Staging France Between the World Wars by McCready Susan;

Author:McCready, Susan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rather surprisingly, Émile Mas, who was no friend to theatrical innovation, did not entirely dislike the production, stating, “This conception of tragedy is not entirely without harmony.”[22] He goes on to qualify, however, “the Phèdre that they are showing has only a vague and distant relationship with the French masterpiece.” He also criticizes some of the liberties taken with the play, basing his objection predictably on the primacy of the text: “In his entrance in the fourth act [Theseus] holds and brandishes the blade which had been in Phèdre’s hands; then shows it to Hippolyte! This would all be very well in the Cinema; but in Racine, the text does not permit this piece of business.”

These are more or less the comments one would expect from conservative critics like Boissy and Mas, but the response of André Antoine to the Russian performance is surprising in its virulence. “From now on,” he warns, “let’s be on guard against this originality and this novelty at any price, because this is a serious offensive against our traditions and our culture.”[23] The implied xenophobia of this remark is particularly surprising because during his theatrical career, Antoine had done more than anyone to cultivate a pan-European movement of art theaters. At his Théâtre Libre and later at the Théâtre Antoine and at the state-sponsored Odéon, Antoine had sought to open up the French repertory to foreign works. He introduced French audiences to Tolstoy, to Ibsen, and to Shakespeare performed uncut. After his retirement from the Odéon in 1914, Antoine became one of the most open-minded and balanced theatrical critics of the interwar years. Even though the modernists of this period had largely cast off and occasionally even denigrated Antoine’s once ground-breaking realistic aesthetic, he did not reject the younger generation’s innovations out of hand, but judged each production on its merits and was often laudatory in his articles on plays performed at the Vieux-Colombier and the other theaters of the Cartel (although he was usually unimpressed by Pitoëff’s efforts). Moreover, as we have already seen, Antoine continued in his role as critic to claim the development of a cosmopolitan repertory not only as the right but the responsibility of theaters of the avant-garde. But although he himself was one of the earliest and most important influences of Stanislavski, Antoine could not accept the application of Taïrov’s Russian aesthetic to Phèdre. A line had been crossed, and even two years later, Antoine still seemed offended by the production. Asked about the Russian school generally in an interview with Léopold-Lacour in the summer of 1925, he replied with qualified admiration for their brand of realism. But when asked about the Phèdre of the Théâtre Kamerny in particular, he objected, “Don’t even talk to me about it, not about that or about the geometrical operettas in the same, delirious Russian vein. The passion for cocaine, for morphine is of a piece with these fantasies.”[24]

These comments boil down to an assertion of the essential purity and Frenchness of Racine:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.