Arrabal’s Theatre of Liberation

Abstract

The theatre is the art of the present. This cliché is repeated over and over again and every critic, at some point or other, is quite happy to state this obvious truth as if s/he had just discovered something profound. But, more often than not, the truism is forgotten as soon as uttered and the clever critic goes on to criticise the playwright, play or production under review sub specie aeternitatis. Too often, if not always, the implicit question underlying theatrical criticism is: ‘How does this play compare with Oedipus, or Hamlet, or Phèdre, or… Waiting for Godot?’ Why these eternal touchstones? Because they are ‘masterpieces that will speak to all wo/men for all eternity’. In other words, what turns a play into a masterpiece is its degree of abstraction, its timelessness. Yet another cliché proclaims that theatre is, par excellence, the art of physical presence. Since Artaud was ‘discovered’ by, mainly, non-practising theatre scholars in the 1960s (some twenty years after the poet’s death), statements like the following are being repeated ad nauseam: ‘I maintain the stage is a tangible, physical place that needs to be filled and it ought to be allowed to speak its own concrete language’,² or the theatre must provide ‘the audience with truthful distillations of dreams where its taste for crime, its erotic obsessions, its savageness, its fantasies, even its cannibalism’ can be satisfied.³

‘Un théâtre qui aspire seulement à être infiniment libre et meilleur.’ ¹