October 17, 2016 • 31 mins
From 1897 to 1962, a small theater in Paris gave became famous for its grisly, terrifying plays. The Theatre du Grand Gignol became a cultural fixture in Europe, and ultimately gave rise to horror as an entertainment genre.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building
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History at check out to get ten percent off squar
space Build it Beautiful. I'm Kristin Conger and I'm Caroline Irvan,
and together we host a podcast Stuff Mom Never told
you that gets down to the business of being women
(00:20):
from every imaginable angle. New episodes come out Mondays and
Wednesdays on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever else you
get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History
Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fraud. I'm Tracy. Will sit Tracy.
It's time for more October horror. Yea. Uh, this time
we're gonna delve into not just as in October spooky story,
but a story of spooky storytellers. Uh. We're going to
talk about a famous theater of Paris, and its name
(01:08):
translates to big Puppet or Big Puppet Show, which could,
perhaps to some ears suggest light silly fair. But the
works performed at the Tatla Dugout were aimed at adult
audiences and they were not for the faint of heart.
The roots of the film horror genre are in the
plays of the Grand, and the plays that were staged
(01:29):
there really became known for telling the darker side of UH,
for exploring the darker side of storytelling, often in really
visceral and very gruesome and explicit and graphic ways. It
was outrageous and terrifying and sometimes scandalous, and it became
a beloved fixture of Parisian of the Parisian theatrical scene.
(01:49):
In the early nineteen hundreds and throughout the nineteenth century,
uh fay de veire were incredibly popular, and these were short,
sensational stories were printed in French papers, and they were
frequently illustrated, and they reported true life, sort of crime stories,
rife with gory details, and unlike fairy tales or morality stories,
(02:12):
these usually did not end happily, and in some ways,
the taste for stories of this nature, which developed in
the consciousness of France throughout the eighteen hundreds, really set
the perfect scene for the tatlad. The story of the
Grand starts in eight seven with Oscar Matagnier, when he
(02:32):
purchased the theater in the Cartier Pigal area of Paris.
He had worked on a police force, and one of
his duties was watching over death row prisoners at the time,
uh basically in the time that was leading up to
their executions. He also worked as a tabloid journalist. Before
he became a playwright, Matainier had been working with Andrea
(02:54):
Antoine at the Teatra Libre, which stage stories of the
lower classes of Paris. They really were kind of doing
this whole naturalist thing that was growing in popularity, but
that theater had really struggled and it shut its doors
for good in the mid eighteen nineties. During the run
of the Libre, Matinier had written some of the most
provocative short plays that were staged there. The Tiata de
(03:18):
Grando sat at the end of a small cul de
sac called the Impass Chaptel. It had originally been built
as a chapel, and some of the original chapel decor remained,
including angel sculptures hanging over the orchestra pit and seating boxes, which,
due to their carved wood paneling, looked like confessionals. And
(03:39):
the stage. There was a tiny square twenty ft by
twenty feet that's about six by six meters, and there
were somewhere between two hundred and thirty and two hundred
and eighty five seats, depending on what source you're reading.
One of the reasons Matinnier started this venu and the
smallest theater in Paris was to mount his own productions.
His naturalist plays were just not the kind of thing
(04:00):
that other playhouses were willing to produce. He had done
some work writing farces and pros, but Mattinie eventually went
back to short plays like those that he had worked
on at the Oscars. Plays written for the Glouigneo featured
characters of the street, such as hustlers, sex workers, and
homeless people, and he launched his theater on April thirteenth
(04:23):
of eight seven with a slate of seven shorts. Two
dark tales performed that evening were written by Mattinier, while
the other five were a mix of comedy and drama
that had been written by other writers. This mix of
styles was part of an approach that Mattinier started that
he called hot and Cold Theater. Dark or gruesome fair
(04:44):
was was alternated with often body comedic pieces. Because the
theater would run anywhere from four to seven different plays
every night, they could take the audience through a series
of emotional highs and lows over the course of one evening.
As a result of this style switching, the horror seemed
more frightening and the comedy seemed funnier. Yeah, it's often
(05:05):
explained as if you run hot water on your hands
and then switched to cold, the cold seems icier than
it is, and vice versa. So that same sort of
thing was being applied to staging their productions for the evening.
And while Mattinier had thought that in running his own
theater house he'd have the freedom to stage the shows
he wanted, it turned out that the Paris police actually
felt a little bit differently about the situation. One of
(05:28):
his first shows, Mademoiselle Fifi, which was an adaptation of
a novel, was shut down temporarily by police censors because
the main character was a sex worker. Although the police
didn't appreciate the gritty realism of Matinee's plays, audiences really did.
The Grand Ginole was successful basically immediately. Yeah, people really
(05:51):
loved it. But even though it was doing quite well,
Oscar Mattinier did not head up the theater for long.
In just the following year, Max Maury took over as
director and Mattainnier had run the theater for four seasons,
but he really felt like it was impossible to keep
the shocking stories going long term, so he sold the
(06:11):
whole business to Maury. With that change in leadership was
a significant change in the tone of the offerings on stage.
Mary had a lot of theater experience, but was not
one of Paris's highbrow artistes. He wasn't especially concerned with
continuing the style of naturalism for artistic integrity. He wanted
to make the theater profitable just because it's a business.
(06:36):
Under his guidance, Grandio gained a reputation for bloody, terrifying offerings,
and Maury catered to a sort of voyeuristic blood lust
in the audience. His lineups filled with unsettling visuals that
struck fear and viewers and made them question exactly where
the line between theater and reality sat came to be
(06:58):
called Slice of Death as a counter to matenier Slice
of life dramas. Mari was a masterful marketer of the
Grand Annual. During this time. He hired a doctor to
attend all the shows in case anybody needed to be
treated for fainting. And he reveled in the publicity that
that move brought. He measured the success of any given
(07:18):
show by how many people fainted during it. Yeah, they
really were doing some very very graphic you know, beheadings, dismemberments, uh, disembowelings,
lots of stabbings and eye gougings. They were really like
doing some pretty impressive on stage effects. And as a director,
(07:39):
Max Murray was exacting. He may not have been driven by,
you know, this intense artistic vision, but he was adamant
that the plays had to be paced perfectly to maximize
the effect of the comedy or horror that was being
delivered to the audience. And he pushed the acting troupe,
which is normally a group of about fourteen actors two extreme,
(08:00):
with endless rehearsals and some pretty cutting criticism that he
could dole out. The actors were basically always on edge.
Arguments were frequent, so the behind the scenes drama was
apparently just as heightened as that on the stage, although
it was absent of the blood and dismemberment portions. One
of Marie's discoveries during this time was Andre de Lord,
(08:21):
a novelist and playwright who collaborated with Dr Alfred Binet,
an experimental psychologist, to create stage scripts that that explored
insanity in depth. The Lord was a physician's son and
had grown obsessed with death as a child. Benet, who
was the Lord's doctor as well, found the patient frustratingly
(08:43):
unwilling to do real self examination, and he probably cut
sessions short because he had ideas for plays while two
of them were talking. The Lord had worked in other
theater at the time, so when that was my note
that he was sort of a discovery of Marie's but
discovery might be a weird word to us there and
not entirely accurate. But he really once he hooked up
with the uh the Glonguigno, his career really blossomed. And
(09:07):
it was because he was always consulting doctors and experts
so that he could really get all of the all
of the gory stuff as accurate as possible. And it
seems odd to me that your psychologist would also be
your creative collaborator, but it seemed to work for them
well and maybe not even maybe definitely also medically not ethical, right,
(09:30):
you wouldn't be able to pull that off today. I
don't think but at the time, Uh, despite Benet's apparent
willingness to talk about how the Lord wasn't doing his
his work on self openly, which again would not be ethical, Uh,
they seem to do really well in terms of putting
plays together, and the Lord would eventually earn the nickname
(09:52):
the Prince of Terror for his dozens and dozens of
plays that combine this fascination with psychology and death with
story that had been sort of gleaned from newspapers and
police reports, and that combination really examined the depths of
humankind savagery. The Lord favored insane asylums and surgeries for
settings of his dramas, and his goal was to write
(10:14):
a play that was so filled with terror that it
would clear the entire audience within minutes of beginning. It's
a weird goal. When I was about twenty four years old,
I had dated somebody whose goal was to write a
book so scary nobody could get to the end of
it anyway. All of this ultimately led to incredible success,
(10:40):
so much that it is often Max Murray and not
Oscar Matinier who was credited with starting the Grand Nile.
There was an average of two faintings per night, which
just seemed to entice new audience members to come in.
And those two people, by the way, were normally men.
The Grand Gniole became celebrated as part of pervis in culture. Yeah,
(11:01):
the explanation that's often given as to why it was
always men that fainted was because the ladies would cover
their eyes when the scarier parts happened, whereas the men
would not. But that I think that matter could potentially
be up to debate. The Congo's next director took the
gory realism portrayed on stage to all new levels. But
before we get into that, we're going to take a
(11:22):
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first order one last time. That is Me Andundy's dot
com slash history. In nineteen the theater's directorship passed to
(12:59):
Camille Schwazi when Max Maori retired. Charles Zabel was also
a financial partner, but it was Camille Schwazi who was
running things, and Chwazi took the stagings of the theater
to all new heights by way of special effects. So,
in addition to make up in physical effects which were
already being done at the Conguignau and which he elevated,
(13:19):
he also used lighting and sound to carry the audience
members along with the actors on stage, into a world
of insanity and gore and terror. As the First World
War played out, there was some concern that audiences would
become so jaded by the events that were unfolding in
Europe and abroad that the French Theater of Blood would
stop being appealing, but Chwazi opted to use the public's
(13:42):
new knowledge to innovate in these plays. In addition to
the knives and pistols, he started incorporating stories with grenades
and poisonous gas. So themes obviously taken from the war,
and he was ever looking for ways to push the
boundaries of realism to keep potentially bored on chances on
the edge of their seats. So Chwazi even purchased a
(14:03):
full surgical setup for use as a set. Plays were
also staged on sets that looked like the interiors of
dirigibles and railroad cars and mines and factories. So the
types of things that were on people's minds at this time.
This is where I want to pause and remind you
that that stage was only twenty by twenty, so building
out these sets had to have been an incredible work
(14:24):
of like engineering and creativity. It was also Chwazi who
hired actress Paula Maxa, who would become the celebrated star
of the Grand Genial compared to the famous Sarah Bernhardt
as her horror horror equivalent. Maxi gained her fame through
play after play in which her character was tortured or mauled,
and in one place, she even decomposed on stage over
(14:46):
the course of several minutes. Over the course of her
time at the Grand Nial, she yelled help on stage
more than nine times, but that didn't really help her
out because she was murdered in the theater more than
ten thousand times. Yeah she uh. You know, when you're
doing for to seven plays at night, you can get
(15:06):
killed over and over in the course of one evening.
As an actor, and by this time, with the range
of special effects in each show continuing to grow, these
actors became masters not only of portraying human emotion at
the extremes of experience, but they also had to become
incredibly skilled at simultaneously deploying the tricks of their trade
(15:27):
that went far beyond like using blood packs and like
having to explode. One of those actors would have to
trigger effects that made their faces appear to melt, or
their skin burst into flame, or any number of other
horrors while they were still doing the job of trying
to act realistically. As the spectacle grew, the Grand can
Yell drew a wide ranging audience. People who live nearby
(15:48):
would attend to enjoy some local theater, and the high
Row art set bought tickets to indulge in the darker
themes of the stage. There, audiences would show up to
openings in formal attire with B y O. B. Champagne. Allegedly,
the boxes in the back of the theater, which were
quite private, were often the sites of romantic trists, and
it was during Schwazi's time at the Helm that records
(16:10):
were set at the good for faintings, as well as
an increase in the number of audience members who would
run out into the alley over the course of the
evening to be sick. The effects had become so sophisticated
that during one play, when an actress had her eye
gouged out on stage and then revealed the gaping hole
in her skull, six members of the audience lost consciousness.
(16:32):
On another evening, what looked for all the world like
a real blood transfusion taking place on stage resulted in
the record of fifteen fainting attendees. Chwazi ran the theater
for more than a decade before Jack Juvan became the director.
In Chuvanne, who bought out Charles Zibel, really seemed to
(16:52):
want to depart from what had gone on before and
in fact had made the Grand Genial famous. Chwazi stayed
on for a while as a collaborator, but he left
after three years to start a competing theater, and Juvene
also fired crowd favorite Paula Maxa, who also left and
started her own theater. Unfortunately, neither max has ventured nor
(17:13):
Chewazis took flight. However, the new director began to stage
shows that were less creative and exploratory and set up
one gag after another. He sets slates that were thematic
for a whole evening, sometimes all penned by the same writer,
sometimes there were multiple writers listed on the playbill, but
they were all just his pseudonyms. Yeah, he usually is
(17:35):
is characterized as kind of not understanding what the true
magic of the Colnguignol was, and without the artistry of
storytelling that had teased out the tension and fear of
a story, the audience lost interest and additionally, the theater
productions started to have to compete with the early universal
horror films. Dracula starring Bella Legocie debuted in one James
(18:00):
Wales Frankenstein also came out that same year, and while
their roots were in many ways in the horror and
the identity of horror and storytelling that had started at
the Glouigno, they were now a very real threat to
that theater, and attendance dwindled rapidly. In n seven, a
British actress named Eva Berkson took over this limping theater
(18:21):
from Juvain. For a while it seemed like there was
some hope for a return to the golden days of
the Grand Guanole. Berkson relaunched the theater with a mix
of old audience favorites and new plays, and she hired
back Paula Maxa but due to years of screaming, the
former Queen of the Theater of Blood had damaged her
vocal instrument, and she could no longer scream like she
(18:42):
once did. Yeah, she really wasn't able to um project,
according to most accounts, or even speak much over like
your standard speaking voice. Berkson was able, however, to bring
audiences back, and for several years the small former chapel
once again was home to devoted crowds and spurting blood.
(19:05):
But the German occupation of Paris in nineteen forty brought
Berkson's involvement to a screeching halt. She fled. As a
British national, it would have been incredibly dangerous for her
to try to stay. Although the theater did continue to
mount productions in her absence occupation slates were by and
large repeats of the ones that had played under Schwaz's leadership.
The old director had returned Berkson's absence to try to
(19:27):
keep things going, and some of the occupying troops did attend,
although the theater was deemed degenerate art, even though her
mind garring quite liked it. Yeah, there were apparently plans
when Germany was finally victorious to basically like, destroy the
Glongaignole and pretend it had never existed, just wipe it
from the history books. But uh, as we know, that's
(19:50):
not how the war played out, and Berkson once again
resumed her leadership role at the Glouignole in nineteen forty four,
and this time when she returned from England, she had
a husband who was Alexander Dundas, and World War Two
really delta severe blow to the theater. For one, there
was some ill will in Paris that the Glongul had
stayed open to entertain the enemy troops. Berkson's return seemed
(20:14):
to help smooth that over a little bit, and a
visit from General Patton to the theater actually caused an
uptick in ticket sales temporarily, But the global conflict also
gave audiences far too much real horror for a theater
that was built around gore to hold any sort of appeal.
To be truly shocked in the genial tradition would have
required something far more sensational than the little stage could manage.
(20:38):
In seven interview with Time magazine, Eva Berkson said, really,
I've almost come to the conclusion that the only way
to frighten a French audience since the war is to
cut up a woman on stage, a live woman, of course,
and throw them the pieces. During the ninety seven season,
in an effort to elicit some sort of excitement or
(20:58):
thrilled response from audience is the Grangno mounted productions that
included La Laboratoire Day's Hallucinacion, which featured a surgeon operating
on the brain of his wife's lover on stage, and Clean,
which was crime in a Crazy House where a pair
of elderly inmates, all women, tortured a young, beautiful patient
(21:21):
by driving a pair of scissors into her eye. Yikes. Yeah, yeah,
well that's that was the tradition of the theater. I mean,
I've had kind of had that response at several moments
in this episode, but I have one in particular. Even
after testing out a variety of different formats and styles
of theater, person could just not regain a foothold and entertainment.
(21:43):
In nineteen fifty one, she retired from the Grand Giole
And next up, we're going to talk about the final
years of the Tea, But before we do, we're gonna
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dot com and enter stuff. The last decade of the
Cologno was marked by struggle, artistic uncertainty, and rapid turnover.
When Berkson stepped away from the theater, Max Murray's sons
bought it and the company manager, Charles Nonon, became the
(23:30):
interim director the plays that were staged from nineteen fifty
one to nineteen fifty four and an effort to try
new things since the old horror just wasn't working. We're
so far outside of the identity of the Grand Ganile
that they just couldn't draw audiences. No one associated the
theater and impassed Japtile with the musical reviews or long
form satire that we're being tried during this time. In
(23:54):
nineteen fifty four, there was a ray of hope. It
arrived in the form of journalist and feminist Claim Macha
when she restarted the theater in its old tradition, but
she hired new young writers to craft the short tales
of farce and shock, which seemed to give it like
an injection of life for a bit while it seemed
like a turnaround. This optimism was really short lived. Productions
(24:16):
were plagued by very real problems and dangerous situations, which
are difficult to distinguish from the publicity stunts that Maschard
was trying to do to reignite interest. Yeah, there were
a lot of stories coming out of this time, and
people were not always sure what was real and what
was just part of a stunt. So there was a
kidnapping of one of the lead actresses, which was definitely fake. Uh.
(24:40):
And even some of the more upsetting stories really remain
a little bit murky. So apparently, a leather harness is
said to have nearly claimed the life of an actress
when she tried to get into it backstage, and she
nearly hung herself. Another actress had a nervous breakdown on stage,
and yet another was burned by a flame effect. There
were a lot of problems. So while my start had
(25:03):
managed to elicit a swell and ticket sales, the tone
of things was a lot less realistic and a lot
more campy, and the theater became more of a tourist
attraction than a cultural icon. Yeah, I think we've all
seen this happen to places in various cities, like the
sort of cool underground thing that develops and becomes iconic
pretty soon becomes more like an amusement park and less
(25:26):
like itself. Um. From nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty one,
a man named Fred Pascal ran the theater, and some
of the plays at this point veered back towards more
realistic horror, but it was really too late to regain
the glory days of Marie's and chwizz times. Charles Nonel
once again became the director of the Grand Nile in
(25:48):
nineteen sixty one, and he would be its last director,
and an interview with Time magazine, he said, before the war,
everyone felt what was happening on stage was impossible. Now
we know these things and worse, our pop stable in reality.
So after sixty five years of frights and chills, the
Glonguignau closed its doors for good in November of nineteen
(26:08):
sixty two. The Chapel Turn Theater reopened briefly as a
new theatrical enterprise, not as the Glogognol, but that also
quickly failed, and in March nineteen sixty three the entrance
and portico of the space were demolished. There were two
spinoff theater companies launched in London that carried the name
grandiol one of the nineteen twenties and one of the
(26:30):
nineteen forties, but neither of them ran for very long.
The theater has been referenced in numerous films throughout the years,
both documentary and fictional, including the first season of Penny Dreadful. Yeah.
If you watch a show, and I do, because it's fantastic, Uh,
there's a whole whole episode that is titled Golgagno. And
there is also a similar theater in the book and
(26:51):
subsequent film interview with a Vampire called the Ala de Vompieu,
But apparently author and Rice has said that she did
not know about the Glogognol when she wrote of the theater, which,
if you missed either the book or that film, audiences
believed they were watching fiction, but we're in fact observing
real deaths at the hands of vampire, so it was
sort of like the snuff film equivalent of the theater. Today,
(27:15):
theater companies around the world still stage modern productions of
some of the surviving plays for the Grand Yole. Yeah,
there are actually textbooks on how to stage clogignol plays,
and there are because you know, for a modern audience,
if you stage them as written, they would probably seem
very hokey in some cases, although they were doing some
pretty amazing stuff with effects at the time. And in fact,
(27:38):
the word cloignol has kind of come to be associated
with shocking, uh sort of extreme horror, So it's taken
on a life of its own. Like I said, it
shows up sort of everywhere. You'll you'll be now that
you have have heard of it, if you hadn't before,
you will start to see it everywhere, and now you
know what it's referencing. So that is the clogignon. That's
(27:59):
one of those things that if I could time travel,
I would probably pick as a place to visit. Kind
of spectacular to do that, not you, I'm not into it.
I will report back if I remain conscious after both
my time travel and seeing a terrifying play or a
terrifying play and a comedy, and a terrifying play in
(28:21):
a comedy and one more terrifying play. Uh yeah, I
think it would be spectacular, which is why I thought
it would be perfect Halloween fair for the podcast. But
now I have not scary at all listener mail. This
comes from our listener Jenna, and she sent it with
a postcard, but it was a parcel. Uh. And she says, Hello,
(28:44):
Holly and Tracy. Obviously I'm not sending this from Stockholm,
which is what the postcard depicts, but I was recently
there and I picked this up with a mind to
send it to you. I work on a cruise ship
as a production manager of entertainment and travel all around
the world, and I am currently home away a visa
to my next job in Dubai. I love listening to
the podcast and hearing about places I've been, just so
(29:05):
I can say, hey, I've been there, and now that
I'm home for a little while, I've cut up, caught
up with my backlog of episodes. Uh cruise ship WiFi,
she says, not so good. While I spend my time sewing.
You guys are great to listen to while I work,
and I get to learn while sewing, two things I love.
So in this package, I've included some of the things
I make for you to use. I hope you liked
them and find some use out of them. I've got
(29:27):
several I made for myself that I use while traveling
for work. Thank you so much for the podcast, Jenna.
Thank you so much. She made us these two beautiful
little cosmetic bags, uh, which mine is going to become
pretty standard in my travels going forward because I love
it so much. Yep, you sent me picture. I'm very
excited to pick mine up from you the next time
(29:48):
we're in the same place. We are actually traveling right
after we record this, so Tracy will get hurt very
soon because I will bring it to where we are going.
And um, yeah, I was just so sweet and they're
beautifully made. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Jenna.
We just love them and they're delightful. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can
(30:10):
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(30:31):
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(30:51):
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space Build it Beautiful. I'm Kristin Conger and I'm Caroline Irvan,
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(00:20):
from every imaginable angle. New episodes come out Mondays and
Wednesdays on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever else you
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Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fraud. I'm Tracy. Will sit Tracy.
It's time for more October horror. Yea. Uh, this time
we're gonna delve into not just as in October spooky story,
but a story of spooky storytellers. Uh. We're going to
talk about a famous theater of Paris, and its name
(01:08):
translates to big Puppet or Big Puppet Show, which could,
perhaps to some ears suggest light silly fair. But the
works performed at the Tatla Dugout were aimed at adult
audiences and they were not for the faint of heart.
The roots of the film horror genre are in the
plays of the Grand, and the plays that were staged
(01:29):
there really became known for telling the darker side of UH,
for exploring the darker side of storytelling, often in really
visceral and very gruesome and explicit and graphic ways. It
was outrageous and terrifying and sometimes scandalous, and it became
a beloved fixture of Parisian of the Parisian theatrical scene.
(01:49):
In the early nineteen hundreds and throughout the nineteenth century,
uh fay de veire were incredibly popular, and these were short,
sensational stories were printed in French papers, and they were
frequently illustrated, and they reported true life, sort of crime stories,
rife with gory details, and unlike fairy tales or morality stories,
(02:12):
these usually did not end happily, and in some ways,
the taste for stories of this nature, which developed in
the consciousness of France throughout the eighteen hundreds, really set
the perfect scene for the tatlad. The story of the
Grand starts in eight seven with Oscar Matagnier, when he
(02:32):
purchased the theater in the Cartier Pigal area of Paris.
He had worked on a police force, and one of
his duties was watching over death row prisoners at the time,
uh basically in the time that was leading up to
their executions. He also worked as a tabloid journalist. Before
he became a playwright, Matainier had been working with Andrea
(02:54):
Antoine at the Teatra Libre, which stage stories of the
lower classes of Paris. They really were kind of doing
this whole naturalist thing that was growing in popularity, but
that theater had really struggled and it shut its doors
for good in the mid eighteen nineties. During the run
of the Libre, Matinier had written some of the most
provocative short plays that were staged there. The Tiata de
(03:18):
Grando sat at the end of a small cul de
sac called the Impass Chaptel. It had originally been built
as a chapel, and some of the original chapel decor remained,
including angel sculptures hanging over the orchestra pit and seating boxes, which,
due to their carved wood paneling, looked like confessionals. And
(03:39):
the stage. There was a tiny square twenty ft by
twenty feet that's about six by six meters, and there
were somewhere between two hundred and thirty and two hundred
and eighty five seats, depending on what source you're reading.
One of the reasons Matinnier started this venu and the
smallest theater in Paris was to mount his own productions.
His naturalist plays were just not the kind of thing
(04:00):
that other playhouses were willing to produce. He had done
some work writing farces and pros, but Mattinie eventually went
back to short plays like those that he had worked
on at the Oscars. Plays written for the Glouigneo featured
characters of the street, such as hustlers, sex workers, and
homeless people, and he launched his theater on April thirteenth
(04:23):
of eight seven with a slate of seven shorts. Two
dark tales performed that evening were written by Mattinier, while
the other five were a mix of comedy and drama
that had been written by other writers. This mix of
styles was part of an approach that Mattinier started that
he called hot and Cold Theater. Dark or gruesome fair
(04:44):
was was alternated with often body comedic pieces. Because the
theater would run anywhere from four to seven different plays
every night, they could take the audience through a series
of emotional highs and lows over the course of one evening.
As a result of this style switching, the horror seemed
more frightening and the comedy seemed funnier. Yeah, it's often
(05:05):
explained as if you run hot water on your hands
and then switched to cold, the cold seems icier than
it is, and vice versa. So that same sort of
thing was being applied to staging their productions for the evening.
And while Mattinier had thought that in running his own
theater house he'd have the freedom to stage the shows
he wanted, it turned out that the Paris police actually
felt a little bit differently about the situation. One of
(05:28):
his first shows, Mademoiselle Fifi, which was an adaptation of
a novel, was shut down temporarily by police censors because
the main character was a sex worker. Although the police
didn't appreciate the gritty realism of Matinee's plays, audiences really did.
The Grand Ginole was successful basically immediately. Yeah, people really
(05:51):
loved it. But even though it was doing quite well,
Oscar Mattinier did not head up the theater for long.
In just the following year, Max Maury took over as
director and Mattainnier had run the theater for four seasons,
but he really felt like it was impossible to keep
the shocking stories going long term, so he sold the
(06:11):
whole business to Maury. With that change in leadership was
a significant change in the tone of the offerings on stage.
Mary had a lot of theater experience, but was not
one of Paris's highbrow artistes. He wasn't especially concerned with
continuing the style of naturalism for artistic integrity. He wanted
to make the theater profitable just because it's a business.
(06:36):
Under his guidance, Grandio gained a reputation for bloody, terrifying offerings,
and Maury catered to a sort of voyeuristic blood lust
in the audience. His lineups filled with unsettling visuals that
struck fear and viewers and made them question exactly where
the line between theater and reality sat came to be
(06:58):
called Slice of Death as a counter to matenier Slice
of life dramas. Mari was a masterful marketer of the
Grand Annual. During this time. He hired a doctor to
attend all the shows in case anybody needed to be
treated for fainting. And he reveled in the publicity that
that move brought. He measured the success of any given
(07:18):
show by how many people fainted during it. Yeah, they
really were doing some very very graphic you know, beheadings, dismemberments, uh, disembowelings,
lots of stabbings and eye gougings. They were really like
doing some pretty impressive on stage effects. And as a director,
(07:39):
Max Murray was exacting. He may not have been driven by,
you know, this intense artistic vision, but he was adamant
that the plays had to be paced perfectly to maximize
the effect of the comedy or horror that was being
delivered to the audience. And he pushed the acting troupe,
which is normally a group of about fourteen actors two extreme,
(08:00):
with endless rehearsals and some pretty cutting criticism that he
could dole out. The actors were basically always on edge.
Arguments were frequent, so the behind the scenes drama was
apparently just as heightened as that on the stage, although
it was absent of the blood and dismemberment portions. One
of Marie's discoveries during this time was Andre de Lord,
(08:21):
a novelist and playwright who collaborated with Dr Alfred Binet,
an experimental psychologist, to create stage scripts that that explored
insanity in depth. The Lord was a physician's son and
had grown obsessed with death as a child. Benet, who
was the Lord's doctor as well, found the patient frustratingly
(08:43):
unwilling to do real self examination, and he probably cut
sessions short because he had ideas for plays while two
of them were talking. The Lord had worked in other
theater at the time, so when that was my note
that he was sort of a discovery of Marie's but
discovery might be a weird word to us there and
not entirely accurate. But he really once he hooked up
with the uh the Glonguigno, his career really blossomed. And
(09:07):
it was because he was always consulting doctors and experts
so that he could really get all of the all
of the gory stuff as accurate as possible. And it
seems odd to me that your psychologist would also be
your creative collaborator, but it seemed to work for them
well and maybe not even maybe definitely also medically not ethical, right,
(09:30):
you wouldn't be able to pull that off today. I
don't think but at the time, Uh, despite Benet's apparent
willingness to talk about how the Lord wasn't doing his
his work on self openly, which again would not be ethical, Uh,
they seem to do really well in terms of putting
plays together, and the Lord would eventually earn the nickname
(09:52):
the Prince of Terror for his dozens and dozens of
plays that combine this fascination with psychology and death with
story that had been sort of gleaned from newspapers and
police reports, and that combination really examined the depths of
humankind savagery. The Lord favored insane asylums and surgeries for
settings of his dramas, and his goal was to write
(10:14):
a play that was so filled with terror that it
would clear the entire audience within minutes of beginning. It's
a weird goal. When I was about twenty four years old,
I had dated somebody whose goal was to write a
book so scary nobody could get to the end of
it anyway. All of this ultimately led to incredible success,
(10:40):
so much that it is often Max Murray and not
Oscar Matinier who was credited with starting the Grand Nile.
There was an average of two faintings per night, which
just seemed to entice new audience members to come in.
And those two people, by the way, were normally men.
The Grand Gniole became celebrated as part of pervis in culture. Yeah,
(11:01):
the explanation that's often given as to why it was
always men that fainted was because the ladies would cover
their eyes when the scarier parts happened, whereas the men
would not. But that I think that matter could potentially
be up to debate. The Congo's next director took the
gory realism portrayed on stage to all new levels. But
before we get into that, we're going to take a
(11:22):
little break and have a word from one of our sponsors. So,
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first order one last time. That is Me Andundy's dot
com slash history. In nineteen the theater's directorship passed to
(12:59):
Camille Schwazi when Max Maori retired. Charles Zabel was also
a financial partner, but it was Camille Schwazi who was
running things, and Chwazi took the stagings of the theater
to all new heights by way of special effects. So,
in addition to make up in physical effects which were
already being done at the Conguignau and which he elevated,
(13:19):
he also used lighting and sound to carry the audience
members along with the actors on stage, into a world
of insanity and gore and terror. As the First World
War played out, there was some concern that audiences would
become so jaded by the events that were unfolding in
Europe and abroad that the French Theater of Blood would
stop being appealing, but Chwazi opted to use the public's
(13:42):
new knowledge to innovate in these plays. In addition to
the knives and pistols, he started incorporating stories with grenades
and poisonous gas. So themes obviously taken from the war,
and he was ever looking for ways to push the
boundaries of realism to keep potentially bored on chances on
the edge of their seats. So Chwazi even purchased a
(14:03):
full surgical setup for use as a set. Plays were
also staged on sets that looked like the interiors of
dirigibles and railroad cars and mines and factories. So the
types of things that were on people's minds at this time.
This is where I want to pause and remind you
that that stage was only twenty by twenty, so building
out these sets had to have been an incredible work
(14:24):
of like engineering and creativity. It was also Chwazi who
hired actress Paula Maxa, who would become the celebrated star
of the Grand Genial compared to the famous Sarah Bernhardt
as her horror horror equivalent. Maxi gained her fame through
play after play in which her character was tortured or mauled,
and in one place, she even decomposed on stage over
(14:46):
the course of several minutes. Over the course of her
time at the Grand Nial, she yelled help on stage
more than nine times, but that didn't really help her
out because she was murdered in the theater more than
ten thousand times. Yeah she uh. You know, when you're
doing for to seven plays at night, you can get
(15:06):
killed over and over in the course of one evening.
As an actor, and by this time, with the range
of special effects in each show continuing to grow, these
actors became masters not only of portraying human emotion at
the extremes of experience, but they also had to become
incredibly skilled at simultaneously deploying the tricks of their trade
(15:27):
that went far beyond like using blood packs and like
having to explode. One of those actors would have to
trigger effects that made their faces appear to melt, or
their skin burst into flame, or any number of other
horrors while they were still doing the job of trying
to act realistically. As the spectacle grew, the Grand can
Yell drew a wide ranging audience. People who live nearby
(15:48):
would attend to enjoy some local theater, and the high
Row art set bought tickets to indulge in the darker
themes of the stage. There, audiences would show up to
openings in formal attire with B y O. B. Champagne. Allegedly,
the boxes in the back of the theater, which were
quite private, were often the sites of romantic trists, and
it was during Schwazi's time at the Helm that records
(16:10):
were set at the good for faintings, as well as
an increase in the number of audience members who would
run out into the alley over the course of the
evening to be sick. The effects had become so sophisticated
that during one play, when an actress had her eye
gouged out on stage and then revealed the gaping hole
in her skull, six members of the audience lost consciousness.
(16:32):
On another evening, what looked for all the world like
a real blood transfusion taking place on stage resulted in
the record of fifteen fainting attendees. Chwazi ran the theater
for more than a decade before Jack Juvan became the director.
In Chuvanne, who bought out Charles Zibel, really seemed to
(16:52):
want to depart from what had gone on before and
in fact had made the Grand Genial famous. Chwazi stayed
on for a while as a collaborator, but he left
after three years to start a competing theater, and Juvene
also fired crowd favorite Paula Maxa, who also left and
started her own theater. Unfortunately, neither max has ventured nor
(17:13):
Chewazis took flight. However, the new director began to stage
shows that were less creative and exploratory and set up
one gag after another. He sets slates that were thematic
for a whole evening, sometimes all penned by the same writer,
sometimes there were multiple writers listed on the playbill, but
they were all just his pseudonyms. Yeah, he usually is
(17:35):
is characterized as kind of not understanding what the true
magic of the Colnguignol was, and without the artistry of
storytelling that had teased out the tension and fear of
a story, the audience lost interest and additionally, the theater
productions started to have to compete with the early universal
horror films. Dracula starring Bella Legocie debuted in one James
(18:00):
Wales Frankenstein also came out that same year, and while
their roots were in many ways in the horror and
the identity of horror and storytelling that had started at
the Glouigno, they were now a very real threat to
that theater, and attendance dwindled rapidly. In n seven, a
British actress named Eva Berkson took over this limping theater
(18:21):
from Juvain. For a while it seemed like there was
some hope for a return to the golden days of
the Grand Guanole. Berkson relaunched the theater with a mix
of old audience favorites and new plays, and she hired
back Paula Maxa but due to years of screaming, the
former Queen of the Theater of Blood had damaged her
vocal instrument, and she could no longer scream like she
(18:42):
once did. Yeah, she really wasn't able to um project,
according to most accounts, or even speak much over like
your standard speaking voice. Berkson was able, however, to bring
audiences back, and for several years the small former chapel
once again was home to devoted crowds and spurting blood.
(19:05):
But the German occupation of Paris in nineteen forty brought
Berkson's involvement to a screeching halt. She fled. As a
British national, it would have been incredibly dangerous for her
to try to stay. Although the theater did continue to
mount productions in her absence occupation slates were by and
large repeats of the ones that had played under Schwaz's leadership.
The old director had returned Berkson's absence to try to
(19:27):
keep things going, and some of the occupying troops did attend,
although the theater was deemed degenerate art, even though her
mind garring quite liked it. Yeah, there were apparently plans
when Germany was finally victorious to basically like, destroy the
Glongaignole and pretend it had never existed, just wipe it
from the history books. But uh, as we know, that's
(19:50):
not how the war played out, and Berkson once again
resumed her leadership role at the Glouignole in nineteen forty four,
and this time when she returned from England, she had
a husband who was Alexander Dundas, and World War Two
really delta severe blow to the theater. For one, there
was some ill will in Paris that the Glongul had
stayed open to entertain the enemy troops. Berkson's return seemed
(20:14):
to help smooth that over a little bit, and a
visit from General Patton to the theater actually caused an
uptick in ticket sales temporarily, But the global conflict also
gave audiences far too much real horror for a theater
that was built around gore to hold any sort of appeal.
To be truly shocked in the genial tradition would have
required something far more sensational than the little stage could manage.
(20:38):
In seven interview with Time magazine, Eva Berkson said, really,
I've almost come to the conclusion that the only way
to frighten a French audience since the war is to
cut up a woman on stage, a live woman, of course,
and throw them the pieces. During the ninety seven season,
in an effort to elicit some sort of excitement or
(20:58):
thrilled response from audience is the Grangno mounted productions that
included La Laboratoire Day's Hallucinacion, which featured a surgeon operating
on the brain of his wife's lover on stage, and Clean,
which was crime in a Crazy House where a pair
of elderly inmates, all women, tortured a young, beautiful patient
(21:21):
by driving a pair of scissors into her eye. Yikes. Yeah, yeah,
well that's that was the tradition of the theater. I mean,
I've had kind of had that response at several moments
in this episode, but I have one in particular. Even
after testing out a variety of different formats and styles
of theater, person could just not regain a foothold and entertainment.
(21:43):
In nineteen fifty one, she retired from the Grand Giole
And next up, we're going to talk about the final
years of the Tea, But before we do, we're gonna
pause one more time for another sponsor break trips to
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dot com and enter stuff. The last decade of the
Cologno was marked by struggle, artistic uncertainty, and rapid turnover.
When Berkson stepped away from the theater, Max Murray's sons
bought it and the company manager, Charles Nonon, became the
(23:30):
interim director the plays that were staged from nineteen fifty
one to nineteen fifty four and an effort to try
new things since the old horror just wasn't working. We're
so far outside of the identity of the Grand Ganile
that they just couldn't draw audiences. No one associated the
theater and impassed Japtile with the musical reviews or long
form satire that we're being tried during this time. In
(23:54):
nineteen fifty four, there was a ray of hope. It
arrived in the form of journalist and feminist Claim Macha
when she restarted the theater in its old tradition, but
she hired new young writers to craft the short tales
of farce and shock, which seemed to give it like
an injection of life for a bit while it seemed
like a turnaround. This optimism was really short lived. Productions
(24:16):
were plagued by very real problems and dangerous situations, which
are difficult to distinguish from the publicity stunts that Maschard
was trying to do to reignite interest. Yeah, there were
a lot of stories coming out of this time, and
people were not always sure what was real and what
was just part of a stunt. So there was a
kidnapping of one of the lead actresses, which was definitely fake. Uh.
(24:40):
And even some of the more upsetting stories really remain
a little bit murky. So apparently, a leather harness is
said to have nearly claimed the life of an actress
when she tried to get into it backstage, and she
nearly hung herself. Another actress had a nervous breakdown on stage,
and yet another was burned by a flame effect. There
were a lot of problems. So while my start had
(25:03):
managed to elicit a swell and ticket sales, the tone
of things was a lot less realistic and a lot
more campy, and the theater became more of a tourist
attraction than a cultural icon. Yeah, I think we've all
seen this happen to places in various cities, like the
sort of cool underground thing that develops and becomes iconic
pretty soon becomes more like an amusement park and less
(25:26):
like itself. Um. From nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty one,
a man named Fred Pascal ran the theater, and some
of the plays at this point veered back towards more
realistic horror, but it was really too late to regain
the glory days of Marie's and chwizz times. Charles Nonel
once again became the director of the Grand Nile in
(25:48):
nineteen sixty one, and he would be its last director,
and an interview with Time magazine, he said, before the war,
everyone felt what was happening on stage was impossible. Now
we know these things and worse, our pop stable in reality.
So after sixty five years of frights and chills, the
Glonguignau closed its doors for good in November of nineteen
(26:08):
sixty two. The Chapel Turn Theater reopened briefly as a
new theatrical enterprise, not as the Glogognol, but that also
quickly failed, and in March nineteen sixty three the entrance
and portico of the space were demolished. There were two
spinoff theater companies launched in London that carried the name
grandiol one of the nineteen twenties and one of the
(26:30):
nineteen forties, but neither of them ran for very long.
The theater has been referenced in numerous films throughout the years,
both documentary and fictional, including the first season of Penny Dreadful. Yeah.
If you watch a show, and I do, because it's fantastic, Uh,
there's a whole whole episode that is titled Golgagno. And
there is also a similar theater in the book and
(26:51):
subsequent film interview with a Vampire called the Ala de Vompieu,
But apparently author and Rice has said that she did
not know about the Glogognol when she wrote of the theater, which,
if you missed either the book or that film, audiences
believed they were watching fiction, but we're in fact observing
real deaths at the hands of vampire, so it was
sort of like the snuff film equivalent of the theater. Today,
(27:15):
theater companies around the world still stage modern productions of
some of the surviving plays for the Grand Yole. Yeah,
there are actually textbooks on how to stage clogignol plays,
and there are because you know, for a modern audience,
if you stage them as written, they would probably seem
very hokey in some cases, although they were doing some
pretty amazing stuff with effects at the time. And in fact,
(27:38):
the word cloignol has kind of come to be associated
with shocking, uh sort of extreme horror, So it's taken
on a life of its own. Like I said, it
shows up sort of everywhere. You'll you'll be now that
you have have heard of it, if you hadn't before,
you will start to see it everywhere, and now you
know what it's referencing. So that is the clogignon. That's
(27:59):
one of those things that if I could time travel,
I would probably pick as a place to visit. Kind
of spectacular to do that, not you, I'm not into it.
I will report back if I remain conscious after both
my time travel and seeing a terrifying play or a
terrifying play and a comedy, and a terrifying play in
(28:21):
a comedy and one more terrifying play. Uh yeah, I
think it would be spectacular, which is why I thought
it would be perfect Halloween fair for the podcast. But
now I have not scary at all listener mail. This
comes from our listener Jenna, and she sent it with
a postcard, but it was a parcel. Uh. And she says, Hello,
(28:44):
Holly and Tracy. Obviously I'm not sending this from Stockholm,
which is what the postcard depicts, but I was recently
there and I picked this up with a mind to
send it to you. I work on a cruise ship
as a production manager of entertainment and travel all around
the world, and I am currently home away a visa
to my next job in Dubai. I love listening to
the podcast and hearing about places I've been, just so
(29:05):
I can say, hey, I've been there, and now that
I'm home for a little while, I've cut up, caught
up with my backlog of episodes. Uh cruise ship WiFi,
she says, not so good. While I spend my time sewing.
You guys are great to listen to while I work,
and I get to learn while sewing, two things I love.
So in this package, I've included some of the things
I make for you to use. I hope you liked
them and find some use out of them. I've got
(29:27):
several I made for myself that I use while traveling
for work. Thank you so much for the podcast, Jenna.
Thank you so much. She made us these two beautiful
little cosmetic bags, uh, which mine is going to become
pretty standard in my travels going forward because I love
it so much. Yep, you sent me picture. I'm very
excited to pick mine up from you the next time
(29:48):
we're in the same place. We are actually traveling right
after we record this, so Tracy will get hurt very
soon because I will bring it to where we are going.
And um, yeah, I was just so sweet and they're
beautifully made. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Jenna.
We just love them and they're delightful. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can
(30:10):
also connect with us across all of social media just
by looking for missed in History, which is our our name,
on virtually everything. We're on Twitter at misst in history,
that Facebook dot com, slash mist in history at misston
history dot tumbler dot com. We're on pinterestes mist in History,
and on Instagram as miss in history. So we hope
to see you at all of those. Uh, if you
(30:31):
would like to do a little bit of research. You
can go to our parents site, how stuff Works. You
can type in the words horror or Halloween and you're
going to get all kinds of results to explore and
keep you busy. You can also visit us at misst
in history dot com for a backlog of every episode
we have ever had of the podcast before Tracy and
I all the way to present day, as well as
(30:51):
show notes on any of the episodes that Tracy and
I have worked on together. So we encourage you come
and visit us at how stuff works dot com and
mist in history dot com for more illness and thousands
of other topics because it has stuff works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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