. The street lighting contrasts with the cellar lighting
as in some etchings. It contains a brilliantly-lit part higher up,
with shadowed sides lower down.
From time to time, against the perpetual background noise,
we hear, very far off, the inexplicable music of an accordion or
the echoes of a song far away, corresponding with the argu­
ments and moans from the cellar below.

ACT IV
This Act contains the most brutal, true-to-life touches.
It ends in a minor key, however, like the echoes of a dying
argument. The set depicts a hotel room flooded with cold,
dreary light. Light like on a rainy day in Paris.
Left, a door, slightly centre ; downstairs right, a window on
to the room. Cheap furniture, used toilet articles. The corners
of the walls and ceiling are disgustingly dirty. A filthy old rug
on the floor, the coverlet on the bed is ripped.

Lighting. Same lighting through the Act.

Sound. As in the other Acts, background sound fills every

silence, but these background noises, conveying the din of a Paris
street, break out at times with increased force. Again and again
we hear buses pass close by, shaking the windows and floor.
Numerous shouts outside. Hawkers' cries are heard, rising
1 14
with great clarity. We get the impre�on life is taking over
again, the anonymity of life where people fade into the back­
ground.
The play ends on a booming note ; a violent sound suddenly
stops and leaves everything in suspense as the curtain falls.
Then silence, followed by more sound, only lower, slowly
fading out.
If desired, the street scene can appear above the set with the
buildings rising by degrees and standing out in the cold, harsh
light.

ACTING
The actors must remain true to life, without any special
approach towards this play, either in speech or moves.
However, contrary to rep. custom, normal intonations and
gestures are deliberately raised a tone, becoming clearer, as if
in relief.
Any stylisation will be systematically rejected. This does not
prevent the characters' natures obeying a certain exceptional
logic.
All the characters in this play, with their unusual psychology,
must find a natural, yet little used, hidden, forgotten tone to
speak on, yet it must be as credible and also as real as any
other.
Without killing any of an actor's spontaneity, his tone of
voice, gestures and moves are worked out so they obey a
rhythm where everything falls into place.
The production supporting the play must work like a
smoothly running machine. Everything from the most general
to the smallest detail must fit. The way the characters develop ,
their entrances and exits, crosses, conflicts, arranged and
finalised with special precision and if possible, even anticipating
the slightest slip. The place for the latter is at the start during
rehearsals, rather than during the run. That's all.
But once the production is set, and set in such a way as to
allow some leeway for the actors' day to day reactions, as well
as for the audience's, everything should conform to it.
1 15
 NOTES ON
THE TRICKS TER S
BY

S T E V E PA S S E U R
 THE TRICKSTERS62

Stimulating yet terrible, Luckmann is unsatisfied since at heart

he not only mistrusts his antagonist's lethargy about Love, but
his own as well,
he has a fear of becoming sated, arising simply from accom­
plishing something, from carrying something out. From habit,
just making use of something or profiting by it, as this kills
our idea of the thing and robs it of its secrets.

He tries to make a beautiful woman fall in love with him,

first of all because he desires her and also no doubt because he
loves her.

He has thought over the problem of the nature and sub­

stance of love, as well as that of knowing at what point it can
be separated from physical fulfilment, or disassociated from
the sexual act.

Thus he wants this woman to love him, but not as one might
want a woman for a night.

To love him like someone who is infatuated, bitten by the

sort of infatuation which lasts a lifetime,

so she will fall in love with him because he is singularly

intelligent.
Yet he knows she will go on being governed by her senses,
being torn by the various physical attractions aroused in her
by all men, and that in consequence being faithful is impossible
for her,
he knows also that even if he has aroused her curiosity and
excited her because he is intelligent, the problem of under-
1 19
standing remains unsolved for her, at least, from the point of
view of love. I mean she will never know what love consists of,
and whether it consists more of sensuality and physical pleasure
than intellectual admiration,

and he wants to see how far this sensuality becomes an all­

embracing love for her when she lives with another man, a

handsome man, and how much it will absorb his own image,
hiE madly penetrating, wonderful mind.

It seems to me we are dealing with a lover at grips with the

total reality of love ; in any case his search for it. He finds he is
determined not to be content with anything that might only
be an imitation of that reality.

Tremendous mental tension in this play. The viewpoint

might flay the audiences, as they are not used to frequenting
such regions of the mind.

So Luckmann wants to see if she has any guts. He pumps

her dry, but by that fact he wants to exhaust her in order not
to feel remorse afterwards.

Thus this play is remarkably clever ; a character who has

decided not just to be satisfied with words, gets the idea that
for once in his life he should see an intellectual problem
through to the end.

He mistrusts the woman on the one hand, but he also mis­

trusts himself. He is afraid to face her in bed where she may
find he cannot come up to expectations etc. , and he is afraid
of shattering a certain ideal by possessing her.

But what is most staggering is his perseverence. Her perse­

veres in not giving in, keeping along the intellectual, not the
sensual lines of the problem and the task he has set himself.
120
 What gave him the idea for his method?

A notion of the diffi culties an ugly man has to face to make

a beautiful, sensual woman fall in love with him.

Who gave him the idea of drawing drastic intellectual con­

clusions from the problem set? How was it set, anyway?

This largely incomprehensible demon is, therefore,. a sort of

ultimate in craving. He doesn't want his image of Agatha
spoiled.

Furthermore, just like everyone else he did not miss feeling,

discerning, the mystery of an intelligent man attracted, drawn
by a woman who is not on his level, whose mind could there­
fore not have attracted him and thus how does she attract him?
Through the senses, of course.
But this would not be enough to explain love. What then?
Among all the other questions, the one that comes to the
fore is the identity of love. Identity like on an identity card,
isn't that right?

I see this play as the act of a man who says to himself (the
person in question is a character called Luckmann in the play),
who says to himself :
" Ah ! so that's the way it is. Someone has you by the nuts
and when they've got you like that, it's enough for someone
else to show up and give you the impression he could grab you
like that, in his way, for you to give in.
" Being faithful is impossible so there is no chance of consist­
ency, identity or continuity and therefore, no love.
" I am going to put a stop to that by disturbing you tremend­
ously, by giving you a feeling of mental reality you have been
unaware of, a reality which differs from the reality of your
senses.
12 1
 " By this very fact, I am going to guard myself against any
possible personal disillusionment, against the fact of having
sullied my ideal by making use of it,
" and also against becoming sated. "

One extremely important thing the production must suggest

in this play, and here it will have to objectify it as much as
possible, to make this most clear and determinative,
is Arlette's entrance,
as she prowls around Agatha to see how this ideal thing looks
physically, this sort of mental reality dreamed up by Luckmann,
by which he saves himself from the uncertainty of that other
reality.
In fact, a transfer, a mental transfer, occurs.
Luckmann is clever enough to know that even with the best
intentions in the world, his love would be spoiled by being put
into effect,
so first of all he suddenly begins to attach enough import-
ance to it to transpose it into an ideal,
(Besides, this is the main point of the play :
Why this importance?
And when did she assume such importance?
Did it come about through habit or just like that, from the
start, and what gave him the idea to persevere in this way?)
and one day he decides on the course of NEVER carrying
it out.
He therefore creates an inner idol he lives for.
For this reason-the scene when Arlette looks her over must
stand out and must be successfully done.
more than any other scene it must give a feeling of a pre­
sence.

Roughly summing up, this is the story of a man who, over­

taxed by the struggles of love and crude, external deceptions,
decides to create an inner reality and opts for it, knowing he
could have that love, decides to follow what he intends men-
122
tally ; thus it is extremely elevated, since it is not a physical
let-down which makes him adopt that course.
Thus while the woman grows,
he has already surpassed her.

The most basic paradox of love, the excuse of all disappointed

lovers (simply a bravado pose concealing terrible bitterness),
becomes a dangerous mental step, a profound attempt, a
powerful intellectual operation only a great, intelligent, even
inspired mind could carry out.
This is the sort of mind, therefore, that deduces all the con­
sequences of a physical or mental act since in the two hours of
the trials of love, what was only an excuse, a vain paradox, the
act of a trickster, becomes a habit and thought out. Because
Luckmann's mind is able to deduce all the consequences of an
act which circumstances have forced him into, and which
circumstances have brought him face to face with.
He went even further than the act,
because he is an intellectual,
he was able to THINK IT OVER where others might not,
to make use of his intelligence,
he did not dodge the issue. Dare I say, at the mind's
command ?
In any case, he drew all the rigorous inferences from this
draining of love ! ! ! ! !
Particularly he was heroic enough not to give in,
and consistent enough with himself to believe the only solu­
tion to his original (primitive) attitude was abstinence,
unworldliness, positive continence and renunciation.
This he did,
nobly.

Luckmann is searching for :

I . Faithfulness,
2 . Love in a woman,
3. To protect the love within him,
123
4. To isolate love from its parasitic elements,
5. To make this love LAST in life,
6. To plumb it, that is to say to render it stable and material,
7. He triumphs, but he has lost, he must have lost.
8. We will never find out.

1 24
REVI EWS
 AT THE THEATRE DE L'OEUVRE

THE CREDITORS BY STRINDBERG

ELECTRA BY HUGO VON HOFFMANNSTHAL

Adapted by Paul Strozzi and Epstein°5

. . . But they act at l'Oeuvre, they don't strut or theorize and

their work is a labour of love. Play production has followed a
fixed pattern for a long time. We know theatre is a convention
where nature is assumed and the rest is left up to the actor's
soul. The kindly father watches, up there. He is a master and
also a great actor. Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck are well
served. No Colombier stands in the way, no speeches, or Pre­
faces from Cromwell, or other Dada manifestos. There, Ibsen,
Strindberg and Maeterlinck are made present like Christ in the
Eucharist. There is Lugne-Poe who has a date with Thekla at
nine o'clock this evening ; and it is Lugne-Poe, not Adolf, since
he is a man, not an actor and it all looks real. And Jean Sar­
ment, a slightly mad, great sculptor who died of a head wound
the other evening. Finally there is Thekla who loves two men
without knowing it and who is evidently one of today's greatest
actresses.
If Van Dongen had been there he would have taken Clytem­
nestra away with him because of her eyes which dominated
her face.
But Mme Despres would still be left, for neither Oscar Wilde
nor anyone else would be capable of putting heroic enough
cries into the mouth of such a tragedienne to attain the lofti­
ness of her character.
Neither the fire of Mlle Fernel, nor the consciousness of
Mmes Mulo and Mevil, nor the expertise of Mm Weber,
Feries and Desmarets could leave one cold.
1 27
 CHARLES DULLIN' S L'ATELIER64

In founding L'Atelier, Charles Dullin has undertaken the

important business of purifying and regenerating the customs
and spirit of French theatre, on whose present low state there
is no need to dwell. Apart from the Vieux-Colombier, we have
no theatre at the present time. One can only consider the
Theatre de l'Oeuvre as commercially enhancing the fine
Nordic tragedies.
First of all, it was essential to form a small group of perfectly
disciplined actors who were completely aware of what their
profession demands, who were perfectly conscious. This is
the tendency of the new methods inaugurated by Dullin, the
first to invent or use them in France. The most important of
these methods is improvisation, which forces the actor to think
his actions through his soul, instead of acting them. Perfect
harmony in theory and practise characterises this interesting
group, and already distinctive personalities, actors and actresses,
are emerging from it. These actors give us an ideal image of
what the total actor could be in our time, approaching the
eternal model of the Japanese actor who has developed his
physical and psychological potentialities to a convulsive point.
Perfect harmony in theory and practice. Above all, Dullin
demands that his students respect their art. For I'Atelier is not
a business, it is a research laboratory. Allowance is made for
error. Love of the profession whips up their energy. And finally,
the flash of an apt discovery is its own reward. Thus the con­
dition of surprise is fulfilled, which, according to Edgar Allan
Poe, is the basis of Art.
It is undeniable that Dullin, although avoiding excessive
idiosyncrasy, will give us theatre that harmonises best with his
own taste and methods of expression. A theatre of latent bar­
barism in a Hoffmannesque mood. This is because there is not
128
only the actor we know in him, but the stuff of a marvellous
man of the theatre who is conscious and deliberate about his
own aesthetic and even stage mystique. In Dullin, culture
equals sensitivity, and serves as a jumping-off point. All of
which makes l' Atelier more than an enterprise-it is an idea.

1 29
 L'ATELIER 1HEATREn

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a

brothel. Furtive pleasure. For them, the theatre is only
momentary excitement. It is like the dumping-ground of their
need to experience pleasure through all their physical and men­
tal senses. The hypertrophy of the theatre of entertainment has
created, alongside and above the classic idea of theatre, a kind
of game with easy rules which is now the norm in theatre and
masks the idea of theatre itself. So that one can say two theatres
now exist : false-theatre that is deceptive, easy, middle-class , a
theatre for soldiers, bourgeois, businessmen, wine merchants,
water-colour teachers, adventurers, whores and Prix de Rome,
as put on by Sacha Guitry and the Boulevards and the Comedie
Franc;aise. But there is another sort of theatre that plays when­
ever it can, theatre conceived as the achievement of the purest
human desires. Small companies of young actors gather here
and there with ardent or simply sufficient faith, trying to revive
Moliere, Shakespeare or Calderon. Among them I' Atelier is
the most ardent and has the soundest but also the strictest
views. Founded a year ago by Charles Dullin, from the Theatre
des Arts, the Vieux-Colombier, Gemier's studio and his own,
this theatre has already presented Moliere's The Miser,
Merimee's Occasion, Regnard's Divorce, and plays by Cald­
eron, Lope de Ruenda, Francisco de Castro, Tristan Bernard,
Courteline (why him?) , Max Jacob and finally the impressive
drama by Calderon, Li/e is a Dream, which was a triumph.
L'Atelier does not claim to invent anything ; it merely wants
to try to serve theatre well. The achievements of Edward
Gordon Craig and Appia, of all these liberators of the theatre
will finally find a place where they can be presented in France.
Accurately, yet without any concessions to old theatre, old
tricks, old stage sets, but without the sort of partisanship that
1 30
 emasculates. Even more than its precursors, I' Atelier will try
to rediscover all of theatre, the theatre of the past and that of
the future.
It would be unjust for the author of this piece, himself an
actor associated with I' Atelier, to judge its productions, but he
can analyse its trends. L'Atelier has its own way of working.
For, outside rehearsals, the group continues to work ; each
actor becomes a student under Dullin's direction. The goal of
the true actor should be to feel, live and think in a real way.
For a long time now the Russians have been using a certain
method of improvisation that forces the actor to work with his
deepest sensibility, to exteriorise this real and personal sensi­
bility through words, attitudes, and mental reactions that are
improvised and invented on the spot. The search for intona­
tions is a great danger to personality. These excercises of
improvisation reveal and sharpen true personality. Intonation
is found within oneself, and pushed out with the burning power
of feeling, not achieved through imitation. Dullin has developed
the method and made it into a deep-rooted one. He improvises
like the others. L' Atelier's artists have already taken part in
performances of improvisation before very small, private audi­
ences. With a few words, a few attitudes, a few facial expres­
sions, they have shown themselves astonishingly able to portray
the characters and mannerisms of human nature or even
abstract feelings, or natural forces such as wind, fire, plants or
pure creations of the mind, dreams, deformations, all of this on
the spot without script, direction or preparation.
L'Atelier has already undergone critical fire. But the mental
laziness of a Manegat is as contemptible as the book-learning
of Henri Bidou, whose culture lacks the high style that makes
a thinker.
Will Marseilles welcome I' Atelier? L' Atelier is glad to accept
Marseilles' invitation. In this city dedicated to merchants, there
are some who love beauty.

•
 L' Atelier's season opens in Paris on 1 5 October at the
Theatre Montmartre with Life is a Dream, by Calderon. Huon
of Bordeaux by Alexandre Arnoux, will open towards the end
of the same month.
 CARMOSINE AT L'ATELIER88

L'Atelier, now established as a theatre and installed in its new

home, is offering Carmosine as the first result of its now regular
efforts. Contrary to what the critics say, we consider that this
production brings with it a much sought-for element of novelty,
capable of justifying all the hopes of a revitalisation of our
theatre.
In fact, no one realises it enough, but putting a play on
depends as much on its physical performance, its spatial re­
creation, as on bringing the characters to life. This revival of
Carmosine may strictly speaking exhibit faults in casting or
lack of style, lack of acting mood and insufficient breadth of
feeling. We are not qualified to judge this, but over and above
the characters, there are the lines and it says a lot that we are
made to feel their secret rhythms and poetry.
Finally the massed, ponderous lighting, and the great spaces
it opens out, the richness it lent the quiet costumes that were
just right, brought out the inmost soul and perfect face of
Musset's work. We can only regret that the standard, static grey
sets did not allow a more exact interpretation. The custom of
using these seems to be established more or less everywhere
now.
The play was followed by a violent, razor-sharp farce, La
Mort de Souper,61 adapted by Roger Semichon from an old
Morality Play ; this stimulated unreserved critical admiration.

1 33
 SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN A UTHOR
AT THE
COMEDIE DES CHAMPS-ELYSEES68

At the start, life goes on as before. Without any show. We look

upstage, right to the very back. The curtain has been flown.
And the whole theatre is one vast stage where the audience is
about to watch a rehearsal in progress. But a rehearsal of what?
There is no play. The play will be created before our eyes.
Everyone goes about his own little tasks. Little by little, how­
ever, the actors come together. Then a family in mourning
steps out of the Comedie des Champs-Elysees' lift. Their faces
are deathly white, as if started out of dreams.
These are the Six Characters in Search of an Author. Now
these Six Characters want to come alive. They want to take
part in a dream. They are more real than you, director of the
theatre, or you, disgusting buskers. They are real and they'll
prove it. What does your own reality entail, you are not
imaginary characters, but characters of living flesh and blood,
having had a father and mother and a birth certificate. Besides
your own uncertain physical reality, what are you in relation
to yourselves, 0 ! stage manager, 0 ! buskers?
A picture, or at the very most the picture of your past desires,
the fabric of your future illusions dashed, now turned to ashes,
0 ! you who are alive. But we are what we are, a fixed idea,
definite outlines, as you have always pictured us. Our own
reality is eternally renewed, its rough shape constantly reviewed.
Born in the mind, our established rule is to live unendingly,
eternally incomplete. Resolve us, therefore, stage manager.
Thus fiction and reality gradually merge, so interpenetrating
one another that we, the audience, can no longer tell where
one ends and the other begins. What are these phantasms do­
ing in our world, on these boards, with stage hands walking
1 34
about, with the players caught in the midst of their bickering?
And the production heightens the play and promotes the
illusion. The sky is a theatrical sky, those trees are canvas, no
one is taken in, neither the rehearsing actors, nor us, nor these
larvae in search of a mould. Then what is theatrical about it?
THEM, they are alive, they assert they are real. They have
made us believe it. But what are we? And yet these Six Charac­
ters are still personified by actors ! In this the whole question
of theatre is raised. Just as, when light plays on mirrors, the
initial image is absorbed yet incessantly reflected, making every
reflected image more real than the first and continually renew­
ing the enigma. And the last image sweeps all the others away
and cuts out all the mirrors. In the same way, all the Six
ghostly-faced Characters, lined up like mummies, are seen
leaving in the lift and disappearing up into the real flies until
the next performance.
A lot of people have praised one actor or another. Yet George
Pitoeff remains the only figure in the play. He endows the
main character with a mask and visionary gestures. There was
only one thing to be said about him, just that, nothing more.
Ludmilla Pitoeff and Kalff are very beautiful yet stay human,
I mean flesh and blood, in a word, I mean actresses. One plays
the ingenue and the other plays the mother and they are very
compact, but only physically, not mentally. And I leave the
rest, the stage manager and other lice as pickings for the stupid
critics to batten down on.

1 35
 THE SECRETS OF LO VE
BY
ROGER VITRAC
(N.R.F. Edition)69

Roger Vitrac practises wonderful, vital surgery. He really

knows the mind's divisions. He clarifies its magic, illogical
activity with the aptness of a theory on reason. Feelings, sensa­
tions, actions, their general human meaning, their vital magic
all out of step. While he winds the mind up, he makes its matter
quiver. What he writes is in the nature of a revelation. It isn't
the means, but the clarification of the action, in such a way
that, while an act can be accounted for, it stands apart from
the muddle of phenomenon, the virtuality of what is possible,
and comes alive.
The Secrets of Love is an alchemy of love, just as Knowledge
of Death will be an alchemy of life and the mind. The Secrets
of Love, a play, is the alchemy of a sort of love, the loves of a
certain number of people, perfectly defined puppets we could
never confuse, yet indivisible from the abstract. If you can, try
to reconcile the two terms.
None the less, these puppets have a physical or rather an
objective existence. They represent, are states, impressions, but
also Persons. They are like demons, we cannot conjure them
up. None the less, they are real, perceptible and phenomenal.
Love maintains relations with death and the mind, it is unaware
of itself, but Roger Vitrac's mind has penetrated them. It is
good to feel such work exists at the frontier of the mind, where
factual logic is excluded and where every feeling is instantly
turned into action. Where every state of mind is registered with
direct imagery and takes form with the speed of lightning. The
abstract puppets are objectified, remain a feeling and do not
become substantial. They only barely stand theatrical defrock-
1 36
ing. Furthermore, allusion properly speaking, that is allegory,
does not exist in this work. This Punch and Judy show really
takes the plot over and there is a constant transfusion of
historical reality in the blood of these ethereal, cloth dummies.
When Roger Vitrac evokes Mussolini, we can be sure this is
really Mussolini himself caught up in the web of the action, or
else his theatre has no further reason for existing. At least that
is the way we should see it.
Roger Vitrac is perfectly conscious of the method of destruc­
tion he uses against love and it appears to him, by the same
right as automatic writing, a Surrealist method of attaining
the vital reality of his own mind. No one ever thought of con­
sidering Surre alism as the sort of activity achieving release
solely through the agency of automatic writing. Surrealism is
perfectly reconcilable with a certain clarity of mind. Higher
logic is a part of this clarity, leading us to choose a certain
number of elements put forward by the subconscious which
systematic logic would set aside. In such operations it follows
new paths, higher than those of ordinary understanding, tend­
ing to destroy such understanding.

1 37
 THE TRICKSTERS
BY
STEVE PASSEUR
AT
L' ATELIER70

If theatre, by using dialogue, without any meaningful gestures

or movements, or using gestures which are never taken except
in their normal sense of momentarily useful signs intimating
needs or expressing feelings, especially denials, if theatre is
really meant to solve ordinary psychological problems, how­
ever it solves them or under whatever new, unexpected aspects
it presents them, The Tricksters is the most successful model
for and perhaps a masterpiece of such theatre. For at least it
presents a human problem that is vitally interesting and it
solves it,. or at least it pushes it to the very bounds of this limit
or solution.
In any case, for the first time in this controversy on physical
confrontation, the most usual theme of non-poetic drama, for
the first time a human problem of vital interest is set and solved
as far as is possible by denial and retreat, for the solution is
always the same. Madness or escape, into death or elsewhere,
in the present state of our ideas, given that we have lost the
power of taking ideas in any other way than at their face value.
If Samuel Luckmann found love was not something to be
lived and went away with the double of the image of his love
within him, leaving the real woman EXHAU STED behind him,
he is only demonstrating his heroic faithfulness to an ideal he
had fashioned for himself. But the human, psychological
interest in the play is that he does not leave before he, too, has
lived his experiment within the strict limits he kept to faithfully
and which he had set himself beforehand.
It is almost certain that the sum total of impressions, images,
138
feelings and revelations each and every love is able to give us
can be used up in two hours, simply by looking, without any
contact.
However paradoxical this idea may seem it is true and it
forms part of the play's great originality.
Rep. theatre already does not offer us many shock-ideas or
such vitally interesting observations we can effectually tum over
in our minds or dream about, accenting the progress of our
feelings in this way. For if it is true that the finest love is used
up in two hours or that in two hours we have gone through all
the ideas and all the basic imagery our love stories are made out
of, it is even truer that we spend our lives rationalising ideas
and images which our inability to love endlessly spins out.
Besides, Luckmann may possibly be cheating when he ex­
plains his unworldly concept of love to Agatha. If from the
start he had thought Agatha was prepared to sleep with him,
he might have risked not being satisfied or disappointment or
the physical let-down and the humiliation which would have
resulted from this.
But on the one hand Agatha only loves him because he
refuses her, giving her the impression his refusal is sincere, and
because of Luckmann's unexplained resistance she comes up
against a frigid mystery whose substance is unknown to her. If
Agatha's love for Luckmann is caused by this mystery, this a
true psychological observation and part of the play's richness.
The problem immediately grows more serious. We begin ques­
tioning the nature of love. To this, Passeur replies it consists in
absolute devotion being able to descend to the very smallest
things, to demean itself to the most menial domestic tasks, so
true is it that the touch-stone of love rests on the capacity for
servile obedience and woman's inexhaustible faculty of adapting
herself to her lover's demands.
We could ask ourselves what Luckmann's reasons are in all
this for refusing to sleep with Agatha.
If these depend on the idea that the finest part of love
is lived in anticipation and that our subsequent actions are
only imitative and will never equal the unique, irreplaceable
1 39
 emotions of the first moments of love, then Luckmann did not
need to live with Agatha, or to lay himself open to temptation.
But in this fact of deliberately laying himself open to temptation
I see :
I . A psychological idea of the greatest interest from the
author's point of view. The author noted a true psychological
trait : Luckmann could not avoid taking chances, even if these
actions appeared absurd and pointless.
2 . From the character's point of view, this way of trusting
in the absurd shows Luckmann believes in the mind's undefined
extensibility ; that is to say the conscious field, like the field of
thought, is really limitless, and when we have gone through
every idea, there may still be a new, unheard-of-idea beyond
known ideas, whose appearance would save us.
We might also simply reason that if Luckmann lives with
Agatha, he does so heroically and to put his own powers of
resistance to temptation to the test, as well as his faithfulness
to a certain idea in his mind. It may also be the absurd idea
that Agatha will in the long run reveal herself worthy of his
burning yet glacial love-aflame with the strength of desire
unceasingly radiating as if in tangible rays around him. Dalio
expresses these surprisingly, spellbinding us with their emana­
tion and radiance. Glacial because of the lofty image he has of
her in his mind, yet which he will never admit she can ever
embody. Jean Duperai's entrance at the end of Act II brings
about the test Luckmann had foreseen and to which, after all,
purely carnal love had to succumb, although it was capable
at a given moment of quasi-mental devotion. And this fall is
also the means whereby Luckmann's love is exorcised. From
now on his love will be pure, without any danger of a fall. He
has been delivered.
If the critics (who anyway did not see that the problem in­
volved in this play was love itself in all its full sexual details
and mental features) maintain they only see Luckmann as a
monster, we must pay homage to the final defeat of this monster
and we approve of his leaving the play defeated.
From the point of view of psychological truth, we find it
140
perfectly right that he was once more tempted to return and
prowl around the couple he created and who owe him their
happiness, so he can be convinced of the truth of that happiness
and face his abstract dream. Happiness cemented together and
born out by Jean Duperai's purely animal handsomeness. It
may be possible that the only true love is sexual from a human
point of view and a woman really stops loving a man she no
longer desires, in order to belong to the man she desires body
and soul. But that being so, Ludemann, with his ideal love,
feeding his imagination on a mental image,. takes an essential
part of Agatha's soul with him when he leaves. She may have
repudiated it and turned away from it, but its absence will
definitely render her infirm.
 THE THEATRE STRIKE 11

The theatres, cinemas, dancehalls and brothels of Paris have,

during this past month, been staging a larval attempt at a strike
(a purely demonstrative one, by the way) , giving us a glimpse
of what the real theatre would stand to gain by the disappear­
ance of everything that makes a business of retailing shows,
whether theatre, music-hall, cabaret or brothel, since these can
all be lumped together. In any case for a few hours we are able
to establish that the atmospheric, barometric, theatrical level
had risen enormously. Every actor in Paris, once free, became
himself and during these few hours was able to find something
else to express than the coarse barbarian language to which he
has accustomed us. I refer to the language of these troglodite
savages who have pulled their minds down to the level of their
excrement, which is as far removed from the language of initi­
ated savages, still close to their primitive customs, as are the
sounds like patting butter and other basic rhythms of the Japan­
ese theatre are from the same sounds and rhythms transformed,
charged with expression by the mysterious spirituality surround­
ing them in the Tibetan and Balinese theatres. An interminable
procession of actors filled the cafes. As if suddenly seized with
feelings of inspired anger, they seemed ready to overturn the
tables. At last they could listen to the language of life and the
streets in that hour of freedom when man is left alone and able
to find an unheard-of wealth of inflexion in a simple " good
morning " . If these actors had listened and transformed their
ears into amplifier shells, they would have grown dizzy thinking
of the intricacies, I might even say the vortex so-called
" normal " things can offer and open up to the mind.
 SUBWA r
AT THE
STUDIO DES CHAMPS-ELYSEES72

A very youthful show, put on and acted by young actors in a

youthful spirit, that is, energetic and lively-but not very new.
One must admit the play wasn't very suitable for innovations
and after Babbitt, Gentlemen Pref er Blondes, and the novels of
Vicki Baum and Valentin Mandelstamm , any satire on
American customs or manners gives a bit of a warmed-over
impression. But what does that matter? This show still leaves
us with an impression of naturalness� life, fervent truth and
quite a few older actors could come and learn a lesson in sin­
cerity from these youngsters.
The humorous, skylarking scenes of fun are played by actors
who are having fun and amuse us while amusing themselves.
Contrary to that stupid idea, that old theatrical preconception
which states that the audience grows bored starting from the
moment the cast begin to amuse themselves. The dramatic
scenes grip us.
I am now waiting to see all these young actors-Jean Servais,
G. A. Martin, and Georges Jamin in the lead-reacting to
things which matter, in a play worth acting. For it might be
thought there are other things to life today than realistically
reproducing subway noises or acting ultra-pedestrian scenes
taken from the manners and customs of another continent in
a fresh, skilful manner.

1 43
 LE CO UP DE TRAFALGAR
BY
ROGER VITRAC
AT THE
THEATRE DE L'ATELIER73

In Roger Vitrac's play there are factors which,. taken collec­

tively, form an extraordinary scene here and there, but their
sum total does not make this a play. So the striking, thrilling
play we expected, which looks like appearing several times,
ends up growing remote, doubtless never to reappear either in
Le Coup de Trafalgar or anywhere else.
First among these factors is the protagonist's mother who
cries when she should be laughing and laughs when she should
be crying. This involves the characters in a sort of phantas­
magoria where the very nature of events becomes distorted.
We clearly see that the whole play rests on this basic contradic­
tion, and that Roger Vitrac's knowledge of poetry comes from
this feeling for contradiction. Lightning knowledge like in a
dream, only the author's mind is not powerful enough to grasp
it.
A character, a surprising word, the mood suddenly becom­
ing concrete, suddenly let loose a stream and bring us face to
face with something which endlessly filters out and in the end
vanishes like the most deceptive magic.
A word, words exchanged, an impression, even an idea, an
unconscious entrance, an unforeseen visitation seem able to
work the charm, to make it click. But in the end everything
cracks up, grows trite, grows orderly or about as disorderly as
a pavement cafe.
Roger Vitrac was unable to choose between Surrealism's
pointlessness and poetry as seen in The Secrets of Love, and the
plain satire of drawing-room comedy. His play smacks of
1 44
" City-ism " , topicality and the conventional theatre of the
boulevards.
He attempted to reconcile poetry and topicality, but was
unable to achieve it by the means he used. He was unable to
twist reality, to emasculate observable morals, feelings and
appearances which seem to be the basic purpose of his play. For
reality does not destroy itself, and in order to bring poetry and
truly magic madness on stage one needs to believe in a world
where this higher, more logical madness, l asts for ever.
Roger Vitrac's play suffers from belonging to a dying social
system and world and must perish with that world. More than
that, Roger Vitrac has made deplorable concessions to such a
world by having recourse to a sort of logic of illogicality where
his very characters lose themselves, without the absurdity of
their actions being caught up with the absurdity of everything
else, and reshaping from below the poison of their replies and
the mystery of their apparitions.
I would go further. We might even be ready to admit the
start of the action which motivates the characters and accounts
for them psychologically. While we may hate psychology, while
we may find the satire on war and the apology for desertion
useless and above all spineless, we would be ready to forgive
the author everything for the surprise which must surely, we
feel, appear at the end, giving this little, teeming bustling world
its secret meaning and a distinct life of its own. But no such
thing occurs and instead the end of Le Coup de Trafalgar pro­
duces a slick Marx Brothers or other American comedian's
answer.
In conclusion, I must say the production, rather than backing
the play up, hinders it, does it a disservice, destroying or cur­
tailing most of its effectiveness, so that in this case the play
supports the production whereas it should be the other way
around.
Which only goes to show once more that theatre takes place
on stage and not on paper.
It remains that this play has brought us a kind of poetry we
never hear in the theatre and that however disorganised and
1 45
fragmentary it may be, the existence of this poetic factor alone
would call for Le Coup de Trafalgar to be staged.
Nevertheless even as it stands Le Coup de Trafalgar leaves
the standard fare, all the poor stuff and baubles with which
avant-garde theatre directors satisfy themselves, far behind.
 ANNABELLA
AT THE
THEATRE DES CHAMPS-ELYSEES11

The French press, or more precisely, the Parisian press, un­

cultured as it is with a few exceptions, thought it their duty to
slate Victor Barnowsky's show.
Once and for all, we should realise that from a theatric al,
artistic or literary point of view the press in France no longer
counts. I will come back to this. Right now I only want to say
what a wonderfully vivid impression of charm, precision,
naturalness, spontaneousness, liveliness and finally truth, Anna­
bella's acting gave me. There is a general effect of quality all
moving towards one dominant note. This was the note Shake­
speare himself dreamed of in his imaginary forest.
There is another uncommonly rare factor in Barnowsky's
show. These are Balthus' costumes and especially his sets, about
which the entire press said nothing or only spoke of them in
contempt, because everything which is profound or notable or
above the ordinary escapes it on principle, and because it lost
any common measure with poetry or anything unusual a long
time ago.
All Balthus' forests in this show are deeply mysterious, full
of sombre grandeur. Quite different from other theatre forests.
They have shadows and a rhythm which addressed itself to
one's soul. Behind the trees and lights of nature, they evoke
cries, words and sounds. They are all imaginary ideas inspired
by the mind.

1 47
 SHAKESPEARE' S
AS rou LIKE IT
AT THE
THEATRE DES CHAMPS-ELYSEES
Adapted by Jules Supervielle75

Childhood is like death. A light, a sound, a cry become pro­

digious ghosts. To me, Shakespeare's fairylands are the work
of a ghost who suddenly finds himself a child again.
This hatred between the two brothers with which the drama
opens, Duke Frederick's hatred, that stolen inheritance, that
exodus into the forest, those wraiths, those antics, I hear them
call out in great voices, drawn out like light in a storm. If all
this is not basically mad, sombre and inhuman, it's improb­
ability lacks spice and the humour of jesting.
No relief or charm is possible in this pastoral play, with­
out there being something unusual, the very basis of Shake­
speare, linking him in all his work with the fatalism of Greek
Drama.
Two years ago I was in Berlin and all the French film actors
went to see Liliom by Molnar, produced by Victor Barnowsky,
just as one would go to learn a lesson. It seems that Barnowsky,
in his Champs-Elysees production, had some diffi culty finding
a point of contact with the French actors. Yet there is Anna­
bella, whom he discovered for the theatre, in the role of
Rosalind. Her acting was so perfect, so true to life, so charming
and so natural as to be truly Shakespearean. I have seen
Barnowsky bring roles to life and direct actors and I had the
impression I was watching a master producer. He was the
man who launched a truly European actress in Berlin : the
stunning Elizabeth Bergner.
In Victor Bamowsky's production there are also Balthus'
sets and costumes. All those forests are dark, unusual and like
phantom fancies. The costumes play against the dark forest
back drops in continually coloured enchantment.
1 48
AB O U T A L O S T P L A Y 7 8
With decentralisation as a goal and in order to give the public
of Marseilles the freshness of a new and revolutionary theatri­
cal venture, we plan to ask M. Antonin Artaud to open his new
show here in Marseilles ; Atreus and Thyestes by Seneca, in an
original adaptation that gives it great contemporary relevance.
In order to emphasise the immediately moving quality of
the play, Antonin Artaud will present this tragedy in a non­
theatrical setting, in a factory or Exhibition hall. Thus the
timeless pathos of this classic drama will recapture all its signi­
ficance, urgency and above all its relevance.
For the originality of such an endeavour lies not only in
seeking an educated public, but in letting the masses share a
supreme adventure which will bring into play the whole poss­
ible range of human and collective feelings. All the great myths
of the past cloak pure forces. They were invented only to show
these forces and to perpetuate them. And without a gang of
scholars and literary men, Antonin Artaud wants to try to
interpret a mythical tragedy so that it expresses its natural
force on stage, and thus restores theatre to its true goal.
In this way theatre will stop being a game and an entertain­
ing way of passing an evening and will become a kind of useful
act, restored to the status of therapy, to which the mob in
ancient times used to flock to regain a taste for life and the
strength to resist the blows of fate.
Never has there been as great a need as now for an exalting,
nourishing show with profound qualities, a show which will go
beyond vulgar artistic effects and will dominate the soul,
achieving a new reality.
Certain North American Indians know and play music that
cures. Quite recently the incantations of Negro sorcerers have
151
been recorded that, whether one likes it or not, can help bring
rain. The cures of Lourdes are the effect of collective sugges­
tion, in which the crowd, without knowing it and by its
unanimous spirit, revives the continuity of the old sorcerers.
Antonin Artaud wants to revive a kind of collective suggestion
that brings order to the spirit through the theatre, and through
this inner order an outward peace that will be of benefit to all.
However anachronistic and misplaced this may seem to
some, however useless from a practical point of view, the effort
is worth making, and it will be made.
And all the more since in any case this will be an unforget­
table, original spectacle which one will not be able to accuse
of uselessness and even of danger and risk unless one has seen
it.
And particularly all the more because this spectacle will
present certain very important innovations in sound, voice,
movement, and gesture.
Where the masses may resist subtle dialogue whose intellec­
tual rhythm escapes them, they will not resist the effects of
physical surprise, the dynamism of cries and violent gestures,
visual explosions, and a whole series of calculated tetanic
effects intended to act directly upon the physical sensibility
of the spectator.
Moved by this paroxysm of violent physical action which
no sensibility can resist, the spectator's nervous system grows
more sensitive ; he becomes more receptive to more rarified
emotional vibrations, to sublime ideas of Greek myths that will
try to reach him in this show by their physical, combustive
power.
Thus one can see how such a show leads to a sort of grandiose
orchestration in which not only the mind and senses participate,
as in some grand opera, but the whole of our effective nervous
sensibility, which the public uses only outside the theatre in
social upheavals or personal tragedies, the accidents or exalta­
tions that make life the most tremendous tragedy.
Antonin Artaud
6 ]uly 1 934
. . . a portrait of the period. This is my last word. Now, two
questions.
1 . What is the Tantalus Myth doing in the story of Atreus?
2 . Why a story about Atreus and Tantalus, why Greek
Drama? There are so many more urgent problems in life of the
very greatest neces.sity and also so many kicks missed by
execrated poets, aesthetes, archeologists and all useless people,
since sensitivity about manners escapes them, as do notions of
the most basic necessities.

1 53
 The Wrath of Heaven,
see Ecclesiastes,
see The Book of Job.

Tantalus : Man.

Hereditary Responsibilities.

No Free Will .

Classify Evil.

Understand Our Fate.

Man, plaything of the Gods, and God, his own plaything.

Reckon with the powers above.

Heroism : admit the epidemic.

0 heaven, that means :

You're back again, oppressing us again.
We can't say words without knowing what they mean.
We know such a word only evokes a very trite response,
used in a purely psychological role. But here, it denotes a
meeting of creative powers at the moment when they issue forth
and express themselves. Cassandra, being a clairvoyante, has
a terrifying organic apprehension of the seething of celestial
powers when their paths meet. She withdraws her faculties,
crushed by the gigantic blasts of the gods, and shows that in
1 54
order to convey a human feeling dramaticall y , one must evoke
a situation in life where such a feeling has been lived through
or assumed by us, along with the emotional attitudes resulting
from it. In the same way, in order to convey this superhuman
feeling we must get a more elevated idea of heaven and what it
contains into our heads.

Let them end up badly, but let them start off even worse,
in this topsy-turvy world where death is a blessing and entering
this world a curse,
let nothing be sacred any longer,
neither family, nor honour, nor glory,
and let the leader covered with glory be suddenly dragged in
the mud.

Man is Tantalus
he thinks he has everything !
power of the possessive word.
Everything deceives him :
delusions of the period,
love,
the love of a lifetime,
riches ; a lure,
examine them closely-nothing there,
property ; he doesn't even own his own soul, even the Ego
doesn't exist.
Life ; who can be sure they can preserve their corpses long
enough to prevent themselves being reborn.
Laws ; borders, Hours, Centuries
Blood-ties.
The Family : what a joke.
War and Peace,
The Economy.

1 55
 ON
L I T E RA T U R E
AND
T H E PLASTI C ARTS
 BIG STORES AND LITTLE TASTE77

The big stores are in very large part responsible for the general
deterioration of taste in France.
With their low prices and speedy delivery, it is they who
have, so to speak, foisted the stupid colour-prints, brass lamps,
nonsensical sideboards and all the other hideous furnishings in
today's middle-class family flats and even in country cottages.
They set about the universal impairing of taste by suppress­
ing those isolated centres of individual initiative, the small
shops.
While [in] 7 8 certain towns in major foreign countries,
Vienna for example, each home bears an individual, quint­
essential stamp, the general standardisation of interior decora­
tion drives visitors away from family homes in France.
The masses are stupid, the masses are blind. They don't
know one doesn't furnish in order to furnish, or that furniture
has a strictly functional use and can only depart from strict
functionalism in so far as it offers artistic interest and assured
beauty. The cheapest whitewood wardrobe, if it is sufficient to
accommodate those things essential to everyday life, is a
thousand times more beautiful than a mass-produced Bon
Marche pedestal table with its vague reminders of caricatured
styles.
For in so doing, Monsieur Boucicault's* sole aim was to
make the greatest possible amount of money flow into his tills.
It makes little difference to him if he is to blame for such an
onslaught of ugliness spreading over the earth so we can now
say men are steeped in ugliness from the day they are born
until the day they die.

* Boucicault in this case is a sort of symbol and could just as well

mean the manager of the Bon MarcM as that of the Louvre Stores or
the Galeries Lafayette, or of any such house of damnation . . .
1 59
 Martine, Mare and Francis Jourdain may rival one another
in ingenuity, and make such harmonious furnishings that they
are truly enchanting both to the eye and almost to the ear, but
they will only reach the wealthiest aristocracy which pays dearly
for the privilege of living in beautiful surroundings.
Boucicault, because his business is so big, will always remain
the great invader of the home and the degrader of the people's
aesthetic well-being.

1 60
 A PROFILE OF
THE AUTUMN SALON79

I wouldn't complain that W aroquier continued to show the same

preference for stylisation, or projecting landscapes into limitless
unreality, if the result were more of those wonderful pictures of
palms, rocks, monasteries, mountains, lakes and skies ; no
artist will ever be able to equal their magic.
Van Dongen is in the process of losing in artists' eyes what
he is gaining in the eyes of the fringes of society, or maybe even
all of society. I can't really tell, anyway they are the same
thing. Only his portrait of Rappaport still contains some of the
qualities which once made this artist worthwhile.
Mme. M arva! is sweet to look at, delightful, fascinating and
indescribable in her 1' oung Girl in Garden, but less so in her
Bouquet with its stained-glass look.
Suzanne Valadon is a great artist, a little gloomy, but pro­
found. I would advise publishers to ask this artist to
illustrate Fleurs du Mal.
I hate Laprade. This artist of repute has neither composi­
tion, nor perspective, nor volume, and when he isn't colourless,
dull or drab, he has barely any colour and even that is grating
and sour, although to tell the truth rather unusual.
0. Friesz carries on an all-out struggle against " the horror
of sweeping dusks " , giving even his smallest paintings the
hurly-burly of frescoes. Here and there the sparkling of crushed
gems attempts to shine through, under the ponderousness of
classical wrestlers at grips with the rocks.
As to Matisse, if this unrivalled joker goes on, it won't be
long before he oversteps the limits, into ultimate flatness and
nonsense.
A. Fraye is proving himself one of the most notable artists
today and a sensational colourist.
161
 Before long, I can see Guerin's Conversation appearing in
art anthologies alongside l' Assemblee dans un pare by Watteau
and Lancret's Music, which do not have its fine electric colours.
Vallotton's paintings are opaline. They have the distinctness
of opal, at the same time as its transience. He is complete, yet
extremely simple. His painting is not true to life, it is real, it
seems to exist. His landscapes are not interpretations but
equivalents.
Sardin is soft and kind. Really gentle enough for us to feel it.
His colour is agreeable and he offers us what the Germans call
Stimmung, which means taste and something more.
Francis Smith cherishes old tales, stories of times gone by.
Valdo Barbey is splendid. Valtat enchanting. Leyritz apo­
calyptic. Seyssaud glittering.
I do not know why Girieud's painting resembles Tobeen's,
but they are both noble and great.
Other critics have spoken of Labasque and Espagnat, better
than and long before me.
Irene Reno Hass enberg revamps.
Finally an insignificant portrait of Tagore by A. Karpeles.
I missed Marquet, Moreau and Boussingault.
Someone used the word tart about a portrait of Maurice
Rostand, but that is not quite the right word.
It is astonishing how many people in one era know how to
paint. In this vast collection of more than two thousand items,
you could not find more than a hundred second-rate ones.
Here, as everywhere, great, exciting works are rare, but
interesting works are legion.
Let us also mention : Sigrist with his striking heads, the
Russian Kikoin with his brassy, restrained colours, who may
perhaps be an embryo genius, Foujita Tzugu-Haru whose
draughtsmanship has rounded lines, like yellow, pink or
silvered moons, softly dreaming. Giraud's flowers and fruit.
Gerbaud's Landscape.
Lotiron is a great painter, Bissiere is a very great painter, as
is Tobeen. Lotiron imitates Henri Rousseau, as Bissiere does
Velasquez, but they are two very great artists.
1 62
 I am fed up with Lhote, Gleizes bores me, Picabia amuses
me, Bonnard would also amuse me a great deal, as well as
Vuillard, but they are not exhibiting. Ottmann may imitate
Renoir, but he must be talented. Camoin paints nudes and
Flandrin paints models. Denis paints coloured paper.
Kisling paints Kisling.
Renoir remains admirable whatever the official critics (who
I don't give a damn about) may think of him . He has one or
two mysterious, distant landscapes with a wonderful promise
of caresses in the curves of his figures and the eclipsed sun of
his roses. He is powerful with all that, a devil of a really great
painter.
Then there are all the rest who are nearly all sufficiently
talented but do not have enough personality.
As to the furniture exhibits, nothing that hasn't already been
seen at previous Salons.
In the book section some magical coloured woodcuts by
Marc Roux for A Descent into the Maelstrom.
0 ! that ancient craft with its red sail, suspended over the
sapphire blue waters.
P.S.-The fact that the way the paintings are hung does not
tally with the numbering in the catalogue forced me to search
fruitlessly and prevented me including an important group of
painters, some of the greatest among them, in my review.
Furthermore I should mention :
Legendary, sumptuous Castellanos ; sagacious, subtle Jean
Marchand ; Dufy, a rich, discerning nature modernising
primitivism ; Alice Bailly, fantastic, irridescent, who paints with
wool.
Finally Marcel Gromaire, intellectualising, one of the most
notable natures of our times whose Landscape with Oak and
M. and Mme. Laboureur leave us with an extraordinary
impression of strength and insight.
 EXPRESSION AT THE
SALON DES INDEPENDENTS80

However we may be prejudiced against a certain manner of

filling up a painting with glass fragments or scraps of flowers,
at least one thing must be taken into consideration. This glass­
ware is peremptory proof of an axiom. Namely that the best
way of reproducing distinctness in colour is to isolate it from
everything that does not belong to it. No one who enters Room
2 of the Salon, unless their heart irrevocably rebels at beauty,
can deny a certain excitement and the pleasure this produces,
strange yet sure, to tell the truth and tempered with an uneasy
feeling. An impression of indescribable purity and harmony at
the same time as originality arises from these savage paintings
which are totally non-representational or represent such simple
things, things so plain and so primitive, that the purity in their
colouring is not marred.
Why does anyone paint? They paint in order to express
sqmething, not to prove theories. And we cannot express what
we want to express in any other forms than those about us.
When we express something, we are expressing them. A colour
which is not a colour belonging to anything, and a line which
is not a line belonging to anything, can only be taken as studies
of self-characteristic harmonies, of which some Persian cera­
mics provide the most perfect examples. But then we have left
painting and where are we . . . ? Some people find there is more
sense in a fine piece of furniture than in a fine picture. Yet this
is not just a matter of taste.
Certain artists have invented forms that are not even naive
but primitive, and have proceeded to execute them wonder­
fully. The mugs fall into the trap. They deride these forms as
the offspring of childish minds, whereas they are the expres­
sion of the maturity of civilised men who have reached the
1 64
final stage of flowering. Thus it is with Foujita, Fauconnet,
Dufy, Itschoc-Grunewald and Matisse. Who, if he had the
slightest idea of draughtsmanship, would think of backward­
ness when faced with the perfume-laden products of these
sensualists, who, with perverse charm and colouring matter of
almost sure subtlety, express the entire sweep of a soul which
has known how to feel?
Draughtsmanship fades into the background. I do not mean
linear design, but rather its execution. When an artist has
thought his work out in accordance with a certain scheme,
when nothing that had to be expressed has been left to rules,
when the fullness of its eloquence matches the fullness of its
expression, what does a slip-shod or shaky brush-stroke matter?
In the last analysis it is obvious that a painting derives its
value from its expressiveness. By expressiveness I don't mean a
certain joyful or sorrowful appearance, but the art's profound
truths. Something equivalent to a new reality following a
certain line, following a certain brush frottage.
Isn't that Japanese girl by Kisling the finest painting in
the Salon, adding an unfading expression to her look of having
come from far away, thinking about things in her ochre-yellow
dress. My brother's great nephews' great nephews will still be
examining her vaguely sad look and her modesty, her ques­
tioning stillness.
Expressiveness also bestows a rarified, almost ethereal air to
Foujita's drafts, to that commonplace House at Collioure as
well as to that darling little child in red holding a black-haired
doll.
Both subject and object make little difference. What matters
is how they are expressed, not how the object is expressed by
the artist, but a certain ideal, a feeling of humanity running
through colour and line.
Why does an artist distort?
Because the model is nothing in itself ; only the result, only
all the model implies, only everything which, through the
model, can be said to be pulsating, vibrating, anguished or
assuaged in life.
 This is why Modigliani depicted some of his faces as one­
eyed. Because there was something more than an eye to express
in a certain face that inspired him , because his soul had to
enter into it following a certain line, with a certain frottage
that the eye might have absorbed. And we don't see the little
girl has only one eye.
There are some who take Sabbagh to be a cubist but he is
only a sham. Lhote is the same. What innovations does this
braggart claim he is making with his episodic paintings seem­
ingly made up of bits of antiques, laboriously stuck onto one
another, totally lacking in expressiveness ? And what about
Lucie Cousturier? Does one paint with one's mind, Madam,
or one's heart? Doubtless the mind co-ordinates, yet the heart
must have spoken. Really for a woman you surprise me. How
different from Gromaire ! There is someone who is not con­
cerned about trying to please. But in dim cavernous light
stands a decapitated nude, powerfully compelling recognition.
Not an impression of life, but reality. And beside it, hasn't
Theaphile Robert with his Summer Day given us almost a
replica of Dejeuner sur l'herbe by Manet and one of the best
works of the Salon, now he has finally abandoned the mildly
charming colour which imbued his former mystical paintings?
But don't these paintings owe the sureness of their value as
much to the modest charm of old colour-prints, as to the bal­
ance of their draughtsmanship and the breadth of their
composition?
Now if we hurry through the rooms, the outstanding items
will soon catch our attention.

ROOM 4. Itschoc-Grunewald. Bissiere keeps it up. Lucienne

Barbey. Excellent Utter. Unrivalled Kisling. Galamis keeps
it up. Simon Levy. Theophile Robert as above. Marcel Grom­
aire. Dufresne sumptuous, exceptional, always new. Dufy.
Anyone who has seen Segonzac's drawings will never forget
them. Nor will we forget his two paintings in this Salon painted
in a muddy, wine-colour in which the subtle mind of a great
painter is suspended.
1 66
 Gimmi. Valdo Barbey. Three Fauconnets constitute unique
discoveries in rare colours, with priceless draughtsmanship.

ROOM 5 . Oppi. Bergevin. Legat and his syntheses. Jacoileff.

ROOM 6. Pick out Gil-Marchex for his brio and the warm
fire of his colours.

ROOM 7 . Laboureur is subtle and delicate. Lur�at. Aerial

Utrillo. Barat. Jacques Biot.

ROOM 8. Unique Foujita. Sabbagh. Gillardon. Three Cornil­

leaus. Kans. Ramey. Waroquier is getting slack. Not feeling up
to producing real Waroquier, he produces Waroquier that re­
sembles Waroquier, unless he has deliberately repeated himself.
We'll see.

ROOM g. Chabas-Chigny.

ROOM 12. Latapie.

ROOM 1 3. Remarkably honest flowers by Sardin.

ROOM 1 4. A. Fontainas. Charles Guerin goes on and on,

when is he going to stop? Mainsieux. J. Puy. A special mention
for Genevieve Dore and Henri Martin who are both no more
than fifteen years old and have already achieved rare colouring
and composition which does not lack ingenuity.

ROOM 1 5 . Valtot, flowers and woman, in carmine. Verhoven.

Let us pay tribute to the great Paul Serusier here, who orches­
trate's his sabbatical harmonies, and let us also pick out
Signac's broad landscapes, always so mathematically lovely.

ROOM 16. Verdilhan. Peske.

ROOM 1 7. Ottmann. Charlot. Francis Smith. Bourty.

167
ROOM 1 8 . Let us be glad, Van Dongen is not lost. Here we
find Marthe Lebasque, Lebasque's daughter.
I don't believe we can put Andre Fraye and Verdilhan, both
of whom are searching for the same art of synthesis, on the same
level. All things considered, bordering on something is to dis­
cover a style. It seems Verdilhan has found this style, clearly
and simply. Fraye hasn't yet. But Andre Fraye is a poet and
he is still searching. On the contrary Verdilhan seems to be
settling down. Anyhow, if he lacks style, Fraye has what could
be called a manner. There is a musical sighing and a sure, rest­
ful air about his colouring that is not easily forgotten.

ROOM 3. A mention for Gondouin. Then Irene Lagut, Lewit­

ska, Marthe Laurent, Alice Bailly, Valentine Prax, the foolish
virgins. The wise virgins are too wise to talk about.
VIXI

Kisling. I believe one may speak of animated geometry. There

is enough of it to disclose the world's construction and little
girls' souls from their most acute angle. A minute of the body
is inscribed for evermore and the soul's is rung up on the same
clock. If we come back in a hundred years it will not have
moved.

168
 A PRE-DADAI ST'S REMARKS
Books to Talk About81

Sumptuousness, insight, graceful languidity, lacquer and gold,

today's style has all the purple, all the play, all the cries, all the
death-rattles, all the spasms and all the agony, and those long,
sleepy sighs where we no longer know who is speaking. We
could say literature today is essentially subconscious. At the
limits of the soul, at that fleeting spot where Idea wavers, it
murmurs animated, yet never was anything more one* or
gave the impression of such weightless rarifaction.
From Gide to Suares and Claudel, it swings back and forth
like a starry gondola on the clouds of our mental twilight.
With long, mad, gesticulating arms, Rimbaud seems to sweep
the planets aside. In ecstasy, Breton throws diamonds to
Soupault.
It was Rimbaud with his sand-burnt hands who dared by
means of images to make the endless descent down into the
depths of the Ego, where life tremulously drags on towards
the borders of Nirvana. He, Rimbaud, and before him Novalis,
who said : " The more style approximates Nirvana, the more
perfect it is. "
In the depths of the vortex, Andre Breton, Soupault and
Louis Aragon flirt with Nothing, but towns are sketched out,
as well as life and death, love, hatred, the hours of the day, our
souls, all of them, even the most obscure ones, and the seasons.
Round about, on the circles swirling up into daylight, Andre
Salmon, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle,. Max Jacob

* That is to say, simple; that is to say, closer to Oneness or Indivisible

Be i ng This is an attribute of all decadent periods. Amidst the a pp a rent
.

dissipation of its strength, the Alexandrine searches for Oneness, its

m e ani n g lost through usage
.

1 69
who rediscovered prose poetry, Jean Giraudoux, already the
leader of a school with Simon le Pathetique and . . .
Finally, on the fringes, Andre Obey, interested in rare, cata­
leptic feelings in L'Enfant inquiet, Andre Birabeau with his
BeBe poilu, T'Serstevens already truculent and magnificent
and Louis Chadourne, Albert Jean and Jean Pellerin.
All this is no longer very new. We had already read stories
by Franc;ois Mauriac and Alain-Fournier that were similar to
this one, 0 ! Louis Chadourne ! The same feelings, the same
anxieties, the same stylistic methods and the same expressions
encountered.
There remains Charles Derennes, who does not lack verve
when he wants to use it, or observation, insight, analysis, and
Roland Charmy, a sensitive, restrained talent, forever making
progress.
Let us mention here L'Etau by Jacques Bonzon, an essay on
political finance. We can be interested in politics, can't we? In
this case, we don't give a damn about literature.
 2
MEN AND THE IR WORK.8

Theatres. Lugne-Poe's production of Le Cocu Magnifique88

at the Theatre de !'Oeuvre is the event of the season.
Another event is As You Like It at the Vieux Colombier.
Also playing is Le Pauvre sous l'escalier by Henri Gheon, a
convert from war.84
At the Comedie-Fran�aise, Maman Colibri.85 At the Come­
die Montaigne, Le Simoun. 86 As to the rest, silence.

EXHIBITION S . Sacha Guitry invites us to Bernheim's, to a

dessert of fifteen paintings. Gondouin at the Licome. Les
Anonymes at Devambez' . Endless moderns at the Marseille.

BOOKS. They are hawking Conrad and Stevenson. There is

a new volume by Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way. Les
Chercheurs d' Or by Pierre Hamp, l'Enfant Inquiet by Andre
Obey. Some collections of Chinese verse worth noting : The
Jade Book and Poems by T'sin Pao. Are we finally going to
get to know Far Eastern literature?

MAGAZINES. Le Crapouillot : this magazine is the most in­

teresting attempt to spread new art forms in vibrant language
and a very assured style.

KNOW-HOW. An unknown person by the name of R.-L.

Doyon having one hundred thousand francs at his disposal
thought he could start a magazine and he did. R.-L. Doyon
will no longer be unknown.

A mention for Le Nouveau Spe ctateur, Litterature.

 A VISIT TO FRA TE THE PAINTER81

Not a Matisse yet. Cannot escape becoming him when our era
has finished taking form, giving rank to one of the most vibrant
and rarest sensibilities by which coloured matter has ever had
the good fortune to be animated. Still owes something to
Matisse, though less and less each day-some of the variations
on his pictorial themes and some of his treatment. To Matisse
as well as to Marquet, but in his most influenced paintings there
is something intense and rare, something musical those painters
must never have suspected. This is the secret of his art. Fraye
has a sensibility expressed in the interpretation of his canvases ;
a poet, a musician.
His panel at the last Autumn Salon was one of the loveliest
pieces of painting today. His nude on a red background riveted
artists' attention and inflamed onlookers' indignation. The
Nationale received a large panel from him. Here he is in
L'Amour de l' art and nominated as a member of the jury for
the next Autumn Salon. He is nearing great repute.
Great Prussian blue curtains colour the darkening day. He
is talking about joy. Five o'clock rings. The day recedes behind
the high chimneys. The chairs are painted the same blue as
the curtain. And the sea on the canvas is the same blue as the
chairs. Something in his soul is inclined towards the dark. He
is coloured by life tinged with a great deal of black. He is
searching. Matisse, Marquet, Bonnard and cold Vallotton ; Ah !
that's been done, that's been done. But I am sensitive ; I like
sensitive art. He takes out an early painting, youthful work.
" There is sensibility there. Yes. One can't say, it still needs to
be marshalled. I have marshalled my sensibility now. " Indeed
he has.
The little women in the style of Matisse, the schematic har­
bours after Marquet, the orange-coloured creeks, all this is his
1 72
daily bread, submitting to the requirements of the Ghouls-­
art that sells. This is not the real Fraye. We were talking about
sensibility. More than that, Fraye is intellect, a most lucid
intellect, the two factors wonderfully balanced. The organism
most liable to carry out the blend of painting to satisfy both
our nerves and our minds at the same time.
Fraye showed me what the art dealers never buy. A wonder­
ful painting where a semi-circular violet screen frames are arc
of a basket in which is inclined the red, white and blue mosaic
of a chianti flask.
" There, " he said, " this is what my patina leads me to do.
This is great art. In the meantime, one has to do the daily
grind. "

1 73
 LUGNE-POE AND PAINTING88

Lugne-Poe likes art and serves it well. This is an important

side of his influential personality. He has always rubbed
shoulders with artists and he understands them. Bonnard,
Vuillard, Serusier and Denis were his chums when he began.
In the delightfully discreet, vast, artistic hall, gems of
modem painting display their muted play of colours. He
showed us his Bonnards from the " down-and-out " period, two
spring-like Vuillards and also a portrait of Colette by Sacha
Guitry, the best work of art by this dabbler in all spheres.
Beneath the stairs, in the Rembrandtesque light of a thick
leaded window, a Bible is laid out, huge in size, illustrated with
original engravings and above it, a creek by Friesz in rare
auroral tones.
Lugne-Poe likes art and serves it well. M. Van Dongen
appears in his gallery, a large well-placed panel at his most
inspired, when he began ; the intelligently chosen reproductions
of a spokesman for the Theatre de l'Oeuvre programmes and
magazine89 bring the artist's name and his style before many
audiences. The Theatre de l'Oeuvre welcomes painters and
will do so more and more, Lugne-Poe tells us. Next year, the
theatre basement will be open to all experimentation and
numerous exhibitions will permit young artists to show their
works.

1 74
 THE SPRING SALONS90

La Nationale

There are people naive enough to see, in the introduction of

contributions by the younger schools of art to the home of " I'll
buy that ", the Nationale, an attempt to adapt to the modem
vision of painting. The truth is that, however exceptional the
opposition of the old dotards on the jury was this year, there
are reputations among the newcomers which compel recogni­
tion and which can no longer be refused admissio n to this
people's palace. Besides, this is the only thing that is interesting
about this Salon. By next year Albert, Auburtin, Jacques E .
Blanche, Bernard, Aman Jean and Boutet d e Manvel will have
given up painting.
Without mentioning the Charity Bazaar for French Artists,
or all the fairground attendants, candy-floss makers and marsh
mallow sellers who make up the bulk of their followers. Once
and for all, the lot of them, they deserve the same censure.
After I have conceded in justice the effeminate grace, the sure­
ness of execution of two still-lives by Blanche and the gleaming
flashiness of the Bernards, I will be quits with Nationale paint­
ing and can turn my attention to art. I make an exception for
the three Charlots in Room I .
It all fits in one room. Incomplete though these gentlemen
of the jury's selection may be, it offers us the enlightenment of
a sufficiently representative general collection which is besides
a resume of the only art that counts. Fraye is bracketed an
equal first with Dufresne, Charlot, Flandrin, W aroquier and
Fornerod. In a commendable effort at completion and preci­
sion, this artist reveals himself capable of grandeur and enlarges
his scope in depth.
A lovely sunny interval strikes the edifice of piled-up clouds
1 75
and the intangible coolness of the air stretches out in vastness.
We might perhaps miss the subdued harmony and the music
of his previous productions. This harmony constitutes one of
the new elements in the ever-delightfully abracadabric com­
positions by Waroquier, who records an amusing flotilla of
sailing boats and gondolas in the warm patina of the old stones
of Venice. Sabbagh wastes on impossible creations his very fine
gifts for composition and colour, which are used to their best
effect in the restricted field of water-colours. Flandrin gives his
desire for stylisation an exquisite feeling for bright colours and
sunlit nature to feed on. Dufresne only need take more precise
care to avoid ugliness, in order to achieve greatness. Van
Dongen need not indulge his talent so easily.
Girls on the lookout for customers, midwives, sailors on
shore-leave and old, out-of-work actors are now free to take
pleasure in this candy art, this photographic art, susceptible to
lost confectioners not knowing the basic principles of art, which
are intelligence and feeling, soul and excitement about nature,
even perverted, even distorted, not just assembling natural
objects.

French Artists

The cook, the old gentleman, the silly goose, the old maid and
the busker all climb aboard for the ride.
Amuse yourselves, onlookers, and talk yourselves into be­
lieving this is art. We know what art is but you know nothing
about it. See above.

1 76
 MAURICE MAGRE AND ENCHANTMENT91

The unreal will always have its devotees. Still, its confines are
vast. It even encroaches on usual, everyday fields, provided
these are other people's everyday customs, far from us--and
they have known how to make the soul squirt out, spurt out,
to bring out the stirring beauty, the resounding humanity of
the tiniest actions in our lives.
There are predestined locations, however, and men's fancies
have always been ready to look to them : India, Persia, China
and Japan. Blessed be anyone, therefore, who, in our rather
dry, matter-of-fact idiom has remoulded Harlequin and the
Dervishes, has brought back fairy grottoes. Magre is the last
Enchanter. Last year, he gave us the exhilerating fumes of an
unreal garden, Harlequin in search of the Eternal Woman.
This year, he has given us Sin, where the alluring phantas­
magoria of China's blossoms open out. This constant desire to
escape elsewhere, soon nearly twenty years of it, is a fine ex­
ample of being faithful to an idea. But why must so much
tinsel be mixed up with so much pure matter? Why does he
have to dress his bewitching phantoms in old, down-at-heel,
background imagery, stolen from Banville three-quarters of the
time. Then in La Mort Enchainee there was that ridicu­
lous procession of Shades, not even good enough for the riff­
raff. Magre is a poet, none the less. Here and there he
unexpectedly bursts into style, to console us for this basic
carelessness.
Then, since he sung about opium, he was able to get an
unbelievable resonance out of daily events. His Montee aux
Enfers is nothing but one long opium dream, shimmering with
lacquer and heady with fumes.
Even here, where expression comes into full flower, where
1 77
every word explodes with its fully charged meaning, revolting
excess spoils his finest poems. His facileness is no longer in the
imagery but in his posturing. However the book is saved by its
sincerity.
 PIERRE MAC ORLAN
AND ADVENTURE STORIES92

Pierre Mac Orlan can be said to be the Sage, the Prophet of

Adventure. No one knows just how to extract Mystery from
movement or Witchcraft in action better than him. In fact, far
be it that Adventure Stories and books which try to recall a
secret magic should have no other coarse attraction than only
being able to captivate feeble or uniformed minds. They really
need keen sensitivity.
In fact, there is a heady factor and something as if partly
unconscious in Adventure Stories, that is able to lead badly
adjusted natures astray. This is because Adventure Stories are,
after all, controlled by that lazy God who amuses himself by
upsetting our calculations, muddling up the cards, throwing
compasses out and whom, for want of a better name, we call
Chance.
Every object takes on unbelievable significance from the fact
of its unknown, living purpose. Such an important object may
be the talisman which releases the God. This is why one of the
secrets of well-treated Adventure Stories lies in the way its
details are vivified. The monkey in Almayer's Folly, the parrot
in Treasure Island and the never ending kaleidescope of objects
and tiny details in The Master of Ballantrae, Kidnapped98 and
The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym. A method Pierre Mac
Orlan has tried to apply to his Chant de l'Equipage.
But compared with these monumental Adventure Stories,
Pierre Mac Orlan's puny attempts look like schoolboy exer­
cises, since he lacks a feeling for transition. The wonderful
exegist cohabiting within him, made him write the admirable
preface to Pirate Captains ;H then, having taken Adventure
Stories and their mechanics apart, he tried to put them back
together in their usual order. But apart from a few, fairly
1 79
successful details, he has been unable to find the primal secret
of movement and life. This lack of action is also to be found in
L'Etoile Maturine, but on the other hand it appears incredibly
colourful and very modern in tone. But his Negre Leonard is a
masterpiece. In this transposing of old witchcraft themes into
the present he has been able to preserve a fascinating air of
almost logical unreality. And there is not even the frankly
unconscious obscenity which might be unsuccessful in being
accepted as one of the constituent factors in a book no morality
could ever disapprove of.

1 80
 THE XIVth AUTUMN SALON95

The Great Masters being absent the XIVth Autumn Salon

offers us an uncommonly stunted view.
Imagine our literary world solely represented by Francois
Mauriac, the Tharauds and Marius-Ary Leblond. In vain
would we be on the look out for the excitement of a colourful
word. Suffice to say that a distressing uniformity in treatment
reduces most of these paintings to the same characteristic skills
and methods, calcified by the spirit of Cubism. We have been
spared the picture-postcard style this time, like muddy old
waste paper in the midst of the freedom of the other canvases.
The interesting items only stand out from the overall uniformity
by apt proportions and the proper use of elements. Underlying
this art is a remarkable care for humanising and truthfulness in
its material. For example, the thing which distinguishes work
sent in by Dunoyer de Segonzac and Marchand is a higher
degree in the quality of their feelings, an inner enriching of
their material. Fraye opalises open window vistas over beaches
with towering black skies. Here, sensations even grow so light
as to attain the nature of feelings. This sentient window is one
of the jewels of the Salon. There is also a remarkably composed
synthesis of locks, where a thrust of humour pokes through the
lovely sails, mother-of-pearl sky and tugs, all spread out in joy.
Neither Mainssieux nor Camoin depart from an earthy
background. But whereas Freisz totters and gets bogged down,
botches and gets gummed up, Camoin raises himself with
facets of fine peacock dress. With the same porousness in his
material, Mainssieux flowers restfully simple oriental visions,
the glow of the beyond transposed, intent on freshness.
Only Theophile Robert's nude reveals preoccupations of a

mental order, in a very carefully applied painting. There is

something complete in the sobriety of the straight lines and
181
curves whose shaded balance makes it the most successful pro­
duction of the Salon.
The tuppence-coloured is pithily represented by Dufy. We
should note the enrichment he adds to a slightly dry view of
the world, sustaining a finely coloured diapason. Bissiere toils
away at fruitless attempts to reconcile Cubism and life. A sad
example of intellectual contamination. Helene Serdriat steeps
slightly imitative pictures in her rather sour harmonies. Marval
illustrates the foolishness of women as Vallodon does the drying
up of a fine talent.
Foujita is a little lacking in grandeur, but every inch of her
canvas is in such lovely enamel that in favour of this spoken
awakening, we can forgive wads of pink cotton and those
umbrellas with curved handles.
Lascaux's Sacre Coeur is the only painting which contains
what is generally missing from French painting : ideas.
Sardin's flowers are the externalisation of a fine, discreet soul
and his landscapes are proof of a fine craft, uncontaminated
by theories.
Similar preoccupations of a mental order create a common
bond between the Russian and Belgian groups. Seething mad­
ness animates the elongated mental puppets Russian hysteria
has a predilection for, while a little further on, their Belgian
colleagues recount mysterious stories whose symbolism is hid­
den, in a way that has a touch of the parables about them.
Such are these works, which their nature puts above all
question of technique.

Charlot le Nain, rugged, precise, exact, unrelenting, resembles

no one but himself. Sunyer presents us with fine views of serene
nature, a delicate technique, a mood, an air and beautiful,
charming, foliage.
Yvonne Gilles is adult and sensitive. Lespinasse is clear,
sunlit and violent. Laboureur remains Laboureur, nothing
more. Favory is developing his style. Ch. Granval, the only
really amusing humorist at the Fran�ais, presents us with two
1 82
styles, both of them in a very intelligent setting, with all their
parasitic details weeded out, a very good synthesis, and sensi­
tive. In the ductile world, they are mental transpositions of his
humorous view of things.
 UNGRACIO US ELSA
BY
PIERRE MAC ORLAN
(N.R.F. Edition)96

More than any of his previous productions, Pierre Mac Orlan's

latest work has a period air. It is extraordinarily dated. It
derives its value as a document as well as its style from this, so as
to speak, temporal nature and fixes a rather furtive moment in
the mental development of the times. Besides, there is some­
thing truly indescribable about Pierre Mac Orlan's style ; he is
able to bring out what we might term the mystical essence of
our feelings, turning it into something eminently representative.
Another characteristic of this style is its preciseness, its clarity,
and form surprisingly well-suited to its structure, giving the
impression the FORM was thought out beforehand. A strong
feeling of the symbolic significance in things gives his creations
the ideal appearance of things seen in dreams. Ungracious Elsa
is like the feminine incarnation of Pierre Mac Orlan's soul. But
in his latest book, the epic teeming of this fine animated fresco
is reduced to illuminated details.
Pierre Mac Orlan is too conscious a writer. This robs his
book of its density and unity. But however scattered the novel's
texture may be, the life interwoven in it makes it disturbing
to read.
 CYNOSURE
BY
C E LINE ARNAULD9 7

The world seen from the bottom of the sea. If you have never
been a coral cluster or a madrepore tree, you will never under­
stand Celine Amauld's art. Furthermore you would have to be
a thinking, intelligent coral cluster. A poem like Chess Game
cannot be tackled head-on. You need a mind equal to it. Per­
haps you expect me to give you a rational, logical explanation,
a co-ordinated description of these poems ! There isn't one.
Celine Arnauld thinks by ass ociating ideas. One image calls up
another according to laws which are those of thought itself.
Each poem is a complete, perfectly formed whole, whose form
and length are dictated by inner, remote needs : e.g. Chess
Game.
But above all, Celine Amauld does not just write literature.
We are not in favour of rules. But the more literature forgoes
rules, the more it needs to be based on life, modelled on life,
infused with life. If, in the eyes of certain people, modem
literature only seems like literate dandies' Mandarin, the fault
lies with certain artificial collectors of mechanical imagery, set
down like full-grown butterflies. However, CCline Amauld's
poetry is an explosion of fiery vigour. Life itself growing outside
such nurtured flowing, like a cauldron of fiery images :

Here come evening's brass bands, clothed in

unembellished music
or :
The procession of her hands clasped like stellar ferns.

A poem by Celine Arnauld i'> ash-green in colour, pimento

violet, all those things which in general remind us of marvellous
1 85
clowning and those fairground parades that enchant grown-up
children.
The collection is prefaced by a likeness of Celine Amauld by
Halicka which seems to define her soul.

1 86
In none of the Paris Galleries98 does one get the impression of
a rebirth in paintings, except at M . Kahnweiler's.
Cubism at Rosenberg Leon's. Cubism is cubism , which was
novel in its time. It has yielded all its fruits. Kahnweiler also
extolled cubism. It is time to change direction.
Bernheim junior. The stronghold of Impressionism. Here
and there some of the cubists are acceptable but only in so far
as they are acceptable to posterity and again there is a scent of
Impressionism in the air.
Marcel Bernheim where a slightly sanctified post-Impres­
sionism unfolds. Around the Nationale, we are in 1 92 3 .
There remains Paul Guillaume, who put Modigliani up ! The
adherents of Negro art !
All these people are staying pat. Their Galleries have the
appearance of museums. But Kahnweiler's is in continual fer­
ment. He is painting's crucible. We really get99 the impression
we are witnessing the gestation of a new art here. Art in labour.
Vlaminck Derain are there as witnesses of well-trodden paths.
A jumping-off point. The solid columns of the new temple. A
guarantee for future harvests.
Juan Gris endlessly renews himself. His window is like a
frozen prism, a moment in time reconstituted with its exact
casing of light.
Living painting is moving in these directions, painting as
yet unborn.
Among the newcomers, Masson applied Cubist ideas to
restoring natural objects, to nature which in his hands really
becomes nature thought over, seen through his temperment.
His forests are soft and imposing, but always a little absolute.
Each of his forests is The Forest, where all the parts o f the
1 87
forest are discovered, organised. Like a real decor. This mighty
man is capable of tenderness, even suavity. This will be his
undoing.
Togores is strong, clear, full of style.
Dascaux is able to marry sensed and thought nature. Each
of his landscapes are true to life, solid, real and yet transposed.
Nothing from Utrillo. Old streets, old hovels. His mood is the
colour of stone, the colour of day, the colour of the sky. While
Invisible, it enthralls you little by little. The general effect is
bitter-sweet. Like truth. But seen through the mind. Every one
of his paintings has an air like the end of something. The artist
is saying : there, that's it. In fact, that is it, in relation to ONE
moment in the mind.

1 88
 LETTER FROM PARIS100

Picasso Exhibition

" I paint my canvasses in the future. I compose in the style

time will grant them. I am three centuries ahead of my time.
I paint future pictures. I paint them with the eyes of the future.
I give them a style I hope they will acquire in the future. "
But, for the moment, Picasso only calls the past to mind. His
art is a remainder, " decanted " painting. By nature it is far too
much the goal and not the means. Picasso strains after think­
ing in categorisable, set forms. He is categorising them for the
future. He defines himself far more than expressing himself.
He expresses himself by reflecting on himself. Now, his art
belongs to the past. His final Cubist paintings affected us far
more. They had their own manner. They only portrayed them­
selves and that little bit of the world they recreated to their
taste. Less directly perceptible, they disclosed their secrets little
by little. Stupendous power sparked along their compacted
lines, unknown, profound reality where the soul was redis­
covered in its entirety.
De profundis, Picasso.

Kisling Exhibition

This artist only applies himself to rendering life seen from its
most acute angle, full of deep unconsciousness and meaning.
Life disclosed for the first time, a new angle on reality. Life in
an Hoffmannesque atmosphere, such as Hoffmannesque eyes
would view it. Effective life affecting things. Adorable little
child whose eyes are empty, insulting old man with glasses, you
are as dense as life.
1 89
 MARTHA AND THE ENTHUSIAST
BY
JEAN DE BOSSCHERE
(Emile Pau[)1 0 1

Why a book on impressions of childhood, now all of a sudden,

so late? Does anyone think it is as amusing as all that to write
a novel like this one, which is a sort of bitter imposition. But
who has never been terrified by the idea we are going to forget
our lives one day. Before he definitely repressed this idea Boss­
chere harked back to it and set it down. Through this past life,
however, we find the skeleton of his eternal tum of mind. These
may be childhood memories, but a gloomy philosophy arises
from them, a sort of desperate pessimism sharing the full whirl­
ing nature with that eternal note prevalent in certain Breughel
illustrations, or in certain paintings by forgotten primitives.
No one has ever attempted to objectify outdoor nature like
Jean de Bosschere. The world's carnal frame, this kind of
planetary system within the very woods, rocks, plains and
plants, with man's mind like a bridge spanning all this.
If a clock strikes, an airborne sound system instantly starts
up. Jean de Bosschere has let none of these impressions floating
in the air get away. We find all the mental richness of child­
hood collected together and disclosed ; the impression of a dish
as a landscape. Jean de Bosschere has forgotten nothing.
So it happens that this work, written as a chastisement, with
all the characteristics of a diligent memory, gathers strength
and power, putting it well above so many auto-biographical
novels written these last few years.
On putting such a book as Martha and the Enthusiast aside
we are not aware of anything, either about the outward appear­
ance nor the moral profile of these two curious types. But
furthermore they come alive before us on an abnormal footing,
1 90
seeming to call us to account. Knowing them as we do, the
way the book ends does not surprise us.
After having taken his characters' psychological mechanism
apart, down to the very subtlest, down to those as sensitive as a
membrane, Jean de Bosschere102 plunges them into a terrifying
drama whose least changes of fortune are described with a feel­
ing for orientation108 and mental perspective effects which have
something really hallucinatory.
Such a severe, condensed104 book leaves us with a flavour
of extreme truth, only strangely dispersed. Is that life, is it a
true landscape of consciousness? Why then does it leave us with
this slight anxiety, suffering and distress?
Perhaps an abnormal desire to objectify, fixes things in our
minds with the harsh shimmering of stalactites. Every atom of
feeling assumes a shape and a backbone. A wonderful flower­
ing of films quiver amid the submarine gleams of the uncon­
scious brought to light.

191
 HANDJI
BY
ROBERT POULET
(Denoel and Steele)1 0 5

For some time now, Robert Poulet has cultivated written

hallucinations. This is a difficult style as there are few land­
marks. We can never be sure we have hit on the relevant point.
Without completely abandoning the attitude of mind this way
of cultivating the purely unconscious presupposes, M. Robert
Poulet's new novel is clear this time. By clear, I mean its place
is clear. We can decipher the areas in the mind, the wellsprings
of his usually extravagant imagination, unsound points in our
thoughts his sensibility corresponds to. His novel gives off a
strong odour of human blood, sweat and urine, a wholly per­
sonal physiology showing how things in the mind have been
resolved by events. At times we get the impression we are
witnessing Handji the ghost's private revels with the two
officers, but these relationships all but boil down to a sort of
housekeeping, changing the sheets, dirty linen and put-u-ups.
Hallucination has taken shape. Like a scene of bizarre sexuality
brought before an audience of fifteen hundred people. But
what a tempting gamble ! To move this nerve-racking mental
alchemy right into the front line, right into a war setting, going
so far as to make a kind of gigantic dream out of war in which
the sole reality consists in the slow progress of two minds.
To a great extent, the critics received this novel in annoyed
amazement. Those who loathed it lost no time in finding its
affinity with all those literary works whose stylistic mannerisms,
verbal distortion and constant preoccupation, one might even
call it being infatuated with insipidity, gives them their sole
value. But Robert Poulet, however much he betrays a resem­
blance to fashionable language, has his own style which
compels recognition from the first few phrases. In Handji we
1 92
must acknowledge above all being confronted with a style, an
exceptional style full of technique and idiosyncrasies. But these
produce an uncommon, dense sighing sound like a knife
abruptly plunged into the earth, breaking new ground, causing
a landslide. A style where all the problems of language, its
stoppages, contingencies, and struggles are laid bare in each
expression. By dint of witnessing like in a dream the landslide
of thought the mind expressed, and being expressed, the whole
system of language collapsed like a dream and the mind lost its
footing while everything in the contingencies of expression
appear equally useless or equally necessary. There are no
longer any casts of thought which stand up, no reason to anchor
thought to this or that, this more than that, there being no
more reason to begin thinking. The framework of our inner
mechanisms suddenly appear before us laid bare, as potential,
as contingent on one level as on another, in one form or an­
other. Only a need to hurry, to tell people what they are
waiting to hear, in a word to put an end to time, guides us in
the end and controls our choice. Robert Poulet's language asks
these and many other questions.
I would like to indicate the strange concept of boredom that
appears on certain pages of this book. Robert Poulet diagnoses
boredom for us, just as one would diagnose a known, classified,
clearly characteristic sickness. This is the most normal form of
boredom that exists, not the foul, poisonous sort of boredom,
motiveless blues, boredom which dulls the brain, but the sort
of boredom which counts the hours, makes each second stand
out, and sets all our actions and sensations in time. Through it,
our unoccupied thoughts makes use of every little bit that
helps to assess people, acts and views :
" This is the way man will carry news of a change, and that
man who is inactive, unoccupied and neutral today already
assumes the importance of his future activity. "
Thus the place of everything that happens is clear, every­
thing our brain customarily takes in without noticing it assumes
its precise value, owing to this creative boredom. Not an iota of
anything or any part of a word remains unused.
1 93
 MAGIC IN ANCIENT EGrPT
BY
FRANQOIS LEXA
(Paul Geuthner)106

Professor Lexa's book is great, valuable, monumental and

extremely valid even if one considers nothing but the compila­
tion of material he provides us with and the painstaking,
judicious, very full analysis he makes of it.
So it is with certain magic ideas on the invocation of holy
myths, in the course of a magic seance to call up the dead,
working up a giddy, spinning sensation which is quickly re­
placed by mad certainty in the minds of those who put them
in their true poetic environment. In the second volume of
the work there follow texts which, even in translation, some­
times lend an impression of the most sublime poetry, such as
certainly we feel no human poet could have composed unaided,
by human means alone.
For example phrases or verses like the one below came from
afar :
"From the ends of the Orient to the ends of the Occident I
faced the heavy skies suspended, and under my vast wing,
swollen by their cry, one after the other I saw the gods pass by
and climb straight up like burning l's, drawn up by the heights
and depths of space and by the four points of infinity. I saw
the Lord, the Son and the Magus, and he who revolves around
them as a crown, who is called the Perigrinator. "
Don't tell me some great epic poems contain roughly simi­
lar stanzas. All the ancient poets drew on sources unknown to
us.
Apart from the technique for forming and writing linked and
unlinked amulets with their required constituents, what is
evident in all this is that " Egyptian Magic " was especially
made u p of texts whose meaning must have been very closely
1 94
linked with their verbal resonance. With ten thousand ways of
repeating the text and pronouncing it, calling forth each time
more and more profound and ramified nervous vibrations. We
can now see how far this must have contributed to the outward
hysteria and inner whirlwinds of the Dervishes.

1 95
 THE CUP OF GOLD
BY
LUDWIG T IECK
TRANS LATED BY ALBERT B E GUIN
(Denoel and Steele)1°7

That cherubic dreamer, Ludwig Tieck, with his hirsute, secular

monk's head, seems like a realist lost among dreamers, but one
who finds himself happy there.
His tales recall a world of the mind, a network of vibrations,
the vibrations of our virgin sensations when we first began
reading them. Two levels of feeling overlap within us, deepen­
ing the pleasurable sensations we get out of them, both of which
are worth analysing.
The first level is one of recurrences, where we can make out
a sort of double undercurrent. There, Tieck's world conjures
up a favourable picture of our dreams, and our dreams are
content with magnifying life108 outside. Not having reached a
chaotic point yet.
Above the recurrent level, where the orchestrated fantasy
of these tales seems to bring the ghost of our Ego to the surface
once more, these stories are like a wonderful testimony that the
imaginary world goes on.109
Out of these works which mark a date in the evolution of
the mind or define a state of mind, without which we would
lack110 intellectual life to a valuable, infinitely revealing,
infinitely important degree, most of them are unknown, for­
gotten or unobtainable in our language. I do not believe there
has been a single translation of Tieck this last hundred years,
if any so much as existed before. We are a bit fed up, a bit sated
with Hoffman. His best tales, the most intense, the harshest
ones, those most marked by the aggravation of a disordered
sensitivity,. the colour of white sinewed raw meat, his most
1 96
violent tales, the most tormenting ones, are no longer available
in French.111
However, imaginary nature sometimes produces the required
climate, alignes its range of effects. There are always damp
dawns, murky, baleful sunsets. There are odds and ends of
natural curiosities where the archeologists of inner lands can
always dig up fresh sensations, the imprints of unchanging
purity. A new edition of Tieck is valuable for these reasons and
this new edition fills a vacuum, allowing us to become orient­
ated.
Where does this impression of being overladen with nostalgia
come from, that most Romantic writing gives us?
All , every one of us present-day writers, might be taken for
enemies of originality. If we are familiar with simple language
in our speech, our conversation and in our lives, our minds
seem to have forgotten it. We are madly romantic, we are dis­
gustingly sentimental. Beneath the travesty of our minds, we
appear like naive school-children, like hopeless day-dreamers
when confronted with love, life and reality. Our attitude never
corresponds to life, life such as it has been made and is. Perhaps
we do live in the mind, but what a larval, skeletal, foetal life
it remains, where all the simplest intellectual steps, sifted by our
rotten minds, turn into some ominous dust, some grotesque
posturing or other. And side by side with this, we weep at
ordinary, pleasant landscapes, senseless music or poignant
melodramas. We are confronted with a world in which our
unconscious would like to live, but to which112 our mind no
longer applies itself. For this reason, Tieck's tales recall our
former sensations and recall them in writing. Those childhood
sensations, more than dead, more than forgotten, fossilised,
infinitely older than us, resuscitating whole towns, like scale­
model towns as if preserved under glass, unbroken landscapes.
They bring back the steps our mind takes, burying in its dreams
the picture of a lost, inaccessible woman which our conceit, our
pride, and our wanderings, not satisfied with being alive, but
wanting to live and dream at the same time, made us lose. This
woman was the loveliest thing in the world, everything the
1 97
world could offer us. We demanded she have attributes no
earthly woman could have and yet we let her get away. We will
meet her again, beyond life and dreams, at the confines of
death. Not dead yet, but stricken in years, her beauty and us
worn out. We are damned. This is the moral of The Cup of
Gold and of our lives.

1 98
 A CURIO US PERSON'S COPY-BOOK
BY
LI SE DEHARME
(Cahiers Libres)118

One day, during the damned Surrealist period, I heard some­

one say something about a pair of blue gloves resembling a
woman's face. Any woman can give herself style if she wears
blue gloves. But any colour which might in itself be idiotic, can
suddenly become sublime because of its place in the picture.
So it was with Lise Deharme's blue gloves, which took on a real
quality of mind. I searched through life for a long time to
recognise the face behind these gloves, in the same way as in
Hoffmann's The Golden Bowl a lost note, by turning into stone
allows one, when one stumbles on it, to rediscover a whole
continent. For we needed breathing-space during Surrealist
times and we found poetry, personified in lovely women's faces,
a means of escaping from the turpitude of our minds. I finally
met Lise Deharme for whom life is always a garden as pictured
by a child. This is the spirit in which she writes her poems and
objects pass through and sometimes make up a mosaic of true
things to delicate, sure music.

199
 SA TAN THE OBSCURE
BY
JEAN DE BOSSCHERE
(Denoel et Steele)114

Jean de Bosschere is lost in Aestheticism, but underneath this

aesthete lies a man. Men are not concerned with essentials these
days.115 Too many epithets, comparisons and flowers. Too
much affected language stemming from 1 900 stop us getting
to the secret of his book. For there are secrets in his book. Satan
the O bscure is more than the description of a hidden person.
It is an incarnation of the realm of darkness, where eroticism,
poetry, religion and the sublime lie side by side just as in the
mother's womb a poet of genius lies side by side with all
the physical horror, the incarnation of other, non-physical
horrors accompanying the birth of certain predestined souls in
the heavens.116
There are secrets and a feverish,111 cruel mood ; perfumes, as
well, alas ! Painting as well, but at times the shrill note and the
uneasiness resulting from it, give Satan the Obscure its rare
literary quality,118 its human, poetic value.

200
 BAL THUS EXHIBITION
9
AT THE GALERIE PIERRE 11

It seems that painting, tired of portraying wild beasts and

extracting embryos, is trying to return to a sort of organic
reality which, far from shunning poetry, the marvellous and
fabulous, will tend towards it more than ever, only with a surer
technique. For to play around with the incomplete and foetal
in forms, to get the unexpected, extraordinary and marvellous
out of them, seems nevertheless just a little too easy. Men do
not paint diagrams, they paint things that exist. We don't hold
nature's work under a microscope to extract the inarticulate
from it. But a painter who is conscious of his technique and
power deliberately moves outside so as to deduce objects,
bodies, forms which he brings into play later in a more or less
inspired mode.
Balthus primarily paints light and form. With the lighting of
a wall, a floor,. a chair or skin, he bids us fathom the mystery
of a body endowed with sexuality which stands out with all its
harshness. The nude I am thinking of has something hard,
something dry, something precisely full about it and, one must
add, something cruel as well. It is an invitation to love, but
does not conceal its dangers.
As for poetry, it enters Balthus' art in a painting called La
Toilette de Cathy, where a young, loving woman's body com­
mands our attention like a dream, in a painting with all the
realism of Courbet's The Studio. Imagine an artist's model
suddenly transformed into a sphinx in real life and you get the
sort of impression this painting makes.
A technique from David's era serving violent, modem
inspiration which is certainly the inspiration of a sick period,
where an artist who concurs with this only uses real life to
crucify it more.
201
 To conclude this detached concept of painting, is anti-realist,
I mean where no painting can be judged on its own merits,
but is only valid depending on the meaning one attaches to it.
This is the concept of trompe-l' oeil which is not in the painting
but in the painting plus the setting we put it in. Art which
recaptures in reality through the artificial lighting through the
corridor, the gallery, the street outside, its hidden meaning, its
priceless purpose. The reality of the mind putting itself in the
place of our discordant actions.

202
 LIFE, LOVE, DEATH, THE VOID
AND THE WIND
BY
ROGER GILBERT-LECOMTE
(Cahiers Libres)120

Contrary to what has been fairly general practice these last

fifteen years, it now seems we must now return to accepting
poetry as expressing something which sounds, even if in a
mysterious way or according to the laws of the quarter-tone.
Now, in Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's poems, which hallow the
void's presence and the secrets of the flowing wind, even in the
amusing parts, even in the poems made up of a very few words,
a few sparse vocables which find diffi culty in discovering their
like, a hidden harmony is present, only giving itself away by
its sharpness.
We might even doubt this barely disclosed, sometimes almost
imperceptible harmony. But throughout the whole book a real
poet is undoubtedly revealed, a poet who is trying to find him­
self. The end of the book establishes that he has found himself.
This intelligent, sensitive collection is an outline of poetry, a
sort of map of the inner sky, a magnetic compass-card (finding
its significance and giving us our bearings) among all varieties
of attractions and currents. A good third of the book is taken
up with that alone. This is work by a man who is finding his
bearings, who is searching for the trail, one trail, and finds it.
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte marks the tempo, the key, the grada­
tions ; he is in pitch. He discovers true poetry in the end, always
genetic, chaotic, always starting from-for when it isn't anar­
chic, however little,. if there isn't a degree of fire and white
heat, the magnetic eddies of worlds being formed in a poem,
it isn't poetry-always starting from Genesis and Chaos.
The best part of the book, where Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's
203
 personality is really disclosed and comes out, is that dealing
with the void and the winds, with death as their make-weight.
Here at last a form of true lyricism appears, modern
lyricism. This is where Roger Gilbert-Lecomte breaks away
from the poets of today, rediscovering that organic note, the
organically rent mood, that dank, foetal, fiery air, ever a
feature of true lyricism, drawing its strength from life-force,
its wellsprings at the wellsprings of life.
Here again, as in everything else, we learn from the Orient.
Western poetry does not have this air of death, this stormy tone,
this air of ill-soothed convulsions, an attribute for example of
Tibetan poetry, what little we know of it. Oriental poetry
grapples with the human life cycle, grasping it before birth,
daring to follow it after death. One of the most riveting poems
in Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's book is one where the poet des­
cribes the spiritual fall of a soul which allows itself to be
trapped into incarnation.
Its theme is a common theme in loftier Tibetan poetry, but
its lyricism and accent are its own.
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte is one of the rare poets today who
cultivate this form of fierce, tortuous, oppressive lyricism, this
flayed man's cry, lyricism accoutred in short words, vigorous
imagery in which spasms and convulsions render a note of
nature in the midst of labour. Dance of death imagery, solemn,
concealed timbre, suppressing sounds, rotating, spiralling, all
characterise two or three of his poems. In a period more anti­
poetic than all others, where writing poetry seems a lost secret,
a genuine poet has been revealed at last.
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, following the example of the loftier
holy parts of Far Eastern traditions, makes metaphysics and
poetry one in his poems. He goes back to the imagery's genetic
origins. He knows that lyricism, love and death all spring from
the same turbulent source. He draws near this turbulent source,
drawing us near it with him as he does so.
The Orient has never made the mistake of lavishing itself
in personal poetry. Everything worthwhile in Oriental poetry
deals with universality. Individualistic poets, if they exist, are
204
automatically banished outside the tradition. In Roger Gilbert­
Lecomte's poetry there is a sort of regret for a lost tradition
and the distant echo of certain great mystical outbursts on the
rumbling, threatening note of Jacob Boehme or Novalis'
writings. This is the highest praise I can give it, and my last
remark exempts me from adding anything further.

205
 NA UMBURG CHURCH
AN ALBUM BY
WALTER HEGE AND WILHELM PINDER
(Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin)121

Messrs Hege and Pinder's album has revealed a sublime, little

known statuary. After glancing through it, we are left in no
doubt that Naumburg Church, near Weimar, contains some
of the most dramatic Medieval sculpted figures, and the sight
of them leaves a livelier and more haunting reminder in our
minds than ancient remorse.
The album certainly contains photos where the faces are
oriented, and where the light alone speaks for itself. These
photos lengthen the faces towards their sensitivity. Further­
more, in these gems, under this etherealised matter which has
been imbued with its own life for so long, there is a sort of
fusile force which seethes as under the skin, or a vast landscape
gushing out as if bursting from the heart. All human tenderness
and love combine to weigh us down before these faces where
style, clarity and simple grandeur seem fed from below by a
sort of soft vibration, by smouldering vitality.
Besides, all real beauty is properly speaking indescribable.
Looking at these statues, we may speak of style, or humanity,
grandeur, simplicity, truth or realism. But the same can be
said for all the statuary of this period which is unique and
unmistakeable. Deep down in my unconscious I am searching
for something which will tell me how, amid such unique
statuary, these statues are unique in tum and do not really
resemble any others. I am searching for a specially human,
realistic note which unites kindness exalted, denuded yet
sumptuous. These statues were sculpted by a strong, loving
hand. They express everything and admit nothing. They are
2 06
a synthesis, yet remain individualistic, and the particular story
they tell seems like time stopped in its flight. Their indefinable
poetry is derived from a very curious mixture of that direct
style and the present.
NOTES
 THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

The Alfred Jarry Theatre was founded by Antonin Artaud,

Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. This venture was immediately
and very effectively seconded by Dr. and Mme. Allendy. Mme.
Yvonne Allendy's part was very important in this. She often
stood in for Robert Aron in his directional duties.
The Alfred Jarry Theatre manifestos and programm es were
printed by the Societe Generale de l'Imprimerie et de !'Edition,
7 1 rue de Rennes, except two which were published in maga­
zines.
Most of the manifestos were not signed. Antonin Artaud
signed the Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre, the Letter to
Ida Mortemart and the letters incorporated in The Alfred
Jarry Theatre and Public Hostility brochure.
But Mme. Colette Allendy, who was closely connected with
the activities of the Alfred Jarry Theatre, confirmed that their
manifestos were drawn up by Antonin Artaud.

1 . The Alfred Jarry Theatre, Nouvelle Revue Fran�aise, no.

1 58, l November, 1 92 6 . This piece is introduced as follows :
" Some young writers are setting up The Alfred Jarry Theatre.
They have asked us to publish some parts of their manifesto. "

2 . This is the comparison with which the Surrealists vehemently

taxed the founders of the Jarry Theatre ! " Finally M. Vitrac,
a real idea guttersnipe . . . a poor devil who in his unfailing
simplicity went as far as to confess that his ideal as a man of
the theatre, an ideal which is of course, shared by M. Artaud,
was to put on shows which vied for beauty with police raids. "
(Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifestos, Sagittaire, 1 946, p. 1 07).

3. Alfred Jarry Theatre-1st Year-1926-2 7 Season. An eight

211
page brochure, 8vo, grey cover, printed by the S.G.l.E. in
1 926.
Near the bottom of the cover the particulars : " Director :
Robert Aron. "
A few sentences, taken from the text of the manifesto pub­
lished in the Nouvelle Revue Fran�aise, seems to indicate this
text is a re-written version adapted from the first manifesto.
In the brochure, the page before last is set apart for a state­
ment by the Management of the Jarry Theatre :

PATRONS, FOUNDER MEMBERS

AND FRIENDS OF THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

" The Alfred Jarry Theatre is a non-profit making venture

without commercial aspirations. It would like to be self-reliant
after its first few shows, by applying the same spirit of integrity
and independence to its financial management as it does to its
artistic direction.
In order to assure its first productions, it must appeal to those
who are interested in its efforts.
These can either join as Patrons, Founder Members or
as its Friends.
A. Patrons of the Alfred Jarry Theatre.
A minimum subscription of 500 francs entitles the holder to
two specially reserved seats for the first performance of each
show, during the 1 926-2 7 season.
B. Founder members of the Alfred Jarry Theatre.
A choice of 250 or 1 50 franc subscription.
250 franc subscriptions entitle the holder to four specially
reserved seats for the opening production of the 1 926-2 7
season.
50 franc subscriptions entitle the holder to two specially
reserved seats for the opening production of the 1 926-2 7
season.
C. Friends of the Alfred Jarry Theatre.
Subscriptions of 5 francs entitle the holder to a 5 franc
212
reduction valid for any ten stalls seats booked during the
1 926-2 7 season. "
The last page, a tear-out, is a subscription form giving the
Alfred Jarry Theatre's address in 1 926 as 2 1 , rue du Vieux­
Colombier.

4. This is no doubt Fear in Love (not Fear is Love), dialogue

No. VII I in the sequence of scenes which make up Alfred
Jarry's L'Amour en Visites.

5. In Paradise or the Old Man on the Mountain, a short play

in five brief Acts, the tenth and last part of L'Amour en Visites
by Alfred Jarry.

6. Max Robur, Robert Aron's pseudonym.

7 . Alberto Savinio, whose real name was Andrea Chirico. Born

Athens 1 89 1 , died Rome 1 952 . Alberto Savinio, Giorgio de
Chirico's brother, was a painter, writer and also a musician.
He wrote one tragedy, Alcesti di Samuele (published by Valen­
tino Bompiano). One of his works, Les Chants de ma mi-mort,
was translated into French.

8. Manifesto for an A bortive Theatre, Les Cahiers du Sud, No.

87, February, 1 92 7 .

9 . The post-script dating almost two months after the text of

the manifesto, was probably written after Antonin Artaud's
expulsion from the Surrealist group, which took place in
November, 1 926. We might even regard it as the first reply to
the pamphlet In the Open signed by Aragon, Breton, Eluard,
Peret and Unik to which Antonin Artaud replied with In the
Dark in June, 1 9 27 (Volume 1, p. 1 9 1 ).

1 0. The Alfred Jarry Theatre-1928 Season. From the copy

of the document sent to us by M. Tristan Tzara.
213
1 1 . The Alfred Jarry Theatre. This four-page circular, Royal
8vo, was printed by the S.G.I.E. in 1 929.
This text was followed by : A few press cuttings :
" These last few days the Alfred Jarry Theatre have presented
a strange production at Grenelle. One could philosophise about
it for ever. "
Fortunat Strowski,
Paris-Midi.
" The new Alfred Jarry Theatre group, which presented its first
show at the Theatre de Grenelle, is even older than the Mont­
parnos ; it dates from the evening of 1 0 December, 1 896
which saw the first performance of Ubu Roi at the Theatre de
l'Oeuvre. "
Regis Gignoux,
'l'lmpartial Franfais.
" The centre piece was a work in three scenes by M. Roger
Vitrac, The Secrets of Love. There is quite a lot of spicy poetic
parody in this. "
Benjamin Cremieux,
La Gazette de France.
" One mustn't ask the Jarry Theatre to make concessions . . .
It remains one of the freest avant-garde groups which gladly
shuns the approval of the masses. Not only does it shun it, but
it encourages the disapproval of the coach-trip audiences. "
Boisyvon,
L'lntransigeant.
" The Alfred Jarry Theatre gave us one Act by a well-known
author . . . despite a really ingenuous, odd, and at times surpris­
ing production . . . part of the audience began to rebel. "
Candide.
" The Alfred Jarry Theatre is poetic work . . . it questions th@
entire significance of theatre. "
Paul Chauveau,
Les Nouvelles Litteraires.
2 14
" This performance (A Dream Play) has confirmed my opinions
that dreams or nightmares properly belong in films.
But it was very strange . . . the scenery was very imaginatively
devised, as well as the acting. "
Andre Bellesort,
Le Gaulois.
" The Alfred Jarry Theatre, whose dramatic ambitions are
gratifying, has just given the first performance in Paris of
Strindberg's A Dream Play. The very least one can say of
Antonin Artaud's production is that he uses it as a strikingly
sensitive, intelligent, careful illustration of the subtlest mean­
ings in the text. "
Monde.
" The universe M. Artaud succeeds in conjuring up is one where
everything assumes a meaning, a secret, a soul. It is diffi cult to
describe and even more so to analyse the effects achieved, but
they are really striking. A true reintegration of magic, of poetry
in the world . . . . "
Benjamin Cremieux,
La Gazette du Franc.
" After a very amusing, well-made first act where the charac­
ters were well presented, they were taken in tow by Victor, a
precocious, vicious child and the play got off the track,
followed strange pathways. "
J.L.,
l'Ami du Peuple.
" M. Andre Gide attended the show. He seemed to be amused. "
Comredia.
" This play attests true emancipation . . . . "
Jean Prevost,
La Nouvelle Revue Franfaise.
" Victor can in all fairness be compared with Impressions
of Africa. And after all it is a continuation of Ubu Roi. If
Ubu Roi is a masterpiece, as some people never stop proclaim-
2 15
ing, why not regard M. Raymond Rou�l's plays as master­
pieces and while we are about it, Victor or the Children are in
Power ! "
Noziere,
L'A venir,
30 December, 1 928.

" Roger Vitrac has written an unbelievable play, an unbeliev­

ably impudent play, with unbelievably comic details . . . .
It was the strangest theatre performance I was privileged to
see during my eight post-war years in Paris. The two French
critics, Paul Reboux and Noziere, who unless I am mistaken,
alone gave their opinions on this ' dramatic attack ' , claiming
the author wanted to startle the audience. I don't believe
this . . . their amused remarks expressed a far more discerning
judgement than the most informed critics ever could.
A critique of patriotism. I am surprised no protest was raised
in a French theatre.
Ida Mortemart is, on the whole, just one more virtue. . . .
Roger Vitrac is a battering ram and loves a fight. That is the
only thing which counts just now. "
Paul Block,
Berliner Tageblatt.
" Despite the scoffers, Victor is a tragedy. "
Paris-Times.
" We could say a lot to put this play in its place in the present
day and to determine its relationship with the past. We must
especially stress the leitmotif of this middle-class tragedy which
seems to be the theme of man's wretched condition, incapable
as he is of going through the most pathetic, the most sublime
moments with integrity but obliged to submit to and be
dependent on matter. "
Lid. Nov. Prague.

Mme. Colette Allendy has sent u s two documents relating

to this circular. These confirm that it was in fact Antonin
2 16
Artaud who drew up the Manifestos. The first is three MSS
pages in Antonin Artaud's handwriting. He had copied out
the press opinions on the Alfred Jarry Theatre's first three
shows himself, numbering them carefully. All the press cuttings,
except two, are reproduced in the circular (cf. above). On the
other hand, the last eight press cuttings contained in the circu­
lar are not to be found in this document. The second document
sent to us by Mme. Colette Allendy is the TS of the same text
corrected by hand by Antonin Artaud. In particular the indica­
tions relating to the typography of the text (italics, words in
capital letters etc.). The changes made are given below.

1 2 . The first version was drawn up as follows : " . . . running.

Required to allow it to exploit. . . . " Antonin Artaud added
between the lines : " Minimum " (the " s " crossed out on
" Requires ") and : " to develop and " .

1 3 . " Without stylisation " written in between the lines in place

of : " on a level with life " (crossed out).

1 4. The typescript reads : " But before, that it will put on a

play . . . " This change was probably made when correcting
the proofs.

1 5 . This play was finally called Le Coup de Trafalgar.

l 6. " Simply, " added in between the lines.

1 7. The Alfred Jarry Theatre and Public Hostility, a 48-page

brochure with a cover by Gaston-Louis Roux. No indication
of the printer's name. [The original brochure included the
subsequent items concerning the Alfred Jarry Theatre.]

l 8. Despite all our efforts, we were unable to find the text of

Acid Stomach or The Mad Mother. Maxime Jacob wrote the
incidental music for this musical sketch.
217
1 9. The Secrets of Love by Roger Vitrac, produced by Antonin
Artaud with stage design by Jean de Bosschere. In the cast
were Genica Athanasiou, Jacqueline Hopstein, Jean Maury,
Edmond Beauchamp, Raymond Rouleau and Rene Lefevre.

20. The invitation cards had the following information on

them :

THE PROGRAMME
" I A masterpiece of modem Russian cinema, V.I.
Pudovkin's The Mother (after the novel by Gorki). Uncut
version.
II An original Act by a ' well known' author, put on
without the author's permission.*
Featuring :
Genica Athanasiou, Andre Berley, Henri Creinieux, etc.
Produced by Antonin Artaud.
* The author's name and the title of the play will be an­
nounced at the end of the performance. "

2 1 . Alluding to the scandal provoked by the Surrealists during

the performance of A Dream Play. cf. Andre Breton, The
Surrealist Manifestos (Sagittaire, 1 946) pp. 99 to 1 07 and
Robert Aron's Manifesto below :

THE ALFRED JARRY THEATRE

AND THE SURREALISTS

" On Thursday 7 June 1 928 the Surrealists put forward reasons

forbidding the Alfred Jarry Theatre to present the second per•
formance of Strindberg's A Dream Play, which was to take place
on Saturday g June at the Theatre de l'Avenue in a matinee.
Some of these reasons were justifiable and others not ; all of
them, however, in comparison with the intellectual value of
the Alfred Jarry Theatre, had only incidental value. Whatever
the reasons put forward were, the Surrealists had no right to
draw up such a ban. The Alfred Jarry Theatre, created along-
218
side them and despite them, did not have to take orders from
them despite the similarities of mind that might exist between
it and them.
Antonin Artaud and I decided to disregard this ban. Having
gone over the different means that were open to two isolated
individuals of resisting thirty brawlers and having ascertained
that none of them were effective, we sent Andre Breton a wire
on the evening of 8 June to warn him that we would not give
in to his threats and in order to stop him entering the theatre
we would use all possible means, whatever the cost, ' even those
we find most distasteful. '
This periphrasis is to be found in a tract we handed out on
Saturday 9 June in the lobby of the theatre, worded as follows :

After the incidents which occurred Saturday last during the

performance of A Dream Play, renewed threats have made it
necessary for us to defend our freedom of action, at all costs.
The Alfred Jarry Theatre, unwilling to accept any restrictions,
declares itself ready to use all possible means to safeguard this
freedom, even those it finds most distasteful. "
Possible troublemakers have been warned.
ANTONIN ARTAUD ROBERT ARON, 9 June 1 928.
-

Thus the question was clearly and fairly put : we felt, as

cruelly as anyone, what a paradox even restricted police help
constituted for a theatre we wanted to make a revolutionarily
spirited venture. But our opponents' destructive intentions fixed
us on the horns of the following dilemma :
either we had to give in to the Surrealists' dictates and aban­
don freedom of action,
or, despite our distaste, resist by the only effective means,
namely the police.*

To underline what is unacceptable about the Surrealist

* I should mention that the only help requested from the police led
to barring demonstrators entry to the theatre. Any police action taken
inside the theatre or in the street had been called for by others than us,
unknown to us and previous to our request.
219
 attitude, it is worth remembering that the first year it existed,
the Alfred Jarry Theatre, on its own, provoked the only
dangerous and daring disturbances of a Surrealist nature to
take place for at least two years. The performance of Le Partage
de Midi on 1 4 January 1 92 8, without the author's permission,
followed by an announcement by Antonin Artaud denouncing
Paul Claudel's treachery-the declaration of public rebellion
made on 2 June 1 9 2 8 by Antonin Artaud during the first per­
formance of A Dream Pla�ntailed serious judicial risks no
Surrealist disturbances had incurred for a long time.
To tell the truth, as a result of this, they stopped being
Surrealist disturbances, almost becoming Revolutionary dis­
turbances, since the two words became irreconcilable a long
time ago.
No one could deny the Surrealists once had a certain spirit
or a certain Revolutionary susceptivity. Certain passages in
their declaration of 2 7 January 1 9 2 5* gave notice of activity,
beside which a few shortlived uproars, without any risk
attached, in theatres or at literary dinners seem ridiculous.
Unwilling to run any real risks and incapable of having any
effect, therefore lacking the two really Revolutionary attributes,
the Surrealists, whatever attributes they may have, by remain­
ing within the literary or artistic domain, incur no risks except
that which is most sought after as a consecration of their
childish acts, namely a short stay in the police cells.
To put an end to this dictatorship by oblivion, whose ridi­
culous exploits compromised even the very ideas they were
supposed to safeguard, in the meantime any means seemed
valid, even those which were the most distasteful to me. For

* We issue the following solemn warning to Society!

Let it watch its deviations closely. We won 't miss each spiritual mis-
take it makes.
Society will find us at every turning point in its thoughts.
We are specialists in Rebellion.
If called upon, we are liable to use any ways and means of action.
(Declaration of 22 /anuary 1925.)
Reference and reproduction prohibited to all newspapers and maga­
zines, except La Revolution Surrealistc.
220
this reason, having no practical means of resisting such hollow
authority, without disguising the contempt I felt for the help
requested, I decided I could not forgive Andre Breton for
having reduced me to this most compromising paradox. I
therefore had the courage, greater than thirty men invading
a theatre, to use the police-whatever this might cost me,
whatever misunderstandings I might lay myself open to, how­
ever disgusted at myself I might remain.
Written by me and committing only me. "
Robert Aron,
10 June 1928.

22. cf. this cutting from a paragraph in Candide, 20 January

1 928 :
" When the play ended, after a fashion, Antonin Artaud, his
voice rising above the din, announced :
The play we have just presented is by M. Paul Claudel,
French Ambassador to the United-States.
There was a sudden hush. The speaker added :
A filthy traitor!
No doubt this was the signal. Applause on the left. We were
among friends. "

2 3 . Reply to the accusations made against Antonin Artaud in

Second Surrealist Manifesto :
" He was putting o n Strindberg's A Dream Play, having
heard that the Swedish Embassy would pay (M. Artaud knows
I can prove it), but the fact had not escaped him that this
passed a judgement on his undertaking. Never mind. " (Andre
Breton, The Surrealist Manifestos, Sagittaire, 1 946, p. 1 02).

24. Idem. "I will always remember, M. Artaud at the door of

the Alfred Jarry Theatre, surrounded by cops, letting twenty
more loose on the only friends he acknowledged the day before,
having arranged for their arrest at the police station before­
hand. " Andre Breton, The Surrealist Manifestos, Sagittaire,
1 946, p. 1 02).
22 1
 2 5 . Idem. " This is M. Artaud, as we saw him and as anyone
might have seen him in a hotel corridor, slapped by Pierre Unik,
calling to his mother for help ! " (Andre Breton, The Surrealist
Manifestos, Sagittaire, 1 946, p. 1 0 5 .)

2 6 . Letter to Ida Mortemart alias Domenica. Letter included

in the programme for the performance of Victor or the Children
are in PowfJr, cover by G. L. Roux.
On the other side of the cover is this press cutting :

ARTLESSLY
Poisonous Plants

" Perhaps we ought never to grow tired of pointing out any

sickness, hoping doctors and kindly nurses will come along with
a cure. We need it so badly ! Whatever point of the compass
one turns to there are plenty of new al arms .
The other evening, coming out of school, three schoolboys
in the Oise district set fire to three wheatstacks, just for fun.
One each. Darling prodigals !
Last Thursday, a lad was caught unbolting a rail. His sole
reason was : we've never had any derailments near us, I wanted
to see one !
Little Andre Hanon, aged nine, held his younger sister's
head under in a bowl full of water. Thank God he was caught
at it. He said : I just wanted to know if it's true you can drown
in a couple of inches of water !
On a Sunday afternoon in the heart of the forest, three
scamps stopped a woman rambler, relieved her of her hand­
bag, saying, just to cheer her up : If we were bigger we'd have
given you something else.
La Sarthe district. A nasty little girl, tired of seeing the cars
go by, amused herself by hurling stones at them. One driver
was blinded and let go of the wheel of his car, which turned
over. Its occupants were seriously bruised enough to give the
criminal child a certain amount of pleasure for a while.
The problem is alarming and we must ask ourselves what
222
this need to injure, this wish to harm for harm's sake, repre­
sents. How can it be properly cured? I am well aware that Drs.
Henyers, Rubinovitch and that excellent Barrister, M. Rollet,
labour incessantly at delving into the secret of abnormal
children.
But can we ever hope to clear human fields of all these
poisonous nettles? "
Blanche Vogt,
L' Intransigeant.

On pages 1 and 2 of the programme, in big, black letters :

" LISTEN TO VICTOR !
HE CAN ANSWER !
HE WANTS TO ANSWER !
HE WILL ANSWER !
I HATE PRECOCIOUSLY WELL-BEHAVED CHILD­
REN.
MAN IS BORN . . . TA-TA-TA . . . WITH EQUAL
RIGHTS . . . "

Victor, produced by Antonin Artaud ; in the cast were

Elizabeth Lannay, Edith Farnese, Jeanne Bernard, Germaine
Ozier, Domenica Blazy, Marc Darnault, Robert Le Flon,
Auguste Boverio, Maxime Fabert and Max Dalban.
Alexandra Pecker was to create the character of Ida Morte­
mart. She dropped out, frightened by the character's disorder.
The part was taken by Domenica Blazy. This is why Antonin
Artaud wrote the Letter to Ida Mortemart at the last minute.
Mme. Colette Allendy sent us the typescript of the text which
should originally have been in the programme. Unfortunately
this copy is incomplete. The following part is retained :
Victor is a typical comedy, if we allow the word its corrosive
power, all its cruel potential.
In the exact amount of time where life collapses-time kept
by a clock on stage-two French middle-class families visit,
eat, sleep and talk in accordance with established custom, really
shut in between four walls.
 · It would all be solid, unquestionably calculable in the light
of the ceiling lamp. But the Paumelle family have a nine-year­
old son, Victor (it is his birthday celebration), the Magneau
family a six-year-old daughter, Esther-and behind these two
children (children are always to blame), provoked by their
curiosity, madness, love, poetry, death and fear will slip in. In
short, the air of mystery in this absurd place will carry away
all the foundations, but in its place will bring on the palm tree
with tri-colour dates and Ida Mortemart. Especially Ida Morte­
mart, miraculous, beautiful, rich, loving and also the most
horrible, the most ludicrous disorder she had to represent, for,
if the one ideal went unscathed, the farce would not be so fine
and the characters could escape through this loophole, whereas
they must-with a cruelty almost equal to life . . . .

2 7 . Letter to Ida Mortemart-from the original MS. sent to

us by Jean-Marie Conty. This version seemed sufficiently
different from the one printed in the programme to merit all of
it being included. Could it have been too long to appear in the
programme?

2 8. A Dream Play by Strindberg, produced by Antonin Artaud.

Text included in the programme for the performances of A
Dream Play. The following particulars are given in the pro­
gramme : " The Prologue and Scenes 6, 1 2 and 1 4 will be
omitted. "
The leading parts in A Dream or Dream Play were played
by : Tania Balachova, Yvonne Save, Ghita Luchaire, Raymond
Rouleau, Straram, Maxime Fabert, Bovfrio, Beauchamp, etc.
Antonin Artaud played the part of Theology. Mme. Colette
Allendy has sent us this MS. note by Antonin Artaud about
the cast of A Dream Play.
" M. Raymond Rouleau, who possesses a rare understanding
of the requirements and rules of theatre today, in the role of the
Officer. M. Boverio, with his warm nature, a burning nature,
will project the ideal poet's vibrant figure. M. Favert has known
how to attune his comic side to the necessities of a part in depth.
2 24
As to the ladies, Tania Balachova invests the part of Agnes
with rare sensitivity as does Yvonne Save the double role of the
Mother and the caretaker. Furthermore among the women
there are Alexandra Pecker, Ghita Luchaire, etc., then Beau­
champ, Decroux who have built up substantial character out­
lines, Straram, Bontoux, Zacharie, etc. "

2 9 . The following should be added to the Alfred Jarry

Theatre file. It is an account by Mme. Vvonne Allendy, sent
to us by Mme. Colette Allendy :

Paris, 12 December 1929

" Having made up their minds to start a theatre bearing Alfred
Jarry's name, bringing out a Manifesto (later published in the
1 November 1 92 6 number of La Nouvelle Revue Franfaise)
and a repertoire including plays by Jarry, Strindberg, Roger
Vitrac, etc., Antonin Artaud, Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron
came to see us on 2 6 September 1 92 6 to ask us to help them
find some money. We accepted and it was decided that, under
the auspices of our Sorbonne Study Group, a lecture would
be given on the aims of this Theatre and Antonin Artaud would
read passages from the works in the repertoire.
As a result of some conflict or other Artaud and Vitrac
backed out and the lecture was given by Robert Aron on 2 5
November 1 926 in the hall of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. All
appeared lost.
Saddened at seeing such an interesting project fall through,
my husband and I resolved to re-establish contact with Antonin
Artaud. It was agreed that, being unable to give a sufficient
sum to start with ourselves or to get one donated through our
efforts we would reserve seats at as high a price and as far in
advance as possible, since there was still no chance of fixing a
date for the show.
By April 1 92 7 we had managed to collect the sum of about
3 , 000 francs and we paid all of this over to Robert Aron. We
decided to risk a production despite the insufficiency of the
amount. In May 1 92 7 Antonin Artaud began rehearsals of
225
 Roger Vitrac's The Secrets of Love in the small rehearsal room
at the Theatre de l' Atelier, lent by Dullin. All this time we
carried on booking as many seats as possible for the two per­
formances to take place 1 and 2 June 1 92 7 at the Theatre
de Grenelle. No more than one rehearsal could be held at
the theatre itself. This took place during the night 3 1 May -

1 June.
The next day and the day after, 1 and 2 June, two perform­
ances comprising a programme of : Acid Stomach or the Mad
Mother by Antonin Artaud, The Secrets of Love by Roger
Vitrac and Gigogne, a one-Act play, by Robert Aron were
given in front of very good audiences, many of whose names
I have kept.
Aron told us there was a loss of between 6,ooo and 7 ,ooo
francs entirely paid by him. A lot of phone calls and conversa­
tions the following day confirmed the very great success of this
venture.
The following December ( 1 92 7), one act of Claudel's play
Le Partage de Midi was to be put on against the author's
wishes, with the first showing of a banned Pudovkin film based
on Gorki's The Mother. For this show we also had to book
seats in advance for all our friends and relations.
-Claudel-Artaud incident
-As a result, several events occurred that were to be of
importance for the Alfred Jarry Theatre :
Two of our Swedish friends who had seen the performance,
in admiration at the mood of the production, told my husband
and myself that if the Jarry Theatre were to put on Strindberg,
the Swedish colony in Paris were likely to book many seats at
50 francs and that certain members might donate several thou­
sand francs which would assure its production.
A Dream Play had been in the repertoire since the theatre
was formed, as the invitations to Aron's lecture of 2 5 November
1 926 attest.
So it seemed to me the time had come to produce this play.
Artaud and Aron immediately agreed-and I put this up to
our Swedish friends. Vitrac was in the South of France at the
226
 time and I asked Aron to write to him since he (Aron) was in
charge of the business arrangements. But at that very moment
Aron said he had had enough of the Jarry Theatre and had
given up bothering about it. I begged him to do no such thing,
to go on, assuring him I would give him all the help I could.
I then used all possible means to make the production out­
standing. From his end, Artaud did all he could, struggling
against enormous difficulties,. since he had no theatre to re­
hearse in. It opened on 2 June 1 928.
I have kept a seating plan with almost all the seat numbers
made up by me. 1 50 seats were taken by the Swedes, plus 34
reserved by the Legation, including the Minister. Eight repre­
sentatives of the main Stockholm and Gotheberg dailies had
taken two boxes. All the important French press, five American
reporters, three Viennese newsmen, three Belgians, two Dutch,
several members of the Danish legation, including the Minister.
Among others I had asked to attend and who were present :
La duchesse de la Rochefoucault, Paul Valery, le princesse
Edmond de Polignac, Prince George of Greece (a Dane), la
comtesse Albert de Mun, la comtesse M. de Polignac, la vicom­
tesse de Gaigneron, Fran�ois Mauriac, Countess Greffulhe,
Arthur Honegger, Lucien Maury, Claude Berton, Pierre Bris­
son, Andre Bellesort, Benjamin Cremieux, G. de Pawlewsky,
Paul Chauveau, etc. Swedish and French artists, members of
the Austrian legation, the famous writer Marika Stjemstadt,
Mme. Karem Bremson, etc.
One cannot name them all. All the stalls were booked as was
the first row of the Dress Circle. Two Swedes had sent, 1 ,500
francs and 1 ,ooo francs respectively.
On arriving I was greatly surprised to see that all the num­
bers of the reserved seats had been changed at the last minute
by the box office. This left thirty or so stalls seats empty, the
ticket-holders having been shifted into the Gallery (not booked
in advance).
Justifiable dissatisfaction on the audience's part. The Sur­
realists were now able to sit in the centre of the house. I believe
you know the rest.
227
 My husband and I reimbursed the Swedes out of our own
pockets.
The official note on the incident sent by the Swedish Lega­
tion in Paris to the foreign and Swedish press was good enough
to remark that the production was very fine, much above
Reinhardt's, who had first produced Strindberg's A Dream
Play at the Intimate Theatre in Stockholm.
Eight days later, on 9 June 1 928, the second performance
took place in the conditions referred to in Aron's Manifesto
dated 1 0 June 1 928.
To avoid the Jarry Theatre succumbing to the attempts to
destroy it which had been made at these performances, alone
this time (Aron liad finally backed out) I wanted to allow Roger
Vitrac as playwright and Antonin Artaud as producer to give
three performances of Victor or the Children are in Power.
You know the rest. . . .
Deeply interested in these repeated efforts, on 1 5 November
I 9 2 9 Vicomte and Vicomtesse Ch. de Noailles presented Artaud
with the sum of 2 0,000 francs for his next production. "
Yvonne Allendy

A MIME PLAY AND

A STAGE SYNOPSIS

30. The Philosopher's Stone, Les Cahiers de la Pleiade, Spring,

1 929. cf. Letter of Louis Jouvet, 1 5 April 1 93 1 , Volume Ill,
p. 203 .

3 1 . There is no more Firmament. Mme. Annie Faure owns

three documents relevant to this stage synopsis. She has been
kind enough to lend them to us :
I . " The MSS. 9 sheets on graph paper, written on both sides,
numbered 1 to I 7 by Antonin Artaud. The MS. is unfortun­
ately incomplete, and ends with the Heading for Movement V.
It has no title. "
2 . " 6 page TS. headed There is no more Firmament ; with a
228
few handwritten corrections by Antonin Artaud. There are
many differences between the MS. and TS. As was his unfailing
practice, Antonin Artaud probably dictated the text and
changed it as he did so. This copy begins at the start of the text
and goes down to the phrase : ' I don't understand what is
going on. ' "
3 . " Very incomplete, uncorrected, 3 page TS, beginning a few
lines before the end of the previous copy, ending with the
phrase : ' You are fire. ' Antonin Artaud must also have dictated
this passage, however, and changed it slightly. "
We have used the first TS. for the part of the text it covers.
The variants are given below :

32. " Harmonies brutally cut. "

33." . . . the theatre, coming . . . . "

34. Major changes in the voices :

" Oh ! That platinum, my dear, blue blonde, sun and
skin, eh ! "
" Look, just lift one finger, just one. "
" That letter, I want to see that letter. "
" A sea-green egret and a wild fox. "
" Dirty bastard ! "
" Listen, did you ever see a funny sun like that. "
" Are we in an ascendant or a descendant phase?"
" With his face covered with freckles, awful. "
" Personally, I have never seen the sun so huge. "
" An astronomer says the spots, etc . . . . "
" Wheat's going up, gold's going down, dust over every­
thing. "

35. " . . . a haunting voice proclaims . . . . "

36 . " I am telling you . . ..

yes,
I proclaim
229
 yes,
What I am proclaiming is,
a great, great, great,. very great . . . . "
.
37. " But 1t ts heard as a . . . . "
.

38. " A woman cries out,. a man falls, a dwarf. . . . "

3 9 . Changes in the Voices starting at :

" Oh ! he's undressing me ! Help ! I'll be naked ! "
" Come on, come on, take me, yes, yes, here, in the street.
I'm crazy. I've had enough. "
" There, take that, and that, and that too, sadist, sadist,
dirty sadist. "
" Oh ! dear, dear, dear, dear, Oh ! dear ! dear ! dear ! my
heart, my heart. "
" I'm afraid, I'm on fire, I'm burning, I'm afraid, I'm
going to jump. "

40. " There, there, what's that then? "

" Look at that spot, I mean just look at that spot. "

4 1 . " as if apoplectic because of too impudent a trick, " no

doubt added when dictating.

42 ." . . . or the moon, is that the sun or the moon? "

A layabout. " That's the moon, fat-head, ain't you ever seen
a pregnant moon before, or your paunch, either. "

43 . " . . . to get a look . . . . "

44. " The moon's falling. I tell you the moon's falling. Look,
it's coming loose, it's falling. "
" Let it fall, let everything go to blazes, tell them where my
love comes from, august Selene.
To begin with, it is certainly a case of love . . . "
.

230
4 5 . " . . . in the dark centre stage . . . . "

46. " GREAT DISCOVERY. Twice.

OFFICIAL. SCIENCE BEWILDERED.
NO MORE FIRMAMENT. "

4 7. This passage is greatly changed :

" What are they saying, what are they talking about? "
" Here, go and buy me a paper.
Son, bing a News over here. "

" NO MORE PYRENEES. NO MORE PYRENEES. NO

MORE FIRMAMENT. SENSATIONAL DISCOVERY.
SCIENCE BEWILDERED. THE GOVERNMENT HAS
IBE SITUATION UNDER CONTROL. FAMOUS
SCIENTI ST SPEAKS. THE GOVERNMENT URGES
YOU TO KEEP CALM. "

48. TS. No. 1 ends here. TS. No. 2 is much too incomplete to
follow. What follows therefore, is the MS. Where there are dis­
crepancies, the notes give the text of TS. No. 2 .

49· " . . . but I'm burning.

Mummy, it's happened, it's happened, I can see it falling.
A man with a newspaper in his hand rushes downstage.
Silence reigns. "

5 0. " But it's not normal. Something is. . . . "

51." . . . moves downstage.

He begins. "

5 2 . " The crowd are glad. People feel reassured. All breathe a
sigh of relief. "

53. " As if two worlds rammed into one another. "

23 1
54. " Loafers walk around him, hardly even pause. "

5 5 . TS. No. 2 ends here.

56. Thus in the MS.

5 7 . The MS. ends with this heading. On the reverse side of

page 1 7, Antonin Artaud wrote the notes beginning : Suggested
act in street. He may have contemplated acting No More
Firmament in the street. These notes seem to imply it. The text
and these notes must date from about 1 93 1 or 1 932 .

58. Word missing in the MS.

TWO PRODUCTION PLANS

59. Production plan for the Ghost Sonata by Strindberg. From

a document sent by Mme. Colette Allendy.

60. Production plan for Le Coup de Trafalgar, a middle-class

play in 4 Acts by Roger Vitrac. Plan lodged with the Theatre
Pigalle in April, 1 93 0, sent by Louis Jouvet.

6 1 . This refers to Amenophis IV's treasure in Roger Vitrac's

play (cf. Roger Vitrac, Theatre, Gallimard, Vol. I, p. 1 3 0).

A NOTE ON THE TRICKSTERS BY STEVE PASSEUR

62. The Tricksters. These notes, which Antonin Artaud must

have made when reading The Tricksters (or after reading it)
were sent to us by M. Jean-Marie Conty.
Among M. Jean-Marie Conty's documents there are also
the two following notes referring to Charles Dullin's production
of The Tricksters (first performed by I'Atelier company at the
Galeries de Bruxelles, 2 1 January, 1 93 2 .)
232
 " Whose tendency either towards simplification or transposi­
tion, of what is most hateful, most aesthetically artificial and
doubtful in a field of illusion where artistry triumphs.
All the scenes were dealt with in the same abominable spirit,
the same tendency towards analysis and discrimination.
a fruitless method, although it can automatically be applied
everywhere, rather than the one stimulus carrying the whole
play along. "

" The only part of the play treated in a slightly original way,
where theatricality happens, where theatre happens, appears in
a physical, concrete manner, in one part, one character, the
one protagonist. Unfortunately, the tendency adopted was the
only one which didn't work as it applied neither to that char­
acter, nor to the play. It was a failure. "

REVIEWS

63. Au Theatre de l'Oeuvre, Demain, No. 82, October/

November/December, 1 92 0 .
Strindberg's The Creditors w as performed a t the Maison de
!'Oeuvre in October, 1 9 2 0 by Lugne-Poe, Jean Sarment and
France Ellys. In Hugo von Hoffmannsthal's Electra, the lead­
ing part was played by Suzanne Despres.

64. Charles Dullin's l'Atelier, Action, special number, second

year ( 1 9 2 1 ) .

65. l'Atelier Theatre, La Criee, Marseilles, No. 1 7 , October,

1 92 2 .

66. Carmosine a t l'Atelier, L a Criee, Marseilles, No. 1 9, Dec­

ember, 1 92 2 . Alfred de Musset's play was performed by the
I'Atelier company, 6 November, 1 9 2 2 .

6 7 . In La Mort de Souper, a one-Act Morality play i n verse

by Nicole de La Chesnaye after La Condamnation de Banquet
233
( 1 6th. century) , adapted by Roger Semichon. Antonin Artaud
played the part of Apoplexy.

68. Six Characters in Search of an A uthor at the Comedie des

Champs-Elysees, La Criee, Marseilles, No. 2 4, May, 1 92 3 .
Pirandello's play w as first performed i n Paris a t the Comedie
des Champs-Elysees, 1 8 April, 1 9 2 3 by Georges and Ludmilla
Pitoeff.

69. The Secrets of Love by Roger Vitrac, Nouvelle Revue

Franfaise, No. 1 44, September, 1 92 5 .

70.The Tricksters by Steve Passeur at L'Atelier, Nouvelle

Revue Franfaise, No. 2 2 4, May, 1 93 2 . After The Tricksters
had been created in Brussels on 2 1 January, 1 93 2 , Steve
Passeu r's play was first performed in Paris 30 January , 1 9 3 2
at L'Atelier, produced b y Charles Dullin, scenery by Vakalo.
The three lead roles were played by Yolande Laffon, Dalio
and Vital.

7 1 . The Theatre Strike, Nouelle Revue Franfaise, No. 2 2 4,

May, 1 93 2 .

72 . Subway, b y Patrick Kearney, Nouvelle Revue Franfaise,

No. 245, February 1 9 34. Adapted by Georges Jamin, this was
first performed at the Studio des Champs-Elysees 1 2
December, 1 93 3 . Produced by Georges Jamin and Jean Ser­
vais. Scenery by Felix Labisse.

7 3 . Le Coup de Trafalgar by Roger Vitrac at the Theatre de

l'Atelier, Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, No. 2 50, July 1 934. Le
Coup de Trafalgar was first performed at the Theatre de
!'Atelier, 8 June, 1 9 34 by Le Rideau de Paris (under the
direction of Marcel Herrand and Jean Marchat). The produc­
tion was by Marcel Herrand.

74. A nnabella at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Nouvelle

234
Revue Fran�aise, No. 2 54 , November, 1 934. There are three
articles devoted to the show in this number of La Nouvelle
Revue Fran�aise. Besides Antonin Artaud's, there are two
reviews, one by Jean Schlumberger and the other by Benjamin
Cremieux.
Shakespeare's As rou Like It, in Jules Supervielle's adapta­
tion, was first performed on 1 2 October, 1 934 at the Theatre
des Champs-Elysees. Victor Barnowsky's production seemed
too daring to the critics, even contrary to the spirit of Shake­
speare. The incidental music was borrowed from Mozart with
Scenery by Balthus. Bamowsky had given the leading parts to
Annabella, a film star making her first appearance on stage,
and Fernand Rene, a music-hall comedian. In the cast we note
the names of Philippe Heriat, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Debucourt
and Reda-Caire. The performances were very soon suspended,
Bamowsky being unable to pay the actors. A virulent cam­
paign was conducted against him by the press. Things grew
so bad that Barnowsky was dismissed.
We ought to mention that on I O O ctober, only two d ays
previously therefore, another production of As r OU Like It,
adapted by Jules Delacre (music by Georges Auric, scenery by
Berthold Mahn) was presented under Jacques Copeau's direc­
tion. Copeau, who had kept away from the theatre for a
number of years, was returning to the theatre (his company
and Charles Dullin's I'Atelier had merged) and this first show
was a great success.

7 5 . As rou Like It by Shakespeare at the Theatre des Champs­

Elysees . This review, very different from the one on Barnow­
sky's production, was sent to us by M. Rene Thomas.

ABOUT A LOST PLAY

76. In 1 932 or thereabouts, Antonin Artaud adapted Seneca's

Atreus and Thesius, calling it The Torment of Tantalus. In
a letter to Jean-Louis Barrault, he adds as a postscript :
235
 " Then I must read you my tragedy, THE TORMENT OF
TANTALUS. " (Letters from A ntonin Artaud to Jean-Louis
Barrault, Bordas, p. 9 7) .
This seems t o indicate that Antonin Artaud had finished the
work.
Unfortunately, the text of this adaptation seems lost for
good, and despite all our research, we have been unable to
find it.
Three documents sent to us by M. Rene Thomas (pp. 1 5 1
to 1 55) refer to this scheme. The first of these documents
(signed by Antonin Artaud, although written in the third per­
son), shows that he had considered putting the play on in
Marseilles. The two other documents are notes referring to
Seneca's play.
See a letter about this addressed to Jean Paulhan dated 1 6
December, 1 9 3 2 ( Volume Ill).

ON LITERATURE AND THE PLASTIC ARTS

77. Big Stories and Little Taste - text sent to us by Mme.

Toulouse.

78. Words M�ing.

79. The Appearance of the Autumn Salon, Demain, No. 8 2 ,

October /November/ December I 9 2 0 .

So. Expression at the Salon des lndependants, Demain, No. 8 3 ,

January/February/March 1 92 1 .

81. A Pre-Dadaist's Remarks, Demain, No. 83, January/

February/March 1 92 1 .

82 . Men and their Work. The title of a new report in Demain

written by Antonin Artaud, No. 83, January /February/March
1 92 I .
8 3 . Le Cocu Magnifique, a three-Act farce by Crommelynck,
first performed at the Theatre de I' Oeuvre, 1 9 December,
1 920.

84. 22 December, 1 920, the Vieux-Colombier revived

Shakespeare's As rOU Like It , a play in Jacques Copeau's
1 9 l 3 repertoire. The dress-rehearsal for Le Pauvre sous
l'escalier in three episodes, adapted from Henri Gheon's Life
of St. Alexis took place at the Vieux-Colombier, 24th January,
1 92 1 .

85 . Maman Calibri, a comedy in four Acts by Henry Bataille

was created at the Theatre du Vaudeville 8th November, 1 904.
The play was first published at the Comedie-Fran�aise 2 8
December, 1 920.

86. Le Simoun, a play b y H. -R. Lenormand, was first per­

formed at the Comedic Montaigne-Gemier, 2 1 December,
1 92 0 . The lead was played by Charles Dullin.

87. Visit to Fraye, the Painter, Ere Nouvelle , 1 9 April, 1 9 2 1 .

88. Lugne-Poe and Paintings, Ere Nouvelle, 30 May, 1 92 1 .

89. A piece by Antonin Artaud, Pictorial Values and the

Louvre was published in Lugne-Poe's Magazine, Le Bulletin
de l' Oeuvre in 1 92 1 (cf. Volume I p. 1 3 3).

go. The Spring Salons, Demain, No. 8 4 , April/May/June

1 92 1 .

9 1 . Maurice Magre and Enchantment, Ere Nouvelle, 1 9 April,

1 92 1 .

9 2 . Pierre Mac Orlan and Adventure Stories, Demain, No. 85,

July/ December 1 92 1 .
237
93. Almayer's Folly, a narrative tale by Joseph Conrad.
Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae, Kidnapped by
R. L. Stevenson.

94. The exact title is not Pirate Captains but A History of

English Pirates by Capt. Charles Johnson with a preface by
Pierre Mac Orlan. (Edition Franfaise Illustree-1 92 1 )

95. The latest appearance of the Autumn Salon, Demain, No.

85, July/December 1 92 1 .

96. Ungracious Elsa by Pierre Mac Orlan, Action, Second

1 92 1 .
Year, special number,

9 7 . Cynosure, by Celine Arnauld, Action, March/ April 1 92 2 .

In Ere Nouvelle, 1 1 April 1 92 2 , we find this paragraph :
" Tonight at nine o'clock at the Salle Pasdeloup, 1 0 rue des
Urselines, L' Albatros will hold a meeting on Modem Literature
(works by Celine Amauld, Max Jacob, Marcel Sauvage, Paul
Dermee, Madame de Grandprey, Antonin Artaud, Geo.
Charles, etc.). With Dancing by Mademoiselle Codriano and
a piano recital by Jean Wiener. "

98. In None of the Paris Galleries, Document sent by the Leiris

Gallery, bearing Antonin Artaud's signature and his address :
" 5 rue de Vintimille " with the reference : " Monsieur Kahn­
weiler. "

99. Word missing.

1 00. Letter from Paris, La Criee, Marseilles, No. 2 7, June

1 924.

1 0 1 . Martha and the Enthusiast by Jean de Bosschere, Nou­

velle Revue Franfaise, No. 1 68, September 1 92 7. On 1 4 July
1 924, Antonin Artaud sent a letter to Jean Paulhan contain­
ing only the la.'1.t paragraphs of the final version of this article.
238
This letter is written on the last page (but completely crossed
out) of the original version of the article. The changes made
are noted below.

1 02 . " . . . he plunges . . . . "

1 03 . " . . . something of a stupefying feeling. "

1 04. " Such a severe, condensed book is very precious, a sort of

typical book that could serve to determine a genre. The lofty
desire to objectify in Jean de Bosschere's mind, fixed things in
our minds . . . . "

1 05. Handji by Robert Poulet, Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, No.

2 1 4, July 1 93 1 .

1 06. Magic in Ancient Egypt by Franfois Lexa, Nouvelle

Revue Franfaise, No. 2 2 1 , February 1 93 2 .

1 07 . The Cup of Gold b y Ludwig Tieck, Nouvelle Revue

Franfaise, No. 239, August 1 933. M. Jean-Marie Conty sent
us a slightly different version of this piece. The changes made
are noted below.

1 08. " . . . magnifies the world outside. "

1 09. " . . . the world outside goes on. "

1 1 0. " . . . lacking intellectual life. "

1 1 1. " . . . are not available in French. "

1 1 2. " . . . would like to live, and on which our mind . . . . "

1 1 3 . A Curious Person's Copy Book by Lise Deharme, Nou­

velle Revue Franfaise, No. 246, March 1 934.
239
 Satan the Obscure by Jean de Bosschere, Nouvelle Revue
1 1 4.
Franfaise, No. 247, April 1 934. M. Rene Thomas sent us an­
other version of the text. The changes made are noted below.

1 1 5 . " . . . men have no idea nor are concerned with things

that matter. "

1 1 6. " • • • with all the physical horror, manifestations of other,

non-physical horror, welling up from unknown psychological
caverns--to salute the birth of any untalented soul in their own
way. "

1 1 7 . " . . . cruel, cowardly mood . . . . "

1 1 8 . " . . . its rare unliterary quality . . . . "

Balthus Exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, Nouvelle Revue

1 1 9.
Franfaise, No. 249, May 1 934.

1 2 0. Life, Love, Death, the Void, and the Wind by Roger

Gilbert-Lecomte, Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, No. 2 3 5 , Decem­
ber 1 934.

1 2 1 . Naumburg Church, an album by Walter Hege and

Wilhelm Pinder, Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, No. 2 64, Septem­
ber 1 935.