Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath

Ireland (French and Francophone studies, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) links commentators on two notably repressive periods of mid-20th-century French history—the civil wars during the Vichy government (1940–44) and the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). He asserts that theater, a continuation of the oral tradition of ancient Greece, with a lifespan older than that of the written word, can better explain shifting, contested memories. Drawing upon the contributions of anthropology and sociology, Ireland addresses concepts such as memory, whereby people analyze experiences after the actual events, thereby producing more realistic evaluations with the benefit of hindsight. He’s less of a fan of institutional theater bound to scripts (a form of capture), preferring interactive, constant adaptational storytelling where there is no rigid separation between actors and audience. There is an entire chapter (and more) on Sartre, the first dramatist to address the cataclysms of both the Vichy period and the Algerian revolution, and explications of the work of Genet, Bernard-Marie Koltes, Liliane Atlan, Armand Gatti, and indigenous Algerian artists such as Kateb Yacine and Noureddine Aba.