The Face and the Profile

Abstract

It was in Strasbourg in the winter or spring of 1977. I was a member of L’Attroupement,¹ a young theatre group. I was rebellious in temperament and living a somewhat restless life. In an effort to reconsider theatre from its origins, to question its most native essence, we had been rehearsing a play by Aeschylus. The precise sequence of events in those weeks is a bit of a blur,² but I seem to remember that after having experimented with some fragments of the The Libation Bearers, we had decided to work on Agamemnon. The group had no secure means of existence. Our sheer survival was solely due to the extremely supportive contributions offered by a dedicated audience in the form of seats sold ahead of time for a performance, of which not only the date could not be foreseen, but also whose title kept changing; a performance for which, most significantly, there wasn’t even a venue. We had neither space to rehearse nor perform. Our first concern was thus to find somewhere to rehearse. So we approached the city council to ask for a space, any kind of space, even if only for a short period of time. And this is how we happily acquired access, albeit only briefly, to the main hall of a sociocultural centre on the outskirts of town: the youth club of ‘Meinau’.³ There wasn’t much there; it wasn’t a real theatre, it was just a local house used for entertainment and social activities.