In Praise of Theatre

Alain Badiou, Nicolas Truong

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745687001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía moderna

In Praise of Theatre is Alain Badiou's latest work on the 'most complete of the arts, ' the theatrical stage. This book, certain to be of great interest to scholars and theatre practitioners alike, elaborates the theory of the theatre developed by Badiou in works such as Rhapsody for the Theatre and the 'Theses on Theatre' and enquires into the status of a theatre that would be adequate to our 'contemporary, market-oriented chaos.'

In a departure from his usual emphasis upon canonical figures of the stage such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, Badiou devotes In Praise of Theatre largely to a consideration of contemporary practitioners, including Jan Fabre, Brigitte Jacques and Romeo Castellucci. In addition, the book features an incisive analysis of the precarious status of the theatre today, in which Badiou describes not only the current threats to the theatre from the right, but the far more insidious threat from the left.

1
Defense of an Endangered Art

Where does your love of the stage, of acting, and of theatrical performance come from?

The first theatrical production that really struck me I encountered in Toulouse when I was 14. La Compagnie du Grenier [The Attic Company], founded by Maurice Sarrazin, was putting on Scapin the Schemer.¹ In the title role, Daniel Sorano.² A brawny, agile Scapin, of remarkable self-assuredness. A triumphant Scapin, whose nimbleness, sonorous voice, and astonishing facial expressions made one want to meet him, to ask of him some outlandish service. And, of course, I did ask this service of him, when, in July 1952, I played the role of Scapin at Lycée Bellevue [Bellevue High School]! I remember that, at that fateful moment when I had to make my entrance and deliver my first line, I had clearly in mind Sorano’s bounding and radiance, to which I attempted to mold my lanky frame. During a later remounting of the same production, the critic of La Dépêche du Midi [The Southern Dispatch] shot me a poisonous compliment by declaring that I recalled “with intelligence” Daniel Sorano. It was the least one could say … But, from then on, intelligence or no, I had caught the theatre bug.

Another stage in the disease was discovering Vilar, of the TNP [People’s National Theatre], at Chaillot, when the provincial youth that I was moved up to “the big city” to pursue his studies.³ I think that what struck me at the time was the simplicity of the staging, its reduction to a series of signs, at the same time as the very distinctive density of the acting of Vilar himself. It was as if, at a distance from the performance he was giving, he was hinting at much more than he was actually executing on stage. I understood, thanks to him, that the theatre is more an art of possibilities than it is of actualizations. I recall in particular, in Molière’s Don Juan, a dumbshow he added.⁴ After his first encounter with the statue of the Commandant, Don Juan, the atheistic and provocative libertine, is of course troubled, though he doesn’t at all want to admit it: what is this statue that speaks? In the production, Vilar re-entered alone, slowly, and stood silently considering the statue, which had returned to its natural immobility. It was a poignant moment, even though it was a complete abstraction: the character was demonstrating his uncertainty, engaging in a tense examination of various hypotheses one could make in relation to an abnormal situation. Yes, this art of hypotheses, of possibilities, this trembling of thought before the inexplicable – this was the theatre in its highest expression.

I threw myself then – and I continue! – into a vast reading. I covered a considerable portion of the world repertoire. I expanded upon the effect produced by the productions of the TNP by reading the complete works of the dramatists selected by this theatre: after Don Juan, I re-read all of Molière; after Peace, I read all of Aristophanes; after The City, all of Claudel; after Platonov, all the Russian theatre available; after Red Roses for Me, all of Sean O’Casey; after The Triumph of Love, all of Marivaux; after Arturo Ui, all of Brecht; and then all of Shakespeare, all of Pirandello, all of Ibsen, all of Strindberg, and all the others – in particular Corneille, for whom I have a special love, encouraged by the beautiful recent productions of this dramatist by Brigitte Jaques and her theatrical accomplice, the great theoretician and, on occasion, actor, François Regnault.⁵

When, later, I wrote a few plays, it was not a coincidence that they were most often based upon older models: Ahmed le subtil [Ahmed the Subtle] upon Scapin the Schemer, Les Citrouilles [The Pumpkins] upon Frogs, L’Écharpe rouge [The Red Scarf] upon The Satin Slipper …⁶ If live performances remain the true points of intensity of the theatre, the written repertoire is the aweinspiring foundation, the historical substrate. The theatrical performance embarks you on an emotive and thinking voyage for which the texts of all times and places are like the maritime horizon.

When, with Antoine Vitez, then with Christian Schiaretti, I participated directly in this sort of embarkment, this time as a part of the navigational crew, I felt, almost physically, this paradoxical alliance, this fecund dialectic between a horizon of infinite magnitude – that of the great theatre texts of all time and of all places – and the luminous and fragile force of the fleeting movement of a theatrical performance, a few hours at most, which gives us the illusion of drawing close enough to this greatness to participate in its creation.⁷

Let’s jump forward 60 years. I attend a production of the Pirandello play No One Knows How by the company La Llevantina, led by Marie-José Malis.⁸ I have always been fascinated by the violent abstraction of this play. The epic encounter it organizes between the triviality of existences (of adulteries, as so often in the theatre …) and the long, the subtle, the interminable obstinacy of thought, which gives rise onstage to a series of confessions in the style of Rousseau, in a prodigious language. Yet, Marie-José Malis’s staging was for me one of these events of the theatre where one suddenly understands something about which one has always been mistaken. In this case, the true purpose of Pirandello’s plays. It’s not a question of loosening the bond between bodies and the text; it’s not about ordering the stage in its division between illusion and the real, or in the language of Pirandello himself, between Form and Life.⁹ It’s a question of entrusting to each spectator a secret which bears a severe injunction. The hushed tone often adopted by the actors of the troupe – all admirable – their way of looking into the eyes of the spectators in this or that part of the audience, all of which has no other object than to make us hear the multiform voice of Pirandello: “What you are, what you do, I know, you can see it and hear it on this stage. And you no longer have any excuse, therefore, to refuse to meditate upon it on your own behalf. From this moment forward, you cannot escape the most important imperative of all: orient yourselves in existence, orienting yourselves first, as the actors are attempting to do before you, in thought.”

Yes, the theatre serves to orient us. And this is why, once one has understood how to use it, one can no longer do without this compass.

You have hesitated between philosophy and theatre for a long time. Why did you not choose the theatre, you who enjoy writing for the theatre, but also taking the stage and performing your own texts?

Without a doubt mathematics is to blame! The theatre satisfies that part of myself for which thought takes the form of an emotion, of a pivotal moment, of a kind of engagement with what is given immediately to see and to hear. But I had – I still have – a need of a completely different order: that thought take the form of irresistible argumentation, of the submission to a logical and conceptual power which concedes nothing when it comes to the universality of its question. Plato had the same problem: he was also persuaded that mathematics proposed an unrivaled model of fully realized thought. But, great rival of the theatre that he was, he also wanted for thought to be found in the intensity of a moment, for it to be an uncertain yet triumphant path. He resolved his problem by writing philosophical dialogues in which mathematics are discussed, as in the Meno, with a slave met by chance.¹⁰ I myself am not capable of such dialogues, though – and besides, no one since Plato has been. So, I accepted to be divided between the classical form of philosophy, which is to say great systematic treatises, and the occasional incursion, a kind of joyful foray, into the domain of the theatre.

Why sing the theatre’s praises at a time when it seems to be celebrated everywhere? Because if the centrality of the theatre has been particularly usurped by cinema, its rate of attendance hasn’t decreased. Art of presence, the theatre is moreover widely favored because it has resisted intrinsically the ascendancy of the visual and the virtual. Why defend an art which gets such good press?

We should be wary, because the theatre has always been violently attacked: for thousands of years the theatre has been regarded with suspicion, slapped with interdiction by the Church, attacked by renowned philosophers like Nietzsche or Plato, considered by diverse authorities to be susceptible to subversive or critical activity. It has been associated with the majority of great revolutionary undertakings, which have often created a theatre in the very movement of their existence. It is established, but in such a fashion that it should be protected and developed. Here at the Festival d’Avignon, we ar...