The Theater of The Grand Guignol

This happy little fellow is Guignol, a heroic rogue and star of the 19th century French puppet theater.

This nasty little poster is typical of the Grand Guignol, a small 300 seat theater in the middle of Paris which, from 1897-1964, staged thousands of short, gruesome plays. The Big Puppet. Hardly a fitting name for a place where exotic tortures, imaginative deaths and infinitely clever methods of injury and maiming were on the nightly entertainment bill.

Born directly out of the Naturalist theater of Andre Antoine's Theatre Libre, The Theater of the Grand Guignol opened it's doors on April 13, 1897 with a program of seven short plays -- a lite curtain raiser, two comedies, three rosse plays [a rosse play is a sort of living news/documentary play that dealt with the underworld], and the capstone of the evening: a play about the murder of a policeman by a prostitute. Arguably the heyday of the Grand Guignol were the post-WWI years -- the war having introduced all sorts of new forms of violence introduced to the world -- and ending prior to the Nazi occupation of Paris during WWII. The theater was visited by the most upper class, the intelligencia, the artists, the lower class and tourists. It was considered a landmark on a par with the Eiffel Tour or the Louvre.

Sound and lighting were recognized as key elements of the stage design for creating the creepy and unsettling mood for the pieces. The scripts call for elaborate on and offstage sounds -- and of course the sonic accompaniment for breaking bones, acid burning flesh and other violence.

It's is unfortunate that no films of performances at the Grand Guignol exist (well, one exists -- it's supposedly from the final performance at the theater but its authenticity is questionable). There are a few flicks that are held up as being Guignol-esque. A couple feature references to the Grand Guignol and some are connected only in that they have the spirit if not the brutality or blood quotient. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI was actually made into a Guignol play but leaving out the Expressionist frame of the film leaving the occult, insanity and evil physians. MAD LOVE was Peter Lorre's first US film (I think) and it's a journey into madness brought on by spurned love. The film is a bit cheesy and melodramatic, but Lorre's performance is over-the-top brilliant and unfortunately stereotyped him for the rest of his career. His spurned love is an actress at the Grand Guignol . Her boyfriend loses his hands in an accident. Doctor Lorre stitches on replacements from a killer. You get the gist... Finally, INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE has a scene that takes place at the Grand Guignol.

The closest thing to the style of the Grand Guignol in US entertainment is EC Comics from the 1950, Tales From The Crypt being the most recognizable title to most people. Famous for leading to the creation of the Comics Code, the EC blend of horror, science fiction, occult, crime and just plain creepiness is pretty much straight from the Theater of Horror. They feature the sorts of plot twists and reversals common to the Guignol shows: sometimes the innocent suffer, sometimes the evil triumph and sometimes everyone loses. If the connection has been made somewhere else I've not seen it so there's a monogram in there for someone to wrie.

Clive Barker wrote a Grand Guignol play called Frankenstein In Love that's way too long but has some really great stuff in it. I occasionally think about directing a production.

There are only two books in English about the Grand Guignol.

  • The Grand Guignol: Theater of Fear and Terror (Amok Press, 1988) by Mel Gordon.
    This is out of print and outrageously expensive -- and frankly not worth the amounts being asked for it. It is chock full of photos though and it has a glossary of 100 Grand Guignol plays with descriptions of the action of each. There are also two scripts translated.
  • Grand-Guignol: The French Theater of Horror (Exeter Press, 2002) by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson.
    This is happily still in print and while it doesn't have as many photos, it has ten scripts translated.

There is a good website at Thrillpeddlers with a concise history and loads of posters and other info.

more to come

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