DANIEL MESGUICH: 'Unsummarisable' mises en scène

One of the directors Whitton identifies with the most extreme aspects of this trend is Daniel Mesguich. Born in Algiers in 1952, Daniel Mesguich has been working as an actor and director for nearly 50 years. From the beginning of his career, critics and scholars have focused on the degree to which his work has been, and remains, intellectually challenging. However familiar Mesguich’s poetics might be to today’s audiences, the ‘intellectualist’ aspect of his cultural identity continues to be foregrounded. While Carlson and Fayard provide excellent descriptions of the specific ways in which Mesguich’s intertextualism manifests itself in his work on Shakespeare, all the strategies of textual intervention and mise en scène they mention are readily identifiable in his work on other authors. Over time, audiences have become increasingly familiar and comfortable with Mesguich’s style – the techniques that he was among the first to introduce in France are now in every director’s toolkit – and yet some discontent remains.