Murderous Enactments: The Media's Presence in the Drama

Abstract

The turn of the century witnessed technology's coming of stage. Technological inventions became the subjects and the protagonists of modern drama. In Jean Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, the Tower itself, as a bold and controversial structure and a gigantic telegraph antenna, took center stage as the poet's lead actor in his surrealist comedy ballet. Guillaume Apollinaire's The Breasts of Tiresias, begun before and completed at the end of the First World War, foreshadowed our own genetic engineering and feminist movement while protesting France's declining birthrate. It also poked fun at the media coverage of the news, the tyranny of journalism, and the obtrusive presence of advertising billboards. In his Victor or Power to the Children, Roger Vitrac unfurled upon the stage the gigantic front page of a newspaper while dramatizing before this inner curtain some of the gory items of yellow journalism. However, the cartoon style of the performances stressed the comical aspects of the new developments and treated them with good-humored lightness and a certain amount of awe.