O teatrze bulwarowym. Szkic

The boulevard and its theatre is a phenomenon of mixed social, political, and artistic character. We can talk about at least three stages of its history. First, we have a prologue reaching back well into the 17th century and possibly even earlier, to fair theatre that has its own history as well. This is where the troupes that started taking up residence on the boulevards in the second half of the 18th century had come from. The boulevards themselves replaced the old city walls that had been torn down. This is where modern popular culture has been born, in a home to a variety of trading, entertainment, and consumption practices that welcomed a large number of private stages that, supported by the processes of democratisation, were cropping up after the Revolution abolished theatre monopolies. What emerged was a multisystem of popular attractions that developed its own culture of participation and, in its original version, referred mostly to plebeian audiences. Theatres performing second-rate plays, mostly melodramas and vaudevilles, opened on five of eleven boulevards of Paris. This is where the Muse of Mise-en-scène was born, speaking to the audience with images and introducing money as part of the poetics of dramas and productions. The second boulevard theatre established itself after Georges Haussmann’s renovation of Paris (1852–1870) and thrived until the 1930s as a bourgeois temple of money and commerce where its own rules applied, though it was despised, or simply went unnoticed, by high modernists and theatre reformers. After the Second World War, with the consecration of avant-garde, when Eurovision has been established and cinema has taken over great commercial and entertainment enterprises, boulevard theatre has become a marginal phenomenon, though it still has a loyal audience.