nm0075: er a very warm welcome to the er year one drama option nice to see so many faces quite surprised to see such a big group actually er my name is namex and i work in the French department of the Modern Languages Unit here at the University of namex and also at namex University so it's a great pleasure to be here this morning to speak to you about er twentieth century drama i'd like to begin now by just giving you an idea of some of the er things i'm going to be talking about in this lecture and if we briefly refer to er the first schema which is on the on the board er there's no need to copy this down actually but if you notice er on this schema it's a fairly basic and fairly er er inaccurate view really of what a a theatrical text actually consists of er in the particular th-, schema that you have er we begin with er the author who actually writes the play er and this obviously in turn leads to the text er the characters within the text er speak using language and that actually is received by the by the audience so it's a pretty sort of unilinear fairly er fairly sort of er uninteresting account of what actually happens in twentieth century plays now er there are some problems with this and one of the main problems actually is that er some of the words are very okay can can you hurry up and sit down as soon as possible please er some of the words are quite overused and not very accurate in terms of er what actually happens in a play for example looking at the author who actually who actually writes the play er is it the author or is it the director so we have a problem of authorship er and er we don't really know who actually r-, is responsible for the play as we as we see it er secondly er how can the director if we assume that the author is replaced by the director how can the director remain faithful to the er the to the author's intentions that's the second sort of big problem with this actually thirdly is the problematic status of language so one of the big problems there is that er verbal language or words are one way of conveying meaning in a play but as you will know from your own experiences of twentieth century plays there are many other ways of er er pr-, producing communication which don't actually depend on language so you have for example mime gesture er stage effects that kind of thing so t-, to view to view verbal language as a a sole means of communication in a play is quite inaccurate in the sense that er directors and playwrights will actually come ac-, come across many other ways of er dealing with er communication finally and perhaps the most problematic area of this schema is the er is the audience the problem with this diagram is that the audience is right at the bottom and is seen as a kind of passive and er very quiet sort of recipient of the the drama in other words er when you go and see a play er the audience basically receives the action and presumably interprets it interprets the action in some way but er one of the problems with this is that it denies the very er active participatory role of the audience in the in the play itself so these are some er rather er major problems with twentieth century er drama if we look at it simply er in this very basic way er what i'd like to propose this morning and the aim of the lecture is er to try to revise this very er this fairly monotonous scheme er into a slightly more dynamic picture which could look something like this so you have a kind of reciprocal relationship between director and audience er the director is at the centre of the play so the director will basically decide er er how the play is actually seen by the audience nevertheless the audience will not receive the drama passively but will participate in the drama okay so er in in if you like the audience is challenged to actually respond to what the director does at the sides of the diagram you have for example author and text i'm actually putting author and text at the side of the diagram because this morning i hope to show that er the author and the text of drama is actually secondary to er the director and the audience in other words the the kind of question that we should be asking is not what did Shakespeare intend to say or what did er Beckett intend to say when he wrote this this piece of this piece of drama rather what we ought to be looking at is how do we actually interpret what was actually said i think that's quite a big difference which at first is rather er disturbing but secondly er becomes quite a lot more challenging when we're looking at drama so my plan for this morning can basically be divided into four parts in the first part i'd like to look in more detail at the rise of importance of the spectator in twentieth century drama with particular reference to French drama of course in the second part i'd like to question the central th-, er area of language in er drama and i'd like to show that language means far more than just words there's another kind of dramatic language which actually has far more importance the third area i'd like to talk about is the rising importance of the drama o-, of the director in drama during the er the the prewar and post-war period er again i'm going to discuss this with particular reference to French drama although a lot of what i say will be er quite general also and would obviously apply to er er plays in other nationalities also finally i'm going to have a a very brief look at the word character er this will be the shortest of my sections er i haven't got a lot to say about it but i want to er try to challenge the way we look at character er sometimes we s-, we tend to see characters as er real people er real er characters sort of behaving in a kind of a very sort of er a very true to life fashion i want to try and question that a little bit and hopefully to give you some ideas for when you study your your subsequent texts one particular one particular dramatist that i shall be referring to throughout the lecture is er Antonin Artaud Artaud er was born in Marseilles in nineteen er sorry in eighteen-ninety- six and er he's quite a marginal figure in twentieth century drama from some standpoints er there are not many books written about him but in fact er one of the books that i'm going to mention quite a lot this morning Le Théâtre et son Double the theatre and its double is actually an attempt to subvert and to revise the rules of drama and so it lends itself very well to the revision er that i'm actually going to be proposing this morning so i will devote probably er about er ten minutes or so to each stage of the lecture er giving you some information that you'll be able to note down er finally i shall leave about five minutes before the end er to allow time for any questions which you may have is the structure of the lecture clear to you you're happy about how we're going from here so my first category then and by far the longest category that i i'm going to be talking about this morning er is the whole area of spectator and audience the twentieth century theatre could be described as a time when the spectator came into being as an active member of the dramatic production you may have noted er in previous studies that Aristotle in his Poetics er viewed the spectator very much in a kind of passive and fairly er er receptive role in drama of course Aristotle talked about things like catharsis er catharsis is the purging of emotions when you attend a play so that er by experiencing the full emotions of a dramatic text er the spectator will be able to kind of go home refreshed at the end of it and er er his or her life will be improved as a result so it wouldn't be correct to say that er classical drama paid no attention at all to the spectator on the other hand in the twentieth century er almost all reactions to the classical theatre involve in some measure er the primary importance of the spectator in the creative dramatic process in French drama one of the strongest early reactions er to er the negative position of the audience came from Antonin Artaud for Artaud the theatre had become much too consumerist in nature and this idea er is er very strong in his writing his most famous work is Le Théâtre et son Double written in nineteen-thirty-eight this is a series of er published essays which criticize the stasis and the status quo of er of theatre at the time theatre should be challenged it should shake the audience with a series of imagined feelings disclosing er depths of the unconscious so what Artaud proposed instead of the the existing model which was er Aristotelian in nature what Artaud proposed was what he called a a theatre of cruelty cruelty for Artaud could involve er violent or aggressive acts on the stage however it also involved challenging the conventions and the niceties of everyday existence and to allow the audience er to experience the thrill of er being alive the the the problem of of existence with all its sort of ups and downs and er this was what er Artaud felt er the spectator should be experiencing in er attending a play if you like er it's the kind of contradictory feelings er er you know the f-, feeling that something is sort of both er positive and negative but these things exist at the same time within oneself Artaud wrote an essay called er Le Théâtre et la Peste so er theatre and plague in this essay Artaud drew an analogy and a comparison between theatre and plague both these events Artaud thought should bring about the er the collapse of normal social hierarchy the condition of the plague victim er was reflected in the position of the actor on stage but also in the audience who was watching if you like the audience was seen to be very much contaminated and infected by the action on stage not a nice feeling not a pleasant feeling but then again er theatre shouldn't be pleasant or nice theatre should be er challenging and should exer-, should sort of expose the horrible side of existence theatre is like an epidemic it sort of makes you er infected and then it's very difficult to become cured afterwards er so the disturbance and the er the problematic emotions that people experience continue long after the play is actually finished in the first quotation er which i'll read for you the er th-, this comes from Artaud's book and it actually er er gives voice to this connection between er theatre and plague il y a dans le théâtre comme dans la peste quelque chose à la fois de victorieux et de vengeur cet incendie spontané que la peste allume où elle passe on sent très bien qu'il n'est autre chose qu'une immense liquidation so strong language er the plague brings about une liquidation a strong sort of liquidation a sort of dissolving of sort of everyday concepts of existence and their replacing with much stronger er er sort of views about life so important was the spectator to an-, Antonin Artaud that also in Le Théâtre et son Double he suggested an i-, an ideal theatre which actually er surrounded the audience er who were seated on pivotal stools so you had the audience actually er raised in the middle of the platform er and you had the action going on around it so if you like it was a complete reverse of the Shakespearean theatre where you had the actors er in the middle of the stage and the er er the audience sitting around it it was a complete subversion of that it may seem very impracticable but in fact this er this was actually done er to quite good effect in the Maison de la Culture er the Maison de la Culture is the equivalent of our repertory theatre and in Grenoble this experience was actually tried and er in this particular building for a while at least the stage was encircled by the audience so Artaud er seems to go beyond er simple fascination with the show's magic so the theatre has to lose its kind of magical appeal as being a slice of life and the theatre needs to look towards its effect as er Artaud said er the aim of theatre was to reforge the links the chain of a rhythm when aud-, audiences saw their own real lives in a show so in other words er the audience's aim was to actually see er things that they were experiencing er sort of within the theatre far from being estranged by the action they needed to feel totally sucked in by what was actually going on in short then theatre for Artaud was a disquieting rather than a comforting experience i'd like to move on to my second category now which is all about language in the Western philosophical tradition er which governs most of the way in which we think nowadays language is often is often seen to be er central er to the way in which we communicate so everything er surrounds the centrality of language er this term is described as logocentrism er logocentrism logocentrism the belief that the word or language er is the foundation of thought and experience however in recent times this concept of logocentrism the central aspect of the word has been er criticized notably by a philosopher called er Jacques Derrida some of you may have heard of for Derrida er meaning is not central er and based on language language is not sort of the central way of communicating er because meaning is not created entirely through language but the way in which we respond to text if you like er language produces thought rather than contains thought language isn't something which is absolute but it's kind of relative er a lot depends on how we use it and how we're caught up with the flow of language but Artaud er coming back to our er our friend er who we're going to be talking about a lot this morning er for Artaud language has also been given too much importance in the theatre er and there's a need says Artaud er to give er emphasis to other things apart from verbal language what kind of things does Artaud suggest in terms of language of the theatre well he wrote some manifestos which actually outline in quite a lot of detail the er the areas which he wants to see developed in the theatre some of these are as follows lighting he wants to see er what he describes as oscillating lights so lights which kind of switch on and off which create special effects musical instruments traditional costumes and accompanied with these er a kind of bareness of the theatre in other words er theatri-, theatrical decor shouldn't actually be er sort of beautiful and elaborate on the other hand it should be simple so you might have sort of whitewashed walls er very plain decor er this particular lecture theatre springs to mind as a as an example of what Artaud might have intended okay er er a very sort of l-, er a very small amount of of of of decoration gestures gestures were also important it wasn't it didn't just matter what people said but it mattered what people did how did people move on stage and Artaud observed er the Balinese theatre er Balinese theatre er so er the Balinese theatre i'll just spell that er er in the nineteen-thirties and discovered that the way they moved er er was er quite odd in a way er they used quite sort of sharp jerky movements in what they were doing and Artaud thought this might actually be quite a nice thing to er integrate into the theatre and similarly at the same time er there's the avoidance of er of articulated language so all these special effects have an equal place in theatre as well Artaud's prescriptions er gave rise to what might be described as total theatre total theatre means a theatre which actually incorporates sort of all different aspects of the production so er the kind of the primacy of language which is present maybe in texts like er Molière's plays or Racine's plays which are based around pretty much around language really although action is important too er all those things become important er when we're dealing with a twentieth century play one example in British er culture which is very interesting is er Peter Shaffer's play the The Royal Hunt of the Sun some of you may know it which deals with the er conquistadors er er er and their relationship to the Incan civilization now Peter Shaffer as Artaud er uses the idea of total theatre so what you get is a kind of amalgam of all different kinds of prescriptions er you get sort of musical instruments special effects very bare stage there is language of course but there's a lot of gesture and i think if you watched a if you watched er er a sort of modern production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun i think you might actually see that er some of the prescriptions are pretty similar to what Artaud was saying in Le Théâtre et son Double it's important to bear in mind when we're talking about language it's important to bear in mind that not all directors and not all playwrights dealt with language in the same way i think Artaud is suggesting a kind of escape from the kind of control of language if you like however er other people do things quite differently so Ionesco who you're going to be studying later in the course er seems to break with er language er he uses language in a kind of absurd and er er mismatched way so er characters do communicate with each other through language but er in ways which surprise us er through their kind of very their very absurdity er Sartre who you'll also be studying er i think er Sartre very much believes in the er in the importance of language but Sartre will er appropriate language for political effects as we know from our er immediate experience with Sartre he's a political dramatist as much as anything er conveying political messages therefore language needs to be important language is quite central so it wouldn't be correct to say that Artaud's er prescriptions for language are adopted by all the playwrights that you're actually going to be studying however it does cast a new light on what's happening in the in the theatre and er it places the er the theatre into er into into a very different perspective one of the criticisms i'll just deal with this before moving on one of the criticisms with er Artaud's idea that er verbal language that you could get away with verbal language er is that er verbal language is always there in the background in a sense it's actu-, it's actually impossible to escape u-, from using language altogether er i think people have tried it in the theatre but it's almost impossible to get away with that kind of er that kind of er thing so what's happening then really is that Artaud is proposing something here which can never be achieved entirely and so er in almost all plays even plays which er you could describe as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd language is is always there in the background it doesn't always make sense but it is basically a problem before we move on er i'd like to make a transition by referring to the second quotation which i think er clarifies what Artaud's er views are about non-verbal language ce langage objectif so he described er setting scenes er colours costumes and things as langage objectif it's a kind of objective rather than subjective language ce langage objectif rend enfin l'assujettissement the subordination okay l'assujettissement er intellectuel au langage en donnant le sens d'une intellectualité nouvelle et plus profonde qui se cache sous les gestes et sous les signes élevés à la dignité d'exorcisme particulier so the idea is to break the kind of subordination which other kind of stage effects have to language okay everything needs to be given the same degree of importance it will come as probably fairly little surprise to note that the director of the theatre er is not mentioned in Aristotle so the director is er a pretty new concept which came of age in the twentieth century it's important when we're studying plays not to forget about the director one of the characteristic features of twentieth century drama er is the debate about the er relative importance of playwrights and directors and the post-war drama period can be seen as er the a period in which we see the gradual eradication of the playwright and the rise to power of the theatre director somebody called Edward Gordon Craig so an early twentieth century dramatist Edward Gordon Craig wrote a prophetic er a prophetic statement in nineteen-eleven which said that the director would eventually become the complete creative artist of the theatre bringing together and mastering all the different expressive idioms of the stage that was a very early that was a very early comment okay nineteen- eleven the director would be the complete creative artist of the future bringing together and mastering all the different expressive idioms of the stage this is one kind of statement which shows us how important the director is going to become in twentieth century theatre but there were other statements which occurred later on which were also important for example Roland Barthes some of you may have heard of Roland Barthes Roland Barthes er declared er in er er in the twentieth century that er there was what he called a death of the author okay so er the death of the author means that the author of a text is not sacrosanct faithfulness to the original is not the primary concern therefore when adapting er works from the past so this is where for example in the Royal Shakespeare Company some modern productions have actually attracted a lot of criticism so for example you get er er Shylock in The Merchant of Venice perhaps riding around on a motorbike or something like that and people say well you know er how dare they do that you know er that that's this is totally unfaithful to the Shakespearean original but some people in twentieth century drama will say well that doesn't matter because it's the director's interpretation that actually matters er so you find often that er that modern productions of Shakespeare or Racine or Molière er are pretty much criticized for being er anachronistic er in other words er applying sort of modern principles er to old texts when those concepts were not actually available the climate of Paris at the time is also very important er directors in particular in Paris were responsible for decentralizing the theatre for moving theatre away from state control towards er private control a little bit like our repertory theatre theatres in this country er they receive grants but what they do is very much up to them in Paris a lot of directors saw the theatre almost as a kind of basic human right really er it wasn't just pleasure but everybody had the right to go to the theatre er theatre shouldn't be expensive and prohibitive to the audience but should actually encourage people to attend far from being a luxury the theatri-, the theatre was actually seen as being pretty much central to human existence at the time let's trace briefly some of the important players er in the development of er the director throughout the twentieth century one particular figure who you will actually er see now and again is somebody called Jacques Copeau okay Jacques Copeau eighteen-seventy-nine to nineteen-forty-nine Jacques Copeau er advocated the return of modern drama to the collaborative kind of drama which happened during the Elizabethan period in seventeenth century drama and er to an extent in Renaissance drama as well what had happened was that the playwright worked in quite close cooperation with the er the the actors and the actresses so what would happen in that if in that case is that er there would be a kind of collaborative drama which was produced and that he thought er was better than er simply being subservient to the playwright doing everything that the playwright says it's not a matter of that it's a matter of negotiation so er Jacques Copeau was quite a central character in that a more recent player in the director debate is somebody called er Roger Planchon Roger Planchon er was er a director of a small theatre er i think just outside Lyon but one interesting thing that Roger Planchon actually did say was that the director was a little bit like a a museum crea-, er a museum curator somebody who actually er er works with relics from the past but may change those relics so that it's actually er impossible to see at the end who is responsible for them that's quite an interesting comment too Peter Brook another director er he directed er in a small Parisian theatre in the nineteen- seventies er what he said was that the job of the director goes beyond seeing himself as the servant of the play text theatre Peter Brook said was an empty space where magical transformations can take place through the interaction between spectator and actor the imaginative stimulus in the play is the important thing and it's the director's responsibility to er provoke and to challenge the the person who's watching the play decor Peter Brook said was of minimal importance the director had the maximum responsibility to ensure that everybody enjoyed the play and was challenged by it Artaud i'd like to go back to again Artaud says a lot about this er er he's er pretty unhappy about Shakespeare er generally speaking and rather uncomplimentary about him er i personally think Shakespeare is a great playwright so i disagree er perhaps with Artaud on this on this point but some of you may well agree with him and if you'd like to refer to the third quotation this is what he says about Shakespeare Shakespeare lui-même est responsable de cette aberration et de cette déchéance de cette idée désintéressée du théâtre qui veut qu'une représentation théâtrale laisse le public intact sans qu'une image lancée provoque son ébranlement dans l'organisme pose sur lui une empreinte qui ne s'effacera plus Shakespeare is responsible for aberration in the theatre this idea of a disinterested theatre which makes theatrical representation leave the public cold okay laisse le public intact leave the public cold er without er images which actually sort of shatter the insides of the organism so the problem really er is that er Shakespeare er doesn't really er stimulate or challenge the playwr-, er the the the watcher of the play er in the way in which er er he should er contends Artaud in the second part of that quotation er we see as follows la poésie écrite vaut une fois et ensuite qu'on la détruise written poetry is okay once but then we've got to destroy it que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres may dead poets leave place for others to come in their place okay que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres Artaud in particular criticized playwrights like Racine for er over- psychological interpretation you've got to shatter the spectator's expectations don't just play don't just give the spectator what he or she wants but challenge the spectator give them what's good for them rather than what they actually want this is actually Artaud's contention here i hope you're all still awake my final m-, my final point er this morning concerns character and actor i'm not going to say very much about this but there are s-, there are some things here which i think do merit er consideration er as we're sort of moving into studying plays characters and actors are actually er mentioned in er Aristotle's Poetics for Aristotle character is a kind of reality characters exist in their own right because er Aristotle doesn't particularly mention actors or actresses who play those characters so the character if you like is a kind of abstract concept what a-, what Aristotle says in his Poetics is that characters should be morally good suitable and most importantly lifelike so the key to success when when you're writing a play is that the characters have to seem like real people in in real life so er this is described as verisimilitude verisimilitude er or vraisemblance er in the French classical theatre it would help if my pen worked vraisemblance that w-, that you could y-, that was a joke actually so you were supposed to laugh then [laughter] okay not a good actor i'm afraid er okay so er vraisemblance er er the sort of verisimilitude however er not er okay i mean so thi-, this is the kind of classical view of character but i think it's important to recognize when we're studying Ionesco er Beckett and and and possibly also Sartre although i think Sartre perhaps to a lesser extent er character the the word character has been pronounced dead by many writers for example a lot of writers er see characters basically as language rather than as er real flesh and blood individuals like ourselves what what are characters well basically characters are sort of words on a page perhaps this is one theory of characters i think it's a contentious theory and i think you know we may decide that characters are real characters and they do have real emotions er so i'm not particularly pressurizing you to think one way or the other i think the the debate is quite interesting but i think we have to recognize that when we're looking at some plays in the twentieth century er characters are not fully rounded individuals er but rather they consist of fragments of language this is again er what Artaud said er in his er Le Théâtre et son Double the fact that er basically er characters er were not really er sort of flesh and blood characters but they they they exterted a kind of power er but i think er Artaud wanted to get rid of the psychology which er lay behind the character and he wasn't very keen on the way in which Shakespeare Shakespeare's characters er analysed themselves so when Shakespearean characters are facing a sort of predicament of one sort or another er they will tend to sort of er go into a kind of process of self-analysis whereby they they explore the whole area of of their of their conscious you know er to be or not to be er it's that kind of thing you know er you know but i think Artaud said that this was kind of unnecessary in the theatre er we don't want this kind of sort of er thought and this kind of complexity let's just get back down to actions again let's let's let's let's judge characters not so much in terms of what they think as what they do in fact i think that's that's a very very big distinction there something something of this kind o-, occurs in what we might call the Theatre of of the Absurd er to which er often Ionesco has been attributed although i don't particularly think that the that the the term Theatre of the Absurd is always a very helpful one er Theatre of the Absurd being er a recognition that er life has lost all its meaning er i i i think i experienced this feeling very well when i was when i was writing up my PhD thesis er i felt that sort of life life life had lost all its meaning but er and er sometimes when we're writing assignments we think you know er what's the point of all this er so what you do is to get the whisky bottle out and have another drink don't you [laughter] okay er well except i don't like whisky so i i i tend to sort of i have other things but i think er er [laughter] but i think i think the er i i i think the thing i think the Theatre of the Absurd is well how can we how can we go on from this point and life seems to be so ridiculous doesn't it and er so theatre for the th-, for the for the absurdist f-, for the absurdist writers like Ionesco theatre er is a kind of antitheatre characters behave in totally ridiculous ways er at the beginning of La Cantatrice Chauve er er which i think is translated er as The Bald Primadonna some of you may know of by by Ionesco at the beginning of that play you have er for example er two characters Mr and Mrs Smith who are sort of discussing things and one of them says right you know it's kind of gives the time i-, s-, it says like it's ten o'clock in the morning and of course i mean what's the point of saying it because the clock's sort of standing there right in front of you it's the kind of absurd exchange and Ionesco took the the dialogue for La Cantatrice Chauve er from an English textbook when he was learning English he's saying well you know this is a totally sort of absurd textbook how could anybody learn English from this i know i'll write a play about it which is act-, whi-, whi-, which er was w-, was a complete flop actually when it first came out but eventually er became much more popular Les Chaises The Chairs is another one where chairs are sort of progressively sort of moving towards the end of the stage until the characters fall off the stage wonderful but but these are not really of course this is this really what happens it might be it might be what happens in some lectures i'm slightly out of touch with er with sort of university er lectures at the moment so er this may well be what happens you know people fall off chairs and all sorts of things but er i think basically er er this is pretty absurd stuff isn't it really er another example of Samuel Beckett in a play er Samuel Beckett in a play called er La Dernière Bande which is translated fetchingly as Krapp's Last Tape er so er La Dernière Bande er where the character er basically is suffering from er constipation because he's eaten too many bananas [laughter] er so er what's this got to do with real life well it's it's just a a kind of escape isn't it it's the characters i mean they're they're we might not recognize very much of ourselves in characters on the other hand we what we do what we do feel is that the charac-, er the characters do communicate in some way and language is not the way perhaps that we would use language but on the other hand it reveals something about our sort of inner selves doesn't it i would say perhaps just as a kind of er as as a kind of final thing on character er we have to look also at the actor or the actress that lies behind the mask because the actor is not particularly subservient to the character now in other words er i mean er one of the one of the big preoccupations of actors in the past has been to say well er am i actually playing this part faithfully to the original i-, is i-, is my is my portrayal of Shylock or Portia in The Merchant of Venice is that how Shakespeare would have wanted me to er to portray it but the answer is well does it really matter i mean does it matter if er you know how we actually perform a a role lies er very faithfully er against the original i mean we can do it in different ways er somebody who actually er wrote a lot on er on on on actors and the theories of acting was somebody called Jean-Louis Barrault Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Jean-Louis Barrault did all sorts of interesting things i mean he s-, he suggested for example that actors and actresses should er cultivate the art of double breathing so in other words er er the characters have to breathe twice er once for er once for themselves and once for the character that's a really strange kind of concept to grasp isn't it the idea of double breathing i mean in the smog of sort of central Birmingham i find it i find it difficult to breathe once never mind twice really but i think you know er this kind of whole concept of sort of breathing is i-, is pretty pretty pretty central to what Barrault is doing er so language is a kind of bodily movement w-, er so characters have to use their bodies in certain ways and use their gestures er Barrault spoke of an alchemy so alchemy extracting gold from from solid material so er Barrault spoke about an alchemy of the theatre er in which the actor or the actress was was in central position Artaud er used to er exploit his his actors in quite strange ways i mean he used to make them scream at the top of their voices and they used to sort of practise sort of shouting er and er it all sounded rather sort of strange and and and problematic really er but noises screams and shouts strange sort of er things er these are are obviously very central to to the kind of thing that Barrault is is coming out with i'd like to conclude now by hoping that er as a result of the things that i've spoken about this morning the the very er unilinear er structure which i presented with you with at the beginning of the lecture namely author text characters language and audience er i hope you can see that er this is er an ideal but rather inaccurate picture of what actually goes on in in twentieth century drama Antonin Artaud was a w-, was a watershed in this development he's totally disregarded by some critics i think in a book called Modern French Drama by somebody called David Bradby who i have recommended in your er in your your documentation packs i think Artaud gets maybe a couple of pages mention in a whole book about French drama i think that's perhaps er underestimating Artaud's importance i think Artaud's Théâtre et son Double is central to the rev-, to the reversal of this particular paradigm which we're actually actually looking at and i think it does sort of repay quite c-, quite careful attention but some people considered that Artaud was rather mad and this particular picture will demonstrate his rather er strange appearance certainly so er Artaud near the end of his life Paris nineteen-forty-eight er a rather sort of peculiar twisted sort of gnarled character he at this by this stage he'd had many electroshock treatments er because of his sort of in-, his supposed insanity er er so he had er he had E-C-T treatment for a number of years and he was he was sort of sent to asylum in a place called Rodez er rather unfortunately er had he not been he might have come up with some more interesting things er characters er these ones the-, these characters come from er a play by Jean Genet called er er Les Paravents okay the only reason i'm showing you these is to show how characters are actually sort of made into almost kind of grotesque sort of high comic figures er through what they wear so you can see le gendarme the policeman okay er sort of you know puffed out in all his sort of regalia er and er basically i mean it's all er it's all very sort of high high drama sort of totally contrived really and the the the last one that i'd like to show you is is basically this one it's er it's a picture from er a play by er Paul Claudel called Le Soulier de Satin er Paul Claudel worked in quite close col-, er collaboration with Jean-Louis Barrault so it actually shows you you know the the dynamism which er er actresses are er er sort of captured sort of through through Barrault's training so again high drama er and er r-, revises to an extent the kind of expectations that we have i'm looking forward to speaking to you next week er at which time i shall f-, i shall focus probably more more particularly on Beckett and Sartre i have tried to pack quite a lot into that lecture i hope you don't mind er and er possibly next week i'll leave a little bit more time for questions so we can deal with anything that might have come up in these in these lectures thank you very much for your attention