You have turned the page, and thus have already opened a door.

A door to the text.

A text about doors.

Or, to be more precise, about the recurrence of doors and their function in Sophocles and Racine.

Our purpose in focusing on plays in which the door or gate has a significant role for the individual and his being-in-the-world is to delineate the passageway which leads the tragic character to a boundary situation and, from there, to a possible transgression of that situation. That which is on each side of the door, the spaces created by the thresholds, will thus help locate the place of the tragic event. This spatialization of the tragic event as the transgressing of a boundary situation is emphasized by the way in which both Sophocles and Racine determine the parameters of the action as it is structured within a specific space.

Surviving records of early eighteenth-century London theatres include a number of account books recording daily receipts, but fewer than we would like. ‘Rich's Register’ gives us daily totals at Lincoln's Inn Fields from 1714 to 1723, and we have accounts in one form or another for a good many seasons at that theatre thereafter. Drury Lane is a different matter. Not until 1741–2 do we possess day-by-day totals for a season there. In view of the comparative paucity of information about receipts at Drury Lane, neglect of one of the few sources of financial information available to us seems odd indeed. The MS at issue was quoted in print as early as 1939, and is cited in The London Stage (under the wrong reference number) – but no one has ever printed or analysed more than a small sampling of the figures available.

John Moore, the Glasgow physician and friend of Tobias Smollett, after attending a few performances at the Théâtre-Fran¸ais during a visit to the French capital in 1779, commented as follows on the surprisingly subversive behaviour of the Parisian parterre at that date: ‘By the emphatic applause they bestow on particular passages of the pieces represented at the theatre, they convey to the monarch the sentiments of the nation respecting the measures of his government.’ Moore gives no precise instances, but it is clear what he is referring to, and there were plenty of other contemporary observers to testify to the growing habit of making applications, and using this method to express opposition to certain government policies which, in the prevalent atmosphere of political repression, it might have been dangerous to contest too openly anywhere else. The theatre auditorium was the ideal place for voicing anonymous criticism with impunity. The guard in the theatre, entrusted with the task of preserving law and order, was powerless to prevent the parterre applying a maxim or simple phrase spoken from the stage to some matter of burning political import, and showing, by their vociferous applause, where exactly their sympathies lay.

Tzara's role in the Dada onslaught on the theatre is well known. His Le Cœur à gaz (1921) is often regarded as the masterpiece of that genre. It is sometimes overlooked, though, that Tzara's theatrical activity did not cease with the disintegration of the Dada movement. His fourth and final play, Mouchoir de nuages (1924), is often relegated to the status of a minor coda to his earlier experiments. It is certainly a less revolutionary work than Le Cœur à gaz or the two celestial adventures of Monsieur Antipyrine. On its own terms, though – that is, as an attempt at theatrical renewal rather than theatrical demolition – it is no less noteworthy than its more notorious predecessors.