Theatre Ouvert and Drama Creation in France

Abstract

The Theatre Ouvert experiment has its roots in radio with France-Culture's 1969 New Drama Repertory (NRD). 1969 is a year which witnesses an anticlimax of sorts after the exaltation of the preceding May. The silent majority voices its reactionary feelings. In the domain of theater, confusion and stagnation reign, as well as a terrified suspense. Theater people are quick to become enthusiastic and to offer passionate speeches which lead them into risky and often embarrassing ventures. Theater institutions are attacked from the left and the right. They have lost some of their prestige and much of their audience. Some accuse them of having sold out, others of being too political. Their directors decide to make a strategic retreat so that they can at least maintain the existing structures and wait and see. The time to be bold has passed. Molikre, Shakespeare, maybe even Brecht (the classics are reassuring and Brecht has become a harmless alibi) almost exclusively, are programmed by subsidized theaters. On the other hand, those who do not have access to subsidized institutions and who realize that they have to work independently, pursue the myth of a 'revolutionary theater', an expression used by a famous group whose Living Theater showed the way with its very successful and explosive Paradise Now. Others, following the example of the Theatre du Soleil, attempt to find their specific mode of communication in order to talk about history. Others still, imitating Grotowski, plunge into the depths of universal archetypes. In none of these cases is anybody working on written texts, whose function is everywhere called into doubt. Collective creation becomes fashionable, with all the excesses of 'creativity for all', and for the most radical, the author is seen as a mere remnant of an outdated bourgeoisie who deserves nothing more than to be thrown into history's garbage heap. As for directors in the private (i.e., commercial) sector, they proclaim the right to make mistakes but refuse to be responsible for them. The situation is disastrous. Lucien Attoun, a journalist and producer of radio shows, is at the heart of the problem. He did not wait for the storm to reveal the ruins before becoming aware that an extremely serious process of degradation was taking place. A journalist is someone who receives confidences and turns them into information. Often enough, he is not better informed than anyone else but he can discern, grasp, retain what is important just when it is going to become important. For many years-