Reign of Terror

The Peculiar Charms of the Grand Guignol

by Gideon Lester

"At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening's faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals."

-- Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol:
theatre of fear and terror.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, John Moran's new multi-media, operatic drama, which premieres on A.R.T.'s Loeb Stage in February, is no painstaking reproduction of the famous silent film of the same name. When Moran and his close collaborator Bob McGrath (who directed Susan Sontag's Alice in Bed for A.R.T. New Stages last year) first discussed creating a Caligari play, they quickly decided that for them the most potent source material lay in the extraordinary theatrical tradition out of which the film itself was born: the Parisian drama of blood and gore known as the Théâtre du Grand Guignol. "The Grand Guignol is everything we love," says McGrath, "-- terror and blood and sex and sordidness, in a theatrical convention."

The Théâtre du Grand Guignol may be the largest dirty little secret in the world. Now little more than an embarrassed footnote in the history of French drama, this tiny theatre, tucked in among the brothels and bars of Montmartre, was for several decades one of the greatest tourist attractions of all Paris. Guidebooks proclaimed it the equal of the Louvre; only the newly erected Eiffel Tower was better known.

Each night for sixty-five years, the Grand Guignol titillated and terrified audiences drawn from every sector of society. The pimps and petty-thieves of the Sacré-Coeur basilica shared benches with the crowned heads of Europe. During the theatre's heyday, regular Guignoleurs, as the theatre's patrons were known, included the King of Greece, Princess Wilhemina of Holland, King Carol of Rumania, the children of the Sultan of Morocco, and a Vietnamese political refugee, Ho Chi Minh, then a noodle and pastry cook at a local Chinese restaurant.

Many ironies surround this extraordinary, uniquely theatrical blend of high and low art. First, when Oscar Méténier founded the Grand Guignol in 1897, he had only recently resigned from a respectable job as Private Secretary to the Police Commissioner of Paris -- a position in which he undoubtedly developed a taste for the tales of real life crime that later filled his stage. Secondly, the building that Méténier chose to house this shrine to the Parisian demi-monde was, of all things, an abandoned chapel, whose carved wooden cherubs and shallow pews contributed to the theatre's special atmosphere. Third, and perhaps most surprising of all, this most unashamedly illusionistic of theatrical genres was a direct descendent of French Naturalism, the aesthetic movement championed by Émile Zola that claimed art's only true subject to be the grimly realistic representation of "real life."

Méténier was a wholehearted subscriber to the Naturalists' artistic philosophy, and the first plays to be staged at the tiny theatre on Montmartre's rue Chaptal were vaudeville adaptations of faits divers, short, graphic accounts of violent crime reported on the front pages of Parisian newspapers. It is therefore a further irony that the symbol Méténier chose to represent his repertory company stems from an altogether different theatrical tradition; Guignol is a stock character from French puppet theatre akin to Mr. Punch or Polichinelle. Méténier's theatre was to be a Grand Guignol, a puppet-show intended for adults rather than children, where the characters were live performers.

In 1898 the flamboyant impresario Max Maurey took over from Méténier, and the Grand Guignol entered its golden age. The "slice of life" dramatizations of faits divers were replaced by what became known as "slice of death" (tranche de mort) theatre, and Maurey dedicated himself to the realistic representation of acts of unimaginable horror. Murder, rape, mutilation, and torture were bread and butter to the Grand Guignol, which quickly filled the gap that had been left in Parisian entertainment by the discontinuance of public executions.

André de Lorde, known as "The Prince of Terror," joined the Grand Guignol as Principal Playwright in 1901. In the twenty-five years he stayed with the company, de Lorde wrote over one hundred plays of fear and horror and was almost single-handedly responsible for the Grand Guignol's ascension from a local sensation to a place of international pilgrimage. His plays may now seem laughably overwritten and ill-conceived, but de Lorde always claimed that he, of all playwrights, best understood the Aristotelean concept of catharsis -- it is certainly true that each of his texts successfully purged its audience with pity and fear, more often than not physically as well as emotionally.

Under the control of Maurey and de Lorde, the Grand Guignol quickly achieved the status of an elite social entertainment. Its visceral powers seem to have been particularly attractive society women, who flocked to each performance in great number. Maurey claimed that a doctor was always in attendance to assist swooning spectators -- on average two members of the public fainted every night. Interestingly, it was mainly male playgoers who succumbed, probably because, unlike their female escorts, the men refrained from covering their eyes during the most horrifying moments.

And Grand Guignol productions were certainly horrifying -- probably even by today's standards. Stage managers had to learn to concoct stage blood to ten different recipes, each mixture congealing at a different rate. Every morning the butchers of Montmarte delivered a variety of animal corpses to the theatre -- Guignol actors knew exactly which species of eyeball bounced best on a wooden stage. One actress known as Maxa, who appears as a character in Moran's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, kept a full journal of her performances with the Guignol. During her relatively brief career, according to theatre historian Mel Gordon, Maxa was murdered more than 10,000 times in some sixty ways and raped over 3,000 times under a dozen circumstances. It has been calculated that while on the Guignol stage, Maxa cried "Help!" 983 times, "Murderer!" 1,263 times, and "Rape!" 1,804-1/2 times.

Three decades have passed since the last drop of fake blood spattered the stage of the Grand Guignol, and the camp horrors of Méténier's theatre have been largely forgotten.

Contemporary French theatre historians prefer to play down the extent of the Guignol's popularity, claiming the more temperate works of the Existentialists and Symbolists as the most important of the period. But the influence of Grand Guignol techniques on other genres, most notably film, cannot be denied, nor can the fact that for sixty years the little theatre on the rue Chaptal played to the kind of houses all other artistic directors can only long for.

Thirty years on, and John Moran has created a gently satirical tribute to these uncontested masters of stage magic. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a new Grand Guignol play in which, thanks to a little post-modernist manipulation, the characters are the actors of the Guignol troupe themselves. With a stack of special effects that would have stunned the Prince of Terror himself, and a script that veers between high farce and true melodrama, Caligari is set to out-Guignol the Grand Guignol. A doctor will be on duty....

Gideon Lester is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.