SYMHC Classics: Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol

This 2016 episode tells the story of a small theater in Paris which was open from 1897 to 1962, and became famous for its grisly, terrifying plays.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Uhguignon got the briefest mentioned this week
when its name appeared at the end of a quote
from the New York Times review of Dracula, which was
directed by Todd Browning. That mention was so brief we
did not even elaborate on what it meant. But the
Guignon was a theater that became known for it's terrifying

(00:22):
and gruesome plays in Paris, and you, in fact got
to visit the location. Yes, yeah, it is now. It's
still a theater, but it is now a theater where
most of the plays there are staged with the intent
that the hearing impaired can enjoy them, which is very cool.
And I must say, we wandered over and the woman

(00:43):
who is the manager happened to be outside at the time,
and she was like, why are you here? And I
tried to explain history podcast in French, which I did
not think about learning to say um, And then she
invited us in and just let us look around at
what it is now, which was very very kind of
her and incredibly week. So yeah, I want to give
a shout out to the International Visual Theater. It's still
there in the same place, and the building looks enough

(01:06):
like it looked in those pictures that we found while
we were doing research with a clang ule that it
is recognizable. So that was very very cool. Yeah, so
that research on the Grand Gnule. Holly did that back
in We covered this on the show on October seventeenth
of that year, so we thought we would fill in
the gaps for folks who had not heard that name before.

(01:27):
Asked Today's Saturday Classic Welcome to Stuff you missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frown. I'm Tracy Wilson. Tracy.

(01:48):
It's time for more October horror. Yeay, Uh, this time
we're gonna delve into not just us an October spooky story,
it a story of spooky storytellers. Uh. We're going to
talk about a famous theater of Paris, and its name
translates to big Puppet or Big Puppet Show, which could,

(02:10):
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 Grange and the plays that were staged
there really became known for telling the darker side of UH,

(02:32):
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.
In the early nineteen hundreds and throughout the nineteenth century,
uh fae de veire were incredibly popular. And these were

(02:56):
short sensational stories that 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, 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,

(03:20):
really set the perfect scene for the tatlad The story
of the Grand Gena starts in eight seven with Oscar Matagnier,
when he 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

(03:41):
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 Antoine at the Tiatra Libre, which stage
stories of the lower classes of Paris. They really were
kind of doing this whole naturalist thing that was growing

(04:02):
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 Grando sat at the end of a
small cul de sac called the Impass Chaptel. It had

(04:23):
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 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

(04:44):
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 in the smallest theater in Paris
was to mount his own productions. His naturalist plays were
just not the kind of thing that other playhouses were
will to produce. He had done some work writing farces
and pros, but Mattinie eventually went back to short plays

(05:08):
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, eight seven with a
slate of seven shorts. Two dark tales performed that evening
were written by Mattinier, while the other five were a

(05:30):
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 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

(05:51):
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 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

(06:12):
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 his first shows, Mademoiselle Fifi,
which was an adaptation of a novel, was shut down
temporarily by police sensors because the main character was a

(06:35):
sex worker. Although the police didn't appreciate the gritty realism
of Matineer's plays, audiences really did. The Grand Genole was
successful basically immediately. Yeah, people really 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,

(06:59):
Max Moore. He 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 whole business to Maury.
With that change in leadership was a significant change in
the tone of the offerings on stage. Mari had a
lot of theater experience, but was not one of Paris's

(07:21):
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. Under his guidance,
Grandio gained a reputation for bloody, terrifying offerings, and Maury

(07:42):
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 called Slice of
Death as a counter to Matinier's pace of life dramas.
Mari was a masterful marketer of the Grand Nile during

(08:05):
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 show by how
many people fainted during it. Yeah, they really were doing
some very very graphic you know, beheadings, dismemberments, uh, disembowelings,

(08:30):
lots of stabbings and eye gougings. They were really like
doing some pretty impressive on stage effects. And as a director,
Max Maury was exacting. He may not have been driven by,
you know, this intense artistic vision, but he was adamant
that the place 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,

(08:54):
which is normally a group of about fourteen actors, two
extremes 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

(09:16):
of Marie's discoveries during this time was Andre de Lord,
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

(09:38):
was the Lord's doctor as well, found the patient frustratingly
unwilling to do real self examination, and he probably cut
sessions short because he had ideas for plays while two
of them were talking. De 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 use there and

(09:58):
not entirely accurate. But he really once he hooked up
with the the Glonguigno, his career really blossomed, and 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

(10:23):
and maybe not even maybe definitely also medically not ethical, right,
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,

(10:45):
they seem to do really well in terms of putting
plays together, and the Lord would eventually earn the nickname
the Prince of Terror for his dozens and dozens of
plays that combine this fascination with psychology and death with
stories that had been sort of from newspapers and police reports,
and that combination really examined the depths of humankind savagery.

(11:07):
The Lord favored insane asylums and surgeries for settings of
his dramas, and his goal was to write 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

(11:28):
scary nobody could get to the end of it anyway.
All of this ultimately led to incredible success, 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

(11:50):
to entice new audience members to come in. And those
two people, by the way, we're normally men. The Grand
Gniole became celebrated as part of Parivisian culture. Yeah, 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

(12:12):
to debate. The Congos 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 little break
and have a word from one of our sponsors. In

(12:36):
nineteen fifteen, the theater's directorship passed to Camille Schwazi when
Max Maury 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

(12:56):
at the Congagno and which he elevated, he also used
light 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,

(13:18):
but Chwazi opted to use the public's 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 board audiences on the edge of their seats.

(13:41):
So Chwazi even purchased a 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 so building out these sets had to have

(14:01):
been an incredible work 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 Bernhardness, her horror Horror equivalent. Maxa gained
her fame through play after play in which her character
was tortured or mauld and in one place, she even

(14:24):
decomposed on stage over the course of several minutes. Over
the course of her time at the Grand Genial, 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 four to seven plays at night,

(14:45):
you can get 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 ex orians, but they
also had to become incredibly skilled at simultaneously deploying the
tricks of their trade that went far beyond like using

(15:08):
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 Grandnil drew a wide ranging audience. People who lived
nearby would attend to enjoy some local theater, and the

(15:29):
highbrow 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
were set at the gang Na for faintings, as well

(15:53):
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.
On another evening, what looked for all the world like

(16:14):
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 want to depart from what had gone on before
and in fact had made the Grand Genial famous. Chwazi

(16:38):
stayed on for a while as a collaborator, but he
left after three years to start a competing theater, and
juven also fired crowd favorite Paula Maxa, who also left
and started her own theater. Unfortunately, neither Max's venture nor
Chwazis took flight. However, the new director began to stage
shows that were less creative and exploratory and set up

(16:59):
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
is characterized as kind of not understanding what the true
magic of the Colonguignol was, and without the artistry of

(17:22):
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 ninety one.
James Wales Frankenstein also came out that same year, and
while their roots were in many ways in the horror

(17:45):
and the identity of horror and storytelling that had started
at the Glongigno, they were now a very real threat
to that theater, and attendance dwindled rapidly. In seven, a
British actress named Eva Berkson took over this limb being
theater from Juvam. For a while, it seemed like there
was some hope for a return to the golden days

(18:05):
of the Grand Nile. 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 once did. Yeah, she really wasn't able to um project,

(18:27):
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.
But the German occupation of Paris in ninety brought Berkson's

(18:48):
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 are by and large repeats
of the ones that had played under Schwazi's leadership. The
old director had returned Berkson's absence to try to keep
things going, and some of the occupying troops did attend,

(19:10):
although the theater was deemed degenerate art, even though Hermann
Gering quite liked it. Yeah, there were apparently plans when
Germany was finally victorious to basically like destroy the Glongoagnole
and pretend it had never existed, just wipe it from
the history books. But uh as we know, that's not
how the war played out, and Berkson once again resumed

(19:32):
her leadership role at the Glogognole in ninety 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 Glongognol had stayed
open to entertain the enemy troops. Berkson's return seemed to

(19:53):
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 Guinial tradition would have
required something far more sensational than the little stage could manage.

(20:17):
In in in ninety 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

(20:38):
thrilled response from audiences, the Grangegno mounted productions that included
Laboratoire Days, Hallucinacion, which featured a surgeon operating on the
brain of his wife's lover on stage, and Clean Defu,
which was crime in a crazy house where a pair
of elderly inmates, all women, tortured a young, beautiful pay

(21:00):
Shint 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 had that response at several moments in this episode,
but that one in particular. Even after testing out a
variety of different formats and styles of theater, Burkson could

(21:20):
just not regain a foothold and entertainment. In ninety one,
she retired from the Grandiole. 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. The last decade of the Coligno was

(21:50):
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 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

(22:11):
outside of the identity of the Grand Guile that they
just couldn't draw audiences. No one associated the theater and
impassed Chaptile with the musical reviews or long form satire
that we're being tried during this time. In nineteen fifty four,
there was a ray of hope. It arrived in the
form of journalist and feminist LeMond Macha when she restarted

(22:34):
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 were plagued by very
real problems and dangerous situations, which are difficult to distinguish
from the publicity stunts that Maschard was trying to do

(22:56):
to reignite interest. Yeah, there were a lot of stories
coming out at 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, and even
some of the more upsetting stories really remain a little
bit murky. So apparently, a leather harness is said to

(23:19):
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 managed to
elicit a swell and ticket sales, the tone of things
was a lot less realistic and a lot more campy,

(23:40):
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 like itself. Um.
From nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty one, a man

(24:02):
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 nineteen sixty one,
and he would be its last director, and an interview

(24:23):
with Time magazine, he said, before the war, everyone felt
what was happening on stage was impossible. Now we know
these things and worse are possible in reality. So after
sixty five years of frights and chills, the glong Gigna
closed its doors for good in November of nineteen sixty two.
The Chapel turn Theater reopened briefly as a new theatrical enterprise,

(24:45):
not as the Gloggnole, 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 Grand Gunil, one
of the nineteen twenties and one of the nineteen forties,
but neither of them ran for very long. The theater
has been referenced in numerous films throughout the years, both

(25:08):
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 Gangagno, and
there is also a similar theater in the book and
subsequent film interview with a vampire called the Atla de Vompiu,
But apparently author and Rice has said that she did

(25:29):
not know about the Golangognol when she wrote of the theater, which,
if you missed either the book or that film, audiences
believed they were watching fiction but were in fact observing
real deaths at the hands of vampire, so it was
sort of like the snuff film equivalent of theater. Today,
theater companies around the world still stage modern productions of
some of the surviving plays. For the Grand Yole. Yeah,

(25:53):
there are actually text books on how to stage Glanignol 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,
the word clognole has kind of come to be associated
with shocking, uh, sort of extreme horror, so it's taken

(26:18):
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. Uh so that is the clognon.
That's one of those things that if I could time travel,
I would probably pick as a place to visit. It
would be kind of spectacular. Do that not you? I'm

(26:41):
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 a comedy and one more terrifying play.
Uh yeah, I think it would be spectacular, which is
why I thought it would be off a Halloween fair

(27:01):
for the podcast. Thany so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or Facebook U r
L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old

(27:25):
how stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in
History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts

(27:47):
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.