Dramaturgy and modernity in Gilles de Raiz by Vicente Huidobro

Abstract

The play Gilles de Raiz by Vicente Huidobro was published in 1932. Today (seventy years later), it is possible to confirm the modernity of the dramatic presuppositions at work in the play. Huidobro articulated its action around the tension between analogy and irony and introduced numerous metadramatic elements, the most important being the epilogue ("Détaché et détachable"), which correlates in an optimal way the concepts of theatricality, fictional self-consciousness and nature. In opposition to a realistic conception of the theater, Huidobro carries out an extraordinary intertextual play, especially in connection with Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1923), and shares in its innovative intent some of the central concerns of the early twentieth century European and Spanish American avant-garde theater.