Dramaturge et démiurge: l'image et l'espace dans le théâtre d'Apollinaire

Throughout his career as a poet, Guillaume Apollinaire was also a playwright. His early comedy, A la cloche de bois, written in 1902, already aspired to a form of spatial simultaneity, encompassing the life of the whole planet, and that drive towards ubiquity would be translated into strongly visual stagecraft from 1914, the year Apollinaire composed A quelle heure un train partira-t-il pour Paris?, his radically modernist and oneiric play without dialogue, which used music, shadowplay and projections of light, images and film, inventing son et lumière. This chapter goes on to discuss how that same ambition was applied in Apollinaire's 1917 musical comedy Les Mamelles de Tirésias, in which costumes and décor reference the cultures of every continent, the action breaks through the frame of the stage and is supported by bright colours, quadraphonic sound, singalong music, projectiles and a shower of playing cards onto the stalls, so the whole three-dimensional space of the theatre is progressively occupied, placing audience and actors in an environment which is as immersive, surprising and kaeidoscopic as life itself, inaugurating a type of theatrical experience for which Apollinaire coined the term "surrealist".