Франция театрының даму тарихы

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An overview of the theatre of France.

The major battle of romanticism in France was fought in the theatre, but was not against the theatre. The early years of the century were marked by a revival of classicism and classical inspired tragedies, often with themes of national sacrifice or patriotic heroism in keeping with the spirit of the Revolution, but the production of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830 marked the triumph of the romantic movement on the stage (a description of the turbulent opening night can be found in Théophile Gautier). The dramatic unities of time and place were abolished, tragic and comic elements appeared together and metrical freedom was won. Marked by the plays of Friedrich Schiller, the romantics often chose subjects from historic periods (the French Renaissance, the reign of Louis XIII of France) and doomed noble characters (rebel princes and outlaws) or misunderstood artists (Vigny's play based on the life of Thomas Chatterton). By the middle of the century, theatre began to reflect more and more a realistic tendency, associated with Naturalism. These tendencies can be seen in the theatrical melodramas of the period and, in an even more lurid and gruesome light, in the Grand Guignol at the end of the century. In addition to melodramas, popular and bourgeois theatre in the mid century turned to realism in the "well made" bourgeois farces of Eugène Marin Labiche and the moral dramas of Émile Augier. Also popular were the operettas, farces and comedies of Ludovic Halévy, Henri Meilhac, and, at the turn of the century, Georges Feydeau. Before the war, the most successful play was Octave Mirbeau's great comedy Les affaires sont les affaires (Business is business) (1903). The poetry of Baudelaire and much of the literature in the latter half of the century (or "fin de siècle") were often characterized as "decadent" for their lurid content or moral vision, but with the publication of Jean Moréas "Symbolist Manifesto" in 1886, it was the term symbolism which was most often applied to the new literary environment. Symbolism appeared in theatre in the works of writers Villiers de l'Isle Adam and Maurice Maeterlinck among others.

The most significant dramatist of turn of the century France was Alfred Jarry. The impact of his plays, primarily Ubu Roi, was writ large upon contemporary audiences and has continued to be a major influence on, among others, Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Young Ones. Avant garde theatre in France after World War I was profoundly marked by Dada and Surrealism. The Surrealist movement was a major force in experimental writing and the international art world until the Second World War, and the surrealists' technique was particularly well suited for poetry and theatre, most notably in the theatrical works of Antonin Artaud and Guillaume Apollinaire. Theatre in the 1920s and 1930s went through further changes in a loose association of theatres (called the "Cartel") around the directors and producers Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Gaston Baty, and Ludmila and Georges Pitoëff. They produced French works by Jean Giraudoux, Jules Romains, Jean Anouilh and Jean Paul Sartre, as well as Greek and Shakespearean plays and works by Luigi Pirandello, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw. Inspired by the theatrical experiments in the early half of the century and by the horrors of the war, the avant garde Parisian theatre, "New theatre"—termed the "Theatre of the Absurd" by critic Martin Esslin in reference to Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal—refused simple explanations and abandoned traditional characters, plots and staging. Other experiments in theatre involved decentralisation, regional theatre, "popular theatre" (designed to bring the working class to the theatre), Brechtian theatre (largely unknown in France before 1954), and the productions of Arthur Adamov and Roger Planchon. The Avignon festival was started in 1947 by Jean Vilar, who was also important in the creation of the "Théâtre national populaire" or T. N. P.

The events of May 1968 marked a watershed in the development of a radical ideology of revolutionary change in education, class, family and literature. In theatre, the conception of "création collective" developed by Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil refused division into writers, actors and producers: the goal was for total collaboration, for multiple points of view, for an elimination of separation between actors and the public, and for the audience to seek out their own truth.