Decentralization as Chiaroscuro

Abstract

Michel Vinaver is a French playwright, born in 1927, who was exiled to the USA during the German occupation, and began to write in the 1950s – alongside a business career until 1982, when he became Professor of Drama Studies in the University of Paris. His complete plays have recently been published in two volumes by Actes Sud, and are widely-produced in France – but in the following article he claims that his few British productions, at the Orange Tree in Richmond and the Traverse in Edinburgh, have often been closer to his textual intentions. This is one of the problems he examines in the following wide-ranging article on the successes and limitations of the French post-war policy of theatrical Decentralization. Against the benefits of financial security and non-metropolitan bias, he weighs the failures to reflect regional cultures, and the cult of the director, with its continuous pressures to be ‘different’ in the interests of promotion and critical prestige. This paper was first presented at a conference at Birmingham University in April 1990. Readers with access to copies of the original Theatre Quarterly may also find it useful to refer to the special issue on People's Theatre in France, TQ23 (1976).