Ghelderode's Theatre of the Grotesque

Extract

Michel de Ghelderode can be compared to those novelists who have concentrated on the creation of a fictional world of their own. Like William Faulkner with his Yoknapatawpha County, Charles Dickens with his nineteenth century London, or James Joyce with his Dublin, Ghelderode has created a microcosm which reflects and comments upon our larger world. Ghelderode's medieval Flanders is savagely grotesque. His sadistic caricatures are shot through with a ribald scatological humor which reminds one of the pictures of his countrymen, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel. So close is this relationship, indeed, that Ghelderode has specifically set some of his plays in a fictitious “Breughellande” where the painter's creations come to life. In all of his plays, with the exception of those written on specifically Biblical themes and set in the Holy Land, there is this quality of the frozen grimace on the canvas suddenly animated.