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Editorial : Playwrights, get empowered!
 

Something is missing, or was missing, was no longer there, and now it has come back, or is in the process of coming back.
All of the increasingly sophisticated additions that sometimes embellish, improve and enrich theatre productions - the sets, design, staging, acting styles, profusion of light or exaggerated darkness, costumes, props and images - gradually had a perverse effect, a "pornographic" effect whose unavowed purpose was to take away our pleasure, as opposed to eroticism which is full of promise.
Pleasure cannot - and should not - be seen. It must be taken in like a breath. But lately audiences have been prevented from "breathing" in the theatre, and thus from experiencing a climax… because the way to the playwright's breathing has been blocked and the audience could no longer see or hear anything.
So playwrights had to get empowered again, to regain strength and courage, resources and resistance in order to say that the theatre is intended for us to hear what cannot be seen. It's the gaps and lacks - what is not there - which must be seen if we are to hear them.
But what must we hear?
Someone observing the times in which he lives? An observer of other human beings living during those same times? Perhaps! But it would be erroneous, for instance, if a spectator three or four hundred years from now thought that I lived the way Rodrigo Garcia says. Did people in the 17th century live the way Cervantes describes them? Maybe not!
Cervantes and Garcia, to stay with the Spanish example, were only "interpreting" their times. They felt empowered to interpret what they saw, heard and felt.
Nowadays we have television to do the observing and reporting!
Playwrights now - more than ever - do not need to be observers, but rather "translators" of the world. In using words as a poetic act of interpreting the world, they become committed and empowered, helping to develop humanitarian values within the community. The very word "author" comes from the Latin auctor, "one who increases" and is thus empowered.
Television fascinates you and wears you out, like pornography. Playwrights, however, by speaking to a live audience (both those performing and those watching), create a stimulating distance which makes the world intelligible and listeners intelligent, provided that their imaginations are allowed a free rein.
And when a director succeeds in making the playwright's words visible, at the same time he makes visible the gap that is the playwright's voice, which must be heard through the actors.
The current focus back on playwrights and the laudable efforts on the part of the sacd, eat, the Théâtre du Rond-Point (and others before them) point to where this voice can be heard, through the playwrights who are again empowered, and thus committed, thereby making the community more human.

Louise Doutreligne