MONTAGE AS A COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGY IN THE PLAYS OF THIERRY DEBROUX

Abstract

The article examines editing as a communicative strategy in the plays of Thierry Derboux, “The Bookman” and “Darwin”. Editing is not just a technical design of a work into a single whole, it is a specific way of organizing cultural existence, which dramaturgy has adopted and uses for a variety of artistic purposes. Editing is a linguistic specificity of imagery, editing simultaneously controls time, space, and movement, creating in the work the illusion of reality that the artist needs to express his ideas. The communicative strategy of editing is revealed in the plays in ambiguity, both formal and substantive. The change of times and spaces, the search for characters recreate the essence of the organization of time and movement through the choice of freedom/unfreedom. The communicative strategy of montage provides the author with a game with time, movement, through the created images, which helps to combine different chronotopes and time dimensions. In the montage composition of both plays, the boundaries between different worlds and times, between life and death are blurred, which is characteristic of the metamodern structure of drama. The cultural context is clearly felt in the plays, it is combined with the scientific and philosophical discourse of the 21st century. The metamodern structure of the plays provides a dialogue with the theatrical tradition, the plays have a tangible influence of the drama of the absurd and the Brechtian tradition, echoes of the boulevard theater and the writing of a modernized myth, but at the same time it is a laboratory where, in experimental conditions, a continuous search takes place, each play is an opportunity to start everything from the beginning in a new way. The movement from chaos to order and vice versa, the game with spacetime thanks to montage as a communicative strategy give the plays fragmentation and integrity at the same time, which simultaneously stimulates and complicates the work of the reader/spectator. Derboux managed to combine several equal and independent lines of action, making the plots of his plays internally unified, monolithic and holistic. They are built on deeply thought-out, multi-valued juxtapositions of characters, events, stage episodes, and lines according to the montage principle. These juxtapositions are very diverse and are made both by similarity and by contrast. Being actually montage at the compositional level, they create a sense of unity of the work in the reader and viewer. The communicative strategy of montage creates external tension in the plays of Thierry Derboux through the "torn" construction of the plot, through overcoming the organicity of the stage world, its undermining. Innovatively saturating his dramaturgy with the movement of thought, a plot-weighted intellectual dialogue, and a socially weighted analytical plot, the playwright undermines the closed nature of stage action and creates a drama built on the montage of contrasting text components and the exposure of the conventions of theatrical action.