THEATER 

Having last night seen Ariane Mnounkine’s breathtaking company in 1789 at the Round House, I attend a discussion of the production with Mnouchkine, Arnold Wesker and Jonathan Miller. Wesker views the show darkly, saying that collective authorship can lead to “group hysteria” and in any case must always lack the “focus” that a single writer can bring to bear on events. I rise to say that it is precisely that single focus that has led to the state of drama today – too many private plays about private middle-class people. When such authors attempt historical subjects, they always see them through the eyes of individuals (usually prominent or powerful figures). Collective authorship, on the other hand, dispenses with individual psychology and is thus uniquely fitted to present the movements of masses, classes and social groups. Mnouchkine’s company, for instance, uses five or six different actors to play Louis XVI in various different guises and situations; so that it’s impossible for us to identify with him. Arnold , I fear, is still enslaved to the idea of a play as the private property of the author – a strange bourgeois hangover. Mnouchkine points out that she was not allowed to register the play with the Société des Auteurs as the joint work of Le Theatre du Soleil: it had to be attributed to one named person. Thus does the law carry out its appointed duty to keep property private.

  -- Kenneth Tynan diary entry, 17 October 1971

The straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

  -- Tennessee Williams, production notes for The Glass Menagerie (1945)


                                         The Wooster Group’s Production of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carre