Jean-Louis Barrault’s Three Kafkas. “Cahiers Renaud-Barrault” (1957, 1961, 1965)

Abstract

The «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault». Four Studies for a Survey. Dossier edited by Cecilia Carponi, Samantha Marenzi, Francesca Romana Rietti. Includes contributions by: Cecilia Carponi, Samantha Marenzi, Vincenzo Mazza, Francesca Romana Rietti, Daniele Seragnoli

The Dossier offers a first survey of the «Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud-Jean-Louis Barrault» (from 1960 «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault»), a French theatre journal published in Paris between 1953 and 1988, first by Julliard and later by Gallimard. The house organ of one of the most significant companies of the second half of the twentieth century, the «Cahiers» accompanied the life of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault (1946-1991) across one hundred and fifteen issues, gathering writings of a markedly heterogeneous nature: essays, rehearsal diaries, testimonies, correspondence, unpublished documents and drawings, photographs. It is a publication at once imposing and surprisingly marginal within theatre studies. Taking the journal not merely as an object and source of study but also as a critical device, the Dossier sets out to show how it elaborates, transmits and redefines theatrical practices and genealogies. Starting from the figure of its founder, Jean-Louis Barrault, the four essays examine individual issues of the journal as lenses through which to read the director’s continuing dialogue with his theatrical origins, together with his complex relationship with literary culture, at the crossroads of playwriting, directing and scenic writing. They address four nuclei: the teaching of Charles Dullin, the complex theatrical legacy of Antonin Artaud, the influence of Jacques Copeau, and Barrault’s three Kafka productions.

Daniele Seragnoli’s essay, In the Shadow of the Master: Charles Dullin in the «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault», is devoted to the presence in the journal of Charles Dullin, le jardinier, Barrault’s first and undisputed master, of whom the pupil retained throughout his life an indelible memory, bound up with an education of the actor – human and ethical as much as technical – absorbed “by osmosis” at the school of the Atelier in the early 1930s. Following the rediscovery and publication in 1954 of À la recherche de Smerdiakov, Dullin’s early text on the construction of character, two issues of the «Cahiers» were devoted to the master’s figure and work, both on the occasion of Barrault’s revivals of his “memorable” productions of 1928: Volpone, after Ben Jonson, in 1955, and Les Oiseaux, after Aristophanes, in 1985, amid the many celebrations of the centenary of Dullin’s birth. Drawing on living testimonies, documents, critical writings and Dullin’s own texts, the essay analyses the two circumstances, showing how they offer not a generic homage but material for interpretative and historiographical reflection on Dullin’s work as actor and director, on the identity and character of the «Cahiers», and on Barrault’s own artistic and cultural personality.

Samantha Marenzi, in Artaud in the «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault». The Dialogue with the Ancestors and the Force of a Latent Theatre, traces the presence of Antonin Artaud in the journal and in the invisible strata of the theatre animated by Barrault. Artaud had been a point of reference for him in the 1930s, and his legacy as a master who transformed the theatre without producing performances found a privileged space in the «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault», which paid tribute to him in 1958, ten years after his death, with a monographic issue destined for a new version a decade later. Amid the chorus of tributes arising within the literary journals, the homage of the «Cahiers» returned Artaud to the field of theatre.

Cecilia Carponi’s essay, Cloaks and Omissions. Le Viol de Lucrèce in the «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault», takes as its object of study the issue publi-shed in 1961 on the occasion of the staging at the Odéon of Le Viol de Lucrèce by André Obey. The issue omits any reference to the play’s first production, staged in 1931 by the Compagnie des Quinze – the company formed by Copeau’s pupils – under the direction of Michel Saint-Denis, yet seen by a young Barrault, who had been dazzled by it to the point of recalling it as one of his greatest “joys of the theatre”. Starting from this erasure, the essay brings to light the posture through which the journal constructs an unmediated filiation between Copeau and Barrault.

Vincenzo Mazza, in Jean-Louis Barrault’s Three Kafkas. «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault» (1957, 1961, 1965), gives an account, through three thematic issues of the journal, of Barrault’s thirty-year relationship with the author of The Metamorphosis. The French director staged The Trial and The Castle, and adapted for the stage Kafka’s early, unfinished novel Amerika. The three «Cahiers Renaud-Barrault» devoted to Kafka were not merely an opportunity to promote the company’s productions: they gathered a significant number of essays revealing the growing interest of critics, in France and beyond, in the writer. The 1957 issue, in particular, returns to the ambitious project of the Procès which Barrault had realised ten years earlier in collaboration with André Gide, opening the 1947/1948 season at the Théâtre Marigny.