House of Horrors: A History of Le Grand Guignol, by Agnes Peirron *

* (Halloween countdown post #3; restored)

 

In 1897, the French playwright Oscar Metenier, bought a theater at the end of the impasse Chaptal, a cul-de-sac in Paris’ Pigalle district, in which to produce his controversial naturalist plays. The smallest theater in Paris, it was also the most atypical. Two large angels hung above the orchestra and the theater’s neogothic wood paneling; and the boxes, with their iron railings, looked like confessionals (the building had, in fact, once been a chapel). Metenier was himself a frequent target of censorship for having the audacity to depict a milieu which had never before appeared on stage — that of vagrants, street kids, prostitutes, criminals, and “apaches,” as street loafers and con artists were called at the time — and moreover for allowing those characters to express themselves in their own language. One of the Grand-Guignol’s first plays, Metenier’s Mademoiselle Fifi, which was temporarily shut down by police censors, presented the first prostitute on stage; his subsequent play, Lui!, united a whore and a criminal in the enclosed space of a hotel room.

 

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‘Gianni Proia’s ‘shock-umentary’ ECCO contains this short scene, which the filmmaker claims is of the final performance at the Grand Guignol Theatre. Whether this is true or not is unclear, as much of the other ‘reality’ footage in the film appears to be either staged or grossly misrepresented. The footage does show actors from the Grand Guignol performing a scene for the cameras as well as some brief interior shots of the theatre itself.’

 

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Metenier was succeeded as director in 1898 by Max Maurey, who, from 1898 to 1914, turned the Theatre du Grand-Guignol into a house of horror. He measured the success of a play by the number of people who fainted during its performance, and, to attract publicity, hired a house doctor to treat the more fainthearted spectators. It was also Maurey who discovered the novelist and playwright Andre de Lorde–“the Prince of Terror.” Under the influence of de Lorde (who collaborated on several plays with his therapist, the experimental psychologist Alfred Binet), insanity became the Grand-Guignolesque theme par excellence. At a time when insanity was just beginning to be scientifically studied, the Grand-Guignol repertoire explored countless manias and ‘special tastes’: L’Homme de la Nuit (The Man of the Night) presented a necrophiliac. L’Horrible Passion (The Horrible Passion) depicted a young nanny who strangled the children in her care. (Like Metenier, de Lorde was often a target of censorship, particularly in England where two of his plays were canceled by the Lord Chamberlain’s censors.

 

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This is an excellent site about Le Grand Guignol that unfortunately presents itself in French language only. However, there are videos showing historically accurate recreations of two Grand Guignol plays, Le Baiser Dans La Nuit and Le Faiseur De Monstres, which you can find by entering the site then clicking on the link titled Pieces.

 

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Fear of ‘the other’ appeared at the Grand-Guignol in countless variations: fear of the proletariat, fear of the unknown, fear of the foreign, fear of contagion (for all the blood spilled, sperm ejaculated, and sweat dripped there, the Grand-Guignol had to feel some degree of nostalgia for cleanliness). The heroes of Gardiens de phare (Lighthouse Keepers) and Le Beau Regiment (The Handsome Regiment) had rabies. Leprosy decimated the passengers of Le Navire aveugle (The Blind Ship), and the servants in L’Auberge rouge (The Red Inn) fell prey to a mysterious malady. In several plays, among them La Fosse aux filles (The Girls’ Den), a brothel visitor was exposed to syphilis. But what carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness, loss of control, panic: themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify. When the Grand-Guignol’s playwrights expressed an interest in the guillotine, what fascinated them most were the last convulsions played out on the decapitated face. What if the head continued to think without the body? The passage from one state to another was the crux of the genre.

 

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The Tragedies’ Theatre is small American theater company that stages the original Grand Guignol plays in English with period costumes, makeup, and props. There’s more than a bit of irksome American style staginess and corniness about their versions, but the qualities of the original plays can be discerned. Here’s their version of the play Chop Chop.

The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – Final Kiss

The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – Laboratory of Hallucinations

The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – CADAVRES EXQUIS

 

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Under the direction of Camille Choisy, who directed the theater from 1914 to 1930, staging overtook text. Once he even bought a fully equipped operating room as a pretext for a new play. In 1917, he hired the actress Paula Maxa, who soon became known as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal.” During her career at the Grand-Guignol, Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was subjected to a range of tortures unique in theatrical history: she was shot with a rifle and with a revolver, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses, kissed by a leper, and subjected to a very unusual metamorphosis, which was described by one theater critic: “Two hundred nights in a row, she simply decomposed on stage in front of an audience which wouldn’t have exchanged its seats for all the gold in the Americas. The operation lasted a good two minutes during which the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”

 

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‘At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening’s faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals.’ — Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: theatre of fear and terror.

 

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If the Grand-Guignol was a popular theater in both meanings of the word — it was frequented by neighborhood locals as well as the higher-brow audience of the Comedie Francaise — it was not a public affair. Going to the Grand-Guignol was less a social act than a private one and certain audience members preferred not to be seen. Some witnesses reported that the iron-grilled boxes in the back of the theater encouraged a certain ‘extremism.’ The cleaning staff would often find the seats stained. With the arrival of Jack Jouvin, who directed the theater from 1930 to 1937, the repertoire shifted from gore to psychological drama. Wanting to have complete control over the theater, Jouvin ousted Maxa, who, in his opinion, was stealing the spotlight. Jouvin’s lack of talent and his personal ambition triggered the eventual downfall of the Grand-Guignol. Birth, evolution, death: the genre sowed the seed of its own decline when it began to parody itself. The abundance of terrifying elements in the later plays became so overwhelming that they were no longer believable.

 

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Further resources: Grand Guignol Online — Le Grand Guignol at Dark Echo — Phantasmic Attractions — The Grotesque in Theater — Le Grand Guignol at Thrill Peddlars — Librairie Grand Guignol (in French) — Fall and Rise: The Grand Guignol

 

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By the Second World War, the theater was beginning to vacillate, carried away by its own excess. The war dealt it its final death blow. Reality overtook fiction, and attendance at post-war performances dwindled. In the spring of 1958, Anais Nin commented on its decline in her diary: “I surrendered myself to the Grand-Guignol, to its venerable filth which used to cause such shivers of horror, which used to petrify us with terror. All our nightmares of sadism and perversion were played out on that stage. . . . The theater was empty.” In an interview conducted immediately after the Grand-Guignol closed in 1962, Charles Nonon, its last director, explained: “We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things — and worse — are possible.”

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p.s. RIP Ken Jacobs ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, it went really well in Baltimore. Same thing here: Xmas in early October?! Love peering at you blearily through dense jetlag, G. ** jay, Hey, jay!! Always happy to surprise and even startle. Congrats on divising an un-‘bad’ feast. I guess it’s digested into ever fainter memory by now. Thanks, yeah, good trip but very burnt until I get some decent sleep, but good burnt. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Hope you got home as safely as I did. The ‘Hellraisers’ are a matter of ever diminishing returns unless maybe you smoke a lot of weed. The MIX rejection was a surprise, but we seem to have gotten something else and better for NYC now, we’ll see. ** Misanthrope, Dude, good to see you and Alex and Little Show even briefly. I hope it was worth the drive. ** Jack Skelley, Hm, okay, I’ll give Ty Segal some quality time then. Hazy salute. ** julian, Hi, j. Personally I think ‘Books of Bloods’ are far, far and away his best fiction. I’m not even sure you need to go further. Long ago I asked John Ashbery to sign a book, and he crossed out his printed name, and I thought that was cool in a personalizing way or something, and I just started doing it. Baltimore went well, and I liked the city quite a bit. It looks really good and it feels a good kind of comfortable. Best to you. ** Dev, Happy October to you! Sure, yes, please about the guest-post, but you really don’t need to pitch it unless you want to. If there’s any kind of post you want to make, I’m automatically interested. Thanks a bunch. Baltimore was very cool. ** Carsten, Hi. Baltimore went very well. I’m still in a jetlag cloud, but I’ll check my email for the author’s hopeful response once I’m awoken. Congrats on the poem pub. I’ll be there as soon as I’m worthy of it. Everyone, Carsten’s poem “Hunter’s Curse & Cure” just came out on the Dewdrop here. ** Måns BT, Hey, Måns! I’ve never played ‘Disco Elysium’, no, and maybe I do remember you recc’ing it. It might have been in my long no-gaming phase. Anyway, I’ll seek it. Thanks, pal. I know I keep saying this, but Stockholm film folks are top of my agenda, and now I won’t be traveling for a while, so I predict I will write to them on my hands and knees any second. Watch. xo, me ** Steeqhen, Hey. I can only recommend ‘Books of Blood’, but I’m not a horror-fantasy book reader, so, while the others weren’t for me, I don’t know. Shoot high as a writer, always, but stay logical about how hierarchies work. ** Mark Stephens, It’s weird and sad that we’re not doing an LA Halloween, and weird and not sad that we’re doing a Xmas-adjacent LA, but hey! Love, me. ** ellie, Yes, of course! ** Stil, The flight I had on Icelandic Airlines had a new level of bad entertainment choices, and you wouldn’t believe what I made my eyes absorb. Great about the film openness situation. Have you started on it? ** Pete, Hi, Pete. It’s so nice to meet you, and thank you so much for the great words about my work. What do you do or make and want to make and etc.? I’d be interested to know. Warmest greetings from over here. ** Nicholas., Hi, man. Uh, we’re deep into fall here, as far as I can tell. (I just got back to Paris, and I’m barely awake). Museums, sure, I mean depending on the aim, but, generally, sure. Tired: me too, like, so tired. ** Uday, Me neither until I made the post. And I haven’t watched it. A Mirbeau book, okay, that’s appealing in theory, but I’ll skip it anyway, thank you. ** PL, I had a good time, but I’m so jetlagged I can’t tell if I’m better yet, haha. ** _Black_Acrylic, Haha, I think I remember ‘Nightbreed’ being sufficiently fun, but don’t hold me to it. ** James Champagne, Hi, James. I’ve read almost nothing of his post-heyday, the ‘Weaveworld’ era, etc. He was really fun to interview, very cool guy. ** Uday, I hang my head in shame. I don’t even remember what that film is, but I am barely brain-functioning this morning if that isn’t obvious. Well, you got a good story. ** Laurenz, Hi, Laurenz. Thank you for coming in. Oh, sorry, I’ll go find your email. I can be really bad at email and miss things constantly. I’m very jet lagged this morning, so I won’t subject your email to my brain today, but I’ll find it and get it ready for my mental return. ** Jack, Hi, Jack. Well, I think we’ve just set up a NYC screening for ‘RT’, and I can’t be specific yet other than to say it’ll happen in December. Thanks for asking. ** darbz 🐻, I’m so happy my blog hit the bullseye with your love. I met Clive Barker in the early 00’s and interviewed him. He was very cool. I put the Instagram stories up, but rarely, and usually they’re shared like that one, I didn’t know there was music on that. How strange. Trip was good. Uh, I ate vegan Mexican food and an omelet and macaroni and cheese that made my stomach upset. How do the locks look? Any news from the Halloween job? And thank you for the playlist! I have to wake up more, but I’ll be all over it. xoxo. ** Steve, Hi. Barker’s a gentleman, even though I don’t think he wants to be. No, unfortunately John Waters was away on tour, so I didn’t get to see him. It went very well. Everyone, New episode of Steve’s mighty music podcast is up and ‘this is the most packed one yet, with 33 songs (10 of them being hip-hop). I also played DL Jeff Jackson’s band Julian Calendar’s cover of Green Day’s “longview”’. Here. ** Midnight Matt, Hi! It was really nice getting to meet you and talk to you a bit. Thank you for shlepping all those books to the theater. I really regret that we had to split before the Stevie, Eileen, Derek shebang. Glad and not surprised it was stellar. Good to see you! ** Billfold Cunninghamster, I haven’t seen it, but I so hear you. ** HaRpEr//, Baltimore went great, but I am very zonked out with jet lag so far. Alas. Just in the last several days, Geese seem to have gone totally viral. They’re everywhere. They’re like the thinking person’s Turnstile or something. If you read him, seriously, read ‘Books of Blood’. I wouldn’t start anywhere else. ** nat, I honestly will be a lot better in conversation after I get some actual sleep. ‘Hellraiser’ is fun and cool enough to try to induce amnesia about the Pinhead/hip stuff and buckle down with it, I think. ** Allright. Apologies for all my haziness up above. Halloween continues with a restored look at Grand Guignol. See you tomorrow.