SOURCE: Levitt, Annette Shandler. “Jean Cocteau's Theatre: Idea and Enactment.” Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (October 1993): 363-72.

In the following essay, Levitt discusses Cocteau's theory of avant-garde theatre as it is put forth in his preface to The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower.

Written in 1922, one year after the play was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs Élysees, Jean Cocteau's Preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower) offers in an informal, non-dramatic mode his manifesto of the theatre. It “was to be one of his most important pronouncements on the theatre,” according to Margaret Crosland.¹ But it has not been adequately appreciated as such. In the Preface, Cocteau sets forth ideas that have come to epitomize the avant-garde theatre, ideas which animate and pervade his own oeuvre. The piece was written ostensibly to introduce the unfamiliar style of The Wedding...