Grand Guignol
The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (French pronunciation: [lə teɑtʁ dy ɡʁɑ̃ ɡiɲɔl]) was a theater in the Pigalle district of Paris (7, cité Chaptal).
Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (for instance Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil), to today's splatter films.
The opaque furniture and gothic structures placed sporadically on the walls of the building exude a feeling of eeriness from the moment of entrance.
[3] Underneath the balcony were boxes (originally built for nuns to watch church services) that were available for theater-goers to rent during performances because they would get so aroused by the action happening on stage.
[4] The theater owed its name to Guignol, a traditional Lyonnaise puppet character, joining political commentary with the style of Punch and Judy.
Under his direction, the theater produced plays about a class of people who were not considered appropriate subjects in other venues: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins and others at the lower end of Paris's social echelon.
Maurey shifted the theater's emphasis to the horror plays it would become famous for and judged the success of a performance by the number of patrons who passed out from shock; the average was two faintings each evening.
He collaborated with experimental psychologist Alfred Binet to create plays about insanity, one of the theater's favorite and frequently recurring themes.
[6] In a typical Grand Guignol performance patrons would see five or six short plays, all in a style that attempted to be brutally true to the theater's naturalistic ideals.
The horrors depicted at Grand Guignol were generally not supernatural; rather these plays often explored altered states like insanity, hypnosis, or panic.
Management attributed the closure in part to the fact that the theater's faux horrors had been eclipsed by the actual events of the Holocaust two decades earlier.
form a sub-branch of the genre called Grande Dame Guignol for its use of aging A-list actresses in sensational horror films.
[15] Grand Guignol flourished briefly in London in the early 1920s under the direction of Jose Levy, where it attracted the talents of Sybil Thorndike, Noël Coward, and Richard Hughes (whose one-act play The Sisters' Tragedy was said to outshine even Coward's),[16] and a series of short English "Grand Guignol" films (using original screenplays, not play adaptations) was made at the same time, directed by Fred Paul.
The sixth production, theater of Fear, included De Lorde's famous adaptation of Poe's The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (Le Systéme du Dr Goudron et Pr Plume) as well as two original plays, Double Crossed and The Good Death alongside The Tell Tale Heart.
[18] The Swiss theater company Compagnie Pied de Biche has revisited the Grand Guignol genre in contemporary contexts since 2008.
The company staged in 2010 a diptych Impact & Dr. Incubis, based on original texts by Nicolas Yazgi and directed by Frédéric Ozier.
[19] More than literal adaptations, the plays address violence, death, crime and fear in contemporary contexts, while revisiting many trope of the original Grand Guignol corpus, often with humor.
[citation needed] Since 2022 Yorkshire-based theater company Contortium have been touring Tales of the Bizarre, a modern revival of the Grand Guignol, presenting a mixture of new pieces by various writers, and adapted originals.
