‘The Théâtre de l'Épée de Bois offers Free Training in Actor's Workshop’, reads the announcement each year in Libération. The response is minimal. Of the four thousand actors in Paris at any one time, few will apply. The workshop offers on-site training for ‘theatre apprentices’ and most students and experienced actors decline. Of those who attend, few will have the constitution necessary to withstand the mental and physical demands required of those subsequently engaged for production, let alone be prepared for a ten-month rehearsal period, twelve hours a day, unpaid. The Épée de Bois is more than just a theatre company, it is also a school, and a way of life.

Daniel Mesguich does not meet with everyone's approval. This child prodigy, this prodigal son, has made a name for himself since leaving the Conservatoire by his provocative mises en scène. Since creating the Théâtre du Miroir in 1974 at the age of twenty-two he has passionately divided both critics and connoisseurs. Some dismiss him outright without a second thought; others proclaim him a superstar, a genius. And there are those who hover in the middle, unsure how long they can entertain this phenomenon. More recently, of course, his opera direction (Wagner's Ring in 1988) has raised temperatures once more. No one can arouse a rather dominant theatre scene or incite new Hernani riots as Mesguich can.

Keith Gore's article ‘The Playwright in an institutionalized theatre’ (TRI, vol. 15, no. 2, Summer 1990) paints a dismal picture of the state of affairs in France at the end of the 1980s. Gore claims that the French playwright is an endangered species, the victim of predatory directors whose uncontrolled lust for power has weakened and impoverished the whole institution. Gore is able to support his claims with an impressive array of statistics and his article must be welcomed for making these available to English readers and for raising what is an important subject for debate. He was greatly helped by the publication, in 1987, of a meticulously researched and far-reaching report on the playwright in the French theatre by Michel Vinaver. Gore's fundamental suspicion of the director finds many echoes among practitioners of French theatre to-day. It has become fashionable to demonize the director and to accuse him (or occasionally her) of stifling new talent. But although the record of French theatre in the decade since the Socialists came to power is, to some extent, disappointing, it is not as bleak as Gore suggests, nor is it helpful to suggest that all its ills can be traced to a single source in the director. The director, too, is a product of the same political and cultural forces that have been at work gradually changing the shape of the theatrical map in France.

With the increasing familiarity of reception theory, deconstruction, collective creation and performance art, it seems as if performers have assumed they should pursue their craft unencumbered by textual dictates. Actors appear to be privileging their own interests over the interests of characters or literary personae. Even when actors turn from fictive characters to real life personalities in their presentations of one-person shows, oral histories and performance ethnographies, it seems less fashionable to discuss the people that serve as a basis for such performances than to focus upon the actors' personal preferences and individual visions. The question is no longer how performers might put flesh on the textual and human ‘skeletons’ they encounter but how they might pull a bone from here and another one from there in order to create their own figures. In short, ‘the other’ serves performers.