The Modern French Theater

In the previous issue Mrs. Najla Aqrawi spoke to us of "classicism" and "Christianity," two of the three pillars of the modern French theater. Today she treats the last of these pillars, "atheist existentialism," the fascinating study to be completed in the coming issue.

Atheist existentialism replies to Christianity with a philosophical system which Sartre summarized and popularized in a book called Existentialism Is a Humanism, and whose substance is this:

1 — Man's existence precedes his essence.

2 — Man is absolutely free (and perhaps this is the only absolute Sartre acknowledges); he makes himself and his destiny as he wills.

3 — Man is wholly responsible for his being, because he is its sole maker. The lazy man is responsible for his laziness, the tyrant for his tyranny, the coward for his cowardice. Do not say circumstances did not serve me and luck did not help me: you form your essence with your own hand, as you will.

4 — Man has no relation to any absolute whatsoever — not God and not the Devil, not heaven and not hell. Man lives on earth with his fellow man, and his relation to the rest of mankind determines his conduct, his principles, and the discipline of his soul.

5 — Man is his deeds: "Man works and inscribes his face upon the surface of the earth." No sanctity and no evil — only a free humanity.

Sartre puts his pen at the service of spreading his message, and so we find the elements of his philosophy in his various plays; at bottom they are a reply to Christianity and a clamorous cry of denial against it. Perhaps his play The Devil and the Good Lord, performed for the first time at the Théâtre Antoine in 1951, is among the most powerful things Sartre has said in setting out his ideas plainly. He made the hero of his play, "Goetz," an abnormal man who took up evil as his weapon because he was born illegitimate and grew up resentful against God, defying His authority. He was the commander of an army, conquering cities to destroy them and shedding blood to slake his thirst, avenging himself on this idealistic world that had cast him out; and so he remained, boasting of the power of his evil, until a priest challenged him one day and told him that all men do evil, and that the difficult thing is to do good. So he wagered with him that he could do good whenever he chose, and cut himself a new path, and clothed himself in the garment of sanctity for a whole year; but at its end he found that the results of his deeds were no better than before, and he came at last to see that God does not exist — and, in consequence, that the Devil does not exist, and that the perfect, ideal world does not exist, so it is no matter that he is an illegitimate son; and that man is alone upon the face of the earth, living with his fellow man... So he cast off the robe of sanctity as he had cast off the robe of evil, and became again a natural man, sharing with the rest of mankind their ordinary life and doing work useful to his fellow man. This idea — the humanity of man — appears with clarity in his play Dirty Hands, whose hero, Hoederer, is a humane man in every sense of the word: he loves men and deals with them on the basis of mutual benefit; the criterion of his work is men's need upon the surface of the earth — no absolute principles inspired by the heavens above or whispered by the devils of hell. He is a leader in a dictatorial party, but he is flexible, changing his plans according to real circumstances, lying if the situation requires it and bending his actions in urgent need. Facing him is a young man, "Hugo," pained and tormented by his sense of an absolute that shackles him and curbs the free rein of the liberty he seeks. Bourgeois by origin, he revolted against his wealthy milieu and joined Hoederer's party, but the principles of an upbringing rooted in his soul he will never shake free of. His problem comes to a crisis when the party changes its policy, making it imperative for Hugo to change his thinking; he rebels and refuses to be flexible and move with the new political currents; he prefers death to that human flexibility he has never known, and he meets his end, doomed by his clinging to that absolute in which he was reared.

Among the religious subjects Sartre treats in his plays is the subject of hell, which in his view is nothing but man's judgment upon his fellow man. He presents it with violence in his play Huis Clos, where he shut three persons up "face to face" in a closed room in the other world, awaiting the varieties of torment and the gnashing of teeth, because they sinned on earth, and they know they sinned, and that they are on their way to eternal punishment. Their waiting in that solitary closed room grew long, and behold, they talk, and they come to know the calamity of man — his faith in some absolute, when everything is relative.

one another; the hidden depths of their souls are laid bare, and the truth of each is revealed naked to the other; they suffer and rebel and want to flee — but to where?... At last they understand that hell is within the walls of this quiet, tumultuous room — it is the judgment of the other — man's judgment upon his fellow man...

As for the language Sartre uses to carry his ideas, it is clamorous and rebellious, expressing the bitterness of his revolt against Christianity and the army of believers who belong to it. His sarcasm is wounding and penetrating: when he mocks the Church and the indulgences that used to be sold at the priest's hands, he reminds us of Voltaire and his genius.

He wounds the feelings of the religious, embitters their lives, and provokes the reply of the Catholic press — so the battle is alive and continuing, and literary activity is alive and fruitful...

And if we wish to take in the whole of this theatrical activity in Paris, we must glance at the foreign plays performed there — English, German, American, and Norwegian. Barrault played "Hamlet" in 1950, and many a one preferred Barrault, with his short stature, his dancing steps, and the sharp gleam of his eyes, to Laurence Olivier and his mighty personality in the role of Hamlet. Jean Vilar performed the play "Murder in the Cathedral" by the English writer Eliot, and the plays of Pirandello, Ibsen, and other geniuses among the West's dramatists are performed as well.

And despite the multiplicity of the theater's different currents, there are certain standards and values to which the critics give their attention, and which determine a play's share of success or failure: skill in composition, which makes of the play a solidly built piece; "the word" that creates a magical atmosphere; the actor's personality and his feeling, and that inner radiance which interacts with the personality of his role, and his gleaming, penetrating glances; the artistic décor of the stage and its measure of harmony with the events of the play and its period; and the music that accompanies it — all these are among the foundations relied upon in the sifting and the criticism, and they determine the piece's share of success or failure. But whether a play deserves classical immortality or not — time alone has the final word in that; for often a play that met with brilliant success at its first performance has been neglected, and often a piece has been dug out of the wastebasket hundreds of years after its composition to take its place in the rank of the immortal classics...

(In the coming issue we shall return again to the modern French theater.)