SOURCE: “Ghelderode and Puppet Theatre,” in French Review, Vol. 48, No. 6, May 1975, pp. 973-80.

In the following essay, Levitt suggests philosophical and aesthetic reasons for Ghelderode's propensity for using puppets in his plays.

It should now be obvious that Michel de Ghelderode (1898-1962) is among the masters of modern theatre. If it was not obvious to his own contemporaries and is still not so obvious as it should be today, it is partly for the reasons that he lived as a recluse, eschewed realism in drama, and ideologically, as well as in practice, propounded an unpopular genre: puppet theatre.

Throughout his life Michel de Ghelderode was fascinated by dolls and marionettes. The inquiring few who visited him in his isolated home near Brussels invariably remarked about the number of puppets, statues, and dolls scattered about the house.¹ His visitors commented also on the frequency with which he introduced the...