What will happen when the conventions of place and/or of the stage are exploded? With writing no longer structured or governed by strict spatial codes, the doors will be open to all attempts to create a fluid and changing style of writing that will spread in the mind and in the imagination, well beyond the boundaries of the stage, and which will broach anything that can be written in the fascinating but frightening absence of any reference points. A curious phenomenon occurred in France in the 1970s, when directors, whose job it is to translate a text into space, ascended to power and cared little for the spaces suggested by writers. They provided a scenography that was independent of the text's propositions, in order to assert their own interpretation. As a result, dramatic writing in France between 1970 and 1980 was consigned to the wilderness, until playwrights came up with the simple yet ingenious idea of writing a textual theatre; that is to say, a theatre that comes under the remit of writing alone, and is completely independent of the demands of the stage. From this point on, dramatic space became an entirely mental construction. It took shape with complete freedom in the minds of the writer and reader, with the result that, unlike in the years from 1950 to 1970, playwrights writing in France from roughly 1980 onwards — though this is only a provisional and partial affirmation — have cared little for dramatic and theatrical space, leaving that to directors.