barthes and the theatre

Third and final essay intended to accompany Roland Barthes by Mireille Ribière (Philosophy Insights, Humanities-Ebooks, Kindle edition, 2010).

Barthes and the Theatre

by Mireille Ribière

‘At the crossroads of the entire œuvre, perhaps the Theatre.’ Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975)1

‘I have always loved the theatre’

Even before the publication of Writing Degree Zero, which was enthusiastically

reviewed by some of the French press, Barthes was making new headway thanks to two

contributions to Esprit, ‘The World of Wrestling’ (October 1952) and ‘Folies bergères’

(February 1953), which showed their author’s interest in popular entertainment and gave a

foretaste of his future ‘mythologie’ column in Les Lettres nouvelles. Barthes had by now

embarked on his lexicology project at the CNRS, and his so-called ‘Theatre Years’ were

about to begin.

From 1953 to 1960, Barthes wrote over eighty pieces on the theatre. Thirty-five of

these – editorials, reviews, in-depth articles – were contributions to the Théâtre populaire, a

periodical that played a major part in the life and development of French theatre in the 1950s

and early 1960s. Some of Barthes’s theatre writings found their way into Mythologies (1957);

a few others were included in Critical Essays (1964); and three, more literary articles made up

Sur Racine (1963). Because Barthes did not collect his writings on the theatre in a single,

comprehensive book, they were for a long time overshadowed by Mythologies and did not

receive much critical attention until the first volume of his complete works was published in

1993, and his collected writings on the theatre appeared in a paperback edition in 2002. As a

1 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), translated as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Richard Howard, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977, p. 177.

M. Ribière Barthes and the Theatre 2

result, Barthes’s militant stance and role in shaping the editorial policy of Théâtre populaire is

now better understood, and the place of his theatre criticism in his work has been reassessed.2

Although initially Barthes did not play a leading role in the editorial team of the

Théâtre Populaire, his name and that of colleague and friend, Bernard Dort, eventually

became synonymous with the magazine. So much so, that two decades after it ceased

publication, one of its many devoted readers still recalled ‘the sparkling […] articles by

Barthes and Bernard Dort’ and the way the review ‘dealt comprehensively with the actual

situation of the French theatre in a sensitive if somewhat biased manner.’3 And four decades

later, Marco Consilini who discovered Théâtre Populaire when Barthes’s ‘terrific’ articles

were translated into Italian, began his scholarly history of the magazine with: ‘Théâtre

Populaire has become today a mythical review. It was founded in 1953 and ceased

publication in 1964. It represents a lost era, a “golden age” when theatre still played a vital

role in the life of people, when reflecting on dramatic art meant to assume a clear cut position,

to take part in the struggles… to be committed.’4 Ironically what Consolini found in Théâtre

Populaire is precisely what, thirty years earlier, Barthes had been longing for and admiring in

Voltaire, the eighteenth-century French writer: a form of straightforward commitment and a

‘festive style’ born out of the assurance of ‘fighting for a just and natural cause’.5

As would be the case with structuralism and the theory of the Text, Barthes’s

involvement with the French popular theatre movement, one of the most exciting movements

in the history of French theatre, corresponded to its ‘heroic’ years. By the time the movement

began to lose momentum at the end of 1950s, Barthes had already moved on. The whole of

his work, however, bears traces of his passionate interest in the theatre, which seems to have

been shaped by his appreciation of French theatre as a young man in the interwar period.

2 Timothy Scheie, Performance Degree Zero, Roland Barthes and Theatre, Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 3 Harold A. Waters, ‘The Heroic Years of French Social Theatre 1945–1956’, Modern Language Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 1975, p. 42. 4 Marco Consolini, Théâtre Populaire, 1953–1964: Histoire d'une revue engagée, trans. Karin Wackers-Espinosa, Paris, Éditions de l’IMEC, 1998; much of the factual information contained in this chapter originates from this book. 5 ‘Le dernier des écrivains heureux’ (1958), transl. as ‘The Last Happy Writer’, Critical Essays by Richard Howard, Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1972, p. 84–85.


In an article beginning with the sentence: ‘I have always loved the theatre,6 Barthes

traces his keen interest in the theatre back to his teens in Paris, when, despite his poor

circumstances, he attended some of the performances of actors-directors Georges Pitoeff,

Jacques Dullin, Gaston Baty and Louis Jouvet. As the ‘Cartel des quatre’ (or Group of Four),

they had joined forces in 1927 to free their theatres from commercial pressures and protect

their work from the hostility or mere indifference of theatre critics. Having succeeded in

revitalising French theatre, they became the most influential figures of the French stage in the

1930s and their legacy endured for several decades.7

In Barthes’s retrospective analysis of his youthful experience of theatre, we find all

those elements that fired his enthusiasm in the 1950s. Barthes explains that as a young man he

had a particular admiration for Pitoeff’s choice of repertoire and his modern, imaginative

stagings of both classic works and plays by living, innovative playwrights. Dullin also

receives particular praise but as an actor remarkable for the sovereign clarity of his delivery –

‘a clarity full of passion’, not without oddities but devoid of stiffness. ‘I like actors who

always play theirs parts in the same way, if that way is both warm and clear; I do not like

actors who put on an act.8 Like Brecht and many of the artists that Barthes would admire

later, Pitoëff, Jouvet, Vilar and Dullin rejected the notion of expressivity: they did not believe

that an actor should attempt to ‘become’ the character and portray feelings and emotional

states in a realistic fashion, and they deliberately made it difficult for the spectators to identify

with the characters. More generally, Barthes was impressed by the high standards of acting,

production and stage design developed by the Group of Four and their aesthetic and ethical

principles. Despite their differences, they had much in common: theirs was not a theatre of

imitation – theatre was not meant to imitate life – or mere entertainment, but rather a theatre

of revelation, in the service of literature and poetry, whose aim was to bring out the very

essence of the dramatic text. They also shared the social ideals of Firmin Gémier who had

attempted to set up a people’s theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century, and

endeavoured to reach beyond the traditionally middle-class theatre-going public.

6 ‘Témoignage sur le théâtre’, Esprit, May 1965, (Œuvres complètes, Paris: Seuil, 1993–95, vol. 1, p. 1530–1532), which serves as the introduction to the posthumous edition of Barthes writings about the theatre, Écrits sur le théâtre, edited Jean-Loup Rivière (Paris: Seuil, 2002). 7 For further details, see Jacques Guicharnaud and June Becklelman, Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Beckett, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961 and David Whitton, Stage Directors in Modern France, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987, p. 70–123. 8 ‘Témoignage sur le théâtre’ (1965), op. cit.


Yet, if we are to believe Barthes’s claims, his knowledge and understanding of the

work of the leading figures of the French stage of the 1930s had little bearing on his own

praxis of the theatre as a founding member of the Antique Drama Group of the Sorbonne

(Groupe de théâtre antique de la Sorbonne). He recalls that at the time, theatre was less an

aesthetic or intellectual pursuit than a social activity for him: ‘it was perhaps at that time that I

thought least about the theatre.9 Barthes’s youthful experiences of the theatre as a spectator

and as a performer nevertheless informed his subsequent views on the nature of theatre: his

first ever published piece of writing, ‘Culture et tragédie’ (1942), was devoted to tragedy as a

genre and both the Group of Four and Aeshyllus, whose tragedy The Persae he had performed

with his Antique Drama Group in the courtyard of the Sorbonne in 1936,10 are cited as models

in Barthes’s first major piece as a theatre critic published in March 1953 in Maurice Nadeau’s

newly launched literary magazine, Les Lettres nouvelles.

The Popular Theatre Years

Barthes’s first major

piece as a theatre critic was a

review of Jean Vilar’s

production of Henrich von

Kleist’s The Prince of

Homburg first performed at

the Avignon Festival in 1951,

with Gérard Philipe and

Jeanne Moreau, two of the

most popular film actors of

the time, in the leading roles.

Many more reviews of Jean Vilar’s productions would follow.

At the time, Jean Vilar was not a newcomer. Formerly a pupil of Dullin, he was an

actor-director who had established himself in 1945 with T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral,

gone on to create the Avignon Festival, and then been appointed director of the ailing Théâtre

du Palais de Chaillot in 1951. The Avignon Festival had started in September 1947 as an ‘Art

9 Ibid. 10 See the photograph in the opening pages of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, op. cit.


week’, which consisted of an exhibition of contemporary art, concerts of early and

contemporary music, and theatrical performances. Initially, Vilar had been offered the use of

the courtyard at the Palace of the Popes to produce Murder in the Cathedral. Although

daunted at first by the weight of history and sheer size of this heritage site, he soon rose to the

challenge, and instead of playing safe by staging his Parisian success of 1945, proposed a

seven-day festival with three new productions. With the help of a local regiment of army

engineers, a purpose-built platform some fifteen metres wide and seating for up to 3,000

spectators were erected in the courtyard of the Palace of the Popes, so as to convert it into a

vast open-air theatre. Instead of using the medieval architecture as a setting, however, Vilar

turned it into a neutral unifying backdrop while focusing the lighting on the action on stage.

Turning the historic location into a performance space enabled Vilar to develop a production

style that became his hallmark and revolutionized French theatre: ‘Most of his productions

were given on the bare stage with no scenery and only a minimum of purely functional

accessories. They relied entirely on the actors and area lighting to situate the action. Critics

dubbed this the ‘trois tabourets’ style after the production of Richard II where the only objects

on the stage were three stools. But far from being austere, as some critics have suggested,

these productions achieved a visual richness through an imaginative use of lighting and

costume, and were sometimes positively sumptuous.’11

Surveying the deserted courtyard of the Palace

of the Popes on a cold, April day of 1954, during a

short visit to Avignon to attend a meeting of the

Friends of Popular Theatre, a nationwide network of

supporters of Vilar, Barthes explained that he had come

to realize more acutely than ever what popular theatre

was all about, and its appeal. This was a theatre that

placed its trust in man and empowered the spectators.

The open stage stripped to its bare essentials treated

them not as children that needed to be spoon-fed, but as

responsible thinking adults; by appealing to and

stretching their imagination, instead of numbing it with

the gimmicks and familiar stereotypes of conventional bourgeois realism, the Avignon

Festival was an opportunity for all to become actively involved in a festive theatrical event.

11 David Whitton, Stage Directors in Modern France, op.cit., p. 227.


Fundamental to Vilar’s and Barthes’s view of this new theatre and this new audience, as

expressed by Barthes in his 1954 attempts to define what a truly popular theatre might be, was

the notion that avant-garde scenography needs not be hermetic or bereft of entertainment

value, and that it was both misguided and patronizing to assume that working-class people

could not appreciate great works and productions of the highest calibre.12 At the time,

Avignon was no longer the main venue for Vilar’s productions. By the end of the 1940s, the

Avignon festival had become a focus for theatrical experimentation. Its success was such that

it served as a model for those regional directors who were striving, within the wider

framework of an official policy of cultural decentralisation, to create a theatre that combined

moral, social and aesthetic considerations while attracting a broad popular audience. Realizing

that Paris was missing out on exciting developments that managed to combine quality and

popularity, the French government appointed Vilar director of the Palais de Chaillot Theatre

in 1951, thus enabling him to relaunch Gémier’s former Théâtre national populaire as the new

centre of French theatre. The new TNP was to function, in Vilar’s words, as ‘a public service,

just like gas, water or electricity.’

Barthes’s review of the Vilar’s 1952 production of The Prince of Homburg13 in this

vast, unwieldy theatre was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. In what was to become one the

characteristic features of his reviewing style, Barthes began with an incisive attack against

bourgeois theatre, epitomised by the traditional Italianate or ‘picture-frame’ stage cosseted on

three sides and complete with front curtain, footlights and painted backdrop – ‘half sweet

box’, ‘half prison’ – where meaning was served ready-made. In contrast, the stage he

surveyed from the top of the 2,800 seat auditorium, his ‘mountain of Chaillot’, was essential

to the drama: it was an open space with edges blurred by darkness that created a powerful

sense of breadth and depth, reminiscent of the amphitheatre, the sports stadium, or indeed the

wrestling ring which had provided the subject of his earliest ‘mythologie’.

What the state-funded TNP had achieved in more pragmatic, but no less essential

terms for Barthes, was to become a mass audience theatre. At Chaillot the price of tickets was

down, seating allocations were no longer based on the cost of tickets, and the tipping of

ushers was banned. The doors were open to the public from 6.45 pm. onwards, and the

evening performances were eventually brought forward from the habitual 9.00 am. to

12 ‘Pour une définition du théâtre populaire’ (Publi 54, no. 23, Avignon, July 1954), Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 430–431, and ‘Le théâtre populaire d’aujourd’hui’ (in Théâtre de France, vol. IV, Publications de France, December 1954), ibid., p. 442–445. 13 ‘Le Prince de Hombourg’ (Lettres Nouvelles, March 1953), ibid., p. 203–209.


8.00 pm., in consideration of the fact that workers relied on public transport to return home,

and rose early the next day; twice a week there were matinees for students, and week-end

events were organized in working-class suburbs. The programme, which was sold at the door

at a modest price, included the integral text of the play performed on the day.

The printing of this programme had been entrusted to L’Arche, a small publishing

house headed by Robert Voisin. As both publisher of the TNP and treasurer of the Friends of

Popular Theatre, Voisin was keen to defend and promote the TNP; even more so when Vilar

came under attack from both the right and, more surprisingly, the Communist left: while the

former was averse to innovation at the tax-payer’s expense; the latter were accusing him of

reactionary tendencies in his staging of a Büchner’s play about the French Revolution. In

order to support the TNP, Voisin set out in 1953 to create a new bimonthly magazine, Théâtre

populaire, which despite its obvious sympathies eventually functioned independently of Vilar.

It was intended for an amateur readership, constituted initially by the Friends of Popular

Theatre. It was to offer theoretical and in-depth critical articles, but was meant first and

foremost to provide information about current productions and debates. This is why Voisin

chose collaborators who had followed unconventional career paths outside academia. Having

read Barthes’s recent contributions to Esprit and his review of The Prince de Homburg in Les

Lettres nouvelles, Voison drafted him onto the editorial board of the new theatre review,

whose first issue came out in May–June 1953.

As the project pre-dated the constitution of the team, it took a while for the recruits to

forge a common identity. It included, in addition to Barthes, Guy Dumur and Morvan

Lebesque, soon joined by Jean Paris et Jean Duvignaud and later by Bernard Dort. They all

shared Vilar’s utopian vision of a popular theatre with a social and moral agenda. Their

common vision reflected and prolonged the post-war desire to

unite the French nation. However, their passionate interest in

theatre and unanimous support for the TNP cause, displayed in

the four issues for 1953, were not entirely based on the same

premises, and this would eventually lead to disagreements and a

number of rifts.

Barthes’s personal notion of what popular theatre should

be was based, from the first, on his view of Greek tragedy as a

pure form of civic theatre where Entertainment meets


Knowledge. There was nothing psychological nor metaphysical in the conflicts being

dramatized on the antique stage, he explained in the second issue of Théâtre populaire;14

Greek tragedy was exclusively concerned with moral and political questions: Aeschylus’s The

Suppliants debated war and peace, Sophocles’s Antigone the clash between parental law and

civil law; what was at stake was not so much the lives of the protagonists as individuals as the

existence of the City as a whole. Antique theatre relied on the ability of the audience, as

embodied in the chorus, to collectively empathize with the protagonists and reach a catharsis.

That state of emotional release was dependent on the spectators having common values.

Unfortunately nowhere, except perhaps in the sports arena where entertainment was the sole

objective, did Barthes perceive any sense of coming together in contemporary audiences.

Even before joining Théâtre populaire, Barthes was all too conscious of the

limitations of the notion of a popular audience. Who were ‘the people’? The word ‘popular’

implied a theatre based on a broad unified community which was as yet non existent. In his

review of The Prince of Homburg, for instance, Barthes had already remarked that, given

existing social divisions, popular theatre could only be an idealistic avant-garde movement

supported spontaneously by the progressive and impoverished sections of the middle class. He

eventually overcame this difficulty by proposing in the editorial of the fifth issue of Théâtre

Populaire (January/February 1954) that popular theatre be defined in the first instance by

what it was not. It could not be the ‘moneyed’ theatre that reflected and promoted bourgeois

values, and as such could only inspire loathing. What was now being advocated by Barthes

and Bernard Dort, under the name of ‘total critique’, was a critique of bourgeois theatre as a

system. Their critique was to focus not so much on particular plays and performances as on

the relationship between the production and the spectators, History and contemporary society.

No performance could be deemed satisfactory if any single aspect of the production – be it the

venue, play, stage set, costume, acting, sound effects – was seen as conforming to bourgeois

expectations.

Over the following months and years, ‘bourgeois’ came to include not only light

entertainment and conventional mainstream theatre but, despite its content, the post-war

poetico-philosophical theatre of playwrights such as Jean Anouilh, Henri de Montherland,

Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre who had done little to reach new audiences. It also included

the flamboyant, innovative dramaturgy of Jean-Louis Barrault who was accused, among other

things, of pandering to bourgeois aesthetics on account of his choice of venue, his extravagant

14 ‘Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique’ (Théâtre populaire no. 2, Jul.–Aug. 1953), ibid., p. 216.


sets and costumes, and his allowing prestigious actors to overact, putting on brilliant

individual performances that distracted from the overall purport of the plays. Even Vilar’s

social agenda and pragmatic approach were beginning to fall short of the Théâtre populaire’s

idealized vision of theatre. In fact, at times, no-one seemed to be able to live up to the

review’s political, ethical and aesthetic ideals, with one notable exception: playwright and

producer/director Berthold Brecht, whose work ‘bedazzled’ Barthes when the Berliner

Ensemble performed Brecht’s Mother Courage and Kleist’s Broken Pitcher at the Paris

International Theatre Festival in 1954.15 ‘Mutter Courage is an entirely popular work, for it is

a work whose profound intention can be understood only by the people’, wrote Barthes in the

summer of 1954,‘but this edification is matched by delight: the performance proved to us that

this profound criticism has created that theatre without alienation which we had dreamed of

and which has been discovered before our eyes in a single day, in its adult and already

perfected form’.16 While Brecht was a Marxist, his plays were not Marxist as social realism

would have it. He did not set out to present a complete and accurate picture of society, nor did

he use the theatre as a tool to explain history in terms of the class struggle. Instead, he

provoked history by calling for an explanation, but without ever supplying it. Marxism

offered Brecht, as it did Barthes, a framework in which he moved freely. While not ignoring

basic social structures, Brechtian theatre focused on the superstructures, the alienation, the

suffering, the alibis of men and women whose misery stems from a lack of understanding of

the historical forces that carry them forward and define their fate. If only they understood,

they would be able to act. Unfortunately they are blind. What the spectator is given to see is

this blindness. Hence Barthes’s definition of Brecht’s theatre as a ‘theatre of consciousness’,

or rather of ‘nascent consciousness’: ‘the spectacle of unconsciousness is the birth of

consciousness’, and functions as an awakening.17

15 ‘Témoignage sur le théâtre’ (Esprit, 1965), ibid. , vol. 1, p. 1531; see also ‘L’éblouissement’ (Le Monde, 11 March 1971), ibid. , vol. 2, p. 1181–1181. 16 ‘Mère Courage aveugle’ (Théâtre populaire, no 8, Jul.–Aug. 1954), ibid., vol. 1, p. 1200 ; transl. as ‘Mother Courage Blind’ in Critical Essays, op. cit., p. 35–36. 17 ‘Sur “La Mère” de Brecht’ (1960), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 1275; as ‘On Brecht’s Mother’, in Critical Essays, transl. by Richard Howard, op. cit., p. 140.


The Brecht Years

Berthold Brecht (1898–1956)

If 1953 and 1954 can be described as Théâtre populaire’s TNP years, those years

when the editorial line of the review was closest to the Vilar’s ethos or conception of the

theatre, 1955 was their Brecht year and started with a special issue entirely devoted to him.

That year also saw the publication of the first volume of Brecht’s Complete Works by

L’Arche, where Barthes, having failed to have his contract with the Centre National de

Recherche Scientifique renewed, was momentarily employed as literary editor. Under the

leadership of Roland Barthes, Bernard Dort, who had recently joined the editorial team, and

Robert Voisin, Théâtre populaire’s critical approach to theatre became in some respects a

‘systematization of Brecht successful formulae’,18 an increasingly radical stance that would

gradually alienate the support of Barthes’s early co-editors and eventually lead to the

departure of Morvan Lebesque, Jean Paris and Jean Duvignaud.19 Henceforth, Brecht’s ‘epic’

theatre replaced Greek tragedy as the standard against which Barthes measured all theatre.

It must be remembered that, except for The Threepenny Opera (1928) whose success

had made him into a household name before the Second World War, Bertold Brecht’s work

was little known in France in the early 1950s. The Cold War was at its height and he was

considered a dangerous East German Communist, the conservative press going as far as to

describe Vilar’s brave decision to produce Mother Courage and her children at the TNP in

1951 as ‘subversive’ and ‘antipatriotic’. But Vilar’s production was nothing as compared to

that of the Berliner Ensemble in June 1954. Although the Berliner Ensemble’s second

18 Harold A. Waters, ‘The Heroic Years of French Social Theatre 1945–1956’, op. cit., p. 34–44 (p. 40). 19 As explained in Jean Duvignaud, ‘Théâtre populaire : histoire d’une revue’, Magazine littéraire, no. 314 (October 1993), p. 63.


appearance at the Paris International Theatre Festival the following year with The Causasian

Chalk Circle was reviewed enthusiastically by Barthes, ultimately it was their production to

Mother Courage under direction of Brecht that represented for Barthes the perfect fusion of

text and performance, and the epitome of Brecht’s art. For years to come, whether he

discussed stagecraft – acting, set, lighting, costume – or issues of structure an d dramatic

coherence in a play, Barthes would almost inevitably refer to Brecht and his production of

Mother Courage as a model. Brecht’s untimely death from heart failure in 1956 meant that his

production of the play, revived by the Berliner Ensemble in 1957 and captured by the

photographer Roger,20 would remain, in Barthes’s view, the definitive example of what

popular theatre should and could be.

Scenes from Mother Courage and

her children performed in Paris in

1957 by the Berliner Ensemble, and

photographed by Roger Pic.

In 1954 and 1955 alone, Barthes published altogether over 20 pieces on the theatre in

addition to his 24 contributions to Théâtre populaire; by 1956, however, this number had

halved and 1957, the year when Mythologies was published, saw a further decline of his

involvement with the popular theatre movement. By the time Vilar had left the TNP in 196321

and Théâtre populaire had stopped publication as a result of administrative and editorial

difficulties in 1964, Barthes had long ceased to play an active part in the magazine. His last

contribution was published in the autumn of 1960, and henceforth, he would only write

20 See Roland Barthes, ‘Sept photos modèles de Mère Courage’ (1959), in Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 833–847. 21 It must be stressed that Vilar’s withdrawal did not mark the end of the TNP as an institution, far from it. He was succeeded by Georges Wilson, who headed the company until 1972, when the TNP moved to Paris to Lyon and Roger Planchon, whose early productions Barthes had reviewed enthusiastically, took over.


occasionally about the theatre and, with few exceptions, mainly on topics that he had tackled

before: Greek theatre, French classical theatre, Brecht, the avant-garde.

In his introduction to Barthes’s writings for the period 1942–1961, Eric Marty22

remarks on the astonishing verbal violence with which Barthes put forward the ethical and

political views that defined his aesthetics. Anyone first acquainted with him through his later

writings cannot but be surprised by the Micheletian tone of some of Barthes’s unrelenting

attacks against ‘bourgeois theatre’, which induced in him a nausea reminiscent of the physical

revulsion Michelet felt for kings and queens.23 In his preface to Barthes’s collected writings

on the theatre, Écrits sur le théâtre, Jean-Loup Rivière explains that when he approached

Barthes in the late 1970s with the idea of this collected edition, the latter was at pains to

understand Rivière’s youthful enthusiasm for this body of work and why the young generation

might read it with interest.24 Although Barthes agreed to help his former student make a

selection, he expressed a number of reservations – perhaps the same that led him to only

include half-a-dozen of his articles on the theatre in his Critical Essays (1964). Barthes

doubted that reviews discussing the work of long-forgotten stage directors could still be of

interest to contemporary readers. The high-mindedness, ‘obsessive reference to the

bourgeoisie’ and strident militancy that characterized Barthes’s stance and style in those

pieces also made him feel uncomfortable: Jean-Loup Rivière quotes him as saying: ‘the

Wealthy, Money (where did I get that from?).’25 The proselytising zeal and infectious

enthusiasm with which Barthes defended and promoted the théâtre populaire’s cause,

sometimes at the risk of hammering the point home, resulted, however, in extremely

accessible, punchy and witty pieces. This ‘combative’ stance, characteristic of the times,26 can

22 Eric Marty, Roland Barthes, Le Métier d’écrire, Paris: Seuil, 2006, p. 122. 23 Unfortunately the powerful sense of revulsion expressed in “vomir” (vomit, spew up) is somewhat lost in translation: ‘Michelet’s kings and queens thus form a veritable pharmacy of disgust. They are condemned, they are loathed [ils sont vomis]’ (Michelet, Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 297; translated by Richard Howard, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987, p. 95); ‘The theatre that we loath [que nous vomissons] is the theatre of Money’ (‘Editorial’, Théâtre populaire (Jan–Feb 1954), ibid., p. 382; my translation). 24 For further details about this editorial project see Jean-Louis Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography (translated by Sarah Wykes, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994) and Jean-Loup Rivière’s preface to Barthes’s Écrits sur le théâtre (op. cit.), whose publication was postponed and then cancelled following Barthes’ accidental death in March 1980, and finally appeared in 2002. 25 Jean-Loup Rivière, ibid., p. 11 (my translation). 26 See, for instance, Jacques Guicharnaud, then Assistant professor at Yale University, whose tone is not dissimilar: ‘Bourgeois writers and directors, if they are good and conscientious workmen, no more


only make Barthes’s writings on the theatre attractive to twenty-first century readers looking

for ways of making art relevant to politics, as the rise of extremism in all forms and shades,

and concerns over the future of the planet gave a new urgency to the political debate.

In view of Barthes’s growing interest in theatre as a display of signs, rather than as

performance practice, as well as his eventual eschewing of militancy, some have questioned

the depth of his political commitment in the 1950s. True, in 1955, when summoned to declare

whether or not he was a Marxist, following a polemic with Albert Camus, Barthes refused to

answer. To ask such a question was over-simplistic and smacked of MacCarthyism, he

replied, adding that Marxism was ‘not a religion but a method of explanation and of action’

that demanded too much of its practitioners to be treated as just another label.27 True also, in

September 1960, Barthes refused to join the 121 signatories, including his friends Nadeau and

Dort, of ‘The Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War’. However, in

the mid-1950s, at the time when his involvement with theatre was at its most intense, there is

no doubting Barthes commitment to the ideals, if not the practice, of a Marxist revolution: ‘art

can and must intervene in history; […] the theatre must participate in history by revealing its

movement; […] finally, there is no such thing as an ‘essence’ of eternal art, but […] each

society must invent the art which will be responsible for its own deliverance’.28The Sartrian

tone of this statement his unmistakable. Indeed, when Sartre’s satire against the anti-

communist press, Nekrassov, came under ferocious attack in 1955, Barthes defended him

vigorously in Théâtre Populaire. With hindsight, any discussion of Barthes’s political ideals

in the post-war period should perhaps take into account the fact that while he shared them

with those, on the left, who had taken arms against Nazism and Fascism during the World

War II, his personal experience might have been closer to that of their juniors. Like the

younger generation, but by reason of his illness, Barthes had ‘missed’ the opportunity to fight,

and he might have been somehow trying to make up for this by his heightened stance in

support of Marxism.29

deserve praise or blame than the good manufacturer of “period” furniture’ (Yale French Studies, no. 14: ‘Today’s French theatre’, 1954, p. 10). 27 ‘Suis-je marxiste?’ (Les Lettres Nouvelles, Jul–Aug 1955), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 499. 28 ‘The Brechtian Revolution’ (Théâtre Populaire, no. 11, Jan–Feb 1955), ibid., p. 1204; transl. by Richard Howard in Critical Essays, op. cit., p. 38. 29 In his personal memoirs, Gérard Genette, a pupil of Barthes, detects a similar attitude in his own generation (see Bardadrac, Paris: Seuil, coll. ‘Fiction & Cie’, 2006, p. 359); to understand the appeal of Communism in the post-World War II France, it may be worth recalling here that the Communists


Barthes gradual and irrevocable move away from the theatre has puzzled not only his

contemporaries but many of those who have more recently discovered Barthes’s early

writings on the theatre. The various interpretations put forward to date are not necessarily

mutually exclusive.

Friends and critics often refer to Barthes’s ‘intellectual nomadism’, his ability

throughout his writing career to apply his analytical skills to different kinds of aesthetic

objects and cultural products, and to embrace whole-heartedly theoretical models which are

subsequently discarded. What is uncharacteristic here, however, is that whereas Barthes never

relinquished literary works or photography as objects of study when his approach evolved,

there is no new discussion of Western theatre as live performance after 1960. More to the

point, Bernard Dort suggested that Barthes’s desertion from the theatre might be related to the

figure of the body, an interpretation developed more recently by Timothy Sheie: ‘The

conundrum of the live performing body’s “presence” haunts Barthes, not only in his theatre

reviews but throughout his early writings: in his euphoric moments, his discontents, and

finally the abrupt and enigmatic end of his theatre criticism and the striking failure of his

subsequent structuralist phase to accommodate live performance practice in its ambitious

project.’30 Much is made, in this context, of Barthes’s 1954 article on Baudelaire’s projects

for plays, later included in his Critical Essays, which mentions the actor’s ‘disturbing

corporeality’, that is the fascination and uneasiness felt at the sight of the actor’s exposed

body.31

Barthes’s own explanation was that the discrepancy between the theatre for which he

yearned, an utopia only approached by Brecht, and the reality of French theatre from the mid-

1950s onwards, was too great for him to find any kind of aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction

as a theatre goer or critic.32 More generally, by the end of the 1950s, the socio-political

had played an important role in the fight against Nazism and paid a heavy price for it, so that in France, in 1945, a majority of people thought that the Soviet Union, not the Allied forces, had played the decisive role in Hitler’s defeat (see Annie Lacroix-Riz, ‘L’Union soviétique belligérant décisif’, Manière de voir (Le Monde diplomatique), no. 82: ‘Pages d’histoire occultées’, Aug.–Sep. 1985, p. 16: ‘In 1945, 57% of the French considered the Soviet Union as the main winner of World War II, as against 20% in 2004’. 30 Timothy Scheie, Performance Degree Zero, Roland Barthes and Theatre, op. cit., p. 69. 31 ‘Le théâtre de Baudelaire’, Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 1194; as ‘Baudelaire’s theatre’ in A Roland Barthes Reader, A Barthes Reader, edited with an introduction by Susan Sontag, Vintage, 1993 (2000), p. 77. 32 See ‘Témoignage sur le théâtre’ (1965), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 1530–1532.


landscape had changed and it was time for Barthes, a man more prone to boredom and averse

to repetition that most, to move on. The popular theatre movement, whose origins dated back

to the early part of the century, reflected very much the concerns and aspirations of post-war

France and, over the years, the sense of political urgency that characterized that period had

gradually disappeared. The political turmoil caused by the Algerian war had strengthened,

rather than weakened, the conservative right, and led to a weakening of Parliamentary

democracy with the establishment of a presidential regime headed General De Gaulle in 1958.

Moreover France was undergoing an extensive process of social transformation, that the

Marxist and Brechtian models could not quite encompass and that Barthes had tried to address

anew in his monthly ‘mythologies’: ‘Society today is particularly difficult to understand […]

Class problems have become unthinkable in the terms used fifty years ago. We are living in

both a class society and a mass society. The big, immediate problems seem confused. Political

culture itself seems to be at a standstill,’ he stated in 1962. ‘Imagine a mind like Brecht’s

confronting life today; that mind would find itself paralyzed by the diversity of life.’33

Barthes’s theatre years, which have been examined here in their own right for the sake

of clarity, can hardly be separated from the journalistic pieces published monthly in the mid-

fifties and collected in Mythologies. Indeed the breadth and incisiveness of Barthes analyses

of theatre performance are the very qualities that would make Mythologies a best-seller.

Barthes showed an active and acute interest in all genres and aspects of theatre and

performance and wrote with equal gusto about Greek classical theatre, Shakespeare,

seventeenth-century French classical theatre, opera, Chekov, the light comedies performed in

the theatres of the Paris Boulevards and contemporary revolutionary or avant-garde theatre.

And with few exceptions – those pieces that deal more specifically with the debates of the

time such as the cultural policy of the French government – his reviews and in-depth articles

raise issues that are fundamental to what is now call ‘performance practice’. By going from

the particular to the general, he succeeded in articulating a penetrating and thought-provoking

critique of conventional drama, and demonstrated how all aspects of production partake of

meaning. Many decades later, he could still be praised by theatre specialists34 for his

33 ‘Les Choses signifient-elles quelque chose’ (Le Figaro littéraire, October 13, 1962), ibid., p. 979–980; as ‘Do Things mean something’, The Grain of the Voice, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, op. cit., 1985, p. 9. 34 See Patrice Pavis, ‘The state of current theatre research’, Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliquée, volume 1, no. 3, 1997, p. 203–230 (p. 204).


‘synthetic approach to performance’, which ‘underlines the main structure of a performance

while avoiding a fragmented perception of it’ and whose appeal stems from ‘its breadth of

vision, its precision and the compromise it managed to find between meticulous observation

and interpretation.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Roland Barthes Reader, edited with an introduction by Susan Sontag, London:Vintage, 1993 (2000). BARTHES Roland, Critical Essays, Richard Howard (transl.), Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1972. —, Écrits sur le théâtre, Jean-Loup Rivière (ed.), Paris, Seuil, 2002.

—, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Seuil, 1993–1995, 3 vols. —, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (transl.), Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. —, The Grain of the Voice, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

CALVET, Jean-Louis, Roland Barthes: A Biography, Sarah Wykes (transl.), Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

CONSOLINI Marco, Théâtre Populaire, 1953–1964: Histoire d'une revue engagée, Karin Wackers-Espinosa (transl.), Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC, 1998.

DUVIGNAUD Jean, ‘Théâtre populaire : histoire d’une revue’, Magazine littéraire, no. 314, October 1993.

GENETTE Gérard, Bardadrac, Paris: Seuil, 2006. GUICHARNAUD Jacques and June BECKLELMAN, Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Beckett, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961. MARTY Eric, Roland Barthes, Le Métier d’écrire, Paris: Seuil, 2006.

PAVIS Patrice, ‘The state of current theatre research’, Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliquée, volume 1, no. 3, 1997.

RIBIÈRE Mireille, Roland Barthes, Humanities-Ebooks (Philosophy Insights), Kindle edition, 2010.

SCHEIE Timothy, Performance Degree Zero, Roland Barthes and Theatre, Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

WATERS Harold A., ‘The Heroic Years of French Social Theatre 1945–1956’, Modern Language Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 1975.

WHITTON David, Stage Directors in Modern France, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.

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