Le Grand Guignol Theatre poster – Jules Alexandre Grün – 1890

Vintage Theatre Poster: Le Grand Guignol Theatre poster – Jules Alexandre Grün – 1890

This vintage poster was created by the French artist Jules Alexandre Grün for a series of performances at the Grand Guignol Theatre. The poster reads: Le Grand Guignol à 9h tous les soirs 20 rue Chaptal. Which translates into English as The Grand Guignol at 9pm every evening at 20 Chaptal Road. The poster features a  scantily clad young woman holding a large baton and looking very pleased with herself. Other characters from the performance sit on a stage in what appears to be in different degrees of death or distress.

Guignol is clever, courageous, and generous with a good humour and a sense of justice. He is the main character in a  French puppet show of the same name. A character was not dissimilar to Polichinelle, the Italian puppet Commedia dell’arte, or the puppet Punch from the popular British Punch and Judy shows.

Guignol was created, by a dentist named Laurent Mourget, in an attempt to attract patients. By 1804 puppetry was going much better than dentistry so Mourguet made the decision to become a professional puppeteer. In France, the word Guigol has become to mean puppet. So when a theatre opened on rue Chaptel with the intention of putting on gruesome, violent puppet shows for adults it chose the name Le Grand Guignol.

Plays at the Grand Guignol were often written by André de Lorde,  known, “Le Prince de la Terreur.  It is estimated he wrote nearly a hundred plays for the theatre, all mainly horror plays. Backstage Paul Ratineau was responsible for making the mutilations, stabbings, and other acts of violence as bloody, gruesome, and realistic as possible.

According to an online article written by Joshua Malone on the diaboliquemagazine website in 2016, it wasn’t unusual to see a cow’s eye or a pig’s intestine appear on the stage. Coupled with specialised props, and up to nine types of blood effects in varying thicknesses and colours, successfully created the illusion of violence on stage. Another article by the Thrillpedders on the GrandGuignol website escribes an evening at Theatre Guignol. A typical evening at the Grand Guignol Theatre might consist of five or six short plays, ranging from suspenseful crime dramas to bawdy sex farces. But the staple of the Grand Guignol repertoire was the horror play, which inevitably featured eye-gouging, throat-slashing, acid-throwing, or some other equally grizzly climax.

Like so many acts in the theatre world, the advent of silent films and later ‘talkies’ meant the steady decline of interest in horror puppet shows. The Grand Guignol Theatre closed its doors in 1962.  

The term ‘Grand Guignol’ is now synonymous with any dramatic entertainment that deals with the macabre subject matter and features “over-the-top” graphic violence.

Our posters are carefully and professionally created from vintage originals. Whilst great care is taken in the production of these posters, we also try to maintain a vintage feel, so there may be small imperfections, fold marks, scuffs, tears, or marks that were part of the original poster master. If these do appear they should be visible on the larger views of the item on this listing. The originals of many of the posters we offer can cost many thousands of pounds, so whilst these posters look great, especially framed and mounted on a wall, they are intended as fun, affordable reproductions and not intended fine art prints.

The 50x70cm version has been specially produced to be used in conjunction with Ikea’s 50x70cm Ribba picture frame which currently retails for around £12. So you can bag a print and frame for a great price.