The Invention of "Theatricality": Rereading Bernard Dort and

Roland Barthes

Jean Pierre Sarrazac, Virginie Magnat

SubStance, Issue 98/99 (Volume 31, Number 2&3), 2002, pp. 57-72 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2002.0041

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32350

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Bernard Dort and Roland Barthes 57

The Invention of “Theatricality”:

Rereading Bernard Dort and Roland Barthes

Jean-Pierre Sarrazac

Art can only be reconciled with its existence by exposing

its internal emptiness. — Adorno, Théorie Esthétique

At the opening of Gordon Craig’s The Art Of The Theater (1912), the
Stage-Director, who has just shown the Playgoer around the theater in order
to give him an idea of the “machine” (“general construction, together with
the stage, the machinery for manipulating the scenes, the apparatus for
lighting, and the hundred other things” [137]), invites his guest to “rest here
in the auditorium and talk a while of the theater and of its art...”(137). This
lesson merits attention: one should never address any of the questions
pertaining to theatrical aesthetics without having first faced the stage itself,
even if only mentally. Prior to developing critical thinking about theater, it
is necessary to take note, once more, of the fact that this confined, flat area,
in spite of its being destined to become the pedestal of an entire world,
appears absolutely deserted when not in use. In the past, the red curtain
spared the audience the sight of this void; it was only drawn back in order
to let through mirages formerly devised back stage. Now purely functional,
the “iron curtain” seems to set the spectators and the artists apart, at the
outset of a performance, only to endow the absolute, gaping void of the
modern stage with greater power. Behind the velvet curtain, our elders were
able to conceive of the munificence and plenitude of a theater founded upon
illusion. Nowadays, as soon as the curtain rises, we become aware of the
inadequacy of the set and scenography, given that these can never quite fill
the void of the stage nor fulfill the audience’s expectations. The stage, even
when particularly burdened, remains utterly empty—and possibly more so
in this case. It is precisely this emptiness—this non-representativeness that
the stage seems bound to exhibit to the audience.
I somehow suspect Gordon Craig and his Stage-Director of having
confronted the Playgoer with the unredeemable vacuity of the stage in order
to impress him with the idea that the Art of the Theater1 was no longer
supposed to provide us with a sense of plenitude and overwhelming life,

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but that, instead, it was to convey the surreptitious, erratic and discarnate
actions of death—“the word death, Craig observes, comes naturally to mind,
as a parallel to the word life claimed as theirs by the realists.” (1912, 85)2

Illusion or Simulacra?
Even if one assumes that twentieth-century theater remains founded
upon imitation—an assumption that must be closely examined—such
imitation, in Craig’s view as well as in many others’ (including a number of
“realists”), no longer demands the spectator’s subservience to illusion, but
requires instead his/her critical inspection of simulacra. I would thus be
tempted to posit that the footlights and the red curtain were abolished de
facto once the spectator was encouraged by the actors or any given group
leader—the stage manager, the director, the author, etc.—to become interested
not in the theater event as such, but in the advent, within the performance,
of theater itself—or of what one may call theatricality. This marked a new
development that led theater away from the realm of the spectacular through
its involvement of the audience in the production process of simulacra on
stage. This is an implicit development, which in most cases is not easily
identifiable. However, it is perfectly identifiable and explicit in Brecht’s work,
as the German director claims he wants “theater to admit it is theater”; this
is also true of Pirandello’s work: doesn’t the Stage Manager of Tonight We
Improvise declare every night to the public that they are going to “try and see
how the acting, the simulation, the simulacra often referred to as theater,
functions of its own accord.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, the theater, along with the other
representational arts, gradually became aware of its inner emptiness and
began to project this void outwards. Such a reversal could obviously not
have occurred without the conjunction of a number of prerequisite
developments, which began to unfold with Zola and culminated with Craig,
and which included the contributions of Antoine, Lugné-Poe and
Stanislavski. These developments encompassed the birth of the stage director,
whose authorship of the production gradually came to the fore; theater’s
emancipation from the authority of text; theater artists’ new focus on the
essence of their art, namely, on what was specifically theatrical; theater’s
acquisition of a full autonomy as an art form distinct from other arts and
techniques pertaining to representation—beyond the compromise and the
“undividedness” propounded by the Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, or
Gesamtkunstwerk. Every attempt at defining the revolution that was at work
at this point in the history of theater rightly emphasizes the consecration of

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the director and the end of the absolute authority of the dramatic upon the
theatrical; yet, it would be wrong to leave out another factor, whose
importance can only be felt when facing the black hole of the stage—that is
to say, the revelation of theatricality through the emptying of theater.
Roland Barthes’s famous dictum, stating that theatricality is “theater-
minus-text” (1972, 26), is a much quoted one. Let us not forget, nonetheless,
his luminous presentation of Bunraku, this theatrical form in which, in his
view, “the sources of the theater are exposed in their emptiness” so that:
What is expelled from the stage is hysteria, i.e., theater itself; and what is
put in its place is the action necessary to the production of the spectacle:
work is substituted for inwardness. (1982, 52)

If theatricality equals theater whenever it becomes an autonomous art

form, this process of formalization must necessarily occur once the
“exhaustion of the content by the form” has taken place (see the reference to
wrestling in Mythologies, where it becomes the paradigm of a theater of the
external).
The idea of a critical theater, which, in the 1950s, stemmed from Vilar’s
TNP, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro, was not limited
(as has been alleged at times) to social criticism. In the view of Roland Barthes
and Bernard Dort (among the first to launch the idea), the critical and political
dimension of theatrical activity only made sense if grounded in a “criticism
in action” of theater itself, as well as in an effort to release theatricality’s
potential. This accounts for the dismissal of all forms of psychological and
bourgeois theater by the editors of Théâtre Populaire, who questioned its overt
allegiance to the “internal,” the “natural,” and the purported continuity
between reality and theater. On the other hand, the artists and writers whose
positions Dort and Barthes openly endorsed (Brecht, Pirandello, Genet) never
ceased to insist upon the cleavage, the disjunction between the real and the
stage. In order to build a relationship with the world at large and to bolster
its criticism of society, theater first had to assert its insularity: the stage was
no longer linked through a hypothetical connecting passage, a kind of
conduit, to an everyday reality which it was supposed to drain and filter
(see Sarrazac, 1977); neither was it a place where the real, left unchecked,
overwhelmed all; it was, rather, a virgin, empty space, a blank page upon
which the moving hieroglyphs of the theatrical performance were to be
written.
The discourse developed by the advocates of such a critical theater—
which was, at the same time, a criticism of theater itself—was not so remote
from Gordon Craig’s own position. There was, however, one major difference:

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for both Barthes and Dort, a theatrical theater was not incompatible with a
realistic theater—or at least with a certain type of realism. When both these
“Brechtian” critics advocated epic realism, they distinguished it entirely from
socialist realism and, more generally, from any artistic system offering a
mirror-image or a direct reproduction of the real. In Théâtre Populaire, they
praised the critical and political impact of productions such as Mother Courage
and The Life of Galileo and acknowledged the power and the clarity—i.e. the
theatricality—of these dramatic texts. Realist Theater was no longer supposed
to absorb the real, but had become more of a kind of in vitro space, a space
under vacuum where experiments about the real might be conducted
according to the sole criteria of theatricality.
In the 1960s, as Barthes moved away from theater (and applied to the
notion of text his theory on theatricality), Dort went on with his own
investigations and widened the scope of his research. He began to look at
the re-theatricalization of theater which had reached its pinnacle with
Meyerhold in Russia of the 1920s and 1930s. Taking Meyerhold into account
implies that one acknowledges, along with Josette Féral, that “the assertion
of the theatrical as distinct from the real appears as the necessary condition,
sine qua non, of theatricality on stage,” and that “the stage must speak its
own language and impose its own laws”(1988). Yet, Dort’s most significant
contribution, as far as the relationship between realism and theatricality is
concerned, is his own attempt to entirely reevaluate Stanislavski, Antoine,
and what is unsatisfactorily labeled “naturalism.”
Introducing Antoine as “le Patron”—the boss of modern theater (1967),
Dort distanced himself from Gordon Craig’s idealism. He did not perceive
in Antoine’s so-called “naturalistic” productions either less theatricality or
a less subtle kind of theatricality than in the “symbolist” and stylized
productions directed by Lugné-Poe.3 The author of Le Théâtre Réel certainly
seemed to believe that true modernity lay in virtually experimental choices,
such as the decision to expose a fragment of life or a social milieu to the
public through the illusion of the “fourth wall,” rather than in the staging of
ghostly ceremonies—remotely inspired from Baudelaire and Wagner—
produced by the Moscow Art Theater and the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre.
Perhaps he even discerned, beneath the apparent continuity and unity
of naturalistic representation, the pointillism or, more specifically, the
“divisionism” practiced by Antoine and Stanislavski. In view of this,
theatrical naturalism could be redefined as a definitively modern art form
and even as the art of theatricality per se, since it was chiefly grounded in
discontinuity, thus leaving room for emptiness. Consequently, Lugné-Poe,

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Craig and Copeau no longer needed to be regarded as the mandatory fathers

of contemporary theater; a new genealogy was in the process of being drafted.
Barthes dreamt of a theater in which, according to Dort’s formula, “matter
would become sign”(1993), and this dream was not solely rooted in hyper-
coded Oriental forms of theater such as Bunraku, but also in experimental
realism as conceived by Brecht and his predecessors, Antoine and
Stanislavski.

The Present-ness of Theater

From the emptiness of the stage—whether ostentatious (empty space)
or discreet (realistic or even naturalistic set)—the actor’s body began to
emerge along with every component of theater—the costumes, scenic
elements, lighting, music, etc. As soon as the stage ceased to pretend that it
was contiguous to, and communicated with, the real, theater ceased to be
colonized by life. The aesthetic stakes had shifted: theater was no longer
concerned with staging the real, but with exposing presence, thus confronting
the autonomous elements—or signs, hieroglyphs—that made up the specific
reality of the theater. These elements were discreet, separate, insolvable, and
merely led us back to their enigmatic appearance and organization. Departing
from the primacy of the real, which still prevailed throughout the nineteenth
century, one was now launched into the “present-ness” of theater, this
literalness which was, for Brecht as well as for the New Theater, the great
concern of the 1950s and 1960s. As early as 1926, Artaud had declared under
the determining influence of the latest Strindberg play:
We do not seek, as has been done before, as has always been characteristic
of the theater, to give the illusion of what is not, but on the contrary, to
present to the eye certain tableaux, certain indestructible, undeniable
images that will speak directly to the mind. The objects, the props, even
the scenery which will appear on the stage will have to be understood in
an immediate sense, without transposition; they will have to be taken not for
what they represent but for what they really are. (1976, 160)

Adamov would be the one to bridge the gap between Artaud and the
“Brechtian” critics, at a time when he was still classified—along with Ionesco
and Beckett—as a purely avant-garde writer much influenced by Strindberg
and Kafka. As for the definition of the “Present-ness” of theater—which
would subsequently be endowed with a more philosophical, more
Heideggerian dimension—it was conveyed in a text written by Adamov in
1950 in which he explained that what he had “tried to achieve was to insure
that the manifestation [of] the content [of his plays] coincided literally,
concretely, physically with the content itself.”4

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In fact, rather than endorsing the example of the Mutilated Man (a

character in Adamov’s La Grande et La Petite Manoeuvre), Barthes and Dort
chose to support the overall idea of literalness. The overtly teratological
aspect of the excessive physicality depicted by Ionesco, Beckett and Adamov
did not, at the outset, win over the editors of Théâtre Populaire. However, the
literalness principle appealed to them, for it asserted the material nature, as
well as the present-ness, of theater. Literalness came to be perceived as the
only path that could lead to the advent of theatricality. Barthes was fascinated
by the true protagonist of Ping Pong, that is to say the electric billiard-table,
which the author of Mythologies called a “literal object,” an object whose
dramaturgic and scenic function was not to symbolize anything but to simply
be present, and, through the obstinacy of its presence, to produce actions
and circumstances, even if these were issuing from language itself. In fact,
the generation that advocated this dramaturgy of “Present-ness” also
supported the “Nouveau Roman” authors. Dort would be among the first
to evolve, in his articles published in Cahiers du Sud and Lettres Nouvelles, a
thematic approach—in Temps des Choses and Romans Blancs—which
foreshadowed the development of the Nouveau Roman. Barthes’s long-lived,
intense and stormy relationship with Robbe-Grillet provides us with an
edifying example of such support.
Whether within theater or the novel, the time had come to irrevocably
exorcise the demon of analogy and to abolish, once and for all, artistic
practices founded upon the ascendancy of the internal, of psychology and
depth. “For us,” declared the author of Les gommes [The Erasers], “the surface
of things has never ceased to mask the heart of things.” What had become
unbearable to writers and theater artists alike was the perpetuation of the
neo-Platonic dichotomy of idea and appearances, of soul and body—where
the second term was always considered to be but a poor translation of the
first one. What seemed more relevant, at the beginning of the 1950s, was the
creation of a theater entirely devoted to the present-ness of the performance
and of the scenic event. This was only possible if one ultimately did away
with the idea inherited from Hegel that, in the end, what was represented
on stage was always no more than a collection of costumed and animated
concepts.
The editors of the French journal Théâtre Populaire wanted the new
perspective developed by Nouveau Roman writers to be applied to the
theater. For Barthes and Dort, however, the champion of this revolution was
not a writer related to the Nouveau Roman movement such as Beckett, or
one of the most radical advocates of literalness, such as Adamov or the early

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Ionesco. Their champion was Brecht, whose Berliner Ensemble productions

were first performed in Paris in 1954. To the editors of Théâtre Populaire,
Brechtian dramaturgy seemed far superior to the avant-garde of the 1950s,
whose works they deemed a-temporal and a-historical, whereas the former
endowed their commitment to literalness with historical, social and political
dimensions. The perspective we now have of this time induces us to wonder
whether the way in which Dort and Barthes relegated Beckett (their respect
for him notwithstanding) to the darkness of a metaphysical and avant-garde
bourgeois theater (Adamov judged his own plays just as harshly) is not
somewhat excessive and unfair. Retrospectively, one may, indeed, blame
the critics of Théâtre Populaire for having confused the works of the
playwrights of the 1950s with the idealistic way in which such works could
be interpreted (in Beckett’s case, Anouilh, for instance, chose to focus on the
absence of Godot-as-symbol rather than on the “literal” hyper-presence of
Vladimir and Estragon). A fundamental issue had nevertheless been
addressed: should the theater still be about this never-ending transference
from the sensible towards the intelligible, and this permanent annihilation
of scenic forms for the sake of ideas, argumentation and other types of
“messages,” as in the Sartre’s plays? Had the time not come, at last, for the
theater to bring to the fore this moment of pure theatricality during which
the sensible became the signifier?
One may infer from this that the principle of theatricality is really but a
vast (Brechtian) distanciation effect or a disquieting (Freudian) sense of
estrangement, through which the scenic presence of objects and beings, worn
out and rendered commonplace by so many centuries of performance(s),
suddenly regains its archaic and enigmatic power. Such a demand for
literalness, clearly formulated in texts written by Adamov, Barthes and Dort,
sealed the deal of a theater re-founded upon theatricality. The series of articles
written by Barthes on Mother Courage and on the art of the Berliner Ensemble
as well as Dort’s Lecture de Brecht (Reading Brecht) demonstrated that, within
this theater of literalness and theatricality, meaning was never global, but
was always linked to its locale and was fragmentary. Signification was always
grasped first within the material nature of the scene, which was itself spaced
out, “as with each type printed on the page of a book”(Benjamin, 1969),5
within the inaugural void of theater.
The Brechtian example was, for Barthes, the opportunity to reexamine
the question of signification, beyond theater itself. Departing from the
“exemption” from, or the “deception” of, signification, linked to Kafka and
the advent of the Nouveau Roman, and under the direct influence of epic

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theater, he conceived of the “suspension” of signification. This implied a

new assessment of the recipient of the work of art, of his/her function as an
active reader or spectator, concerned, once the reading was done or the
performance over, with the unraveling of the enigma of signification. Barthes
certainly owed his most refined conception of semiological reasoning to
Brechtian literalness—a polyphonic theatricality, based on a “density of
signs,” a “layering of signification” (1972, 26). Pure theatrical presence was
what rendered an object, a body, a world perceptible in all its fragmentary
hyper-visibility, its reflexive opacity, so that it might be deciphered, although
it could never be deciphered in its entirety.
Hence, the content of a show no longer exhausted its form; the form, on
the contrary, was the element that resisted, absorbed the viewer’s attention
and channeled his/her thoughts. Literalness achieved the greatest possible
level of concentration of the theatrical object, thereby increasing the viewer’s
own ability to concentrate. Through this extreme intensification and
densification of theatrical matter—which affected the actors and the language
as well as the set and the objects—the spectator was inescapably confronted
with the mutual Present-ness of men and the world. Hence, literalness was
also a (false) opacity, a blindness that became visible in the glare of the theater
lights: “We see Mother Courage blind, Barthes writes, we see what she does
not see”; this line is echoed by the following fragment on Platonic dialogue
written in 1964: “To see the not-seen, to hear the not-heard […]. We can hear
what Menon cannot, yet our hearing is commensurate with Menon’s
deafness” (1972, 34).6
Dort and Barthes’s endorsement of literalness in the 1950s and 1960s
may appear unsatisfying today. To some of his detractors, Brecht only offers,
under the guise of literalness and theatricality, a covertly militant, preachy
theater. If one were to succeed in proving that the pedagogy alone intended
by epic theater was of a heuristic and Socratic nature, a major objection
could still be made: indeed, Brecht did not thoroughly examine the concept
of representation, since he basically avoided the question of this absolute
present, this “more-than-present” presence exposed by a pure theatrical
process. If, in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, a new demand for literalness
and theatricality has been expressed, such demand pertains to a theater event
that is so deeply involved with pure performance, pure presentifying, that it
obliterates any idea of reproduction or repetition of the real.
The Nouveau Roman and the New Theater have now become very
remote from us (although the singularity of the works remain, especially
that of Beckett), while Brecht, on the other hand, has become suspect to

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many. It is therefore tempting to reconsider the value of a principle such as

literalness, which dates back to the 1950s, and to either propose a more potent
version of it or dismiss it altogether. Some of today’s theater artists intend to
extend the reach and expanse of the Present-ness of theater; they seek to
further dilate the theatrical instant, to introduce a greater distance between
the performance and its signification in order to free theater, at last, from all
necessity of commenting on dramatic action (Brechtian theatricality remained
subordinated to the “commentary on gestus”[see Brecht, 1964]).7 Yet, one
can also sense, at the core of the current controversies, an indictment of the
misuses of literalness and of the loss of trust in signification that it engenders.
Depth isn’t what it used to be. For if the nineteenth century witnessed the
long process of the destruction of appearances and their supplanting by
meaning, the twentieth, subsequently, saw an equally massive process of
the destruction of meaning... and its replacement by what? We find pleasure
neither in appearances nor in meaning. (1990, 6)

Baudrillard’s ironic observation should certainly capture the attention of

today’s theater practitioners and scholars.

From Stage to Text

Theatricality is often defined as theater’s propensity to distance itself
from the text, which is not without justification but can lead to a rather
univocal and abusive use of this notion. Barthes, at any rate, did forewarn
us against such reductive thinking: while he defined theatricality as “theater-
minus-text” in Baudelaire’s Theater (26), he introduced a paradox according
to which such theatricality is “a datum of creation not of production.” He
specified that “in Aeschylus, in Shakespeare, in Brecht the written text is
from the first carried along by the externality of bodies, of objects, of
situations.” Is Barthes’s position thereby ambiguous? It is, if one considers
that it does not shed light on the relationship between the text and the other
elements of the theatrical performance. It isn’t, insofar as it secures the
possibility of a dialectic, a tension between these elements.
For Barthes and Dort, theatricality did not call for a text-deprived theater,
but rather for theater in the process of being made, or as it becomes. This
conveyed a willingness to trace theater back to the hic et nunc of performance,
and to reinstate it within its specifically scenic dimension, after several
centuries of feudal subservience to literature (to “Your Highness The Word,”
as Baty so pleasantly put it; as for Artaud, he denounced the attitude of
“grammarians and introverts, that is to say, of Westerners”). Above all, there
was a desire to free theater from its abstract and atemporal literary identity

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in order to reconnect it to the world and to the real. To this extent, theatricality
reestablished the art of theater as action.
These concerns were not first expressed by the editors of Théâtre Populaire.
Henri Gouhier, for instance, had always defended the idea that theater should
be examined from the threshold of performance:
Performance is inherently part of drama, the latter being able to fully come
into existence solely through a metamorphosis in time and space. Hence,
performance is not an added bonus that can be dispensed with; it is an
end in itself. This is true in two ways: on the one hand, drama is written to
be performed, wherein lies its finality; on the other hand, performance
constitutes an accomplishment, the moment during which drama finally
reaches completion.8

It is worth noting that the academician actually employed the phrase “score-
text.”
However, Gouhier’s position (or a very similar contention put forth by
Touchard, his contemporary) still partook, as far as performance as such
was concerned, of this “textocentrism” denounced by Dort. To the very
“Galilean” author of Lecture de Brecht, neither the text nor any of the scenic
elements were to be considered as the center of the theatrical performance.
In an essay that is as clear as it is erudite, Le Texte et la scène: pour une nouvelle
alliance,9 Dort delineated the birth and development of the modern concept
of an open, incomplete, dramatic text awaiting its staging. Almost in spite
of himself, Hegel had endorsed the existence of the creative role—instead of
merely interpretative or illustrative—of the actor, who through his/her
mimicry and silent actions filled in the gaps in a text which, in itself, remained
unfinished. Le Texte et la scène refers to the pages in Aesthetics that deal with
drama, considered as a new genre, and where it is said that “the poet even
lets gestures express some of what the Ancients wanted to be expressed
solely through words”(1984). Along with Hegel, Dort also could have referred
to the creative function—often in contradiction with spoken words—of
“pantomime” as described by Diderot and Lessing.
Yet, if Dort denounced textocentrism in order to assert the autonomy of
performance, he categorically refused to be swayed by the “modern” myth
of a theatricality that would be incompatible with the existence of text. He
even added yet another paradox to Barthes’s by stating (alluding in part to
Artaud) that “theater without text is a writer’s dream [that] has only been
able to be conceived and expressed through text and in writing. Whence the
theatrical silence to which its prophets are condemned”(1984)10 . The line
must therefore be drawn between a necessary break with a purely literary
theater devoid of physicality, and a more extreme position, if not an impasse,

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which would imply the repudiation of dramatic texts altogether. Dort was
so concerned with the necessity of finding a balance—or perhaps a dynamic
imbalance—that he strove to solve the contradictions that characterized The
Theater and its Double:
When Antonin Artaud quoted Woyzeck among the first works to be enlisted
in the repertoire of his theater of cruelty, he seemingly contradicted his
determination to do away with masterpieces of the past, yet, he also
foresaw the new alliance of text and stage which may quite possibly define
today’s theater—beyond the alleged opposition between text and staging
(mise en scène), between a text-oriented theater and a theater-oriented
text. (Dort, 1984)11

In spite of his attachment to the epiphany of performance—the point at

which theatricality manifested itself—Dort remained open to the question
of dramatic text, especially when dealing with contemporary texts, and he
was well aware that the latter resisted mimesis. The fact that the text could
refuse to play the game of representation—since, as Duras wrote, “when a
text is performed, it is at its remotest point from the author”—did not appear
to Dort as an aberration. In truth, unlike Barthes, Dort was not fond of
impasses but of passages. In Le Texte et la scène: pour une nouvelle alliance, and,
a little later, in La Représentation émancipée, he attempted to outline—in his
usual “reasonable” manner—a new (post-Brechtian) utopia of performance.
Above all, by suggesting a “new alliance,” Dort warned us against two
dangers that currently threaten the relationship of stage and text.
On the one hand, a rather conservative attitude is becoming increasingly
prevalent and can be interpreted as a willingness to restore literary theater,
namely, “text-oriented theater.” Jacques Julliard, for instance, recently
asserted in one of his chronicles for the magazine Nouvel Observateur:
For as long as the theater is led astray from its original purpose, which is
to ensure that the sacred words of the poet can be heard, and as long as
the current directors, these ill-bred would-be tyrants, keep up their racy
posturing at the cost of the author, the dramatic contract, this three-sided
adventure which unites author, interpreters and spectators around a text,
will be torn apart, dishonored and destroyed.

We can easily counter Julliard’s prejudices (which, by the way, largely

pre-date the emergence of modern directing) by quoting Dort’s comments
on what he designates as “the greatest theater texts”: “They seem most
problematic to read […], so complex as to appear incoherent […], proliferating
on the edge of disorder [since they] deliberately endorse their own lack of
completion [and] require staging.”12
On the other hand, we are faced with an alternative which, in accordance
with the idea of the “emancipation” of performance (I believe this phrase

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dates back to Evreinoff), remains vague, unreliable and hazardous. Such a

position seems to induce Alain Badiou, in his “Dix Thèses sur le
Théâtre”(1995), to do away with the question of text, thus reducing the latter
to a kind of eternal essence to which the performance alone may bring a
sense of immediacy, of being in the moment, or, in other words, of life. Dort
would probably agree with Badiou’s claim that “the idea of theater remains,
within a text or a poem, unfulfilled, and […] the text’s staging or mise-en-
scène is not an ‘interpretation’ but a ‘fulfillment’.” Yet I imagine that he
would find far less convincing the assertion that theater is the “organization
of extremely varied material and ideal components whose existence is solely
dependent upon performance.” Badiou simply seems to forget, in his
arguments, that the text necessarily has a different status and function, within
the performance, from the other components. Firstly, by default, as the text
is the only element that no longer exists in its original form—that is to say as
a written text—when included in the performative event; it transforms,
metamorphoses and virtually dispels itself through its very manifestation.
Secondly, by excess, as the text is so much more pervasive—able as it is to
infringe on bodies, voices, space, and even on the minds of the spectators
who may have a prior knowledge of it—than any other element present on
stage.

An Impending Polyphony
Should one advance beyond Adamov’s contention to which Dort and
Barthes subscribed—“the theater of which I conceive is entirely and
absolutely linked to performance”—and endorse Badiou’s stance, which
alleges that theatricality (or the “idea of theater”) only exists “within and
through the performance”? The drawback of Badiou’s “idea of theater” is
that, because it does not account for the articulation—or, as Dort would put
it, the “interplay”—between the various scenic components, it only
strengthens the ambiguity that we have previously identified in Barthes’s
work. In a way, the “idea of theater” fills the place left vacant by the Brechtian
gestus, the cornerstone of the conception of a critical theater earlier developed
by Dort and Barthes:
Every dramatic work can and must reduce itself to what Brecht calls its
social gestus, the external, material expression of the social conflicts to
which it bears witness. It is obviously up to the director to manifest this
gestus, this particular historical scheme which is at the core of every
spectacle: at his disposal, in order to do so, he has the ensemble of theatrical
techniques: the actor’s performance, movement, and location, the setting,
lighting [...], costume. (Barthes, 1972, 41)

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Bernard Dort and Roland Barthes 69

The advantage of gestus—nowadays considered obsolete, along with

all forms of theater based on fable—over the “idea of theater” is that it is
both transcendent in relation to the components of performance as a whole,
and indexed to the text. The gestus exists not only as an all-encompassing
viewpoint of the text, but also as a unit (in the semiological sense) which can
be used towards reading, breaking down and commenting on a text.
While resigned to the fact that Brechtianism was done with, Dort, intent
as he was on preserving a certain “interplay” between the theater and the
real world, strove to devise the surrogate utopia I alluded to earlier, which
is more technical than political. Whence his choice to extend the Brechtian
metaphor of a “Copernican” revolution of theater to that of a truly
“Einsteinian” revolution. In order to make this hope more feasible, he evoked
a model of the ideal performance:
The Copernican Revolution of the turn of the century has become an
Einsteinian Revolution. The end of the primacy of the text over stage has
led to a general re-evaluation of the elements of the theatrical performance
in their relationship to each other. The idea of organic unity considered as
a given, or even of an essence of the theater event (that is to say, the mystery
of theatricality), have eventually been relinquished, and the theatrical is
now conceived of as a signifying polyphony, encompassing the spectator.
(1998)13

The “emancipated performance,” according to Dort, was certainly

closely related to Barthes’s notion of “polyphony”; however, unlike his
colleague, Dort rejected the idea of an “ecumenical” theatricality. Dort
specifically supported, among the various components of performance, the
type of violently contradictory relationship that Brecht had initially planned
to develop in his theory of a “Brotherhood of the Arts” (Schwesterkunste),
but which, according to Dort, he had eventually neglected:
Endowed with the privilege and duties of a playwright and a stage director,
as well as that of an artistic director for the Berliner Ensemble, he
undoubtedly forsook the independance of brother arts in order to devote
himself to a unified dramaturgical conception of the works he directed.
However, his teachings expand beyond his own practice. They outline a
non-unified performance whose various elements should co-exist, or
perhaps even rival one another, rather than contribute, through the
annihilation of their differences, to the construction of an overarching
signification. (1998)14

For Dort, “play” was always synonymous with struggle and strife.
However, the theoretician’s intractability was attenuated and channeled by
his spectator’s propensity towards hedonism. Incidentally, for this spectator
of romantic proportions, the “joy of theater” was always imbued with a
nostalgic and even melancholic aura. Was this due to the fact that his activity

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70 Jean-Pierre Sarrazac

as a critic was irrevocably rooted in the battles he had conducted along with
Barthes when they were the editors of Théâtre Populaire? Or was it because
no theater production had ever fulfilled their expectations in the way the
staging of Mother Courage by Brecht and The Life of Galileo by Strehler had?
Or did it perhaps have to do with a more mysterious, broader feeling, directly
connected to the advent of theatricality: the feeling of the loss of theater within
theater itself? Whatever the case may be, for Bernard Dort, performance turned
out to be the site for that which was lacking, for the experience by default of
a space and a time which were forever out of reach. As if the spectator’s
passion could henceforth only express itself as a relentless form of
disenchantment. A disillusion which the artist (who was the spectator of
his/her own effort to make theater) shared with the audience. Echoing in a
contradictory manner Barthes’s declaration “I no longer go to the theater,”
Dort never ceased to warn us mezzo voce that theater was constantly forsaking,
deserting us (and itself). It was the mode of nostalgic bedazzlement, indeed,
which characterized Dort’s appreciation of Sur La Grand-Route by Gruber:
“a stalling of the infinitely recurrent motion through which Gruber never
ceases to leave the stage [...],Sur La Grand-Route speaks of a last prospect of
happiness.”15
The last paradox of theatricality may very well consist of the (Beckettian)
task of being done (again) with theater while constantly dreaming of
beginning theater all over again. For theater can only be achieved outside
itself, whenever it is able to let go of theater, and this can only be accomplished
if theater is recurringly emptied of theater.
Institut d’études théâtrales, Paris
translated by Virginie Magnat

Notes
We thank the journal Esprit for permission to publish our translation of “l’Invention de la
théatralité” (Esprit, Jan. 1997). This essay also constitutes chapter 3 of Sarrazac, Critique
du théâtre. De l’utopie au désenchantement. Belfort: Circé, coll. Penser le théâtre, 2000.

1. Craig claims to be the first to define theater as an autonomous art, that is to say, an art
independent from literature and free from the “indivision” which, in Wagner’s view,
implied that theater was still controlled by music, poetry, pantomime, and even
architecture and painting.
2. Craig adds: “several times in the course of this essay has a word or two about Death
found its way on to the paper—called there by the incessant clamouring of Life! Life!
Life! which the realists keep up.”

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Bernard Dort and Roland Barthes 71

3. Josette Féral, “Naturalism itself is acknowledged as being a form of theatricality.”

4. Our translation. See also, “Si le drame d’un homme consiste dans une mutilation
quelconque de sa personne, je ne vois pas de moyen pour rendre dramatiquement la
vérité d’une telle mutilation que de la représenter corporellement sur la scène.” (Adamov,
1964)
5. Our translation. “…comme des caractères d’imprimerie sur la page d’un livre. ”
(Benjamin, 1969).
6. Our translation. “Voir le non-voir, entendre le non-entendre [… ]. Nous entendons ce
que Ménon n’entend pas, mais nous ne l’entendons qu’à proportion de la surdité de
Ménon.” (Barthes, 1964, 48)
7. On the necessary subordination of theatricality to the commentary on gestus, see Barthes
(1955, 1972).
8. Our translation. “La représentation est inscrite dans l’essence de l’œuvre théâtrale;
celle-ci n’existe réellement qu’au moment et dans le lieu où s’accomplit la métamorphose.
La représentation n’est donc pas un supplément dont à la rigueur on pourrait se passer;
elle est une fin aux deux sens du mot: l’œuvre est faite pour être représentée; là est sa
finalité; du même coup, la représentation marque un achèvement, le moment où enfin
l’œuvre est pleinement elle-même.”
9. Le Texte et la Scène: pour une nouvelle alliance is an essay written by Dort in 1984 as an
addition to Encyclopoedia Universalis, and subsequently included in a collection of texts
by Dort titled Le Spectateur en dialogue (Paris: POL, 1995).
10. Our translation. « Le théâtr e sans texte est un rêve d’écrivain [qui] n’a pu être pensé et
exprimé dans le texte, que par l’écriture. D’où le silence théâtral auquel se sont trouvé
condamnés ses prophètes »(1984).
11. Our translation. “Quand Antonin Artaud citait Woyzeck parmi les premières œuvres à
inscrire au répertoire de son théâtre de la cruauté, sans doute entrait-il en contradiction
avec sa volonté d’‘en finir avec les chefs-d’œuvre’ du passé, mais il pressentait aussi la
nouvelle alliance entre le texte et la scène qui pourrait bien caractériser le théâtre
d’aujourd’hui—au-delà de la pseudo-opposition entre texte et mise en scène, entre un
théâtre du texte et un texte théâtral” (1984).
12. Our translation. “À la lecture, [ils] nous semblent les plus problématiques […],
complexes au point de paraître incohérents […], foisonnants à la limite du désordre
[parce qu”ils] pren [nent] délibérément le parti de leur propre inachèvement [et] font
appel à la scène” (1984).
13. Our translation. “La révolution copernicienne du début du siècle s’est muée en une
révolution einsteinienne. Le renversement de la primauté entre le texte et la scène s’est
transformé en une relativisation généralisée des facteurs de la représentation théâtrale
les uns par rapport aux autres. On en vient à renoncer à l’idée d’une unité organique,
fixée à priori, voire d’une essence du fait théâtral (la mystérieuse théâtralité), et à concevoir
plutôt celui-ci sous les espèces d’une polyphonie signifiante, ouverte sur le spectateur”
(1998).
14. Our translation. “Fort de son privilège et des ses obligations d’auteur et de metteur en
scène, d’animateur aussi, du Berliner Ensemble, il a sans doute sacrifié l’indépendance
de ces arts-frères à une conception dramaturgique unitaire des œuvres qu’il montrait.
Mais sa leçon va plus loin que sa pratique. Elle dessine l’image d’une représentation
non-unifiée dont les différents éléments entreraient en collaboration, voire en rivalité,
plutôt qu’ils ne contribueraient, en effaçant leurs différences, à l’édification d’un sens
commun” (1998).
15. Our translation. “… une halte dans le mouvement infini par lequel Gruber ne cesse de
quitter le plateau […], Sur la grand-route nous parle d’un dernier bonheur possible”
(1998).

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72 Jean-Pierre Sarrazac

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