Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Roger Planchon, Director and Playwright by Yvette Daoust

1983; Western Michigan University; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.1983.0026

1936-1637

Felicia Hardison Londré,

Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis

Reviews 287 should they look to find a poem entitled “To the Descendants”? Its English titles in the available translations are ‘T o Posterity” or ‘T o Those Born Later.” And the well-known poem about a reading worker gives an English title “A Worker, Reading, Ask Questions,” which has no relationship to any English translation in print today. At least half a dozen similar examples of sovereign but unfamiliar translated titles occur. And what is the “estrangement” effect mentioned repeatedly in this collection? The difficulties of translating the German Verfremdung are well known, but all this translation does is to cause “estrangement” in readers without transmitting the sense of “defamiliarization” or “alienation” or “distanciation” Brecht was trying to achieve. A useful book, a provocative book, and an irritating book marred by poor translations, faulty arguments, unevenness of style and quality, and categories that do not work in every case. Of the making of books on Bertolt Brecht there is clearly no end. This latest addition to the enormous volume of secondary literature will deservedly take its place in libraries and on the shelves of English-speaking scholars with specific interests in these topics. Beyond that, it does not seem destined to have much impact on Brecht scholarship in general except in these few essays mentioned as original contributions. JAMES K. LYON University of California, San Diego Yvette Daoust. Roger Planchon, Director and Playwright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. xi + 252. $44.95. The unprecedented rise to prominence of the director in French theatre since 1968 overcame a long-established view of the playwright as the primary artist of the theatre. Traditional reverence for the dramatic text (or Sire le Mot) in French theatrical practice gave way to concern for a “stage language” in which the text is only one of many elements of performance. Roger Blin, Jean Vilar, and Jean-Louis Barrault were perhaps the only directors’ names that came readily to mind in the days when one eagerly awaited every new play from the pens of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Sartre, Anouilh, Audiberti, or Adamov. Today the situ­ ation is just the opposite. André Benedetto, Antoine Bourseiller, Patrice Chéreau, Daniel Mesguich, Ariane Mnouchkine, Roger Planchon, Jerome Savary, and Antoine Vitez are only a few of the contemporary French directors who won international renown in the 1970s, but one is hard pressed to name as many outstanding French playwrights of the same generation. Although some of those directors also write plays, most consider playwriting a secondary effort. No director-playwright has aroused more interest in France and abroad than Roger Planchon. Yvette Daoust’s book traces Planchon’s career in professional theatre from 1950 to 1980 and places his work in the context of a changing French theatre. Although Planchon’s endeavors have been thoroughly documented in Theatre Quarterly (numbers 5, 14, 15, 22, 25) and in Emile Copfermann ’s very useful Théâtres de Roger Planchon (1977), Daoust’s 288 Comparative Drama schematic presentation and lively performance analysis will make the subject far more accessible to American theatre historians and practi­ tioners. Two introductory chapters offer an overview of Planchon’s approach to theatre and the specific activities that led to his appointment in 1972 as director of the Théâtre National Populaire (which brought about that theatre’s move from Paris to Planchon’s Théâtre de la Cité de Villeurbanne, in a working-class suburb of Lyons). Daoust makes it clear that Planchon was always in the vanguard of post-war efforts to make French theatre accessible to all economic and social classes. It is not surprising that recognition of those efforts did not come as early to Planchon as to Vilar, since Paris so long remained the focus of French culture despite significant steps toward decentralization. Part I of Daoust’s book treats Planchon’s directorial work, dividing his major productions into three categories: “Contemporary Drama: the Social Context” (plays by Brecht, Vinaver, and Adamov), “English Classics” (Shakespeare and Marlowe), and “French Classics” (Molière, Marivaux, Musset, Racine). This non-chronological plan of organization somewhat obscures the through-line of Planchon’s artistic development, but Daoust compensates by providing a separate Chronology and frequent...