No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Homage to Robert Aron, 1898—1975
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
I went to see Robert Aron in the summer of 1972. He was then seventy-four years old, a tall, striking man in an apartment of stuffed furniture overrun by books. In all my meetings that summer with former surrealists, people who had made avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1920s, there was always a sense of trembling at reaching out to touch cobwebbed memories. Forty-five years had passed since the events we talked about. Tristan Tzara, recalled by Gide as a charming man with a young wife who was ‘even more charming’, had since fought with the French Resistance during World War II and later joined the Communist Party. André Breton, when he died in 1966, was accompanied to his grave by ‘waves of young men and young girls often in couples, with arms entwined’. They had come from all over France to pay him tribute. Philippe Soupault is a respected editor, critic and radio commentator, Louis Aragon is at the forefront of the French Communist Party and dislikes talking about his days as a Surrealist, Roger Vitrac is an acknowledged and produced playwright while Artaud is a cult figure. There are moments when in looking back, the whole Dada-Surrealist performance world looks like some great Dada swindle perpetrated on the only too fallible researcher and critic. Robert Aron does nothing to dispel this feeling. The man who sent a telegram to Breton warning him that he would stop at no measures to keep the fervent Surrealist claque from disturbing the performance of Strindberg's A Dream Play at the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, was elected a member of the French Academy before his death.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1977
References
Notes
1. In addition to Gigone (part of which was produced on the first program of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry), Aron wrote two other plays: Le Jardin des Miracles, a play in three acts which has remained unpublished and unproduced, and La Reine du Monde, which was staged in the Théâtre des Ursulines in 1927 by the Hungarian painter Medgyes.
2. Mme Allendy, in her short account of the affairs of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry writes: ‘By April 1927 we had managed to collect the sum of about 3,000 francs and we paid all of this over to Robert Aron. We decided to risk a production despite the insufficiency of the amount. In May 1927 Antonin Artaud began rehearsals of Roger Vitrac's The Secrets of Love… all this time we carried on booking as many seats as possible for the two performances to take place 1 and 2 June 1927 … [after this first program …] Aron told us there was a loss of between 6,000 and 7,000 francs paid by him.’ A.A., Collected Works, vol. II, pp. 225–6.
3. Writing to Jean Louis Barrault in 1935, in response to an offer of Barrault's to collaborate with him, Artaud refuses and explains: ‘JE NE VEUX PAS que dans un spectacle monté par moi il y ait même un clin d'oeil qui ne m'appartienne. … S'il y a des animaux à faire passer dans ma pièce, je les ferai passer moi-même sur le rythme et dans l'attitude que je leur imposerai.’
(Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 5, p. 262.)
4. The text of Ventre Brûlé ou la Mère Folle, listed on the Théâtre Alfred Jarry program as ‘Pochade Musicale par Antonin Artaud avec la collaboration de Maxime Jacob’, appears quite definitely to have been lost. The reconstruction of the ‘events’ of the piece which follows is translated from Maguire, Robert's Le hors théâtre: Essai sur la signification du théâtre de notre temps (unpublished dissertation, the Sorbonne, 1963).Google Scholar
Scene 1. A character enters dressed in a long black robe and wearing gloves. Long, straight, wirey hair covers his face. It seems made of leather. He dances a sort of Charleston in almost complete darkness, pushing a chair back and forth while uttering some mysterious phrases. A sudden gunshot – and he collapses. Just at that moment Mystery-of-Hollywood enters, dressed in a long red robe, his eyes turned down towards his nose by a mask with a stripe down the center. He fingers the long hair of the first character and fascinated, holds the strands up to a violet light to study them – as a chemist would his flask. At that moment, from the other side of the stage, the character Cornucopia enters and shouts ‘The macaroni is finished Mystery-of-Hollywood’, to which the latter responds ‘Look out for the lightning Cornucopia – look out for the lightning!’ A Queen passes and dies (the other characters die as well) but her cadaver rises up again as the King passes. She cries out at him ‘cuckhold’, before lying down again, this time for good.
Scene 2. The second scene is devoted to the burial – a sort of half grotesque, half-poignant funeral march with the cortege illuminated by a violet light from the wings. All this is accompanied by the roll of drums from behind a curtain lit like fire.
Maguire's reconstruction of Gigone follows:
The stage is filled with infants' cradles. Amidst the general squealing the ‘great impregnator’ called ‘the son of Citroën’ steps forward to harangue the spectators in the philosophical tone of a neo-Don Juan. He is in revolt against the physical and metaphysical states of parenthood and love, all this in the manner of a hawker showing the ‘bastards’ his ware:
Come see what they've made of me In their womb, their brain-of-a-woman, All those whores whom I slept with: Creatures of Chance Born of one instant of trouble and long months of disgust. That allows them to resemble me. Through a thank-you letter written by one of the mothers and brought by a servant we learn that the ‘great impregnator’ has legitimized one of his bastards. This, however, in no way deters him from leveling his revolver and shooting all of the infants before the curtain comes down. All this amidst cries not only from the stage but from the ‘claque’ in the audience as well, while the ‘hero’ marches straight down to the prompter's box to address the audience: ‘Messieurs, Mesdames, vous êtes des C….’ Maguire's sources were the actors who participated in the piece, among whom he interviewed Max Joly, Eduard Beauchamp, Rene Lefevre, Jacqueline Hopstein, and Genica Athanasiou. He also interviewed the critics Marcel Sauvage and François Impartiel. Among other recollections gathered by Maguire, M. Crémieux calls the piece ‘a brief hallucination, practically without text’, and Maxime Jacob, who wrote the music, considers it ‘a lyric piece which humorously exposes the conflict between cinema and theatre’. In his letter to Maguire of 20 November 1955, Jacob (then Brother Clement Jacob of the Abbaye d'Encaleat, Dourgne, Tarn, France), writes: ‘As for me, I am unfortunately incapable of reconstructing the theme and development of the play. I can only tell you that it was connected to the attempts at negation and revolt of the surrealist movement. It seems to me that the characters (the King, his wife) embodied the anguish of the author in his hopeless and blasphemous denial of life: love, marriage, death, society, etc. I composed music that was almost entirely for percussion. The pulsating monotones or frenetic basic rhythms and their combinations seemed to me to best illustrate the torments of the author's soul, which I, by the way, didn't share at all.’