Our desire for a humane future, for a future diminished in violence and enhanced in human possibility, insists that every means possible be used to warn and work against genocidal activity. Political scientists, historians, psychologists and others have their disciplinary agendas when they seek to sound the genocidal alarm, and to prevent the eruption of wholesale slaughter. I am concerned with the arts and how they contribute to moving us ‘toward the understanding and prevention of genocide’, specifically how the art of theatre can be used for the purpose of creating a world less violent and more protective and supportive of human life.

The Lebanese-French playwright Andrée Chedid begins her play, Le Montreur (1967), with a song sung by ‘une—ou plusieurs—voix’. As the voice becomes voices become voice, the song addresses the audience saying, ‘Ce soir, ce soir, ce soir, amis, / Le Sire Montreur nous dévoilera: / L'unité et la pluralité des choses!’ Like the image of many voices among one voice, the trope of the ‘unity and plurality of things’ is arguably Chedid's vision of human consciousness—a consciousness that is both one and many; a consciousness that is embedded in a relationship with the other, which is figured as a connectedness that makes society. In Les Nombres (1965) and Bérénice d'Egypte (1962), through her writing and use of theatrical space and sound, Chedid constructs a unique vision of consciousness—configured as a vital empathy with the multitudes. She centres her revolutionary vision of consciousness on her women characters, who, by interacting with ‘the multitudes’ (le peuple, la foule, les nombres) open the possibility that human connectedness can make consciousness multiple and thereby transcends the dichotomies of self and other.

War and the military life have traditionally been perceived in most cultures as a sacrosanct ex-periental world devoted to masculine maturation and bonding. By definition both these traditionally male organizations have until now excluded women, treating them as objects to be despised (if not feared), and also the target of active opposition. Note, for instance, the gleeful celebrations among cadets when Shannon L. Faulkner, the first woman admitted (after court order) to The Citadel, a single-sex military college in Charleston, SC, decided after one week in August 1995 that she could not survive the harassment, hi refusing to admit her the institution had claimed that her presence ‘would undermine a proud and legitimate tradition dedicated to molding the minds, bodies and spirits of young men’. The counter argument was that she was being denied equal opportunity to take part in ‘a unique academic environment that requires on-campus residence and that is being built around a system of hardship, competition and bonding, […and] also a lifetime of countless, less tangible benefits’. Such was also the basis of the US Supreme Court's majority opinion written by Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1996) mandating the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute. Though now federal government supported service academies admit women, nostalgia still exists in certain quarters for the days when the comment, ‘If the army had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one’ summed up the distinctly peripheral position held by wives, who were, and are still, classified as ‘dependants’. But now women are in the United States Armed Forces, in command positions and certain combat units, as well as in the medical corps. The transition is difficult.

The truth of Shaw's dictum that ‘those who can, do, and those who can't, teach’, is questioned by the history of commedia dell'arte in the twentieth century, in which research, practice and teaching are inextricably bound together. The significance of commedia's influence on the modern stage lies precisely in the fact that the nature of commedia cannot be defined objectively but is mediated through research and stage practice. We have to deal, therefore, not so much with commedia itself as with an ‘idea’ of commedia, a phrase I have borrowed from Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards.

Much critical engagement with the work of Hélène Cixous has tended to foreground her early writings and the discourses of écriture féminine, whilst overlooking the importance of theatre to the development of her aesthetics. This continued focus has contributed to a perception of her work as divided into distinct, chronologically or generically defined sets and has consequently hampered the exploration of common threads and evolving representations of issues central to her work. This study aims to identify a consistent concern behind Cixous's strategic use of the theatrical form: the desire to construct and project representations of poetic identity, a theme which I will argue has become increasingly explicit in her work in the theatre, and which is essential to a reading of Cixous's writings as a coherent body of work. After a brief contextualization of the representation of the poet figure in her early theatre, I will focus on her most recent plays: Voile noire voile blanche (Black sail white sail, 1988), La Ville par jure ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City or the Awakening of the Erinyes) and L'Histoire (qu'on ne connaîtra jamais) (The Story (which we will never know)), both published in 1994. This play constitutes an explicit staging of the scène de l'écriture.

Greek tragedy was created under a unique and very unusual set of circumstances. What we today call Greek tragedy was not really ‘Greek’ but specifically Athenian. It articulated Athenian values, celebrated Athenian institutions, debated Athenian problems. Despite the undisputed artistic achievements of the great tragedians, the primary motives behind the creation and production of classical Greek tragedy were not artistic or literary, but social and political. Greek tragedies were contemporary and topical civic spectacles, and a central component of Athenian civic life and political discourse. Aristotle identified this ‘political’ aspect of classic Greek tragedy as its distinguishing feature by noting that ‘the earlier poets [Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides] made their characters talk “politically” [politikos], the present-day poets rhetorically’.

Ophaboom Theatre was formed in 1991 with the aim of developing, researching and performing a contemporary version of commedia dell'aite to provide humour and resonance for a modern audience. By returning to the roots of commedia, on the streets, Ophaboom's performances, we hoped, might recapture its popular appeal, and be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In doing this we have questioned many of the traditional ideas associated with this form, and also its contemporary relevance. Our approaches to each mask or character type, such as the Zanni (servant), the innamorata (lover), and Pantalone (old man), are tested in live performance in turn, and only when satisfied with it do we move on to the next mask. This return to the roots is aimed at invigorating the form methodically through an evolution possibly analogous to that of the original commedia. Our belief is that the eighteenth-century manifestation, which is often the only perception and thus representation of commedia today, does not appeal to a wide public. At its height, commedia owed its vitality to its wideranging appeal, and by rediscovering its spirit we hope to revitalize this popularity.

In their plays, Yourcenar, Sarraute and Duras repeatedly portray women who oppose men, sometimes violently. Drawing on several examples, this paper aims to define a typology of female characters by analysing the double theme of violence and revolt. Some women find themselves imprisoned both by men and by their epoch; all they can do is to submit to the system put in place by society, against which they struggle in vain for freedom. After an initial submission to the rules of society, they are impelled towards a more or less successful revolt and this allows them to find fulfilment through rebellion. In the case of Yourcenar, woman resists as best she can; despite everything, her happiness is found in revolt and especially, perhaps, in revenge. In the case of Sarraute, the emergence and development of the Sarrautian ‘tropism’ becomes both an act of affirmation for the female character and an act of struggle against the other, the male. Woman, for Duras, is hi a position of quasi-imprisonment by two psychic spaces which occupy her totally: both violence and revolt are expressed through the body, its behaviour and its sexual pleasure. But there is also a contained violence, already filtered by an attempt, sometimes vain, to express it through words. However, many of the lines spoken by these women demonstrate a clear self-awareness through violence which is either contained or which can explode in a bid for freedom.

In Nathalie Sarraute's Ici (1995), the textual voice is attacked for using ‘on’ instead of ‘je’, and masculine agreements instead of feminine. That voice, in characteristic Sarrautean fashion, justifies its practice with the words: ‘N'est-on pas tous pareils?’, explaining that ‘C'est pour faire participer, pour mettre tout le monde “dans le coup”’. At the level of the tropisms, those movements at the very edge of consciousness which Sarraute has made the foundation and substance of all her writing, we are, she claims, all alike: ‘sur un plan précis, à un niveau égale-ment précis, nous nous ressemblons tous’, irrespective of sex, creed or colour. Sarraute's interest is attached to

ce qui est propre à tous, à quelque chose qui me paraît exister absolument chez tout le monde, qui n'est pas propre aux femmes, pas propre aux hommes, pas propre aux Noirs, aux Blancs, aux Jaunes … J'essaie de saisir quelque chose qui me parait d'ordre général.

Nathalie Sarraute has written six plays over a period of some fifteen years (1967–82). Her latest play, Pour un oui ou pour un non, was first performed in 1982. Given their relative success, however, one is forced to wonder why she has not continued to write for the theatre (though, since 1982, she has published four major works of narrative, Enfance, Tu ne t'aimes pas, Ici and Ouvrez). When I put this question to Nathalie Sarraute in October 1996, at the Institut Français in London, she replied that she had ‘found more amusing things to do’. Her failure to answer the question directly perhaps suggests an unawareness of the real answer, at least at conscious levels. The theatre, an inescapably physical medium, which requires the bodily presence of men and women as gendered beings, was, in fact, never really suited to a writer who continually takes refuge from the physical and even the sexual, hi words. It seems plausible, then, to conjecture that Sarraute gave up writing for the theatre, because her radio plays had, by reason of their success, been translated onto the stage, and the author did not know how to deal with a medium that privileged the physical as opposed to the emotional and psychological dimensions of human relationships which had been her territory since Tropismes. The frequently impersonal voices of her fiction work well on radio, but less so on a live stage, upon which the actors are physically as well as audibly present: ‘Le person-nage de théâtre’, says Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘est en scène, c'est sa première qualité: il est là.’ In Sarraute's theatre, however, this physical presence is no more than a kind of contingency, wholly superfluous to the action. The characters find themselves together for no particular reason and they hardly ever interact physically. The very lack of stage directions, which the author justifies on the grounds of textual purity, is itself indicative of an absence of movement, the main signifier of physical presence. Textual purity depends for Sarraute on words alone.