From the concerned perspective of theatrical theory, the question might be put in the these terms: how does dramatic criticism, that of the written and audiovisual media, help one to better appreciate (in every sense of the term) mise en scene. Instead of looking down on journalistic dramatic criticism, it might be preferable if subtle theory was to look up to it. In any case, dramatic criticism in the media, being almost instantaneous, is perhaps closer to the theatre event, which is also instantaneous, than to intemporal, heavy, static theatre, which, by its very nature, falsifies the visceral and emotional impressions that the spectator receives at the time.

Our theoretical hypothesis, in any case, is that mise en scène is the most useful and central notion for evaluating a spectacle, not only for analysing it, but also for judging it in aesthetic terms. The notion of mise en scene is nonetheless far from being universal, and the term, though internationally known, takes a specific sense in each cultural context. In France, mise en scène initially designated the passage of the dramatic text to the stage. Then it rapidly came to signify stage work, the spectacle, the show, specifically as opposed to the text or the written proposal for stage acting. To this empirical conception (and current) of mise en scène must be added the one used here, more precise and technical, theoretical and semiological, of a system of meaning, of choice of mise en scène. We thus make a marked distinction between performance analysis, which describes the various signs of the representation in an empirical and positivist way, and the analysis of mise en scène, which offers a theory of its overall functioning. Dramatic criticism practices both types of analysis, but especially interesting for us is the one where mise en scène is considered as a more or less coherent system. In short, this type of criticism is actually in a position to describe the options of mise en scène, to reveal the system of it, the Konzept (as the Germans say), the dramaturgy (as the Brechtians say), the ‘acting’ or ‘staging style’, as it is put in English. The big problem is to know whether these global notions are still pertinent for shows from the last ten years. Before using the example of the 2005 Avignon festival to check this, let it be clear that the dramatic criticism envisaged here is above all that of the daily press; previews in the weekly press, radio and television programmes, as well as audience discussion groups on the internet should also be mentioned.

The example of Avignon demands that we rethink the role and method of dramatic criticism as well as the new mise en scène practices. This double perspective and double crisis is therefore helpful as once again it proves the hypothesis according to which criticism must endlessly adapt itself to changes in theatrical practice, which, in turn, allows new or unsuspected properties of mise en scène to be discovered.

Until the 1980s, critics were aware of the fact that their art was split between information for the general public and studies for professionals, be it industry people or artists themselves. For Thibaudet (1922), the model is a trinity: “the criticism of honest folk, the criticism of professionals and the criticism of artists”1. More often, the model is binary: thus Bernard Dort (1967) opposes a “consumption criticism” and “another criticism (…) both a criticism of the theatrical fact as an aesthetic fact and a criticism of the social and political conditions of the activity of theatre.” Criticism is thus “equally outside and inside2”. Later, this same Dort (1982) would attempt a delicate dialectic between two types of criticism: “traditional criticism, mainly journalistic ”, of an “ideal average spectator” and the “scientific or academic” speech of “Theaterwissenschaft or theatrology.” The synthesis, the “third party”, “both outside and inside”, the “concerned spectator (…) must have theatrical knowledge, be it historical or semiological”, a knowledge that she does not “apply to the show”, but “submits to the test of theatre performance3”. Georges Banu (1983) returns to this dualism: criticism depends as much on the “enlightened amateur” as on the “dramaturge in the German sense of the word”, who “disposes of a theory, a certainty (…) that he stubbornly endeavours to realise”4. The continuity of this French tradition can probably be found in many other countries, in other forms. However, it is by no means universal, and the German critic Henning Rischbieter, for a long time the editor of Theater heute, proposes an entirely different distribution of the tasks of criticism, which responds, he claims, to three realities: 1) it is a branch of journalism and information; 2) it has an economic impact; 3) it is literary output since it requires an artistic talent of writing. The absence of reflection on dramaturgy or mise en scène would surprise the French, who would wonder if this absence bears witness to a certain cynicism, eclecticism or indeed whether this position shows a extreme openmindedness.

Whatever the conceptions of dramatic criticism in these last thirty or forty years may have been, the hurricane of Avignon 2005, which was in fact partly caused by this same criticism, has tended to carry them into the storm5. That year, the difficulty was as much about evaluating the shows at the festival as measuring the deep reactions of the audience. The fire raged between the critic and the artist. In a serious crisis of confidence, each suspected the other: the artist is nothing but a charlatan, thought one; the critic is just frustrated, figured the other… Nothing new about this misunderstanding? Yes and no!

The current crisis of confidence comes notably from the fact that the theatre audience no longer consists of homogenous groups who feel represented by the critic, in particular according to clear political divides. Conversely, the critic does not constitute the echo of a given group, since there are now only mini-groups, sub-groups of fans or sworn and vocal enemies. We no longer speak, at least in France, and since Vilar of the theatre in general, nor of the mise en scène as a concrete, aesthetic and ideological mise en relation of the theatre.

Another kind of interference of which it is unclear whether we should be proud concerns the old distinction between journalistic criticism and theoretical university research, which is becoming blurred. The written press no longer plays its role of immediate riposte to the stage event, as it is beaten to first place by the other media, linked to the internet of forums and blogs. Many critics publish their accounts a week, a month, even a year after the show. These are sometimes academics who follow and support this group or that trend, seeming to almost be the accomplices of the artists. And this is understandable in fact, since the university, be it European or American, has stopped proposing theoretical models, and is becoming the conservatory of know-how and of the ready-made, of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Its image as being scientific, impartial, rigorous and even intellectually honesty has suffered much. The good news is that the day-by-day critics and the one-year-tothe-next theoreticians are in the same boat, and they can no longer be played one against the other.

For the first time, Avignon poses the question of trust to the critic: how can readers, future or potential spectators, be helped to decipher, or simply accept, the shows? The question is as much aimed at the critical experts as at the mere mortals! The brutal good sense of the critics of yore no longer suffices. Their only response to the question “what does it mean?” is a pirouette: “what do you see in it?”. They are in no position to provide a guide to the use of mise en scène. The passing perplexity that according to Banu guaranteed the “regeneration of a critic6” has become the rule for everyone.

That being the case, it is not surprising that dramaturgical analysis and research on the choices of mise en scène are coming to an end. The mixture of genres (comic, tragic, grotesque, absurd, etc.), the multiplicity of registers cloud the issues. The critic must send out a hypothesis on the functioning of mise en scène, its system or its main thread, in order to help the perplexed spectator, but this hypothesis also risks misleading or losing the spectator, if it is revealed to be false or forced.

There is no doubt: a change of paradigm for mise en scene practice has rendered the analytic grid ineffective, at least temporarily7. The structural, functionalist, semiological conception of mise en scène, which conceived of the show as a spectacular text and a semiotic system, is no longer in circulation. This change is not entirely new, even if French criticism has not yet taken note. Theatre seems to discover that the important thing does not reside in the result, in the finished show, but in the process, the effect produced. Mise en scène has become performance, in the English sense of the word: it participates in an action, it is in a state of becoming. It is necessary to somehow envisage the spectacle from two extremities: its origins and its extensions, to understand from where the performative action comes and where it is going. In this spirit, Vincent Baudriller, the co-director of the festival, suggests that critics and spectators should only ask where the artist “wants to go with it”: “the important thing is that the spectator understand the meaning of the creator’s activity*8”. We are thus invited to interrogate the artist’s intentions: a question that we thought we had got past and which returns with force in such biographical criticism.

As a consequence, are we once again faced with a stable, graspable, describable aesthetic object? Has the object of analysis, mise en scène, once again acquired something tangible, has it become, like the plastic art objects described by Yves Michaud, an “art in a gaseous state” whose works are soluble in the air, reduced to single aesthetic experience for the spectator? This aesthetic experience is the only thing that remains when one neglects the stage object in favour of its mode of reception. What is true for the plastic arts is true also for the mise en scène, which is made up of objects that are even more fragile and which disappear as time goes by: the works “no longer aim to represent nor to signify. They do not refer to anything beyond themselves: they no longer symbolise. They no longer even count as objects made sacred but aim to directly produce intense or specific experiences.9”. We are in a paradoxical situation facing, or rather inside, the work: it is material, sensitive and physical. But at the same time, what counts is no longer this materiality, rather we are plunged into experience. In this way, the work dematerialises itself, becomes virtual, prevents us from being able to distinguish its properties or significations. In the 1980s, the critic was at least guaranteed the presence of a body, one it shared with its generation10. At the moment, there is a slight sensation of losing this empirical body, as the spectacular object dematerialises itself and the spectator, recovering an imaginary body, withdraws into aesthetic experience (and it is difficult to say who is the winner in such an exchange).

This withdrawal is difficult to halt. Nonetheless, criticism, concerned with description of representation as a whole, continually returns to the stage/d system. The recent study, by Mitter and Shevtsova, of fifty theatre directors, concludes with a distancing from the term directing/mise en scène in favour of a domination of the body in movement11. This corporeal action in movement must thus become the object of criticism of mise en scène. Instead of comparing text and its stage concretisation (as criticism has been doing for a long time), it is appropriate to reveal the logic of the body in movement as well as the space-time where it is to be found. If criticism, and in turn the spectator, are preoccupied with the whole show, and not with the isolated details, they protect us from the effects of zapping between channels: if I don’t like it, I switch to something else. There remains nonetheless the extreme difficulty of reading and deciphering the show in its internal logic and in its reference to our world. This is a difficulty but not an impossibility.

The crisis of representation, which affects mise en scène as much as dramatic criticism, leads to a re-evaluation of both. Therein lies the challenge to the very notion of mise en scène, which is perhaps no longer in a position to follow the evolution of theatrical forms. Is mise en scène a relic to which we are attached, while performance no longer requires a coherent whole, based on a directive, an idea or dramaturgical analysis? In the shows at the Avignon ‘in’ festival in 2005, it had become impossible to rebuild an overall discourse on mise en scène, a story or a conception of the whole12. Inside a single show no homogenous acting style, directing style or scenography could be found. The shows were neither classic, since neither harmony nor coherence reigned; nor romantic, since there was no genius like that of Wagner or Chéreau to organise the material; nor Hegelian, since no synthesis was forthcoming to conciliate and overcome the various styles. From a critical point of view, there was no “system of art”, no “magic key thanks to which the work can be entered13”. What, for Jean Dutour, would have been a good thing, a sign of simplicity, appears to us now a double abdication: mise en scène is totally disorganised and it discourages all coherent methods of analysis.

But this very personal perspective does not take into account current mise en scène practice, practice that precisely goes against ‘classical’ mise en scène, and which leads us, or brings us back, to performance, in the English (and not the French) sense of the word. We have seen performance blowing up the fixed frontiers of mise en scène. But, from the English perspective, that is a good thing - it is a vision that renews our too narrow conception of mise en scène, at least of classical mise en scène: “The term ‘mise en scène’ has emphasized how performance’s meanings are produced not only in the performance product—the show—but also through the process of both production and audience reception.14”. This implies that dramatic criticism has two ways of thinking of mise en scène: 1) by imagining how the preparatory work took place, not only the reading around the table but also the directing of the actors. 2) by integrating the description of the reaction of the audience, to give readers or future spectators an idea of the way in which they too might react.

Besides this widening of perspectives, which dramatic criticism has in fact always practiced, it is necessary to venture to grant it new tasks, precisely in the domains that Political correctness carefully avoids. What might these tasks be? Let us list a just a few:

1) To take on and make explicit value judgements, which criticism, like theory, cannot avoid; to admit the enterprise of legitimization presupposed by any discourse, even a negative one, on an artist, a movement, a way of working; to nonetheless remain aware of the relativity of this judgement in giving the reader the possibility of contesting of deconstructing it.

2) To become aware - and make aware - of the cultural identity of whoever gives a judgement, all the while allowing them the right to talk about what does not concern them, about another culture, another milieu, another identity, another religion. To delocalise critics. To make them analyse shows that are still foreign to them. To not burden oneself with legitimacy, authenticity, fundamentalism, even of a cultural nature.

3) To reaffirm the importance of mise en scène and of the director as mediating between the work and the audience. As was said twenty years ago, when Vitez arrived at Chaillot, “we will defend the function, the very existence of mise en scène, once again, today contested in principle. We will not let ourselves be closed in the ineffable relationship of the actor to the text and to the audience.15”. Vitez’s lesson has not been forgotten, it is as true for criticism as for mise en scène. It is now our job to recognise the new functions and frontiers of mise en scène: an “extension of the province of the struggle[16].

The critic too is a species in danger of extinction and yet, like the director, is essential as a mediator between the stage and the auditorium. The critic and the director are old comrades, secret accomplices each obliged to hear what the other has to say for fear of becoming extinct.

Mise en scène thus remains in all respects the territory and the stakes of theatrical

production and dramatic criticism. It is to this that we should devote the majority of our time.

As Estragon, in Waiting for Godot, would say, “let’s go!”

[3] Le Monde, 1982. Text reproduced in Chantal Meyer-Plantureux’s Un siècle de critique dramatique, Complexe, 2003, p.142.

[4] Théâtre/Public, no. 50, 1983. Article reproduced in Un siècle de critique dramatique, op. cit., p.146.

[5] A debate on the programming took place in the press, with some critics finding that the shows were often violent, incomprehensible, botched, far from the spirit of the founder Jean Vilar. See the following books: Régis Debray. Sur le pont d’Avignon, Paris, Flammarion, 2005. Georges Banu et Bruno Tackels. Le cas Avignon 2005, L’Entretemps, 2005. Carole Talon-Hugon. Le conflit des héritages, Du Théâtre n.16, juin 2006.

[6] Ibid., p.149.

[7] We are no longer in the alternative of the critic divided between the desire to speak of the mise en scène (as a system) and to mention the performance of the actors. Thus, Jean-Pierre Léonardini: “I am absolutely convinced that to not speak of the actors in my own work is a blind spot. I think that, at this moment in time, the concept of mise en scène is to be defended, as is that of critical mise en perspective. Nonetheless, in talking about that, rather than about the actor, I am amputating my work from a secondary construction” ‘La critique en question’, Théâtre/Public, no.18, 1977, p.19.

[8] La Croix, 9-10 juillet 2005. Quoted in Carole Talon-Hugon. Avignon 2005. Le conflit des héritages. Du Théâtre, hors-série, no.16, 2006.

[9] Yves Michaud. L’art à l’état gazeux. Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique. Paris, Stock, 2003, p.100.

[10] Georges Banu. ‘Le corps du critique n’est pas seulement le sien, mais il est aussi celui de sa génération à laquelle il appartient’, Un siècle de critique dramatique, op.cit.,p.150.

[11] Shomit Mitter et Maria Shevtsova. Fifty key Theatre Directors, London, Routledge, 2005, p.XVIII.

[12] See Patrice Pavis. ‘Théâtre et calamité’, Théâtre/Public, no.180, 2006.

[13] Jean Dutour. Le Paradoxe du critique, Paris, Flammarion, 1970, p.20.

[14] Paul Allain. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance , London, p.171.

[15] Antoine Vitez. ‘L’art du théâtre’, L’Art du théâtre, n.1, 1985, p.9.

[16] See my study in Théâtre/Public, ‘Extension du domaine de la lutte . La mise en scène à Avignon 2006’, 2006.