Gatti, Armand (b. 1924). French playwright, filmmaker, journalist, and poet. A committed artist of anarchist tendencies, he embraced theatre and other performance media as a means of testifying to the struggles of the modern world. His plays are challenging in both content and form. They seek not to unite audiences, not to communicate a reassuring revolutionary faith, but to force spectators to confront uncomfortable questions concerning contemporary reality. In an attempt to reveal the multiple aspects of a situation, Gatti employs a complex dramaturgy, which he calls ‘théâtre éclaté’, with actions and characters situated on several planes and in different time-scales.
In the 1960s much of his writing was autobiographical. La Vie imaginaire de l'éboueur Auguste Geia (1962) presents his father, an Italian immigrant worker, at five formative stages of his life. In La Deuxième Existence du camp de Tatenberg (1962) Gatti, himself an escapee from a Nazi concentration camp, explores the long-term effects of the experience on former inmates. Among other plays from this period, Un homme seul deals with the Chinese Civil War, La Naissance with the Guatemalan independence movement, La Cigogne with the survivors of Nagasaki, Chant public devant deux chaises électriques with the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Frustration with the restrictions of established theatre, especially after the government's intervention in 1968 to ban the TNP production of La Passion du Général Franco, led him to explore more open and participatory structures permitting fuller contact with audiences. He also became a peripatetic artist, documenting his plays by drawing on lived experience in a specific community: in Northern Ireland, for example, where he produced a film, Nous étions tous des noms d'arbres (1982), and a play, Le Labyrinthe (1982). An uncompromising poet who seeks to express complex truths through a combination of reportage and telling images, he stands as the foremost committed dramatist of post-war years.
[David Whitton]
