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Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), ISBN 0-859-89696-X, xii + 276pp., £47.50 hb, £15.99 pb.
When, in 1963, a small theatre at the end of a cul-de-sac in an unfashionable district of Paris closed its doors for the last time there were few who genuinely mourned its passing. Though the very term Grand Guignol had become synonymous with a kind of play dispensing psychological suspense, brutality and extreme violence, the theatre in the impasse Chaptal was already an anachronism. In the last decade of its life, seeking no doubt to reconcile the interests of its own dwindling band of regulars (known affectionately as the grand-guignoleurs), the tourist trade, and a post-war Parisian audience with a very different range of cultural expectations, the programme became an uncomfortable mixture of revivals of the classics from the theatre's own heydays, sub-pornographic shockers and stage adaptations of American-style thrillers.
As is often the case with cultural institutions of this kind, it is only with hindsight that we realise their true extent and stature, the highly problematic nature of their achievement, and the degree of ambiguity entailed in our own response to that body of work. The Théâtre du Grand Guignol was founded in 1897 by Oscar Méténier, a playwright who had cut his teeth in the experimental theatre on the fringes of Naturalism, and was taken over two years later by Max Maurey who then remained in control until the eve of WWI. Since it was Maurey who, in the words of Hand and Wilson, 'rebranded the Grand-Guignol as the "Theatre of Horror"', there is no little interest in observing how the genre developed during this crucial early period. Indeed, one myth that the ten plays assembled here (one from the Méténier years, seven from the Maurey years, and two from the interwar years) debunk is that the Grand Guignol was exclusively a theatre of gore. What we find instead is a theatre of meticulious, obsessive even, emotional intensity and bizarre, often disturbing, eroticism interspersed with crude sexual comedy. In Méténier's Lui! (1897; tr. here as Jack), for example, nothing much happens except that a drunken man visits a prostitute, falls asleep, and is arrested. The tension...