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While the Internet has been widely used for more than twenty years and may very well be the greatest media revolution since Gutenberg’s printing press, it’s a subject that has never been addressed on one of the stages of the Comédie-Française. The Readers’ Bureau has read several texts that use web communications as a dramatic subject matter (Jennifer Haley’s Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom and The Nether) but no play that deals with networks, emails and other associated systems has actually been staged. Yet the material published on the Internet, marked by a strong return of the written word, seems particularly fertile for dramatic and stylistically inventive uses.

Communication technologies have infiltrated stages in different ways over time, but their theatrical potential has proved to be variable. Devices that renew the relationship to the written word are always appealing insofar as they offer another way of relating to the style and distribution of a play’s text (newspapers, telecommunications), however the physical mechanisms of communication are sometimes difficult to represent, in particular because of their monumentality (railways and other means of transport).

Missives and letters – most often transmitted by a servant – were the first means of communication used on stage. They even act as essential dramaturgical devices, accessories that advance the plot by exposing and confounding characters.
Ever since the periodical press made its debut in the seventeenth century, newspapers became a choice subject for playwrights, offering not only tasty characters (gazetteers, journalists, editorialists) but also a fertile way of disseminating information. Edme Boursault’s Mercure galant (1683) was devoted precisely to this issue: this newspaper was a vector of communication, between Paris and the provinces, and served to disseminate both official and sometimes very personal news.

Means of transport and communication are more difficult to incorporate on the stage due to their monumentality (boat, railway, car, plane), except as part of the scenery (for Les Fourberies de Scapin the set often represents a ship, in reference to the port of Naples). On the other hand, the railway station is a popular setting because of the many entrances, exits and cases of mistaken identity it generates: the vaudevillian Eugène Labiche knew what he was doing when choosing this setting for Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon, which premiered in 1860, i.e. twenty years after the development of the French rail network – Labiche is the author of Les Chemins de fer, a railway vaudeville created in 1867 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal – followed some time later by Jean Sarment withLe Voyage à Biarritz (1936) and Jules Romains with Donogoo (1951). The authors who witnessed the beginnings of the automobile also tackled this subject, but to avoid problems of representation, left them off stage (Feydeau’s Le Circuit, Mirbeau’s Les Affaires sont les affaires).

The telephone, the telegraph and the tyre are mentioned, especially in Feydeau again, who devises malicious uses for them in order to thwart the adulterous schemes of his protagonists. These technologies, which radically changed the relationship to communication, are widely used in the theatrical repertoire. The theatre even gave rise to a specific, original technology dedicated to its own dissemination, the “théâtrophone”, which, from the 1880s, transmitted the plays of the major Parisian theatres to private homes by telephone. In 1933, the device was also used in theatres as a means of amplifying of the voices of the actors for spectators with hearing problems. Cocteau’s La Voix humaine (1930) is composed entirely of a telephone monologue.

Radio and television, mass media and therefore media of social cohesion, seem more difficult to bring to the stage – perhaps because of the necessary passivity of the listener, which does not work well with the actor’s performance – and appeared late in Comédie-Française stagings, whereas these technologies were used from their early days to broadcast theatrical productions. Jacques Lassalle directed L’Émission de télévision by Michel Vinaver in 1990 and David Lescot looked back on the history of pirate radio stations in Les Ondes magnétiques (2018) and the breath of freedom they represented in the early Mitterrand years of the 80s.

Jeanne Herry turns her attention to Internet forums to take up this challenge of expressing the theatricality of communication tools.