Abstract
This article deploys the production history of Ionesco’s most famous play, La Cantatrice chauve, to interrogate a theory of the failure of the avant-garde propounded by cultural theorists. This play has been produced without interruption by the dedicated cast of the small Left Bank Huchette theatre in Paris since 1957. I argue that, while the Huchette’s ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ has become a tourist commodity for many theatregoers, the specific circumstances of this production history allow us to see the show not as a hegemonic, de-politicising cultural institution, which a theory of the failed avant-garde would have us believe, but as an impetus for aesthetic experimentation with La Cantatrice chauve beyond the Huchette’s walls. As such, the article propounds a continued ‘spirit of the avant-garde’ that inheres within La Cantatrice chauve.
This article examines the extraordinarily long and prolific performance history of Eugène Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (1950), one of the best-known plays of the 1950s dramatic avant-garde that Martin Esslin named the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. Together with Ionesco’s La Leçon, the play has been staged at the Parisian Left Bank Théâtre de la Huchette most nights since 1957. This has earned ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ a place in history (and the Guinness Book of Records) as the longest-running dramatic production in the same theatre, and only Agatha’s Christie’s The Mousetrap (which premiered in 1952 in the West End) surpasses it as the longest-running theatrical production of all time. The Huchette’s La Cantatrice chauve, which sets the action in a stuffy household in Victorian Britain, stands alongside a huge number of creative mises en scène that have aimed to revitalise the play both in France and worldwide. Taking the dual production history of Ionesco’s most famous avant-garde play (that is to say, the Huchette production and its creative competitors), this article interrogates Peter Bürger’s (1984 [1974]) seminal theory of the avant-garde. Bürger argues that the historical avant-garde failed, politically speaking, by dint of its commodification. I suggest, in this article, that the staying power of La Cantatrice chauve exceeds Bürger’s theory and disrupts his notion of the purported failure of the avant-garde artwork. I will pinpoint what I call a retained ‘spirit of the avant-garde’ in La Cantatrice chauve, a provocative edge that may still push aesthetic norms, which is a form of challenge that critics have identified at the heart of vanguard politics.
On the absurdist avant-garde and its death
In its assault on the theatrical standards of a linear plot and characters with psychological depth, La Cantatrice chauve was immediately categorised as ‘avant-garde’ drama when it debuted in the Théâtre des Noctambules in 1950. The play is essentially a comedy in which two characterless couples, the Smiths and the Martins, engage in circuitous conversation; they are joined by a not much more lucid maid named Mary and a fireman, who questions the extraneous title of the play, the enigmatic cantatrice chauve, much to the other characters’ exasperation (‘Silence général, gêne’ (Ionesco, 1954: 92)). The ‘conversation’ of the two British couples is littered with inanities (‘un médecin consciencieux doit mourir avec le malade s’il ne peuvent pas guérir ensemble’ (1954: 45)), clichés (‘Charity begins at home’ (1954: 95)), and non-sequiturs (‘l’automobile va très vite, mais la cuisinière prépare mieux les plats (1954: 95)). The play culminates in a complete collapse of communication, as the characters recite a series of disjointed words and letters. There is no resolution of the drama. The play’s final moment returns us to the start of the dramatic action with the roles of the Smiths and Martins reversed.
As Richard Murphy describes, ‘the avant-garde’s attack is directed more than anything against the bourgeois construction of social reality in all its guises’ (1999: 261). Avant-gardists attacked aesthetic norms, because they believed that institutionally sanctioned art was central to shaping an apprehension of reality that supports dominant ideologies. As such, aesthetic politics and revolutionary politics are united in the principle of the avant-garde. Renato Poggioli traces this unification back to one of the first artistic deployments of the term ‘avant-garde’ by proponents of the Decadent movement at the end of the nineteenth century, following the Paris Commune of 1871 and the short-lived journal La Révue indépendante, founded c. 1880 (Poggioli, 1968: 11). Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve engaged in this vanguard-inflected battle with prevailing artistic norms, as it aimed to provide a satirical critique of ‘la mentalité petite bourgeoise’ (Ionesco, 1966: 253) conveyed in the robotic actions of the Smiths and the Martins by means of a ‘théâtre abstrait’ and ‘drame pur’ (Ionesco, 1966: 255). This form of drama pitted itself against the canonised theatre of the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis clos and Albert Camus’s Caligula (both 1944). The prevailing theatrical current did little to question a theatrical traditionalism stretching back to Aristotle that privileged the unity of time, space and plot, as well as a psychologically consistent view of dramatic characters.
La Cantatrice chauve and Ionesco’s oeuvre more broadly situate themselves in Martin Esslin’s classification of ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ uniting predominantly immigrant playwrights such as Arthur Adamov, Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Fernando Arrabal, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee. This avant-garde, which Sartre neatly glossed as ‘le refus de la psychologie, le refus de l’intrigue, le refus de tout réalisme’ (1973: 206), issued an unprecedented challenge to the establishment by stripping the theatrical medium down to its barest components of théâtralité. According to Esslin, the Absurdist movement explored through this minimal form of theatre the bleak ‘absurdity’ of the human condition in the wake of two world wars. Sartre and Camus had successfully taken up the existential issue in their philosophical treatises but had failed to do so in any compelling way in their theatre (Esslin, 1961: 24–5).
The Theatre of the Absurd was immediately linked to what critics commonly argued to be the first avant-garde play, Alfred Jarry’s succès de scandale, Ubu roi, which premiered in Paris in 1896. Jarry’s satirical play depicted the eponymous Polish tyrant, who famously utters a thinly disguised French expletive ‘Merdre!’ at every opportunity. In a similar way to the Absurdists’ attack on Aristotelian precepts half a century later, Jarry’s play shook the fin-de-siècle theatrical establishment, then dominated by realism and the idea of the ‘well-made play’ (promoted, for instance, by the theatre of Aléxandre Dumas fils and Émile Augier). Ubu roi upset the ideologies and bourgeois morality of the theatre-going public of the late nineteenth century in its characterisation of the royal hero – a status he gives himself – as grotesque, uncouth and irrational. Leonard Cabell Pronko describes La Cantatrice chauve as recalling Jarry’s ‘grotesqueness of … exaggeration’, ‘simplicity of characterisation’ and ‘free linguistic invention’ (1962: 6). La Cantatrice chauve and Absurdist theatre more generally constitute part of the lineage of the dramatic avant-garde that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century. Non-realist, anti-rationalist experimentation underpins this lineage which includes, but is not limited to, Jarry, the ‘nonsense poems in dialogue form’ of Dadaist theatre (Esslin, 1961: 367), Meyerhold’s and Eisenstein’s montage-saturated theatre, surrealist drama such as Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, the Symbolist experimentation of Maurice Maeterlinck, and Artaud’s theory of a hypnotic théâtre de la cruauté.
Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve, when it was first staged in the 1950s, entered the Parisian theatre scene as a successor to these forerunners of the dramatic avant-garde. However, as the Huchette performances wore on, it began to outlive its avant-garde status. Critics charted the transition of La Cantatrice chauve and its playwright from the margins of culture to a modern form of theatrical classicism. This trajectory culminated in 1970 with Ionesco’s accession to the Académie Française, but as early as 1964 one journalist remarked that ‘la pièce est devenue une véritable institution’ at the Huchette (Le Figaro, 1964). By 1972, another journalist asserted that the play ‘deviendra centenaire et entrera à la Comédie-Française. N’a-t-elle pas déjà fait entrer son auteur à l’Académie [Française]?’ (Elle, 1972). Likewise, journalist Nancy Bachène observed, in 2002, that ‘au théâtre de la Huchette, Ionesco, l’avant-gardiste d’autrefois est devenu un classique’ (2002). Scholarly criticism supports this history. Rosette Lamont remarks that:
[La Cantatrice chauve] … has become one of the great modern classical works in France, recommended viewing for lycée classes. It is ironic that Ionesco, an enfant terrible, is now enthroned in the pantheon of assigned authors. No play has had a longer run, nor been performed in so many countries. Once considered difficult, it has proved that its appeal is universal. (1993: 48)
These comments illustrate what Paul Mann calls a pronouncement of the ‘death’ of the avant-garde work, which, in this very invocation, also denotes a form of the avant-garde’s discursive ‘recuperation’. He argues that ‘in late avant-garde discourse recuperation takes on an especially fatalistic tone, as if the absorption of any given movement [into the institution] were driven by natural forces’ (1991: 15). Ionesco himself articulated the inevitability of the disappearance of the avant-garde when he stated that ‘l’avant-garde ne peut être généralement reconnue qu’après coup lorsqu’elle aura réussi … lorsqu’elle est devenue arrière-garde’ (1966: 77). Cultural theorist of the avant-garde Peter Bürger has a particularly pessimistic view of the avant-garde’s institutionalisation. He equates it with the artwork’s commodification and argues that the absorption into the mainstream negates the avant-garde work’s subversive gesture, becoming the ‘inauthentic’ ‘neo-avant-garde’ (1984: 53). The principle of the avant-garde bears the same logic as ‘commodity aesthetics’ at this point. In their aesthetic depredation of the cultural institution, avant-gardists aimed to destroy the elitist autonomy of art, such as is to be found in high modernism’s claims of ‘l’art pour l’art’ (Murphy, 1999: 258). Bürger describes the avant-gardist’s gesture in Hegelian terms as a ‘sublation’ or synthesis of art and lived reality, or what he terms the ‘praxis of life’. However, commodity aesthetics, continues Bürger, also aims to integrate art and the praxis of life. In our consumption of vanguard art as a valuable ‘commodity’, ‘art becomes practical but it is an art that enthrals’ (1984: 54). This marks a ‘false sublation’ of avant-garde art for this critic.
Bürger’s theory would suggest that La Cantatrice chauve lost its capacity for a politics of the avant-garde in its institutionalisation at the Huchette. Certainly more broadly, by 1971 Esslin had lamented the reception of ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ in similar terms of a commodification of the avant-garde. The term had become ‘a reality as concrete and specific as a branded product of the detergent industry’ (1971: 179). In fact, the rubric of ‘Absurdism’ precipitated the commercial success and subsequent commodification of many plays other than La Cantatrice chauve. Genet’s Les Nègres was staged off Broadway a remarkable 1408 times between 1961 and 1964 (Kabatchnik, 2010: 725). Beckett’s En attendant Godot has been staged innumerable times all over the world. One of its most recent incarnations starred prominent actors Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart at the prestigious Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2008 (Stern, 2009: 305). Even before Esslin’s notion of Absurdism became common currency, Edward Albee’s first play Zoo Story debuted in the United States off Broadway in 1959, but it was later hailed as ‘the first theatrically intelligent attempt at adapting absurdist idioms to American themes’ (Vanden Heuvel, 1991: 28–9).
La Cantatrice chauve is therefore in good company in its commercial longevity and swift institutionalisation. However, a closer inspection of the history of Ionesco’s first play leads us to question the political ‘failure’ of the avant-garde described by Bürger. I do not wish to argue here that Ionesco’s play is not a ‘modern classic’. 1 However, I do wish to assert that critics’ pronouncements on the death of the avant-garde within La Cantatrice chauve are overstated. A ‘spirit of the avant-garde’ – that is, a politics of aesthetic subversion of the institution – can still be detected in the extraordinary performance history of the play.
More broadly, my analysis has implications for the contemporary political assessment of the Theatre of the Absurd, which seems apposite just the other side of the half-century anniversary of Esslin’s coining of the term in 1961. We could, for instance, draw parallels between La Cantatrice chauve and Genet’s Les Nègres, as the latter’s success off Broadway in the 1960s is coupled with experimental mises en scène such as Excalibah and Ultz’s adaptation of the play to rap lyrics at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2007 (Logan, 2007). As Tom Bishop states, what was extraordinary about the Absurdist theatre was that ‘it was an immensely successful avant-garde … It is rare for an avant-garde to impose itself so thoroughly and for the experimentalists in revolt to become so quickly the established figures of an art form’ (2007: 7–8). Bishop laments the lack of a subsequent avant-garde that could match up to the challenges issued by the movement in its heyday. 2 I want to take Bishop’s contention further and recapture a contestatory ‘spirit of the avant-garde’ that still resonates in the case of La Cantatrice chauve, and that by extension could potentially still inhere within many other examples of the Theatre of the Absurd. In the following, I elaborate on the history of the record-breaking stint of La Cantatrice chauve at the Théâtre de la Huchette, in order to make two points: first, that the form of institutionalisation of the play is more complicated than Bürger’s theory would allow; and, second, that this unique form of institutionalisation has acted as an impetus for experimental reinvigorations of Ionesco’s play (explored in the third part of the article).
The Huchette hit
Le théâtre de la Huchette est l’une des plus petites salles de Paris et l’une des plus connues au monde. Le secret de sa notoriété … ? Deux pièces d’Eugène Ionesco à l’affiche depuis un demi-siècle, La Cantatrice chauve et La Leçon, qui ont attiré plus d’un million et demi de spectateurs. (Phélip, 2007: back cover)
Founded in 1948 by Georges Vitaly and Marcel Pinard, the Huchette theatre was in existence for nine years before ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ set up permanent residence in 1957. Despite two previous productions of Bataille’s La Cantatrice chauve in 1950 and 1952–3 that had garnered only a lukewarm reception, the 1957 version was an immediate hit with the stars of the day. Édith Piaf (who attended twice), Sophia Loren and Jean Renoir counted themselves among the highest profile attendees of the spectacle (Phélip, 2007: 95). The cast of the dual production went on a very successful tour of the United States in 1962 and Japan in 1967, which promoted the theatre’s renown on an international level (2007: 111–15).
The Huchette was therefore made famous by ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ just as much as the theatre provided the leverage necessary for La Cantatrice chauve (and La Leçon) to enter the canon as a modern classic. This interdependency of the play and the theatre diverges considerably from Bürger’s description of the absorption of the avant-garde into the institution. Using the example of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), Bürger charts the trajectory of the avant-garde critique of the institution of art – Duchamp’s piece is no more than a signed urinal that claims artistic status – to its progressive absorption into the mainstream. Duchamp’s artistic transformations of everyday objects such as urinals and bottle driers eventually became accepted as art by the institution. Bürger asserts that ‘once the signed bottle drier has been accepted as an object that deserves a place in a museum, the provocation no longer provokes; it turns into its opposite’ (1984: 52).
La Cantatrice chauve, while made famous by the Huchette signature production, falls outside Bürger’s descriptions of the avant-garde-cum-mainstream artwork. Bürger envisages the absorption of the vanguard into a pre-existing institution, the museum. In 1957 the tiny Left Bank space of the Huchette could hardly have claimed the kind of pre-established institutional status that Bürger supposes. In a postscript to his book, the critic concedes that he had concentrated on the ‘institutional frame’ defined predominantly as ‘aesthetic theory’ and that he had ‘underestimated’ ‘the importance that physical institutions such as school, university, academies, museums, etc. had for the functioning of art’ (1984: 98). Therefore, two things are meant by ‘institution’: the physical locale where the artwork is exhibited as a culturally sanctioned piece of art; and the dominant critical discourses on art that propel the work’s integration into the canon by shaping modes of its reception to fit the parameters of the institution. Bürger’s example of choice, Duchamp’s Fountain, has been integrated into both: it has been displayed at the Pompidou Centre and the Tate Modern, among other galleries; it has also been accepted by dominant critical discourse as one of the most influential works of all time (BBC News, 2004).
La Cantatrice chauve, I would argue, has been subjected to the latter discursive form of canonisation but exceeds the physical kind of institutionalisation under-investigated by Bürger. Dominant discourse has secured the position of Ionesco’s play within the parameters of Absurdism. As early as 1959, Serge Doubrovsky described Ionesco’s plays such as La Cantatrice chauve as ‘the comic of absurdity’, and he praised Ionesco and Beckett for conveying a ‘genuine experience of the absurd’ in ‘creat[ing] forms that are not those of rational discourse’ (1959: 3–4). Forty years later, Absurdism has become de rigueur in journalists’ accounts of ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’, as the following illustrates: ‘Mentionné dans les guides étrangers, le spectacle est devenu l’incontournable étape des touristes theatrophiles, amusés de découvrir ici les premières œuvres du maitre de l’absurde dont la notoriété a passé les frontières’ (France Soir, 1999).
This demonstrates not only the circumscription of the Huchette production within a canonised principle of Absurdism, it also brings into relief the eminently marketable quality of this discourse. This journalist’s observations serve to illustrate Bürger’s theory of the easy equation between the absorption of the avant-garde into ‘aesthetic theory’ and commodification.
‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ is in fact attended by a considerable number of current and former students of Ionesco who most likely have a knowledge of this dominant discourse of Absurdism. In an interview that I conducted with Gonzague Phélip and the director of the Huchette, Jean-Noël Hazemann, the former estimated that 60 per cent of their audiences consisted of lycée students whose baccalauréat programme has included both La Leçon and La Cantatrice chauve since 1975 (Blume, 1979). 3 Archived correspondence, released in 2012 as part of the BNF’s celebration of the Huchette theatre, reveals that international students also make up a significant proportion of attendees of ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’. 4 Group bookings, each time filling up about a third of the 86-seat theatre, were recorded throughout the 1980s and 1990s from high schools in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and the United States. 5 According to Hazemann, former students (both anglophone and francophone) constitute another significant proportion of the audience. As Nate Johnson remarks, ‘For many Anglophones like myself for whom learning French and reading Ionesco in high school were part of the same process, a pilgrimage to La Huchette is a rite of passage’ (1997: personal communication from Gonzague Phélip).
A large proportion of the Huchette’s audiences are likely to be familiar with the dominant discourse of Absurdism and influenced by it, which would correspond to Bürger’s description of the ubiquity of ‘aesthetic theory’ in a process of institutionalisation. However, ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ exceeds the inscription of the avant-garde within the pre-established museum space also outlined by this critic. Although the Huchette theatre enjoyed some success with critics prior to 1957 – in particular with the plays directed by Georges Vitaly (such as Audiberti’s La Fête noire in 1948) (Phélip, 2007: 25) – the theatre was little known and lived through precarious years prior to the inauguration of ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’. The Huchette could in no way have been described as a theatrical ‘institution’, a label that we would ascribe to, say, the Comédie Française in Paris or the National Theatre in London. Indeed, it was Ionesco’s oeuvre that made this theatre famous among Parisians, as a number of additional plays by the Romanian playwright such as Victimes du devoir (in 1952) and Le Tableau (in 1955) were put on there prior to 1957. Phélip dubs the years preceding 1957 ‘les années incertaines’ (2007: 57), and identifies a distinct cooling of critics towards the theatre at times when Ionesco’s experimental plays were not being staged (2007: 78). This was, therefore, by no means a theatre that was an established home of theatrical classics. As a corollary, the housing of La Cantatrice chauve at the Huchette could be said to contravene the paradigm of the absorption of the avant-garde into an established museum space laid out by Bürger. On the contrary, the Huchette gained its reputation as a locus of Ionesco’s vanguard experiments.
To put it simply, our consideration of the institutionalisation of this play would be impoverished if we did not pay attention to the specificities of the Huchette’s history. In particular, the precarious nature of ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ over the years must be taken into account. The show has not been as profitable as we might expect upon reading Bürger’s description of the commodified avant-garde. One major blow to the production came in 1975 when the Huchette’s owner Marcel Pinard died and his successor (his son Guy) pushed to shut down the theatre in order to open what he had hoped would be a more profitable restaurant or nightclub (Phélip, 2007: 128). The cast of the production fought for years to contest this, acting, as the administrator at the time Françoise Alessandri describes, as ‘des squatters’ in a building that was not their own (Acte I, 1986). In 1985, the actors and crew had saved up enough money to buy the business from Pinard. A ‘coopérative de comédiens’ has managed ‘le Spectacle Ionesco’ ever since this turbulent period, but as Alessandri noted, the theatre risks perpetual bankruptcy as it is difficult to turn a profit from such a small-scale organisation (Acte I). Even today, Phélip describes it as ‘toujours fragile’. 6 Despite a boost in ticket sales in 2007 when the theatre celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’, there has been a steady decline in the number of theatregoers visiting the production. Ionesco’s oeuvre may still serve to attract visitors to the theatre, but it has been the cast’s and crew’s tireless efforts to preserve ‘Le Spectacle Ionesco’ that have kept the Huchette going. As Johnson observed about Nicolas Bataille, for instance, ‘Few people who’ve been at the job for so many years have such obvious affection for their work’ (1997: personal communication from Gonzague Phélip).
Given this history, it would seem that the Huchette begins to approximate David Graver’s (2000) description of the prototypical avant-garde theatre and to distance itself from the staid museum space described by Bürger in the process of institutionalisation. Graver describes such theatres as ‘[s]mall [and] private’ and ‘instituted to avoid … the need to accommodate popular tastes to turn a profit’ (2000: 44). To this day, the Huchette remains a struggling, non-subsidised theatre. Graver also argues that this conditioning of the avant-garde theatre ‘lend[s] greater aesthetic freedom to the small company’ (2000: 44). While the Huchette’s coopérative has successfully fought to put on other plays since the 1980s, in order to return the theatre to its former status as a ‘vrai lieu de création’ (Phélip, 2007: 134), 55 years of the same versions of La Cantatrice chauve and La Leçon could hardly serve to align it wholesale with the avant-garde theatre outlined by Graver. However, what I want to suggest is that the theatre’s unique history has made it a kind of ‘resistant’ or ‘niche’ physical institution of La Cantatrice chauve. It is not the ubiquitous physical institution assumed by Bürger but one reduced to a microcosmic scale, one that encourages a much more democratic interrelationship with its competition. As the final part of the article will argue, the Huchette is an institution that foments the ‘aesthetic freedom’ of the avant-garde beyond its walls; it has propelled – or at least aided – a mushrooming of experimental productions of La Cantatrice chauve over the years.
A pathway to experimentalism
Comparing Ionesco to fellow Absurdist Samuel Beckett, Fabienne Darge observes that the Romanian playwright’s oeuvre tends to be staged by amateur, fringe or small theatre companies:
Ionesco est souvent monté, à l’étranger comme dans l’Hexagone, par de petites troupes, à la lisière du théâtre amateur. Mais dans les grands théâtres, notamment les prestigieuses scènes publiques, Ionesco est bien peu présent, surtout depuis le début des années 1980, contrairement à son rival, Samuel Beckett, qui n’a cessé d’être joué, encore et encore. Les exemples d’adaptation se comptent sur les doigts de la main, entre les années 1980 et le milieu des années 2000: Jean-Luc Boutté avec Les Chaises à la Comédie-Française (1990), Jorge Lavelli et Macbett au Théâtre de la Colline (1992), Michel Bouquet jouant Le Roi se meurt (1994 et 2004). (Darge, 2009)
The performance history of La Cantatrice chauve serves to illustrate Darge’s point. Not only is the most famous production of the play staged in the low-key setting of the Huchette theatre; it is rivalled by a multitude of small-scale experimental mises en scène. Experimental productions of La Cantatrice chauve range from the resilience-testing 24-hour version of the play by Brat Productions in Philadelphia (so successful in fringe theatregoing quarters that it was put on in 1998, 2007, 2010 and 2012) to Jean-Claude Berutti’s théâtre ambulant production (in 2004) in which the stage was a portable boxing ring, the Smiths and the Martins wore masks which made them appear like a cross between monsters and robots, and the maid Mary was a drag queen. The consistently small-scale production pattern of La Cantatrice chauve contradicts one journalist’s assertions cited earlier that the Huchette’s version of the play would earn Ionesco a rightful place in the canon-defining Comédie Française. It never has, unlike other paragons of the dramatic avant-garde such as Jarry’s Ubu roi.
In numerous cases, the Huchette’s perennial production has directly inspired aesthetic experimentation with Ionesco’s most famous play. These productions have ostensibly set out to challenge the Huchette paragon, commonly assumed to be the definitive version of the play. Ionesco himself endorsed Bataille’s production as ‘sans doute la meilleure’ (Ionesco, 1964). In addition, until recently (c. 2000), the Huchette had a form of patent on La Cantatrice chauve and La Leçon, designed to stop copycat productions in and around the French capital, which it was forced to lift under the instruction of Ionesco’s daughter, Marie-France (Phélip, 2007: 170).
One of the clearest examples of a theatre director’s intention to attack, in aesthetic terms, the Huchette trademark locates itself just a few métro stops away at Alambic Comédie in Paris. According to Hazemann, Paul Clément felt compelled to direct his version of La Cantatrice chauve (2011 was its third season) under a pseudonym in order to challenge the Huchette play in which he was initially an actor (interview, 29 November 2011). And Clément succeeds in his aesthetic break from the Huchette. Whereas the ageing, conservatively dressed cast of Bataille’s production poke fun at a historically distant prudish culture of Victorian Britain, the younger actors of Clément’s production bring to life a more modern, feminist and queer form of critique in their performance. Gender norms are constantly parodied. Mme Smith initially reads the newspaper while her husband knits – it is the other way round in the Huchette piece – and they reverse their activities midway through their first conversation, hinting at an inter-changeability or fluidity of gendered conventions. The fireman, who is a restrained and sober character at the Huchette, is more akin to a self-important Hollywood star in Clément’s version. The production parodies the character’s masculinity, as he wears a superfluous thick metal chain and gas mask, and the lights dim to an atmospheric red hue as he enters the stage.
Jean-Luc Lagarce’s La Cantatrice chauve, originally staged in 1991 at the L’Athénée-Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, also set out to challenge its pre-eminent counterpart. Commenting on a reprisal of the production in 2007, Jean-Pierre Han remarked that Lagarce worked against ‘la mise en scène de référence’, the Huchette production (Han, 2007). The production’s scenographer explained that Lagarce’s production deliberately took the play outside, removing it from the stuffy interior of Bataille’s signature version. Lagarce’s staging arguably destroys any reference to this paradigmatic interior setting as, towards the end of the play, the huge facade of a house collapses and falls forward onto the centre of the stage, making a noise that would shock many audience members. In addition, the bright colours that flood the stage – the lush green of the lawn, the bright pinks of Mme Smith’s and Mme Martin’s identical outfits – distance themselves from the muted tones of Bataille’s sober, Victorian stage (Han, 2007).
Elsewhere, Frédéric Dubois directed his experimental version of both La Cantatrice chauve and La Leçon in 2007. While admitting his debt to Bataille’s production (he wanted to be ‘fidèle au spectacle original’ at the Huchette), Dubois also ostensibly wished to subvert the paradigms of this dominant forerunner. He stated that he wanted his production to be a mixture of ‘le répertoire et le théâtre de création’ and declared his intention to ‘essayer, se confronter, se péter la gueule’ (Porter, 2007). Dubois fulfilled this intention by introducing onto the stage the mysterious cantatrice chauve, who has for so many years been excluded from the dramatic action of the standard Huchette version. At four different times during the production, a dozen actors were called upon to disrupt the ‘plot’ and ‘faire ce qu’ils veulent: ne rien dire, hurler, réciter un poème, chanter La Flûte enchantée, etc.’ (Porter, 2007). The insertion of spontaneity into the play may serve to critique the well-trodden jeu of the actors at the Huchette, who, according to Phélip, know the production so well that they do not customarily rehearse prior to performance.
These directors have explicitly launched an assault on the perennial Huchette institution. They recall, in this manoeuvre, an aesthetic politics at the heart of the historical avant-garde that works against the institution. These experimental productions have also given critics the opportunity to experience a recalcitrant, anti-institutional aesthetic politics. Turning to Hungarian Gábor Tompa’s production in 2000, we can see the vanguard spirit alive and well in one theatre critic’s eyes. Nicholas Powell describes Tompa’s play in relation to the Huchette production. Describing the latter as ‘not … an inviolable monument’, Powell argues that Tompa ‘propos[es] a radical perspective on Ionesco’s masterpiece of unreason’ (Powell, 2000). The comparison allows this critic to identify the contestatory aesthetic of the latter version, as he contrasts the sedate outfits of the Huchette cast with the ‘angry doll’-like ensemble of Mrs Smith, the ‘grotesque bewigged’ and ‘tin robot’-esque demeanour of Mr Smith, and the ‘improbable tartan’ of Mr and Mrs Martin in Tompa’s production. The comparison further permits Powell to define the end moment of Tompa’s La Cantatrice chauve – in which the ‘play jerks into high speed reverse [and] the characters act out their preceding gestures backwards’ – as ‘an extraordinary coup de théâtre’ (2000).
The aesthetic assaults made by Clément, Lagarce, Dubois and Tompa on the Huchette’s La Cantatrice chauve are just a few examples of the different forms that experimentation with Ionesco’s debut play have taken. They recall, on a microcosmic scale, Bürger’s generalised explanation of the avant-garde as ‘an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society’ (1984: 49). Insofar as the Huchette has become the institutionally sanctioned version of La Cantatrice chauve, these experimental productions reveal a ‘spirit of the avant-garde’ still within Ionesco’s first play.
More broadly, this article has demonstrated the need, in critical and cultural theory, to take account of the specificities of the avant-garde object and its form of institutionalisation in a consideration of its politics. I have suggested that the Huchette theatre, while undeniably creating a form of tourist commodity out of Ionesco’s oeuvre, cannot be made to square entirely with Bürger’s de-politicising, pre-established museum space. I have argued that this difference is crucial, because the Huchette has precipitated – not negated – an avant-garde-inflected revitalisation of La Cantatrice chauve. Far from marking the failure of the avant-garde, the institutionalisation of Ionesco’s play at the Huchette has contributed to the success of a spirit of vanguard experimentalism beyond its walls. In this argument, this article also points to the need of avant-garde theory to consider the specificities of the medium of the artwork. Through a perpetual capacity for innovation in staging and performance methods, theatre can aesthetically contest the status quo from within the cultural institution and this may unsettle the position of a well-established play such as La Cantatrice chauve in the sanctioned canon. Finally, as theorist Paul Mann notes, vanguard politics may only ever be loosely defined, as the equation between aesthetic revolution and ideology critique constitutes an assumption, not an empirical certainty, made by the avant-gardists (1991: 10–11). Nevertheless, it is possible to assert that in the experimental examples of La Cantatrice chauve, directors, theatre critics and spectators are at least given the potential opportunity to play out a politics of the avant-garde.