In 1947, in the aftermath of World War II, Jean Vilar (1912-71) founded the Avignon Festival as a contribution to national reconstruction, a response to the urgent imperative to restore France's dignity and rebuild a sense of community. He believed in the power of arts and culture to heal, nurture, and transform. Shakespeare's major influence on Vilar's implementation of a theater for all people is now well established. The founding production of Richard II, a play never before staged in France, in the Honor Court of the Popes' Palace, an open-air, monumental, medieval venue, provided Vilar with a unique opportunity to regenerate the theater outside Paris, while breaking away from the conventions of the Italian-style playhouse. But the huge success of Richard II somewhat eclipsed the oblique presence of Shakespeare in La Terrasse de midi, a rewriting of Hamlet by Maurice Clavel and one of the three theater productions of the Week of Art in Avignon, as the first edition of the festival was called. Also directed by Vilar, the production of Clavel's play was rooted in a double irony: Vilar's well-known dislike of Hamlet and his choice of Avignon's Italian playhouse for its venue.

This essay explores the paradoxes of Shakespeare's multifaceted presence in the origins of the festival. How was Shakespeare processed by French culture in the postwar context, in a festival that has characterized itself right from its foundation as a laboratory of sociocultural practices? To what extent were his plays reshaped to fit Vilar's artistic, cultural, and political project, and how did they fashion in their turn the format and specific ethos of the festival?

The 1947 encounter of Richard II with the Honor Court established the ideological and aesthetic foundations of the Avignon Festival, which was meant to promote civic theater and to be a laboratory as well as a ritualized festive event. Richard II lent itself to Vilar's project on several accounts. Vilar intended to experiment with new forms of theater in Avignon and since Richard II had never before been staged in France, he commissioned a new translation for his production. The history play helped him negotiate the space of the Popes' Palace, a place that had never been used for performances. The play's epic dimension appropriately matched the monumental venue. Moreover, the historical period of the dramatic action corresponded with the time when the fourteenth-century palace was erected. Laden with rituals and ceremonies, the play also served Vilar's intention to ritualize the theater, as it had been in ancient times. Furthermore, Vilar's minimalist aesthetic, which relied on the spectator's capacity for imagination (as Shakespeare famously celebrates in the prologue to Henry V), left its mark on the festival. The "aesthetic of the three stools," as it came to be called, was named for his staging of Richard's prison scene. Produced again for the festivals of 1948, 1949, and 1953, Richard IImet with such success that Vilar was pressured to make the Avignon Festival a Shakespeare Festival. (1) Yet, he resisted the temptation for fear of turning Shakespeare into "guaranteed income" or "share capital." (2) Vilar's production of Richard II thus seemed to strike a balance between a Shakespeare-centric and a context-centric approach. However, a consideration of the "global kaleidoscope" of Shakespearean sources and models available to Vilar prompts one to go beyond this dialectic to consider the range of mediations between Shakespeare and himself, and suggests more answers to explain his intriguing choice of a patriotic English history play as a means to further French national reconstruction. (3)

In fact, Vilar found in the Elizabethan "theatre of a nation" a conceptual basis upon which to invent, in the aftermath of World War II, a French civic theater that intended to ensure social cohesion through the construction of a collective memory and the critical appropriation of history. (4) Heir to Charles Dullin (1885-1949) and Firmin Gemier (1869-1933), the fathers of democratic theater in France, Vilar himself discovered theater through a Shakespeare history play, as he attended rehearsals of a Richard III directed by Dullin in 1933. The epiphany he experienced led Vilar to become a man of the theater in his turn, and to ground his own practice of popular theater in Shakespeare in general and history plays in particular. After Richard II, he staged the two parts of Henry IV in Avignon in 1950. And just like Gemier, who had founded the French Shakespeare Society in 1919 to strengthen the alliance between France and Britain in the aftermath of World War I, Vilar placed his own project of national reconstruction in a broader context of Anglo-French cooperation. In this respect, the ambivalent role assumed by France in Richard II epitomizes the history of its complex relations with Britain. While the play's action takes place during the Hundred Years' War, France is also dramatized as a refuge for exiles, such as Bolingbroke or the French-born Queen herself.

Jan Kott and, more recently, Dennis Kennedy, have analyzed how Shakespeare was used after World War II, not only in France but elsewhere in Europe, to explore a diversity of national political contexts. (5) As a matter of fact, the Edinburgh festival was also founded in 1947 with a production of Richard II, only weeks before the Avignon venture was launched. The translation of the play into French culture was thus part of a supranational, European process of acculturation.

Historically linked to the origins of the festival, this founding play holds symbolic significance and enjoys a specific status due to the way it has continued to inform the Avignon event. Two other productions of Richard II were staged in the Honor Court, respectively by Ariane Mnouchkine in 1982 and Jean-Baptiste Sastre in 2010. Over the years, Richard 77has become the play through which the development of the Vilarian project for Avignon is regularly assessed.

The Hamletian origins of the Avignon Festival, which have thus far been completely overlooked, exemplify a different form of artistic and intellectual transfer. La Terrasse de midi was Maurice Clavel's second play. It was first performed during the Week of Art and first published in its aftermath in October 1947, and then again in a revised edition in 1948. It has long been out of print and now can only be found at the Bibliotheque nationale de France and at the local library in Sete, Clavel's hometown. Successful in Avignon, it was performed again a few months later, in January 1948, at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris. But here ended its good fortune, as it inspired no other known stage production.

In La Terrasse, the Shakespearean plot is decontextualized and recontextualized in the here-and-now, in South France after World War II. Such radical translation, in the etymological sense of the term, was meant to stimulate a political, philosophical, and aesthetical reflection on the reconstruction of French society as well as on the relevance, after 1945, of tragedy as a model inherited from Ancient Greece and revived in the Renaissance. The plot revolves around Jean, a young man whose mother has driven her husband, a famous poet, to commit suicide so that she can marry her lover. Jean has been preparing himself for revenge for six years and is now putting on a play he has written, which dramatizes the family story, and which he intends to have performed in front of his mother at night. The title, La Terrasse de midi, is an indication of place and time. It refers to South France--le Midi--and to the elevated terrace next to the hotel in which the characters are staying, the very terrace that will serve as an open-air stage for the embedded performance. (6) The title also refers to "Midi," midday, in broad daylight, when the summer sun scorches the terrace, and thus points to the revelatory function of the terrace and the show it hosts in disclosing the painful truth by shedding crude light upon it. (7) Furthermore, since the publication of Paul Bourget's novel, Le Demon de midi (The Devil at Noon) in 1914, "midi" has also come to refer metaphorically to midlife, and more specifically to midlife crisis and uncontrolled sexual appetite. La Terrasse de midi thus designates the stage upon which Jean's/Hamlet's mother is going through her midlife crisis, and it is there that the crimes deriving from that crisis are dramatized; it furnishes, too, the space in which her deception is discovered and theatrical illusion is deconstructed. A play in three acts, La Terrasse opens with rehearsals for an unnamed embedded play and ends shortly after an interrupted performance of that play. Thus at many levels, La Terrasse de midi focuses on the metatheatrical dimension of Hamlet. The device of the play-within-the-play, with its structural and thematic mirror effect, results in emphasis and distancing, providing both homage to the source and a means to keep it at a remove.

The palimpsestic nature of La Terrasse de midi is widely acknowledged in Clavel's and Vilar's notes of intent and interviews, as well as in the first lines of the text itself. Leopold and Madeleine, embodying Jean's late father and his mother, who correspond to Hamlet senior and Gertrude, are rehearsing under Jean's guidance:

Leopold.--How will the audience understand that I'm committing suicide?

Jean.--They will understand.

Leopold.--Provided they already know the plot.

Jean.--It is well-known. (8)

Vilar's programming and staging of this play was all the more surprising since his distaste for Hamlet was no secret. As an actor, he wrote: "Romeo would have been a role for me. Not Lear, not Hamlet." (9) As a stage director, he said, tongue-in-cheek, that his epitaph should read: "Here lies the only French director that never staged Hamlet." (10) As the founder and director of the Avignon Festival, he was wary of the play's mythical dimension. For him, the sacralized text could only produce a museum of Shakespeare, and thus Hamlet would have impeded his intention to turn the festival into a laboratory, an experimental platform, and Shakespeare into a catalyst for contemporary creation. Or, conversely, Hamlet could be seen as a top-selling brand, crystallizing Vilar's fear that Shakespeare be considered a business:

   How many actors have only dreamed this persistent, crazy dream,
   this nightmare, for more than a century: play Hamlet! If Hamlet
   wasn't so difficult to stage and so expensive to produce, believe
   me, we would have a dozen Hamlets a year and as many in Germany, in
   Italy, etc. (11)

Either way, Hamlet could only lead to sclerosis. Accordingly, between 1947 and 1971 only one other production of Hamlet, beside La Terasse de midi, was programmed at the Avignon Festival while Vilar was at its head.

Staged in the Honor Court of the Popes' Palace in 1965, this Hamlet was directed by George Wilson, who had succeeded Vilar as head of the Theatre National Populaire in Paris in 1963. As a person, Vilar had no affinity with the melancholy persona of the Danish prince. He copied in his personal notebook the following lines from the "poem on Hamlet" composed by Bertolt Brecht in 1940:

   Here is the body, puffy and inert,
   Where we can trace the virus of the mind.
   How lost he seems among his steel-clad kind
   This introspective sponger in a shirt. (12)

Hamlet represents what Vilar never was, or never had the luxury of being. At the same time, Jacques Tephany, the former director of the Maison Jean Vilar in Avignon and Vilar's son-in-law, suggests that Vilar and Hamlet shared the same self-detestation: Vilar did not like Hamlet, but just like him he did not like himself either. (13) When away from home, Vilar would write to his family, using humorous masks and pen names. He was Sidi Mohammed Vilar when writing from Algeria in October 1949; J.L.C. Vilarus when writing about Plautus and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in spring 1949; or Hamlet senior when he concluded his letter on February 7, 1950, addressing his children in English: "I love my sons and my daughter. Hamlet-the-father." (14) Such a pen name crystallizes his ambivalence to the play, so deeply rooted in Western culture that it is impossible to ignore or silence it. As he compares himself not to the protagonist but to the ghost in the play, Vilar acknowledges the haunting presence of Shakespeare's masterpiece while keeping it at a distance. In the summer preceding the Avignon staging of La Terrasse de midi, Michel Bouquet, the famous French actor who was to portray Jean/Hamlet, signed a letter to Vilar with "your Horatio." (15) He thus ironically transferred Hamlet's mask to Vilar while assuring him of his own fidelity to Vilar's theater project and of his personal friendship. By directing a rewriting of Hamlet, Vilar had provided his own mousetrap.

Thus, in Vilar's production of La Terrasse resistance to the source was part and parcel of the process of its cultural translation. But the Shakespearean play also resisted Vilar's political and artistic project. The other paradox underlying the production of La Terrasse de midi in Avignon resided in Vilar's choice of the Italian-style opera house for its venue. By decentralizing the theater from Paris and moving it to Avignon, Vilar intended to reinvent the relationship between stage and audience. He hoped to encourage a pact of performance inspired by Ancient Greek and Elizabethan theaters, employing direct address to large audiences in open-air venues in order to magnify the sense of togetherness in a society sorely afflicted by the war. Vilar's project questioned the architectural and aesthetic codes of the Italian playhouse which divide instead of bringing together. Firmin Gemier had already argued that after World War I had gathered all social classes in the trenches, performing in Italian playhouses, in which the vertical distribution of the audience mirrors the social hierarchy, was no longer relevant. (16) Similarly, the imaginary fourth wall dividing stage from audience had to be broken. An obstacle to the sense of inclusiveness that Vilar embraced, it prevented the audience from cooperating in the performance and becoming the "participant[s]" he wished to address. (17) In addition, for obvious economic reasons in the immediate postwar years, Vilar had to turn to places that were not initially designed as theaters, although they were highly theatrical: the Honor Court of the Popes' Palace for Richard II and Pope Urban V's orchard for Paul Claudel's Histoire de Tohie et de Sara. Although Vilar believed "that theatre lost a special kind of magic when it deserted earth, sky and stones to retreat indoors," he nevertheless resolved to use the local opera house as well for two main reasons. (18) First, it proved difficult to find three new venues for the very first festival. The installation of two open-air venues demanded huge logistics: the military was called upon to help; local inhabitants lent their own chairs; etc. Secondly, the indoor theater fitted Clavel's intimist play. In his note of intent, the playwright emphasized how relevant the enclosed stage or "cage," as he called it, was to the performance of the protagonist's inner conflict, to the exploration of his conscience, to the portrayal of his meandering introspection. (19) The stage of the opera house was as appropriate to Clavel's psychological drama as the Honor Court of the Popes' Palace was to Shakespeare's epic drama. Yet, one critic mentioned that the architecture of the playhouse, with its divide between stage and audience further increased by the presence of an orchestra pit, constituted an obstacle to the intimate pact of performance that the play required. Furthermore, the physical circumstances forced the actors to speak up. (20) Vilar explained later that La Terrasse de midi fitted his project for Avignon in terms of quality, not of genre. (21) The venue was not to be used again until 1976, five years after Vilar's death.

Considering Vilar's reservations about both the source text and the venue, one may wonder to what extent Clavel's rewriting of Hamlet served his project for Avignon.

Clavel was introduced to Vilar by Jean Cocteau in 1944, as Clavel was looking for a theater director to read the manuscript of his first play, Les Incendiaires. Vilar told him: "The last scene is excellent. The rest is worth nothing. Everything must be rewritten according to the last page." (22) Clavel followed his advice and won two literary awards. Both men were from Sete, near Montpellier, and Clavel was actively involved in the organization of the Week of Art in Avignon and the following festivals. In 1952, Vilar asked Clavel to become secretary general of the Theatre National Populaire, of which he had himself been appointed director the year before. Both men shared a passion for Shakespeare and were convinced that he would be the pillar on which to build popular theater in France. Besides rewriting Hamlet, Clavel ensured that Vilar's production of Richard II was adequately promoted. He participated with Jean Curtis in the tradaptation of Henry IV for Vilar's production of the play for the 1950 Avignon Festival; refused to tradapt Henry VI for fear of being labelled an adapter rather than an author; and then bitterly reproached Vilar for not asking him to contribute to the translation of Macbeth for his Avignon production in 1954, after their estrangement. The "global kaleidoscope" of Clavel's interactions with Shakespearean sources and experiences of appropriation and mediation evidences his deep commitment to Vilar's project to decentralize the theater in Avignon, develop a theater for all people, and assign Shakespeare a special prominence in the enterprise.

As he had done with Les Incendiaires, Vilar advised Clavel stepby-step on the writing of La Terrasse, until he declared: "Last night, I've read a masterpiece." (23) Producing the play in Avignon thus allowed Vilar to achieve his objective of promoting emerging talents alongside celebrated authors. Vilar also meant to program both classical and contemporary repertoires, as exemplified by Richard II and Paul Claudel's Histoire de Tobie et de Sara, and Clavel's dramatic palimpsest interestingly positioned itself at the crossroads of both repertoires. Eventually, Clavel's transposition of Hamlet to the postwar context served Vilar's humanist understanding of the Avignon Festival as a specific place and time to ponder the place of the individual in contemporary society. Such reflection conditioned for him the reconstruction of the nation. Clavel, who was twenty in 1940 and had studied philosophy, postulated that the war had deprived teenagers of everything not only material but also spiritual. The playwright dramatized the impossibility of developing one's conscience in a world without a moral framework or metaphysical beliefs. (24) Clavel hinged his rewriting on act 3, scene 4 of the source text, when Hamlet confronts his mother. (25) While Shakespeare's Gertrude is quickly overwhelmed by remorse, urging Hamlet to "Speak no more," in La Terrasse Jean's mother shamelessly justifies herself. Nor does Jean die at the end of the play, perhaps because in 1947 physical death had lost some of its impact. The only death that still seemed meaningful at the time was the death of conscience. Jean's tragedy is that he lives, and that, to do so, he must stop thinking. For a character who embodies conscience, renouncing one's conscience can only be self-destructive, suicidal. In the end, ironically, Jean resembles the stepfather he intended to kill to restore justice and morality.

With La Terrasse, Clavel attempted to reinvent tragedy in new historical, philosophical, and sociocultural contexts, revisiting Shakespeare's humanist tragedy at a time when Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that existentialism was a humanism. (26) He thus contributed to the experimental vocation Vilar assigned to the Avignon Festival, helping to make it a laboratory for theater and drama.

The denouement of Clavel's tragedy, which suggests that there can be no redemption through the theater since the embedded performance misses its target, proved Vilar right and Hamlet wrong. Rereading Hamlet in the light of Nazism, Vilar wrote that theater can only have an impact on spectators with a conscience, and capable of experiencing emotions--which, according to him, is not the case with Claudius. Himmler, he argued, never went to the theater and was never aware that his crimes exceeded those of Macbeth. He had no taste for Shakespeare. There was never any theater production at rue des Saussaies--the Gestapo's headquarters in Paris. For Vilar, Hamlet misreads the effect of The Mousetrap on Claudius, who is not moved by the dramatization of his own crimes, but rather by their parodie performance. (27) Vilar's analysis probably accounts for the fact that, unlike his production of Richard II, his cultural translation of Hamlet to Avignon resulted from an exclusively context-centric approach.

The production of Clavel's rewriting of Hamlet thus confirmed Vilar in his views against Italian-style playhouses and against Shakespeare's most famous, nearly mythic tragedy. By staging Richard II in tandem with La Terrasse, the first festival programmed an ambivalent Shakespeare, who, like Janus, revealed the two faces of the theater in Avignon: on the one hand, Shakespeare in the spotlight of the Honor Court heralded the future of the festival; on the other, Shakespeare's shadow in the Italian-style playhouse made evident what should be left to the past. The production confirmed that the Italian-style playhouse was not appropriate for Vilar's festival, even though it seemed appropriate to the dramatic situation of Clavel's play. The relationship between stage and audience induced by the venue was not what he sought. Thus, Vilar turned to Shakespeare to question the theatrical medium, his own artistic practice, and his project for Avignon. Later on, in 1959, in the golden age of the festival, Vilar questioned the meaning of his enterprise through A Midsummer Night's Dream. In sum, from the origins of the festival until now, Shakespeare has qualified as a mirror of its evolution and a measure of its assessment, as well as a source of inspiration and an incentive for creation.

Richard II and La Terrasse de midi were two ways of exploring the issue of conscience at political and psychological levels, by connecting history and individual story, in a monumental venue and its intimate opposite. At the origin of the festival, the two plays paved the way for Vilar's development into an "athlete of conscience," locating his theater midway between Brecht's epic theater and lyrical theater calling upon the spectators' emotions. (28) By negotiating with two Shakespearean texts in its first iteration, the Avignon Festival hinged its ambitious project on cultural translation as a key contribution to a new socio-political order in postwar France.

Notes

I wish to express my utmost gratitude for their generous assistance to the staff of the Performing Arts Department at the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Avignon (Maison Jean Vilar) where the archival collections on Jean Vilar are kept.

(1.) Claude Roy, Jean Vilar (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1968; Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1987), 66.

(2.) Jean Vilar, Chronique romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1971), 95-97. All translations from the French are mine, unless specified.

(3.) Margaret Litvin, "The French Source of the Earliest Surviving Arabic Hamlet," Shakespeare Studies (2011): 133-51, at 144-46. Litvin proposes the "global kaleidoscope" as a new approach to non-Anglophone Shakespeare, in order to go beyond the binary system of either Shakespeare-centric or context-centric approaches to adaptations.

(4.) Richard Helgerson lists the main occurrences of the phrase in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 197-98.

(5.) Jan Kott, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, transi. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Dennis Kennedy speaks of Shakespeare as "a cultural Marshall Plan" in Western Europe (The Spectator and the Spectacle. Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 81), and as a "cold warrior" in Central and Eastern Europe ("Shakespeare and the Cold War," in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, ed. Angel-Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars [Newark: University of Delaware, 2003], 163-79).

(6.) Archival collection on Jean Vilar (BnF, Maison Jean Vilar). Fonds Jean Vilar, 4-JV-69.7: drawing of a set annotated by Vilar.

(7.) Fonds Jean Vilar, 4-JV-69.8: program of the revival of the production at Theatre du Vieux-Colombier in 1948.

(8.) Maurice Clavel, La Terrasse de midi. Trois actes (Paris: Gallimard nrf, 1949), 15.

(9.) Letter from Jean Vilar to Andree Vilar, Wednesday 17 October 1956, in Cahiers Jean Vilar, no. 113 (2012): 139.

(10.) Jacques Tephany, "Vilar et Shakespeare: je t'aime moi non plus," Cahiers Jean Vilar, no. 117 (2014): 11.

(11.) Tephany, "Vilar et Shakespeare," 11.

(12.) Ibid. Bertolt Brecht, "poem on Hamlet," 1940, trans. John Willett, in Poems 1913-1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (Methuen: London, 1976, 1987), 321.

(13.) Tephany, "Vilar et Shakespeare," 11.

(14.) Cahiers Jean Vilar, no. 113 (2012): respectively 113, 110 and 113.

(15.) Fonds Jean Vilar, 4-JV-69.6: letter from Michel Bouquet to Jean Vilar.

(16.) Firmin Gemier, "Le theatre de demain et la societe Shakespeare," in Firmin Gemier, le democrate du theatre, ed. Nathalie Coutelet (Montpellier: L'Entretemps, 2008), 67.

(17.) Vilar thought the word "participant" was more appropriate than "spectator" for the type of popular theater he wished to develop. Jean Vilar, "Education et theatre," in Jean Vilar par lui-meme (Avignon: editions Maison Jean Vilar, 1991), 93.

(18.) John K. Savacool, "Festival in Avignon," Theatre Arts (Dec. 1947): 72.

(19.) Fonds Jean Vilar, 4-JV-69.5: handwritten note by Clavel.

(20.) Lucien Trompette, "La Terrasse de midi de Maurice Clavel," Le Provencal (September 8, 1947).

(21.) Roger Bastide, "Jean Vilar consacrera neuf mois de son activite a la preparation du Festival d'Avignon 1948," Gazette Provencale (September 17, 1947).

(22.) Monique Bel, Maurice Clavel (Paris: Bayard, 1992), 88.

(23.) Bel, Maurice Clavel, 102.

(24.) Speech by actress Beatrice Dussane before the first performance of La Terrasse, in H. Dibon, "Le Grand Cycle d'Art dramatique obtient en Avignon un triomphal succes," L'Echo du Midi (September 10?, 1947).

(25.) Fonds Jean Vilar, 4-JV-69.5: handwritten note by Vilar.

(26.) On October 29, 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre gave a seminal public lecture, "Existentialism is a Humanism," at Club Maintenant in Paris. It was first published in 1946 in French (Paris: editions Nagel) and in 1948 in English as Existentialism and Humanism--a title that erases the polemical nature of Sartre's theory.

(27.) Tephany, "Vilar et Shakespeare," 11.

(28.) Andre Benedetto quoted by Paul Puaux in Avignon en Festivals ou les utopies necessaires (Paris: Hachette, 1983), 44.