The Poetry of Theatre: L'Eté of Romain Weingarten

Abstract

The Poetry of Theatre: L'Ete of Romain Weingarten FRANCO TONELLI GENERALLY. CRITICS CHARACTERIZE Weingarten's dramaturgy as "poetic" on the basis of the disorienting effect his "ecriture" produces on the reader. Thus, Jacques Guicharnaud speaks of '''new chills'" the theatre of Weingarten has sent "down the "spine of French poetic theatre,'" and Denise Bourdet, of a theatrical space where poetry breathes' From the same point of view, although slightly more thematic , Genevieve Serreau sees its poetic quality in its powerful feast of words, and she adds, "ce que retient Weingarten de la ler;on d'Artaud, longuement meditee, c'est 'un effort unique, jamais dementi, contre louie bassesse' et c'est, reduit a I'essentiel, un 'esprit d'aventure' qui est l'autre nom de la poesie."J These approaches, however, by-pass an essential question raised by the very nature and originality of Weingarten's "';criture," the dynamic of which resides in its fusion of poetry into drama.4 By what process can two ontologically different structures- lyric and dramaticmerge into one?' In this essay I propose a reading of L'Ele- the play to which the author owes a great deal of his fame- as a possible method of identifying the ontology of Weingarten's poetry of theatre' L'Ele, to use the words of its stage director, "c'est ... le poeme d'Amour scenique de notre temps.'" Two children, brother and sister, Lorette and Simon, live in a house with two speaking cats with whom they communicate as though the animals were human. One day two lovers arrive as boarders, and their presence seems to upset the household emotionally. As onc of the lovers secretly leaves the other, 117 118 FRANCO TONELLI Lorette and Simon sense- each in different ways- that love is often coupled with abandon and that perhaps such is the lot of the human condition. As this brief resume shows, little in fact takes place in this play, except for a growing awareness of love as an emotion. The playwright does not really develop love as a theme, nor are love relationships explained in any realistic way. If anything, love is invisible. Its presence is felt in the warm still evenings of summer, in the strange sensuality troubling Lorette and Simon; it is felt through its dramatic absence, but never in a discursive manner. It is this lack of discourse that makes inadequate any thematic reduction of the play, short of concluding that there is nothing to say. Yet the absence of any omniscience is the very texture and richness of the work. This richness can be understood by examining the dynamics of Weingarten's art as it unfolds in the text of L'Ete, by looking at it not as a result but as a process. A poetic notion of destruction and re-creation, articulated in all its dramatic potentiality, will surface as the matrix of a new language of theatre. 1. The World: Space and Time In L'Ete, the objectified world is present in a naturalistic way, apparently rooting the text in daily and banal reality- a house, a garden with trees and benches are the representational symbols of an anonymous bourgeois setting. But no sooner is this concrete reality postulated than a process of rupture with the logical normal order takes place. This garden exists in a kind of limbo whose precarious ties with the rest of the world- such as arrivals or departures of characters, a parade celebrating an unknown "fete du village," the presence of neighbors, roads going from and to it- are never seen, only spoken of and often merely suggested. It is an isolated point, pushed in a far II distance- thus highly deconcretized- where the voices of common .P activities reach only sporadically. Here, space loses its traditional integrative function to become rather separate components of an unusual tension created by the subtle shifting from the familiar to the unfamiliar , from the known to the unknown. Furthermore, the house and the garden are in a kind of enigmatic rapport with each other. The house is never described or seen inside, for the entire action of the play takes place in the garden. When the...