Bacchus: Pièce en trois actes

by Jean Cocteau, Jean Touzot

En 1523, en Allemagne, on couronne un paysan, Hans, qui sera, sous le nom de Bacchus, roi pendant sept jours. Il se lance dans de grandes réformes, se réclame d'un Christ révolutionnaire, ami du peuple, dont il soulève pourtant la colère. Il finit mal. En 1951, Cocteau, au sommet de sa gloire, et qui s'est imprégné des livres sur la Réforme et Luther, propose, par la bouche de son héros, une explication de l'univers, où la vérité apparaît comme la valeur suprême. À la scène, l'écrivain a toujours représenté un éternel suspect (lui-même ?), selon des procédés dramatiques éprouvés, jusqu'au meurtre final. Ici, l'actualité compte autant que l'Histoire, par les attaques contre l'Église catholique, les revendications ouvrières, le rejet radical de l'ordre établi, l'évocation du désarroi de la jeunesse. Bacchus est, avec La Machine infernale, la pièce la plus importante de celui qui peindra, à la chapelle de Milly, le Christ en croix et le Christ ressuscité.

Genres: Plays

Mass Market Paperback

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the "algebra" of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Colette, Édith Piaf, whom he cast in one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet.

His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.

Reviews

[Elinaz Ys · Rating 3 out of 5]

شیطان پاک است چون جز بدی کار دیگری نمی‌تواند بکند.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cocteau critiques the Church for usurping the message of Christ and using his martyrdom to consolidate wealth and power, while concealing his radical message from the docile masses. A decidedly twentieth-century take on an old theme, with perhaps a few oblique nods to Schiller and Racine, Bacchus posits that power, like capital, reproduces itself. Any attempt to overthrow the Church hierarchy from within – in this case by a rebel masquerading as the village idiot during a Church-sanctioned Bacchanalian festival similar to Mardi Gras, in order to be crowned as “Bacchus,” and thus the town's “king,” for a week – is ultimately squashed by Church leaders who use the festival only as a distraction to prevent the masses from thinking too much about that pesky Martin Luther. And so one can choose only to bend the knee or die, with any self sacrifice only serving to further the Church’s narrative in the end.

François Mauriac condemned the play as heresy and then went on to win the Nobel Prize the following year, so you know Cocteau was rattling some cages.

[Mahdie Sahranavard · Rating 3 out of 5]

«از نظر من، این نمایش یک نمایش نیست. و چون هرگز یک نمایش نبوده، باید آن‌قدر ادامه پیدا کند که به مصیبت ختم شود و تکلیفش یک‌سره شود.»