La Parodie, Arthur Adamov's first play, was written in 1947 and performed in 1952, in Paris, at the Théâtre Lancry. In the second volume of his collected plays (Théâtre II), a preface by the playwright comments on his career, on the origins of his plays, on his dissatisfaction or satisfaction with them.
His real reasons for writing for the stage are not clear to Adamov. He had been reading Strindberg intensively and he believed that because of this reading he had been paying attention to chance street scenes that were theatrical in nature. He was impressed especially by the steady flow of walkers, by the solitude of each individual walker in the midst of such a crowd, and by the diversity of the conversations he overheard, the fragmentary remarks whose ensemble seemed to contain a profound symbolism. Then one day he witnessed an incident on the street, seemingly insignificant, but which appeared to him as a scene from a play: C'est cela le théâtre, c'est cela que je veux faire.... He observed a blind man asking for alms. As two young girls passed, they heedlessly bumped into him. At that moment they were singing a popular refrain: "I closed my eyes and it was wonderful." (J'ai fermé les yeux, c'était merveilleux....)
From this scene, almost casual and banal in itself, the idea for Adamov's first play, La Parodie (The Parody), came to him. He would try to demonstrate as blatantly as possible the subject of man's solitude, the impossibility of communication between men. La Parodie was the result of three years' labor and many different versions. Later, looking back, Adamov considered the characters in La Parodie as marionettes, and this seemed explicable to him by the fact that he took as a point of departure not real details but a general idea, a "metaphysical" idea. His basic philosophy was that all existences are equivalent, that the character N., in his refusal of life, and the character of the clerk (L'Employé), in his unthinking acceptance of life, come to the same end, namely total destruction. This first play was a sign of rebellion for Adamov. He had been strongly influenced by Artaud's The Theatre and It's Double, and disgusted with the so-called "psychological" plays of his day.
When the character N. in La Parodie says that everyone is dead (tout le monde est mort, il n'y a pas que moi), he summarizes two major characteristics of Adamov's world as reflected in his plays: everything moves toward death, and death has no reason. Adamov seems to be preparing the advent of tragedy and at the same time denying the authenticity or the competence of tragedy. In this sense, his world is a "parody." If fate is the same for everyone, then there is no fate.
For his second play, L'Invasion (The Invasion), performed in 1950, at the studio des Champs-Elysées, under the direction of Jean Vilar, Adamov resolved to take a specific subject and create characters rather than types. But he intended to maintain the leading principle of La Parodie: no character understands or even hears any other character. He believed he was inventing a new stratagem in the theatre by having a character heard by another but not having him say what he meant to say. Adamov later discovered that this kind of dialogue distinguishes the plays of Chekhov!
A dream was the basis of Adamov's third play, La Grande et la Petite Manoeuvre. In his dream Adamov was threatened with militaristic exercises that were to mutilate and finally kill him. The fear that he felt in the dream he wanted to communicate in the new play (first presented at the Théâtre des Noctambules, in 1950). Le Mutilé (Adamov in his dream) is destined to be destroyed, but le Militant is also destroyed. The Kafkaesque themes in this play are used in a fully theatrical way. The mise-en-scène is of primary importance. Noises and unexpected events are the physical destruction that really narrates the moral destruction of the hero. The revelation of the play, namely the belief that the failure of all human action is written down somewhere, is the result of the fear Adamov had experienced in his dream and his rationalization about human existence. These first three plays of Adamov were in reality demonstrations of a profoundly pessimistic philosophy, concerning the uselessness of man trying to oppose the forces destined to crush him. An action is accomplished only to be defeated, a passion is experienced only to be denied. Everything fatally results in failure.
Adamov interrupted the composition of his fourth play, Le Sens de la Marche, in order to begin the writing of his fifth, Le Professeur Taranne (Professor Taranne) (first performed in Lyon, in 1953). This, again, was the transcription of a dream, but this time Adamov claims he did not try to confer a general meaning on the drama. He believes that the satisfaction he still derives from this play comes from the fact that he used no parts of the dream as mere allegory. The speeches of Taranne are comparable to the speeches Adamov made in his dream. The writing of the play was accomplished immediately, within the space of two days. He had spent five years on La Parodie and L'Invasion.
Le Professeur Taranne is a brief play about a man unable to live up to his public role as university professor. He is accused of a number of things, among them appearing naked on a beach, where some young girls had seen him, and of plagiarism. As his imagination evokes the accusations, we see the changing sets and the accusers. This is a play about fantasies, of a very cruel order, and one of the most successful theatrical projections of Adamov's world. The protagonist appears completely within his tragic circumference. He has been condemned for exposing himself. This is the beginning of a long series of affirmations on the part of Taranne which are immediately turned against him and act negatively on his case. Every word he uses exposes him in the wrong way and ends up annihilating him. Every minute during the action of the play, Taranne is within the confines of the tragedy of his existence.
The central object around which the action of Ping-Pong revolves is the pinball machine, the dominant attraction for the clientèle of Mme Duranty's café. The characters are defined by their varying reactions to the machine, to the degree of obsession which the machine creates in them. This object, both fetish and symbol, permits the spectators, according to Adamov, to separate themselves from the characters. Although the playwright claims that he has left a certain amount of freedom to some of his characters in Ping-Pong, they appear more simply as victims of the pinball machine, namely of the inevitable structure of the tragic universe.
The première of Paolo Paoli took place in 1957, in Lyon, at the Théâtre de la Comédie. This very ambitious play was then performed in Paris in early 1958, by the same company, under the direction of Roger Planchon, at the Vieux-Colombier. The subject of the play is the egoism and the narrow-mindedness of French society between the years 1900 and 1914. In the earlier plays Adamov's characters were general and allegorical, but in Paolo Paoli they were more real and more individualistic. The principal character, Paolo Paoli, the son of a bourgeois family in Cayenne, comes to paris about 1900 in order to found an unusual business--selling rare butterflies. This highly poetic commerce is the center of the action: twelve scenes during which the injustice and cupidity of a society moving toward self-destruction are exposed.
Paolo Paoli, a cynic, employs at the lowest possible wages the convicts of Cayenne to hunt his butterflies. His principal client, Hulot-Vasseur, runs another business, equally poetic, the sale of hummingbird feathers and heron plumes for ladies' hats. He, too, is an exploiter of the women in his employ. Abbé Saulnier, a former chaplain at Cayene, is a friend of Paolo Paoli; he represents a fanatical belief in the Church and in tyrannical supervision of the working classes. The action of the play is precipitated by the escape of a falsely condemned convict, Marpeaux, who comes for help to Paolo and Abbé Saulnier.
The play stresses the worst side of French civilization during the pre-1914 years, but this worst side, in its farcical, lively and wicked aspects, is admirably drawn in the theatrical medium. The story is both weird and plausible. Adamov himself, a very harsh critic of his early plays, saw a radical change in his manner with Ping Pong and Paolo Paoli. The characters of these two plays are far less abstract than those of La Parodie and L'Invasion, but this second manner of the playwright is in no way a negation of the first. In Paoli Paoli we come into direct contact with small, limited men, concerned with small businesses. Paolo Paoli is an entomologist who sells butterflies, and Hulot-Vasseur is an industrialist who sells aigrettes and colibri plumes worried over the new social laws among the working class. The indignation scenes of Abbé Saulnier and the lamentations over the state of the world recited by Mme de Saint-Sauveur are simultaneously comical and biting.
This world of the play is a microcosm of the bigger world moving steadily and fatalistically into war. The false or the materialistic reasons for the associations existing between the characters of Paolo Paoli serve as premonitions for selfish alliances between peoples and nations. Between the various scenes or tableaux, quotations from newspapers and celebrities are projected on a screen. These relate to the important political figures of the epoch and to the world situation. This is a device that serves to maintain an equilibrium between the immediate parochial drama taking place on the stage, and the wider context of world politics and the doom of mankind.
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