French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris, and by Edward Baron Turk

By Edward Baron Turk

 In 2005 literary and movie critic Edward Turk immersed himself in big apple City’s ACT FRENCH pageant, a daring attempt to augment American touch with the modern French level. This dizzying crash path on a number of points of present French theatre prepared the ground for 6 months of theatregoing in Paris and a month’s sojourn on the 2006 Avignon competition. In French Theatre Today he turns his yearlong involvement with this wealthy subject into an available, clever, and complete evaluation of latest French theatre. Situating a number of the approximately a hundred and fifty level items he attended inside contexts and timeframes that reach back and forth over a few years, he finds French theatre in the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century to be remarkably important, vulnerable towards either innovation and quandary for its viewers, and as open to overseas effect because it is respectful of nationwide tradition.

 

French Theatre Today presents a continuing mixture of serious research with energetic description, theoretical concerns with reflexive feedback through the theatremakers themselves, and issues of present French and American cultural politics. within the first half, “New York,” Turk bargains close-ups of French theatre works singled out in the course of the ACT FRENCH competition for his or her presumed recognition to American audiences and critics. the second one half, “Paris,” depicts a extra expansive diversity of French theatre items as they play out on their lonesome soil. within the 3rd half, “Avignon,” Turk captures the topic inside a extra fluid context that's, such a lot curiously, either eminently French and resolutely foreign. The Paris and Avignon chapters comprise useful and well-informed contextual and historical past details in addition to descriptions of the milieus of the Avignon pageant and some of the neighborhoods in Paris the place he attended performances, details that readers can't locate simply in different places. eventually, within the spirit of inclusiveness that characterizes rather a lot new French theatre and to provide a consultant account of his personal reviews as a spectator, Turk rounds out his survey with observations on Paris’s vigorous opera scene and France’s wealth of circus entertainments, either conventional and newly envisioned.

 

With  his smart exams of up to date French theatre, Turk conveys an pleasure and an affection for his subject destined to arouse related responses in his readers. His book’s freshness and openness will present theatre lovers who're focused on a side of French tradition that's inadequately recognized during this nation, veteran students and scholars of up to date global theatre, and people American theatre pros who've the final word authority and luck to figure out which new French works will succeed in audiences on those shores.

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