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Playwrights on Playwriting

Collection of Essays

Edited by Toby Cole with Introduction by John Gassner

Two Laws

By

Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944)

TWO LAWS govern – if I may thus express myself – the eternal status of the playwright.

The first law defines the sad and slightly ridiculous position of the playwright toward those of his characters he has created and given to the theatre.  Just as a character, before being played by an actor, is docile toward the author, familiar, and a part of him – as you may judge from my own creations – so once he appears before the audience he becomes a stranger and indifferent.  The first actor who plays him represents the first in a series of reincarnations by which the character draws further and further away from his creator and escapes him forever.

In fact, this is true of the play in its entirety.  From the first performance on, it belongs to the actors.  The author wandering in the wings is a kind of ghost whom the stagehands detest if he listens in or is indiscreet.  After the hundredth performance, particularly if it is a good play, it belongs to the public.  In reality the only thing the playwright can call his own is his bad plays.  The independence of those of his characters who have succeeded is complete: the life they lead on road tours or in American is a constant denial of their filial obligations.  So while the hero of your novels follows you everywhere, calling you “father” or “papa,” those of your stage characters you chance to meet – as I have – in Carcassonne or Los Angeles, have become total strangers to you.

It was largely to punish them for this independence that Goethe, Claudel, and so many other writers wrote a new version for these favorite heroines – but in vain.  The new Marguerite, the new Helene, or the new Violaine left their creators just as quickly.  Once I was at a performance of Claudel’s Tidings Brought to Mary.  That day, at least, this law operated in my favor: I noted that the play belonged more to me than to Claudel.

How many playwrights are forced to seek in an actor or actress the memory or reflection of their sons and daughters who have escaped; just as, in daily life, other parents look for the same thing in a son-in-law or daughter-in-law….On the terrace of the Café Weber, in the lobby during a dress rehearsal, on the lawn of the country house of a noted actress, how often we have met such couples: Feydeau and Mme. Cassive, Jules Renard and Suzanne Desprez, Maurice Donnay and Rejane.  The woman slightly inattentive, the man alert, reminiscing, chatty, full of questions, was talking of his absent “child”.

The second law, a corollary and inverse of the first, defines the wonderful position of the playwright toward his era and its events, and indicates his role therein.  Here, if I wish to be sincere, I must strip myself and my colleagues of all false modesty.  The figure who in the play is merely a voice, without personality, without responsibility, implacable, but a historian and an avenger, exists in a given era in flesh and blood: the playwright himself.  Of all writers in the theatre worthy of the name, one should be able to say when they appear: Add the Archangel!  It is futile to believe that a year or a century can find the resonance and elevation ultimately befitting the emotional debate and efforts represented by each period of our passage on earth, if it does not have a spokesman of its tragedy or drama in order to reach its heights or plumb its depths.  Tragedy and drama are the confession which humanity – this army of salvation and ruin – must also make in public, without reticence and in loudest tones, for the echo of its voice is clearer and more real than its voice itself.  Make no mistake about it.  The relationship between the theatre and religious ceremonial is obvious; it is no accident that in former times plays were given on all occasions in front of our cathedrals.  The theatre is most at home on the open space in front of a church.  That is what the audience goes to, on gala evenings in the theatre: toward the illuminated confession of its petty and giant destinies.

Calderon is humanity confessing its thirst for eternity, Corneille is dignity, Racine is weakness, Shakespeare its appetite for life, Claudel its state of sin and salvation, Goethe its humanity, Kliest its vividness.  Epochs have not come to terms with themselves unless crowds, dressed in their most striking costumes of confession, so as, to increase the solemnity of the occasion, come to these radiant confessionals called theatres and arenas, to listen to their own avowals of cowardice and sacrifice, hatred and passion.  And unless they also cry: Add the prophet!

For there is no theatre save that of divination.  Not that false divination which gives names and dates, but the real thing: the one which reveals to men these amazing truths – that the living must live, that the living must die, that autumn follows summer, spring follows winter, that there are four elements, happiness, millions of catastrophes, that life is a reality, that it is a dream, that man lives by peace, that man lives by blood; in short, what they will never know.

This is theatre: the public recall of those incredible splendors whose visions disturb and overwhelm audiences by night.  But – and this it is which heartens me – already by dawn the lesson and the memory are diluted, no doubt in order to make the writer’s mission a daily one.  Of such is the performance of a play: the sudden awareness in the spectator of the permanent state of this living and indifferent humanity – passion and death.

Translated by Joseph M. Bernstein

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