4 - Drama: theory and practice

Summary

Sartre's theatre overlaps, but also extends beyond, his novel-writing period, stretching from Bariona, written and produced in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1940, to Les Troyennes, an adaptation of Euripides's Trojan Women, in 1965. It is a genre which corresponds to Sartre's purposes in a very different way from the novel, both in the contingent conditions of its production and in its essential aesthetic constitution. In the former perspective, the economic and ideological situation of the theatre in mid-twentieth-century France makes it a singularly inappropriate medium for the expression of a philosophy of self-liberation; but in the latter perspective, as a performance of action and dialogue before an audience, drama is the art-form most eminently suited to the communication of an existential world-view. Critics, however, have tended to focus on the ideological contradictions inherent in the presentation of radical committed theatre to a predominantly bourgeois audience; and indeed these contradictions have led to Sartre's drama being attacked on two very different scores. On the one hand, Sartre has been criticized by the dramatic avant-garde, Absurdist or Brechtian, for creating traditional, non-experimental, bourgeois theatre; on the other, he is accused by the bourgeois of writing left-wing théâtre à thèse, didactic, polemical and excessively political. An examination of the plays will show them to be both dramatically unconventional and politically ambiguous.

It is, of course, the economic situation of Parisian theatre which determines to a large extent the nature of its audience and the reception of its plays.