In a dusty underground passageway of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, several historical and legendary inventors discuss the automatons they have built. Each one talks about their inventions, dreams or utopian visions: a bronze fly to chase away real flies, a hydraulic theatre, giant automata with colossal voices preaching peace, mechanical lions and magic apples, two metal heads with superhuman voices, and an automaton that knows every language. Suddenly, a human automaton—the robot—appears. The robot knocks over all the characters and throws Jaquet-Droz to the ground, just as he was explaining that the word written on a sheet of paper by his writing automaton was ‘marvellous’.

Not specified

France

Paris

Printed

Automate

Phantom

Science

Discussions

Invention

Remembrance

Rivalry

Merveilleux

Fantastic

French

Albert le Grand

Héron d'Alexandrie

Virgile de Naples

Regiomontanus

Roger Bacon

Thomas de Bungey

Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen

Léonard de Vinci

L'Abbé Mical

Jacques Droz

Automaton

Robot

Jacques Vaucanson

Inserting poetry

Aside

Apparition of a ghost

Off-stage noise

Succession de personnages

Voice

Destruction of a puppet

Au paradis des fantômes

In ghost paradise

After performing a traditional guarattelle show, the puppeteer and his Pulcinella think they won’t have anything to eat as the audience left without paying. They both decide to leave Naples for France. When they arrive at court, the King carefully examines Pulcinella with a magnifying glass, and finds him too poor, so drives him away. Pulcinella beats the King with a stick and the guards come to arrest him. The puppet escapes from the puppet booth with the Puppeteer, who explains that if the puppet wants to eat, he must “change his face”.
The Puppeteer then turns Pulcinella into Polichinelle, giving him new, luxurious clothes decorated with ribbons and little bells, two bumps (one on the belly and the other on the back) and a white mask to hide his black half-mask. Thus transformed, Pulcinella moves and speaks far more slowly, but his new lazzi with a cock amuse the King greatly. The puppet and the Puppeteer are able to eat a big plate of pasta in front of the puppet booth and go to sleep with a full belly. Woken by the Marseillaise, they enter the puppet booth, believing a party is going on. On stage, in front of a guillotine, Robespierre and Danton debate whether the King should be tried. After cutting off the heads of Danton and the King, Robespierre also wants to kill Polichinelle, who is friends with the King. First, he cuts off one bump, and then the other, and finally the white mask. Polichinelle, who has now gone back to being “Pulcinella the revolutionary”, cuts off Robespierre’s head and then, like Napoleon Bonparte, proclaims himself emperor and uses a stick to beat, one after the other, the emperor of Austria and the Pope who has come to crown him. He shows his emperor’s crown to the Puppeteer: it means he’ll be able to eat for 200 years. The Puppeteer comes out of the booth for a last monologue at the end of which he dons the black half-mask and proclaims himself to be Pulcinella.

Glove-puppet

All audiences

Leone Bruno

Italy

Naples

Hunger

Quest

Poverty

Wealth

Revolution

Marseillaise

Plurilingualism

Capital executions and executors

French Revolution

Guillotine

People and history

Emperor

Comical

Farcical

Puppeteer

Pulcinella

Louis XVI

King

Minister

Guard

Polichinelle

Danton

Maximilien de Robespierre

François I d'Autriche

Pie VII

Dialog between a puppet and its puppeteer

Dialect as a social marker

Blow-with-a-stick

Word warping

Building a puppet on sight

Disguised character (false identity)

Monologue

Beheading

Swazzle

National language as a social marker

Pulcinella et la Révolution française

Pulcinella and the French Revolution

The play is set in 2077, in a military dictatorship. Everything happens in the cellar of a common citizen – Joan. One day when she comes back from work, she finds Dummy in it. He broke into her apartment by breaking a window, as he was trying to hide from the army. He does not own papers and has been shoplifting to survive. At first, Joan believes that he wants to rob her and asks him to hand her his knife. But Dummy is homeless and undocumented: his knife is his only means of defence. What is more, he is emotionally attached to it. Joan then agrees to feed and hide Dummy. He relates his past and confides that he was forced by soldiers to kill one of his parents. Joan and Dummy call on a smuggler, Jack, who promises to forge papers for Dummy, which would allow him to cross the border. However, the money Dummy was keeping in a box has disappeared. At this point, Jack declares that he has links with the army and threatens to report them. Despite the help Joan offers him (she goes as far as trying to request a loan), Dummy turns down her offer to run away with her: he says he wants to leave with Jack and to continue to steal for a living. Joan’s life has radically changed since meeting Dummy, for whom she says she has sacrificed everything. She does not understand his decision and launches into a xenophobic monologue, during which she inflicts extreme violence on Dummy. She stabs him several times, steps on him and tears him up. At the end of the play, the actor dubbing Dummy’s voice walks among the “debris” of the puppets and speaks in a fictional language.