Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Department of English Literature and Culture School of English The Theatre of the Director-Auteur: Text, Form and Authorship by Avra Sidiropoulou A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty In Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION: Auteurism: A New Theatre for a Changed Perception of the World 1 Contemporary Auteur Scholarship and personal contribution 9 Methodology 14 Chapter Breakdown 19 CHAPTER ONE: The Rise of the Modern Auteur 1.1 The early director-producer 23 1.2 The director’s new role 27 1.3: The Significance of the Performance text and the Legacy of 51 Early Experimentalists on the “écriture” of contemporary auteurs CHAPTER TWO: Artaud and his Legacy 2.1. Rapture and Utopia 57 2.2. Myth and Metaphysics 60 2.3. Representation, mediation and interpretation. The spectator’s 66 new role 2.4. Renunciation of verbal language and the new mise-en-scène 77 2.5. Artaud’s Legacy 87 CHAPTER THREE: Beckett’s Later Drama 3.1. In quest of a new form 92 3.2. Beckett as director and the question of authorship 98 3.3. Stage Directions and the languages of staging 105 3.4. Lighting, Set, Movement and Costume 108 3.5. Structure and Characterisation 117 3.6. The sensory image 122 3.7. Technology 126 CHAPTER FOUR: Auteur Practice Directors’ Method 4.1.1: Creating an autonomous universe on stage: self- 131 collaboration, recycling, and Gesamtkunstwerk 4.1.2: Activating the Creative Impulse and Ensemble Work 146 4.1.3: Manipulating emotional involvement: alienation and 150 festivity Creative Sources of auteur performance 4.2.1: Devised theatre 156 Case Study: Complicité’s Μnemonic 162 Case Study: Marmarinos’ National Hymn 167 4.2.2: Adaptation and Re-contextualisation 171 Case Study: Houvardas’ Bérénice and Sara 178 Case Study: Ivo Van Hove’s The Misanthrope 184 4.2.3: Modern (-ised) Myth and Mythologised History 187 Case Study: Brook’s The Mahabharata 191 Case Study: Terzopoulos’ work on Tragedy 197 CHAPTER FIVE: Languages of the Stage: The Means to an End 5.1.1: Image structuration-Framing Devices 204 5.1.2: Time and Rhythm 213 5.1.3: Technology-Mediation 218 5.1.4: The Body as Text 225 5.1.5: Sound as Language 232 5.2: The Pursuit of Beauty and the Loss of Relevance: A Critique 235 CHAPTER SIX: Authorship and Authority: The Conquest of the Text 6.1: New Structures for a Changed World & the Mise-en-Scène as 248 Confrontation Directors Vs Playwrights: A Battle for Supremacy 6.2: The Challenge of Neo-dramatic Writing 261 6.3: The Question of Authorship The Text-less stage and the Ethics of Auteurism 279 AFTERWORD 286 Appendix 287 Bibliography 294 This dissertation is dedicated to my son, Nikiforos, whose birth coincided with the beginning of this research journey and whose smiling face is behind each and every thought put forward on each and every page of this work. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been made possible without the help of a number of people. I would like to extend the warmest thanks to those numerous friends who have encouraged me to embark on this demanding project and have stood by me in the process. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Elizabeth Sakellaridou for all the support and encouragement, together with all the constructive comments and criticism she provided throughout. Her comprehensive expertise has made her guidance invaluable. Moreover, I appreciate our heart-felt sharing of theatre-going experiences and the exchange of ideas and creative input. I am also profoundly grateful to the other two members of my thesis committee, Professor Nikiforos Papandreou and Professor Telemachos Moudatsakis for their valuable suggestions, as well as to Professor Savas Patsalidis for sharing with me his profound knowledge of contemporary American theatre. The research done for the dissertation involved a great deal of work in the U.S. I have been very privileged to recurrently hold long conversations on the nature of auteurism and the future of the theatre with playwright Charles Mee and director Robert Woodruff, both of whom have been a major source of inspiration not only to the writing of this dissertation, but also to the shaping of a personal aesthetic in my directing work as well. Furthermore, I am indebted to my good friend in New York, Mr. Tom Dale Keever, a theatre scholar and practitioner himself, an invaluable source of production history with an insider’s knowledge of the contemporary Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway scene. I cannot thank him enough for sharing it with me, as well as for all the audio-visual material he has provided me with in the course of working on the dissertation. I also appreciate his endless trips to the Butler Library at Columbia University to procure several articles relevant to my research. I also wish to thank my good friend, Alisa Regas, for supporting me in every way possible during my New York trips. Finally, this dissertation would not have been realised without the continuing, tireless support and patience of my family. First of all, I would like to thank my husband, Dimitris, for being there always and surviving it all with me. My gratitude extends to my my parents, Frideriki and Panayiotis and my aunt Dina, for relieving me of all practical burdens to make it possible for me to work. I can never thank all of them enough for their unwavering belief in me at times when I felt my courage failing. I am also highly indebted to my sister Chryssi, whose academic experience and distinguished intellect have been of major help in guiding me through my research and the clarification of my argument. Last but not least, I feel that I need to thank all those imaginative artists working in different parts of the world, whose names may not appear in this dissertation, but whose commitment to a surprising, sincere, as well as profound theatre has helped keep this artform alive. Sidiropoulou 1 INTRODUCTION Auteurism: A New Theatre for a Changed Perception of the World In 1960, Eugene Ionesco likened the avant-garde artist to “an enemy inside a city which he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels.” He argued that like any system of government, “an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system. He is a critic of, and not an apologist for, what exists now” (45). Since the beginnings of the 1960s, the role of the director as maker, creator, ultimately, “author” of the theatre event has been firmly rooted in the reality of the avant-garde stage. Among the most common titles that came to be identified with innovative directors, such as “conceptualist”, formalist, avant-garde artist and scenic writer, the term “director-auteur” has been the most apt. Borrowed from French film criticism, auteurism applies to the work of imaginative directors who adapt/ “play around with” and/or deconstruct the playwright’s original script, or devise their own, developing their own unique style, a trademark that characterises their work. In effect, the concept of the auteur (French name for “author”) emerged with Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 article “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo” in L’Écran Français. The camera, according to Astruc, was the director’s pen, and cinema could provide a potent means of expression, such as writing had been doing for a very long time. Astruc’s ideas were taken on by a number of critics, like André Bazin, and filmmakers, like François Truffaut, who used the French cinema journal Cahiers du cinéma as a forum to voice their iconoclastic ideas on art. In fact, François Truffaut’s revolutionary article in 1954 “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” first introduced the term auteur in the coined phrase “la politique des auteurs”, which celebrated the director’s total control, claiming that he/she was the only person in charge of all Sidiropoulou 2 aesthetic choices in the cinema. Later on, American film critic and writer Andrew Sarris in the U.S. developed the notion of auteurism in his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory” in 1962. For Sarris, a director qualifies for the title “auteur” if and when he/she displays a unique personal technique and consistent style in the work. Sarris’ the American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, quickly became the unofficial “bible” of Auteurism in the cinema. As in film, auteur theory in the theatre ultimately espouses that the director is actually the “author” of the work, leaving a distinctive imprint on a production, which expresses a unique sense of visual style and thematic concerns, consistent across a body of work. It was essentially the film auteur theory of the 1950s that gave the extra (necessary) push from the 1960s on to awakened critical interest in the concept of performance as autonomous text, a text quite separate from the dramatic play which originates in the playwright’s mind and is exhausted on the printed page. Thus, from its inception, the practice of auteurism in the theatre has displayed a thematic, stylistic and methodological consistency, based on the director’s strong personal vision and aesthetic; moreover, it has produced recurring themes, manifested an established technique, and been characterised by the director’s significant degree of control over the process of production. In such way, the works of acclaimed auteur directors are stamped by the personality and artistic vision of their creators, just as recognisable and distinctive as would for example be the paintings of a particular Impressionist, or the scores of a specific Baroque composer.