Grand Guignol

The small hall at the end of the cité Chaptal, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, was inaugurated on 16 May 1896 as the Théâtre-Salon. It occupied a former convent chapel that had served as the studio of the painter Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse, and the building's earlier life stayed visible in the confessional-like boxes and the angels above the orchestra. With fewer than 300 seats it was the smallest theatre in Paris.

Oscar Méténier took the direction the following year. He had been the odd-job man of a police commissioner and the author of rejected plays, was a familiar of Guy de Maupassant, and had been trained in naturalist theatre by André Antoine, whose Théâtre Libre gave him the working model for his own house. His plan was a specialised venue alternating short horror dramas with comic sketches, and the Grand Guignol opened officially on 13 April 1897. The name came from Guignol, the traditional Lyonnais puppet who joined political commentary to the manner of Punch and Judy.

Under Méténier the theatre staged a class of people other Paris venues did not consider proper subjects: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins and others at the bottom of the city's social scale. A varied audience, from the neighbourhood and from the wealthier quarters alike, came to be shocked. The censors were watching from the first and banned several pieces, among them Méténier's own Lui!, which put a prostitute and her murderer alone together on stage for the first time. He also drew in writers such as Jean Lorrain, Fabrice Delphi and Georges Courteline.

Max Maurey, a playwright himself, took over the direction at the end of the 1890s and shifted the house towards the horror plays it became known for, putting staging before text and beginning to use special effects. He judged the success of a performance by the number of patrons who passed out from shock, and the average ran at two faintings an evening; he turned the goriness to account by hiring doctors to attend performances as a marketing ploy. To build a specialised repertoire, much of it concerned with mental disturbance, including among medical staff, he brought in new authors: André de Lorde, nicknamed the Prince of Terror, along with José de Bérys, Henri-René Lenormand, Élie de Bassant, René Berton, Charles Foleÿ, Maurice Level, whose vitriol drama Le Baiser dans la nuit of 1912 became emblematic of the genre, and the psychologist Alfred Binet.

De Lorde was the theatre's principal playwright from 1901 to 1926, credited with more than seventy pieces by some counts and at least a hundred by others, among them The Old Woman, The Ultimate Torture and Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous. He worked with Binet on plays about insanity, which became one of the house's recurring themes, and his Le Système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume of 1903, taken from Edgar Allan Poe, became a classic of the repertoire. A typical evening gave patrons five or six short plays in a style meant to be brutally true to the theatre's naturalist ideals. The horrors were generally not supernatural; the plays worked instead on altered states such as insanity, hypnosis or panic, and were alternated with comedies in a running order known as "hot and cold showers".

Camille Choisy, an actor and former head of the théâtre Fontaine, took the artistic direction when Maurey moved on to run the théâtre des Variétés; the handover is placed in 1914 by some accounts and in 1916 by others. Choisy brought his own expertise in special effects and scenery to the house style, kept de Lorde at the centre of the repertoire and added new writers, Charles Méré, André-Paul Antoine and Jean Sartène for the horror and Albert Willemetz and Henri Duvernois for the laughs. The theatre turned a profit, but he fell out with the administrator Jack Jouvin in 1927 and left to found his own house, the théâtre Saint-Georges.

The Grand Guignol's peak came between the two world wars, when royalty and celebrities in evening dress went to it. The boxes beneath the balcony, built originally so that nuns could watch church services, were let to theatre-goers during performances, and it has been said that occupants grew so boisterous that actors would break character and call for quiet. Other patrons could not take what was staged in front of them: the special effects were frequently too realistic, and audience members often fainted or vomited during performances. Paula Maxa, who performed there from 1917 into the 1930s, was one of its best-known players and appeared most often as a victim, known as "the most assassinated woman in the world"; over her career at the theatre the characters she played were murdered more than 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways and raped at least 3,000 times. René Chimier also made his name on the same stage.

The form travelled. A Grand Guignol flourished briefly in London in the early 1920s under Jose Levy, drawing in Sybil Thorndike, Noël Coward and Richard Hughes, and a series of short English Grand Guignol films with original screenplays was made at the same time under the direction of Fred Paul; several survive in the BFI National Archive. In Italy the only company of the kind was Alfredo Sainati's La Compagnia del Grand-Guignol, founded in 1908. In Paris, Georges-Anquetil launched a satirical monthly called Le Grand Guignol in 1921, which ran until 1927.

Jack Jouvin moved the subject matter away from gory horror towards psychological drama, and under his direction the theatre's popularity waned. Receipts began to slip in the early 1930s, with the arrival of talking pictures and of American genre films such as Frankenstein and Doctor X making the competition hard. He gave up the direction in the mid-1930s while remaining the owner of the building. Jacques Bary and Clara Bizou followed him, then the British actress Eva Berkson in 1939, and after her a run of directors who were mostly authors or actors from that stage, improving the effects and varying the terrors.

The house got through the Occupation with difficulty. De Lorde died in 1942 and Choisy, who had meanwhile come back to run the theatre, died in 1944. Berkson returned in 1945 intending to freshen the repertoire and staged Pas d'orchidées pour miss Blandish, after James Hadley Chase, in 1949, but audiences did not follow. The Maurey family came back in 1951 in the persons of Denis and Marcel, sons of Max, who commissioned new authors such as Frédéric Dard and brought in young directors including Georges Vitaly, Michel de Ré and Robert Hossein; Hossein staged Les salauds vont en enfer with Roger Hanin, Docteur Jekyll et Mister Hyde with André Toscano and Judith Magre, and La Chair de l'orchidée with Roger Hanin, Pierre Vaneck and Cécile Aubry. From 1955 the direction changed hands again several times.

Audiences fell away in the years after the Second World War and the Grand Guignol shut for good, a closure dated to 1962 in some accounts and to 5 January 1963 in others. Its management put the end down in part to the theatre's staged horrors having been overtaken by the actual events of the Holocaust two decades earlier. "We could never equal Buchenwald," said its final director, Charles Nonon. "Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality."

Marcel Lupovici took the premises a few months later and, after substantial renovation, reopened them as the théâtre 347, named for the number of seats then available, where he staged Shakespeare, Federico García Lorca, Tennessee Williams and above all Michel de Ghelderode. In 1982 the state bought the hall and gave it to the École nationale supérieure des arts et techniques du théâtre for its practical work, until the school moved to Lyon in 1996. The building still stands, and since 2004 it has housed the International Visual Theatre, directed by Emmanuelle Laborit, a company devoted to presenting plays in sign language.

The theatre's name outlived it. It gave French the adjective grand-guignolesque and became a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, one that has since taken on a pejorative sense for work leaning on violence or grandiloquent effect. Paula Maxa's years at the house were the subject of Frank Ribière's film La Femme la plus assassinée du monde, released on 7 September 2018, with Anna Mouglalis in the part.