In NTQ 30 (1992) Dorothy Knowles provided a description and explication of the recent work of the visionary French director Armand Gatti. For what he calls his ‘plural writing’ projects, Gatti has increasingly come to recruit not actors but ‘actors’: those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them – together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether developing a performance within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre are entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. Here, he speaks for himself, describing both the inspiration and the evolution of his work in a style which characteristically combines pragmatism with lyricism. The article derives from a series of interviews conducted in 1991 by Hélène Châtelain – an actress who has worked with Gatti since 1966 – and first published in Le Monde Diplomatique for February 1992. The translator for NTQ, Wesley Hutchinson, wrote his doctoral thesis on Gatti at Trinity College, Dublin, and now lectures in the English Department of the University of Paris, Nanterre.
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