Through Artaud

At the entrance to the smaller, downstairs space of the Théâtre du Rond-Point, two oversized and dominating photographs hung in the 1980s, one of Antonin Artaud, the other of Samuel Beckett. From 1958 the theatre was directed by Jean-Louis Barrault (1910–94), from which post he was dismissed by the Gaullist culture minister André Malraux during the student uprising in the spring of 1968, even as the Théâtre du Rond-Point under Barrault's direction was one of the theatres in Paris where the Compagnie Renault-Barrault introduced Parisians to what was then European avant-garde performance and included the work of Samuel Beckett.

The Artaud/Beckett conjunction or contrast was dear to Barrault and formative to his sensibility, but the two influences seemed to represent very different, if not diametrically opposed strains in the emergence and development of twentieth-century, European, avant-garde theatre. On the one hand, Artaud advocated a performance- based theatre only loosely respectful of texts, which, he thought, tended to limit, even stifle the dynamics, the energy, the motion of performance, advocating instead an infectious theatricality, one that should be uncontained and spread like contamination, like a plague, and feature what he called ‘cruelty’, intense emotions too often avoided or masked by polite, boulevard or bourgeois theatre. On the other hand, Samuel Beckett, a literary if not lapidary playwright, heir both to Samuel Johnson and James Joyce, protective of his theatrical texts to the point of brooking no deviations from printed or typescript versions, and as a consultant or director, of his own work in particular, limiting displays of emotion.