Intimité de Jean-Victor Pellerin, ou à la recherche du « théâtre du silence »
Intimacy by Jean-Victor Pellerin, or in search of „theatre of the silence”

Summary/Abstract: Jean-Victor Pellerin was a representative author of the „school of silence” or, as some called it, „art of unexpressed”, in which emotions are implied in gestures, fragments of speach, and silence. In his first drama Intimacy (1922) the French playwrighter presents a bourgeois marriage living a monotonous life. The characters discuss trivial things of everyday life, they talk to each other, but there is no communication between them, because each of them is closed in their own world. Nobody is listening one another and words are spoken only in order to fill their existential emptiness. The writer is focused on the dialogue between the characters in the context of what they hide and what they do not want to tell themselves. People who appear to them are not flesh and blood human beings but they are the reflection of their own disturbed personality only. In this manner the writer focuses on the inner life of his solitary, their nostalgia for youth or even their hidden sexual motives. This is why the silence grows into the main element of the drama. Intimacy is one of the finest examples of „intimist aesthectic” developed by the avant-garde theater creator Gaston Baty who rejected the predominance of the word for discovering the mysterious world of the spiritual man.

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