Breasts, couples, children and othercliches: Visual/verbal imagery in surrealist drama

Abstract

In the first moments of Les Mystères de l'amour (1924), his only play labelled “drame surrealiste,” Roger Vltrac uses visual imagery to initiate a radical shift from conventional staging. The play opens with a Prologue in which the protagonist is seen “tracing sinuous lines in the mud with a stick.” He is, he tells a policeman, “finishing off [the] hair” of a female portrait painted on the wall of a house. According to the stage directions, “He leaves, tracing a sinuous line. The curtain slowly falls” (p. 229)(1). In this brief Prologue the protagonist by his tracing both adds to (and partially relocates) the set and leads the audience's gaze away from the stage. Appropriately,, the play's first tableau begins in “A box overhanging the stage. The proscenium lights are out. The house lights, a chandelier above the audience, are lighted” (p. 230), and the action, a parody of courtship rituals, takes place In the box, with occasional shouts Into and from the audience. Thus Vltrac transcends the two- dimensional limitations of set design and controls the audience: Initially directing its attention from the conventional locus of action and then destroying the traditional boundaries between actor and audience. The protagonist's initial gesture, reinforcing the visual aspects of theatre, ultimately undermines our basic assumptions about the genre.