MEL GORDON:
Let’s get right to the point, because academics like me are used to talking for a minimum of 90 minutes whether people are sleeping or not. I’ll tell you very quickly my way in to the Grand Guignol.

I am from New York and I wrote a column for a competitor to the Village Voice. It wasn't a theatre column, but it should have been treated as kind of a theatre weekly. It was a lot of fun looking at stuff that people back then didn’t see as theatre. I reviewed probably one of the first really hard core sex theatre performances at the time, which was extraordinary in the ‘70’s. It’s the kind of thing you see on the street all the time now, we saw it here, tonight (at Shocktoberfest!!). I referred to it as having the realism of the Grand Guignol -- like the worm stomping thing (from Shocktoberfest!!).

So some publisher called me, I had published some books, and said me ‘Do you know anyone who could who could write a book on Grand Guignol that you could refer me to?’ and I said ‘Well, I’ll call around.’

Well, I didn’t know anyone who’d do it. Finally, I said ‘Look, if you’ll pay for a trip to Paris, I’ll write the book." So there I am in the place I most want to be on God’s earth, in Paris and of course after you've been there eight weeks you get expelled. And then I was back in my New York apartment and I had to write this book. I was completely depressed because I’d gathered fantastic material on the Grand Guignol, but of course writers don’t want to write, the way actors don’t want to act and directors don’t want to direct. Unless there’s a shotgun to your head. So the shotgun was I had to write the book because the publisher had paid for this big trip. Then I thought, "The only way I can write this book on the Grand Guignol is I had to convince myself it’s an important book. It’s not a joke." And suddenly, I was able to think "It’s the most important theatre on earth." I began to look, because I was a serious academic at New York University, "what is theatre?" Theatre is about the display of the body - Grand Guignol has that - we saw it tonight. Theatre’s about transformation of the human soul - which we saw tonight, particularly in the first piece. Theatre’s about storytelling - which Grand Guignol does very quickly. And most important - theatre’s about displaying taboo. That’s why all these people running for President are full of shit. That’s the whole purpose of performance is to show us what happens when we do the wrong thing - when we fuck our mothers, when we cut off people’s hands, those things that happen that we see on the stage and in the cinema. So suddenly I became very excited. I realized that the Grand Guignol really was the most important theatre on earth because it did all these things the most efficiently. And suddenly it was the easiest book to write and I did it in a flash.

So that was my way into it. Some of the stuff I tried to collect and think about was "what’s so important today about Grand Guignol?" Well for one thing, I was glad that I wrote a book that inspired -- and Agnes did that exactly the same thing -- that when you read about it, when you look at the texts, the photographs and the posters, it’s easy to get excited because it’s the purest theatre on earth. It’s all about sex and violence. Which is what performance should be about. (laughs) It’s about taboo. And it’s done in the most shocking efficient ways that our brains like (laughs).

So one of the things I thought about is that there’s certain ways of tracing Grand Guignol in terms of this importance. One of course in terms of horror in Hollywood develops from it. The look of Grand Guignol, the plots, and all of that. But I began to think about other things, how the Grand Guignol over a long period of time, 60 years, changed the format and its appeal that one of the things had to remain, and this is acting. The Grand Guignol has a special kind of acting that we fall in love with. When we see it, its this dark humor behind the violence. I’ll give you an example and I’ll show you two different things, very quick examples. One is a little clip from the last performance of the Grand Guignol. It’s about three minutes and its a little different than what we thought. Then I’ll show a clip from the ‘30’s of Grand Guignol actress from Rome (Rafaela Ottiano), who was one of the most successful of the Grand Guignol performers in Hollywood. And you begin to see as an actor, as a spectator, that this special magic that is both funny and horrifying and both real and totally supernatural that goes inside and in an external expressive way of what Grand Guignol acting is.

Film clips shown: ECCO (1965) and THE DEVIL-DOLL (1936)

If you didn’t know weather to laugh or not, its part of this remarkable aspect of Grand Guignol acting. In one sense it is totally ridiculous. In another sense it really touches us. That we are laughing because the dark humor inside it really touches us in this deep way and this one of the best examples, I mean all the people around her, John Barrymore’s of course a great stage actor and he actually acts much better when she’s around through this whole movie. He kind of falls apart with normal actors, but she brings this insanity to every actor around her which is the strength of the Grand Guignol. Now I’ve taken my time up and I want to turn the next section over to Agnes Pierron.

AGNES PIERRON:
The second piece (The Devil-Doll), its a play called "L'Horrible la Volupte". But the text is lost. It’s rare that the texts are lost. Almost all are printed, and we can see them, read them, but that one is lost. It would have been a very modern because of AIDS for example. Its the story of a blood transfusion. You saw the blood and the things boiling. It is about a person who was poisoned by a disease with the blood transfusion.

And you saw, the first film, you saw very quickly, the inside of the theatre. Its very precious, because nowadays the inside of the theatre is completely destroyed. You have seen the wooden walls like in a Gothic church, because it was at the very beginning of the 19th Century it was a chapel where priests make great speeches and that’s why the place was very special. That’s why many people went there to have pleasure by seeing the plays, but also to be inside that theatre - that specific theatre.

When an actress, Maxa, a very famous one, wanted to play otherwise, and to have her own theatre - it didn’t succeed. The place had been an old chapel, afterwards an painter’s studio, and then a Naturalism theatre.

And as you saw tonight, you saw a "Scottish Shower" (alternating doses of hot and cold water), because there were two dramas and at the middle a comedy, a very short comedy. An evening at the Grand Guignol was not to see a play, specific play, but was to spend the night at the Grand Guignol with at least 5 plays, 5 different plays. That is to say a curtain raiser, a drama, a comedy, the big drama, and another comedy, and then perhaps another drama. That is to say that it was very quickly played. Now we used, not tonight (in Shocktoberfest), but generally speaking the players and the directors say to play slowly that everything is shown.

So it was a "Scottish Shower" because the people had to recover after a drama. They have to recover because they were very anxious, they fainted, they could faint. The director, Max Maury was in the back (gesture to the back of the theatre) and was saying "one seat up!" (the Grand Guignol featured retractable theatre seats). "Two people fainted, three, four, yes - a great success!" (laugh) So the people fainted and they had to recover by the comedy, but also by drinking something (laugh) at the bar. The bar of the theatre was worthwhile. They especially drink cognac, or vodka, but also something that will interest you. A wine, a special wine called "Marianni wine" and that Marianni wine is the ancestor of Coca-Cola. (big laugh). Because it was made out of herbs, very aromatic wine, and when we put the alcohol away and just keep the cola it was afterwards the Coca-Cola. And that wine Marianni was celebrated by the greatest writer of the Grand Guignol, the writer of "Man of the Night" - Andre de Lorde. We can see in the paper that the picture of de Lorde and he has written saying that "Vin Marianni is great to make the actor active again -- and the audience, too!"

It was very earnest as a theatre. That people had pleasure, yes, they don’t want to be bored. They were really in fear, now people laugh, because the sensibility changed. At that time people were more shocked - and the blood was not always shown, really very seldom. Horror was produced by lighting, atmosphere, and a magician’s technique (misdirection of attention prior to shock). If nothing happens on the stage, the people feel as if it happens. For example, there was a play which featured a naked woman tied to a post being shot with arrows. As an actor "shot" the arrows, arrows would pop out of the post. Audience members swore that they could hear the arrows whizzing through the air towards the woman - but it was just their imagination. Those are the great plays - when atmosphere and drama combine with the audience’s imagination to create fright.

The plays were not as sexual as Thrillpeddlers portrayed them. The sex was actually in the gallery. There was something uniquely Parisian at the Grand Guignol, and in other theatres and cinemas. Until the Nazi occupation in WW II, theatre’s provided trysting places. There were stairs at the back of the theatre that led ticket holders to private boxes. The boxes were designed with lattice work so that audience members could see the play, but not be seen. The Grand Guignol was the last theatre in Paris to offer this kind of seating.

After WWII, the Grand Guignol remained popular, especially with tourists. One night they would see a play at the Comedie Francais, the "academic" theatre, and the next night go to the Grand Guignol and other Pigalle theatres. We can say that it was a serious theatre because Andre de Lorde, the great thriller author, explored medical problems, madness... and he had compassion for those people. It was not to laugh at them, but to have pity for them - to show social problems to the people.

The was a play called The Surgeon in Service, that impacted laws of the day. At the time (pre - WWII) there was only one surgeon on duty during the night for the entire city of Paris. People who needed emergency care would find themselves at a hospital with no surgeon on duty. So many people died because they could not get medical attention. That play, was taken so earnestly, that a law was created to provide a surgeon in every hospital in the city. So yes, it was Pigalle, it was pleasure, it was sex, but it was also a theatre that was engaged. When the theatre closed in 1962 it was considered dirt - a joke. It has taken over half a century to revive it.

Q: What are the roots of the Grand Guignol?

AGNES PIERRON:
There are two things that are Grand Guignol: the creation of the building and the repertoire. It was an assistant police chief that created the company and named it Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol in 1897. That man new a lot about the criminal life of Paris and slang. He was among the first to write about the milieu. It was a revolution - these bad boys: murders, criminals, prisoners, the insane were now on the stage. The artists were bored with theatre at the time, with vaudeville. They wanted something more exciting - more real. So he created a special theatre where that could happen. At first it was not bloody, but it became bloody very quickly - 1903. Since the building had been a chapel, part of its roots are in the torture of the martyrs. All that iconography was pictured in murals and statue in the actual theatre and the company brought that on to the stage.

Q: Some of the published versions of the plays leave out stage directions for the blood events that end the plays. Why is that?

MEL GORDON:
I discovered it because I had a published version of Orgy in the Light and had publicity photos and description of the play that clearly showed that there was a throat slit and burning. On reading the printed script, they weren’t there. One of the reasons is that they weren’t written that way, some of them. One of the things about Grand Guignol is that it resurrected the one-act play. If you wrote short plays, there was no place to produce them at the beginning of the 20th Century. They didn’t work anymore in vaudeville. So if you are a short play writer the Grand Guignol is perfect. So there were hundreds of writers who wanted to be included in the repertoire of the Grand Guignol. So some of these people were writing plays without horror, but that’s not how the Grand Guignol worked. The Grand Guignol, particularly in the 20’s, needed fantastic, horrific effects, and these events were probably added by the directors. The other thing is probably censorship. There’s a peculiar reason to publish a play, how do you produce it without being banned or giving away trade secrets. The Grand Guignol was so popular, involved so many people, that it went through generations and changes. Novelty is part of popular culture and the Grand Guignol became more bloody then less bloody. Early on it embraced the idea, which no theatre had done before, that any normal person, given the right circumstances, could do something crazy. This is a horrifying thought and really an essential one - we could be as crazy as the people we see on the street and back away from. This enters in to the Grand Guignol with the bloody effects, but this becomes worn out so other things have to replace what is horrifying in life.

AGNES PIERRON:
When a Crime in the Madhouse played in London, it was censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, they could not perform the eye gouge or the face burn on the British stage. So the playwright may have had to change the end. They couldn’t have a father deal with the corpse of the doctor’s daughter, but it could be someone else.

MEL GORDON:
The British refused a Grand Guignol play that took place outside a public toilet. You could even say the word toilet on the British stage. The Grand Guignol erupted in various places: in Bucharest, in San Francisco, but horror always played differently in front of a French audience. (to Agnes) What is the most shocking thing that you have learned in your research?

AGNES PIERRON:
I was never shocked! 

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