Cocteau and "Le Numero Barbette"

Abstract

ONE OF THE ACCUSATIONS most frequently leveled against Jean Cocteau is that there is no continuity in his work, that he created merely for the sake of effect without having any real goal in mind. Yet, if the evidence is fairly examined, it becomes clear that this is not the case, at least in his conception of stage performance. One of his earliest esthetic formulations is an article entitled "Le Numero Barbette" which appeared in the July 1926 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, and his last play, L'Impromptu du Palais Royal, produced and published in 1962, is a theatrical presentation of his theories of theater. The latter is in fact a refinement, a sophisticated version of the former. However dissimilar Cocteau's plays may appear, they are linked by the same high ideal of the craft of theater: if their likenesses have been obscured, it is because they are united not by a theme or a message but rather by a conception of the art of the stage, of what theater as spectacle means. Cocteau was never interested in a play qua text; instead, he strove to create a certain art-object/spectator relationship based on illusion and enchantment. That this essential aim never changed in the course of his career becomes evident through a comparison of "Le Numero Barbette" and L'Impromptu du Palais Royal.