THEATRE RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL • VOL. 33 \ HO. 2 \ ppllJ-126
© International Federation for Theatre Research 2008 • Printed in the United Kingdom doi:10.1017/S0307883308003635
On Faithfulness: The Difficulties Experienced by the Text/Performance Couple
PATRICE  PAVIS
The question of whether the director has beenfaithful to the author or whether theproduction conforms to the text of the play resurfaces in many different shapes. Three recent theories are given as examples of this dogma of necessary fidelity. But this dualism is its elf historically relativistic. Examples of recent productions show that the text-performance 'couple' must constantly be reconsidered.
I have always considered mise-en-scéne as a category in itself; it is the inheritor of a long Western tradition from literature and text-based theatre, but it is open to many other practices. I might have approached it as a subcategory of cultural performances, as the twentieth-century quartet that has, according to Richard Schechner, become the theatrical avant-garde. But did I perhaps not sufficiently decentre the euro- and texto-centric position? Whatever system of classification has been employed, I have taken pains to widen to the maximum the scope of performances, without making judgements in advance about their limits or, even more so, about their value or originality.
The text-performance couple
A Western obsession never ceases to torment us: the relationship of text to performance, the'fidelity" of a mise-en-scene to its text, of the theatre to its double. What hierarchy can be established for them? How does theatre practice effect change in this infernal couple and does it still need them? Is this opposition relevant in other cultural contexts than that of Western theatre and how does it vary across history?
The debate remains open and it is not my intention here to add to the confusion. The old question as to whether theatre is literature or an autonomous art has not been of interest for some time. Throughout history it has sometimes been one and sometimes the other. Plays, literary works and dramas are still being written, and a performance does not need a textual origin, aid or trace in order to exist. The most important thing is rather to identify the status of the text in the performance: is it received as a source of meaning to be meditated upon by a spectator or listener, or is it to be treated as musical material, more audible than understandable? But the artist himself does not have to decide in a definitive or univocal way. Actually, he often cultivates doubt: his actors carry the text, they pronounce it, but they often do so as if they do not understand it and as if
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it was not their problem anymore. And on the other hand, the spectators are sometimes obsessed by the deciphering of the text, while the important thing lies elsewhere, in the image, for example. No law can impose on us what we want to perceive.1
Stephane Braunschweig makes another distinction between the 'theatre as text' and the 'theatre as material. In the first instance, the director presupposes that the text contains a coherence that must be recovered or established, since 'that thing was thought, wanted, even unconsciously, and it forms a whole: the whole of the author'.2 This 'whole of the author' allows us to find the author 'at the source'; that is, as the instance that helps us to reconstitute the play as a whole. It is thus possible to go from the totality of the text in order to analyse it. In the second instance, we do not worry about reading bits of the text as a whole, but we assemble, we edit, we bind together these verbal and extra-verbal fragments within a show. Afterwards we grasp the logic of the director, the synthesis that he has made from these heterogeneous materials.3
This distinction between text and material is comparable with another opposition, which came about in the 1960s and became relevant in the 1970s, particularly in the Anglo-American world Thus, as Chris Baugh has suggested, we can distinguish between directing a play and making a performance.4 Either we push the existing text in a certain direction and according to its own logic, or we create a stage event in making a new object, which owes nothing to any textual source. 'Directing a play' is therefore choosing a direction, an orientation, an interpretation, reducing the range of possibilities. It particularly means taking as a starting point the text's givens as unalterable to the letter. This is what lürgen Gosch did for his Macbeth: he followed the order of the scenes and saw violence as giving a coherent reading despite the scatology.
This fabrication of the event can even lead to textual production. From acting indications, the performers improvise the words that will then be retranscribed. This is what Chris Balme, in the working process of Robert Lepage, calls a szenisches Schreiben, a 'stage writing':
What comes about during rehearsals are stage events and texts. These texts are sometimes fixed as writing during the process of rehearsal. Often, movements or images precede textual choices. In such a context one could talk about stage writing, where the aim is not to create a ready text without stitching, nor to deconstruct that text as a foreign object. The text is a necessary product of the work of staging and is continually being altered.5
The stage and the scene are thus at the point of origin of textual production. This text is a verbalization of stage actions, it varies according to stage improvisations and is only fixed at a given, arbitrary moment. It is not the source of the dramatic situation, but rather its consequence, its moving trace. Mise-en-scene is not an execution of the text, but its discovery. Writing about the text of Noh theatre, Antoine Vitez states,
The text is full of gaps, incomplete, incomprehensible, a scribble that must be deciphered. To show that a text is never anything other than that: incomplete, obscure, it is not clear to whom it is addressed. Mise-en-scene (and acting) not as an execution
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of what is known but as research. In other words, research does not (will not) precede mise-en-scéne. Mise-en-scéne is research: we set out to discover.6
Fateful fidelity
Whatever the status of the text, be it at the source of mise-en-scene or in the final results of stage work, it is worth distinguishing two radically different ways of treating the 'play'. Everything depends on whether the accent is placed on the literary text, on dramatic art or on the stage event, the acting and the stage considered in themselves:
There remains a primary divide in theatrically oriented studies - the divide between those who address performance through a focus on the language and literatures on which it is often based, and those who see the performance event itself as their key concern, and text as simply supportive of it.7
Things have been cleared up in recent years and we seem to enjoy an appropriate status quo between the texto-centrists and the sceno-centrists. Neither is trying to prove that the other is wrong, and theatre-goers often enjoy both kinds of show and both kinds of operation (to direct a play/to make a performance). There is thus a clarification of the possibilities and the positions. Nonetheless, theories of interpretation and of mise-en-scéne sometimes come back to the old argument about 'fidelity". Fidelity: such is the illusion that we have of reading, interpreting and performing the play according to the author's intentions, as if there existed a correct reading, a reading that reveals a verifiable truth in the play or the interpreted work. It seems that at whatever historical moment, in whatever culture, common sense - and society with it - holds on to an idea of a truth of the text, inscribed in it, incontestable, inalienable, and so to an idea of a necessary and possible fidelity of interpretation. This fidelity argument has always been a subject of discussion; it was considered true and incontestable, at least until the moment when, with the simultaneous invention of mise-en-scéne and psychoanalysis (at the same time, the end of the nineteenth century, and according to the same epistemological break), we came to question the very possibility of being faithful (to a text, to a word, to a person). Directors, at least, started to question faithful reading and saw their work as an inevitable and productive betrayal regarding a so-called truth of the text which, according to them, never existed and had neither meaning nor appeal. But the dogma of fidelity has thick skin; it reappears regularly in theory, even where theory thought it had finished with it, and with the norms of faithful reading.
Three examples of the resurgence of fidelity
Didier Plassard, in his remarkable 'typology of the staging of classics', suggests distinguishing between
two major types of choice, stagings with a restitutive aim and those with a projective aim. By restitutive stagings we refer to those that are centred on an immanent reading of the text; it is a labour of understanding the work, usually taken at the moment of its historical emergence . . . Projective stagings, on the other hand, are those that
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use the work to produce a commentary that goes beyond the work's own limits in principally bearing on more general objects, be they historical questions (for instance contemporary society, orthat of Louis XIV), philosophical questions, psychoanalytical questions, or others.8
Didier Plassard's examples are rather convincing and we can readily recognize these two 'types of choice'. Our objection is more of a theoretical nature, and is a question of principle: can a classic be read in an immanent way, and without projecting all that we know today thanks to philosophy, psychology, sociology and so on? Do we not always read it through all these filters which we can no longer do without? And, on the other hand, what is the point of reading a classic according to our 'contemporary preoccupations' if we lose sight of the vision of long ago and of historical forms? Are we not in danger of creating an object that is certainly of our time, but which no longer has much to do with the original? Is it still this classical play that we are staging? Are we directing a play or making a performance?
We can surely agree that the art of mise-en-scene is precisely the art of compromise between these two types of aim, between an immanent structural analysis and a hermeneutical relationship built with a new audience. The notions of 'restitution' and 'projection' cannot be categorically opposed; they call for a compromise and a transaction, and it will be the task of the director to lead these negotiations. The restitution-projection couple is in danger of straying towards the fidelity-infidelity couple whose epistemological and conjugal problems are well known. Or, to be more positive, restitution requires projection and projection requires restitution. In order to be faithful, one must be unfaithful!
A comparable debate seems to occupyrecent theories of mise-en-scene; it is expressed in different terms, perhaps, but according to the same scheme of thought. The question still revolves around what the director brings from outside, or around the manner of restitution of what the text supposedly contained before, when he went looking for it. Bruno Tackels takes up this alternative, which I have just criticized:
There remain two distinct attitudes of mise-en-scene confronted with the chosen text. Either the director says: I am going to try to tell you what the text wanted to say. Or he answers: I am going to try to tell you what I want to tell you, by exploiting in the best way possible what he wanted to say. In each case the politics are radically different.9
In fact, the first attitude has become rare. Who would still claim to be able to say what the text wanted to say? The second attitude, despite looking like the compromise that I have just praised, remains an ambiguous solution and is doubly problematic: does the director know from the start what he wants to say, and does he really know what the text means to say? We can have our doubts, at least in contemporary practice. We have seen in fact that many experiments do not take any certainty as a starting point, but that they invent a framework of enunciation, and a tuning and adjustment which will bring out unexpected solutions from the text, which only acting and staging can invent. The artists do not wonder what the text or what they themselves wanted to say. Why, indeed, would they take that into account, given that they often consider that they work with
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materials and can be considered creators in their own right, authors of the performance, sceno-centrists who are more or less aware or conscious of this fact?
The argument of necessary fidelity (or, which amounts to the same thing, of inevitable infidelity) is never far away. It goes hand in hand with an implicit conception of mise-en-scěne considered as a superfluous and harmful additive, as a useless supplement. The return of the philological and logocentric conception is never far away either. For instance, in the introduction to Theatre aujourd'hui, by lean-Claude Lallias, we find forms - sometimes quoted and sometimes taken up by the author (it is not always easy to tell the difference) - which betray a possible slippage of the conception of mise-en-scěne towards a theory that advocates pedagogical justification and fidelity. According to Lallias, mise-en-scěne is a contingent and personal 'translation':
Even if traditions exist in the West, an art theatre can better be defined by its innovations of staging, i.e. by the creation of a unique work and a work of stage translation which is knowingly contingent and personal. Hence the essential role of the director.10
Lallias rightly points to the emergence of the director in a Western context, but he perhaps 'essentializes' the director's function in limiting it to that of 'stage translation' (a very improper term). In evoking 'stage translation' he is probably implying that any 'worthwhile'11 mise-en-scěne is the translation of a text or a personal idea. He also emphasizes the potentiality of the text which it is the task of dramaturgy to sort out: 'Perhaps one must first of all learn to describe what potentiality the text brings by way of an open, patient and informed reading. This is the role of dramaturgy".12
The implicit typology of the tasks of mise-en-scěne goes back to the usual opposition in critical discourse of the director as tyrant or the director as servant of the text: 'So in the hierarchy of the theatre the image of the omnipotent director contrasts with the pedagogical facilitator of a collective undertaking (which very often goes beyond the stage object) or with the modest servant who disappears before the work'.13 It is hard to say how the author evaluates this hierarchy, or whether he brings the extreme differences of this typology to bear in order to complain about them or to celebrate them. In any case, this polarity can be a cause for concern, as it depends upon a normative evaluation of the work of the director who is torn between creative omnipotence and pedagogical humbleness. This normative and pedagogical vision of mise-en-scěne is very common and it can also be found in a quite different polarity that is just as contestable, the polarity that, 'confronted with texts, will oppose work that renders opaque, concentrates, creates a multitude of references - intertextual and inter-scenic - with the dream of transparency, readability and homogeneity of signs'.14 Once again in the theoretical doxa, this fateful opposition between a 'degree zero of mise-en-scěne' and a plethora, made redundant due to an excess of extra-textural and extra-scenic references, comes to light. This opposition is just as problematic as that which distinguishes visual productions and 'those that rarefy the signs, tend towards a bare stage and privilege listening, the sonic and the vibrating body of speech'.15 This false opposition between the plethoric vision and immaterial listening is a resurgence of the Western dualistic conception, dividing the external vision bound to the represented body and the internal word bound to the naked voice. Thus these great supposed oppositions are merely dualistic metaphysical constructions, which
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are implicitly based on the dogma of a faithful word as opposed to an uncontrollable corporal visuality.
It is not enough to say, as Lallias does, that truth lies between these extremes; one must also attempt a theory that describes particular cases and explains the functioning of existing shows by way of different criteria and different couples than those traditionally used, such as power-modesty, opacity-transparency, present-day-archaeology, writing-architecture, natural-theatrical, baroque vision-word neutrally spoken, archaism-media. This is what I have tried to do here in seeking to overcome these false oppositions by way of a few allusions to diverse recent experiences of theatre practice. Visual, media-based, intercultural, deconstructionist and gestural experiences in the contemporary theatre world are necessary challenges to theatre and to its theorization. They share the possibility of displacing the supposed binaries of stage production, of forcing us to rethink the tuning mechanism that underlines the creation of this aesthetic object called 'mise-en-scěné.
The historic relativism of this dualism
Such a rethinking is, however, by no means easy: the spectator, like the reader, remains subject to logocentric premises regulating the relationship of this fateful and very Western couple, text-performance. We find it difficult to escape from logocentrism, to imagine that the text is not always and necessarily at the origin of meaning, to imagine that it is not always illustrated and incarnated in the acting or the staging. This is why Derrida's deconstructionist position might be helpful in rethinking these delicate relationships. It is also very helpful in dealing with these non-verbal or non-word-centred shows as intercultural, media-based or gestural theatre.
How, then, can we continue to think of, or 'unthink', and overcome these binaries -text-stage (page-stage), readable-unreadable, readable-visible? The situation is clarified and it is an impasse. We have put aside the norms of the 1950s around the cursed couple of text and/or performance, fidelity and/or betrayal. We have also stopped seeing the performance as a semiotics emanating from the text. But have we come any further, in particular in theorizing a 'post'-theatre: postmodern, postdramatic, post-post? And are we jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire when we refuse theoretical explanations en masse, or put off until tomorrow's 'post' what could be done today?
A simple and helpful measure might be to historicize and localize this debate between text and performance and not to continue to treat it as an atemporal logical problem. The break with the philological thread for theatre people came towards the middle of the 1960s, when authoritarian structures were questioned and the body was placed at the centre of attention, when psychoanalysis and literary theory were on the verge of reversing the subject. All of this suffices to reverse the direction of the text-stage relationship, to privilege spectacular performances, to marginalize dramatic literature. Contextual and geographical variations relativize or modify these changes. Germany in the 1960s, with its rebellious youth discovering the ill effects of blind obedience, brutally rejected daddy's Regietheater, and before you knew it put its great classics through the mincing machine, to a degree that would have worried even Brecht. The United Kingdom
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of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, being more sober, resisted the dictatorial cult of personality and confirmed the importance of acting and the actor. It delegated to actors or participants of the showthe task of devising, of collectively creating the show, step by step from the research of the themes to the establishment of the score, without having recourse to the central perspective of a patented and labelled director. In the 1990s, in France, the text-stage relationship continued to evolve: the separation described by Braunschweig between text to be staged and material to be mixed became accepted, all the more as the former 'directator' assumed a low profile, renouncing the easy effects of spectacular mise-en-scěne, and yielding to the delights of directing actors, taking inspiration from performance art and site-specific performance.
In contemporary practice it is nonetheless not easy to distinguish clearly the staging of a text and staging as a show, as an autonomous art. Often the artist has not consciously decided if it is one or the other and the spectator will, even more so, be caught between the two ways of seeing. There are obviously no rules for telling them apart. Thus Gosch's Macbeth, which could shock and seem cut off from the play, ends up revealing itself to be a reading of the text. And, the other way around, the classics mounted by Castorf are more stage events than readings of a literary work, as one (at least in my case) does not manage to make the link with the source text.
An unexpected consequence is that a confusion of roles, a great confusion of genres, reigns. Long ago, from Craig, with his praise of the director, to Artaud, and beyond to the generation of the 'directators', the director ended up taking herself for the author of the show, to the point of giving the real author leave to go. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, annoyed with dramatic literature, the author took himself for the director, and proceeded to stage his own texts, seeing them as mere scripts for performance, which had all of a sudden become the supreme ideal. Since the 1990s the opposite has happened: the author gives free reign to the director, to allow her to explore the possibilities of the text. This dramatic text is not 'incomplete' because it is an orphan of the stage, but rather 'full' because it is open to be used by actors and spectators alike.
Island or peninsula?
As Michel Vinaver has shown, in the twentieth century theatre has 'constituted itself as an island'.16 It has separated from literature, and even from culture, to realize Craig's prophecy: 'When in turn the director will know to combine line, colour, movement and rhythm, he will become an artist. That day, we will no longer need playwrights. Our art will be independent'.17 This newly independent mise-en-scene which rejects dramatic literature would, according to Vinaver, be the reason for the formation of this island, and would lead to the suppression of the duality of text and performance and the promotion of shows, 'generally forcing admiration because of the harmony that distinguishes them'.18
This radical position goes back as far as 1988, when Vinaver's article was written. We must also bear in mind the extraordinary growth of dramatic writing in the 1990s, in France and in Europe, a shift due in part to Vinaver himself.19 His island became a peninsula. Until the 1980s, at least in France, theatre was actually rather stage-based and
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cut off from literature. Texts were buried in the shows or reduced to the status of scripts or librettos, or made into a montage of linguistic material. A welcome result was that the work on classical plays profited from a singular interest, and was a conduit for the interpretative energy of the directors, subjecting the classics to a 'catalytic operation'. Further,
There is the great universal repertoire, the classics, through which the director can express himself intimately, make of them a personal and contemporary work, provided there is catalytic operation whose aim is to make elements of the present react by the use of old substances, or the reactivation of the past through an injection of today's materials.20
The chemical reaction of the classics could hardly be better described. It is up to theorists and artists to decide what exactly they would like to reactivate from the past and thanks to what vision of the present. The intertwining of the reactivation of the past and of this vision leads to an interpretation that is original and unique every time, to an intimate signature of the director. This conviction remains at the heart of the creative act, an act that tends to escape any control and any theoretical pretension. This conclusion might sound very worrying. But it must be admitted that it is not the task of the theoretician to clarify the intimate and unconscious choices of artists.
The old question of the text-stage couple arises again. The eternal debate on the fidelity of the director comes back like the return of the repressed. Other couples, other ruses, more modern ones, come and get between them in order to disguise the old line about the necessity of fidelity to the interpreted text - an illusory fidelity, a right-thinking fidelity. But can we escape normative thinking? Are we not ourselves - as spectators, actors, directors - always after-the-act: in the act of reading, interpreting, using language, staging the word? And can we or should we escape the desire to reconstitute the whole of the author byway of the coherence guaranteed by an author and a textual structure? This desire for coherence, for verification, validation and fidelity, runs very deep. As deep, indeed, as the desire to create another theatre, less logocentric and more eccentric.
Sometimes, in fact, the text does not show up or there is nothing audible, readable or relevant about it. It has become sonic material, a sound without a sense, a signifier without a signified. Thus the stage event, the physical action and the performance are all that counts. We respect them as visual or musical works, an attempt to escape the word, and sometimes the meaning as well. And by the miracle of meaning, sometimes this materialization of the situation of enunciation, this materialization of the material in the time-action of the stage, manage to provoke the text, the dogma, the immobile, to let it fly off the handle, to give rise to unexpected vibrations, unpredictable connotations. It is, however, not so easy to mix and liquidate the text: like living tissue, a hydra, a seaweed, it regenerates at the slightest touch, as soon as there is a listener, but it potentially remains a symbolic system, a textual hydra whose tentacles grow back before your very eyes.
The text-performance couple is still a very good barometer for judging mise-en-scěne. The barometer should not, however, prescribe the weather. It would be better if it
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went wrong all the time, or was subject to permanent adjustment: checking, fine-tuning, but also a systematic and anarchic detuning of the senses.
It is high time that we returned in extremis to the old text-performance couple, which is constantly challenged by both textual as well as stage pratice. The current of this practice, at the beginning of the millenium, actually displaces certainties and undoes unions from the old days. Thanks to the practice, we seem to be abandoning essentialist research on the specificity of the dramatic text and of theatricality. As for the clear distinction between between text and mise-en-scéne, it no longer holds except for the mise-en-scéne of classics where the director cannot be ignorant of the existence of a play that is not only published and recognized, but possesses a tradition of readings.Even for the publication of contemporary texts, it is often the case that the published text takes previous productions into account. It is like a transcript. It gets harder and harder to distinguish the text from the show. The evolution of dramatic writing as well as that of mise-en-scene tends towards convergence. Certain directors or authors no longer distinguish between the two practices, like Francois Tanguy and the Theatre du Radeau or loel Pommerat, for whom 'directing and writing will merge together more and more'.21
Paradoxically, today, the coming together of the text and the stage is borne out in the use of classics. There is a tendency to treat the text, even the classical text, by way of'showing', 'quoting' and 'displaying' it in a sort of sonic and graphic installation. It is thus no longer a question of interpretation, or illustation, but of exposing the text like sonic material, of finding a device that allows the audience to walk around it. Think of a Hungarian Hamlet the performers know very well that they will not be understood in Paris. It is quoted in the subtitles, not as the speech of a character but as a series of texts borrowed from other authors. The performers speak it without seeming to let it affect them. They hold it at a distance and do not show what they think, do not make any interpretation. The main thing is not saying the words, but rather seeing how they take place and expose themselves.
Mise-en-scéne - a deliriously ambiguous oxymoron. If we stress the word mise, the transfer, the placing of a material, be it textual, narrative or thematic, onto the stage, we are still in the logic of representation, whatever we do to escape Derrida's 'fate of representation'. If we stress the word scéne (scene or stage), we give it a weight, an existence, an autonomy, which owes nothing to what came before, be it textual, narrative or thematic.
Luckily, we never really know in what scenario we find ourselves. Deep down, we do not want to know. We can only observe this historically established shift from the mise to the scéne, from the mise-en-scéne to the performance.
A new figure appears: a mise en per/or a performise.
Perhaps it is just a mirage. If it does not materialize, it at least encourages us to go forward, to move our feet and not get stuck in the same position forever. At least then we will not repeat the same simplifications, the same old faithful philanthropic philology.
NOTES
1        See Robert Wilson's staging of Fables of La Fontaine, there is no rereading of the fables, or even of the
dramaturgical story of each fable. The stage image, its logic and its visual evolution are the only
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important aspects, even more so because the textual details, its textuality, are no longer always accessible.
2          Stephane Braunschweig, Petitesportes, grands pay sages (Aries: Actes Sud, 2007), p. 290. (Added emphasis, p.p.)
3          Le Misanthrope, staged by Lassalle, Braunschweig or Lambert, reads as a system which is certainly open and enigmatic, but which proposes each time a way of understanding the motivation and the fate of the character in a global way.
4          Chris Baugh, Theatre, Performance and Technology (London, Palgrave, 2005), p. 217: 'The "making of a performance" has become a significantly different activity from that of "directing a play" and has required new practices, new technologies and a new stagecraft'.
5          Chris Balme, 'Robert Lepage und die Zukunft des Theaters im Medienzeitalter', in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Christel Weiler, eds., Transformationen. Theater der Neunziger Jahre (Theater der Zeit, 1999), p. 142. (This and all other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.)
6         Antoine Vitez, Ecrits sur le theatre (Paris: P. O. L., Vol. 1,1994), p. 196.
7          Presentation by Steve Bottoms for the Performing Literatures conference, University of Leeds, June 2007.
8          Didier Plassard, 'Esquisse ďune typologie de la mise en scene des classiques', Líttératures classiques, 48 (2003), p. 251.
9          Bruno Tackels, Fragment d'un theatre amoureux (Besancon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2001), p. 119.
10        Jean-Claude Lallias, 'Les tensions fécondes entre le texte et la scene', Theatre aujourd'hui; 10 (2005), Paris, Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique, p. 4.
11         Lallias suggests that this process of translation is necessary for 'toute mise en scene de valeur' ('any mise-en-scene of worth'). Ibid., p. 4.
12        Ibid., p. 4.
13        Ibid., p. 5.
14        Ibid., p. 5.
15        Ibid., p. 5.
16        Michel Vinaver, 'L'ile', Theatre en Europe, 18 (September 1988).
17        Gordon Craig, Le Theatre en marche (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Quoted in Vinaver, 'L'ile', p. 21.
18        Vinaver, 'L'ile', p. 21.
19        See his report for the Ministry of Culture: Michel Vinaver, Le Compte rendu ď Avignon (Aries: Actes Sud, 1987).
20       Vinaver, 'L'ile', p. 22.
21        Joel Pommerat, 'Vers l'autre Langue', Theatre/Public, 184 (2007).
patrice pavis was a Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Paris and is currently Professor in the School of Drama at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His most recently published book is La Mise en scene contemporaine (Armand Colin, 2007).