SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. Introduction to French Theater: 1918-1939, pp. 1-14. London: Macmillan, 1985.

[In the following essay, Knapp provides a brief history of French playwrights and directors during the years between the two world wars.]

11 November 1918. The Armistice. The end of World War I. A spirit of intense joy swept over France. Jazz bands howled out their brash sounds and rhythmic beats; dancing became popular once again; parades filled the streets. Theatre flourished. Entertainment and excitement were the rule of the day. A counterpoise, certainly, to the harsh facts of war: one and a half million Frenchmen had died; countless had suffered in the trenches; still more had been permanently disabled, deprived of a normal future.

After the Armistice, Paris remained a composite of opposites. Its theatres seemed to satisfy the requirements of all classes, all types, all tastes. The classical and historical repertoire of the state subsidised Comédie-Française and Odéon offered the works of France's greats: Corneille, Molière, Marivaux, Musset, Beaumarchais, and so many others. Here young and old alike listened in rapt silence to the declamation of ‘sacred’ stanzas and monologues they had committed to memory in school.

Other people went to the theatre simply to be entertained and distracted. For these individuals, the so-called boulevard theatre answered their needs. Sacha Guitry (1885-1957) was perhaps the most popular dramatist actor of his day. In his stage works, which number one hundred and thirty, we find levity mingling with acrimony, flippancy with seriousness, love with hate, passion with rage, but always controlled, subtle, nuanced.

There were many playwrights who regaled, chilled, or cheered their audiences at this time. Jean-Jacques Bernard (1888-1972), for example, was a practitioner of what came to be known as ‘the theatre of silence’. In Martine (1922) Bernard did away with psychological analyses, relying on gesture and pauses in the dialogue to emphasise the alteration of emotional situations and to underscore the agony of doubt. The protagonists in The Cardboard Crown (La Couronne de carton, 1920) and Leopold the Well-Beloved (Léopold le bien-aimé, 1927), by Jean Sarment (1898-1976), lived in an illusory world, a mirage-dominated realm. Paquebot Tenacity (1920) and Madame Béliard (1925), by Charles Vildrac, brought sensitive, withdrawn, and poetic people to the stage. The human tragedy inhabiting the lives of these eternal types was emphasised by externalising their deeply buried feelings through seemingly banal conversations.

The facile, supple, and humorous Tovarich (1934) of Jacques Deval (1894-1972), won the hearts of audiences the world over. The regional dramas of Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974)—Marius (1929), Fanny (1931), Caesar (1937)—were unforgettable for the reality of the characterisations and the poignant banter of the protagonists.

Violence, cruelty, and a psychoanalytical approach to drama also appeared in boulevard theatre. ‘All my plays,’ wrote H. R. Lenormand, ‘attempt to elucidate the mystery of inner life, to unravel the enigma that man is to himself.’ In Time Is a Dream (Le Temps est un songe, 1919), The Eater of Dreams (Le Mangeur de rêves, 1922), and Man and his Phantoms (L'Homme et ses fantômes, 1924), Lenormand (1882-1950) brings conflicted, antagonistic and anguished beings to the stage. These Freudian-oriented individuals are haunted by guilt, by repressed and obscure pulsations. Edouard Bourdet (1887-1945), who dug so incisively into the human psyche in The Prisoner (La Prisonnière, 1926) and Difficult Times (Les Temps difficiles, 1934), did away with theatrical conventions when he enacted pathological situations on the stage.

There were other playwrights and directors as well, who appeared shortly before World War I and whose creative breadth continued during the interwar period. Not as much appreciated by the majority as were the writers of the boulevard offerings, these highly creative and dedicated workers appealed more directly to an elite—an avant-garde. They questioned, disrupted, toppled the commercially oriented way of doing theatre, which they considered staid and uninspiring.

Jacques Copeau (1879-1949), one of these innovators, struggled valiantly against the business customs and practices of what he considered to be dishonest theatre. Artistry, integrity, and a spirit of renewal reigned in his newly formed theatre du Vieux-Colombier (1913-24)—a theatre he rebuilt from the bottom up along simple classic lines. He did away with the heavy ornamentation, gold plate, and rococo cut-glass chandeliers of the boulevard theatre. He let in clean air where there had been an accumulation of dust and stuffy ideas. He cleansed the theatrical industry of all he considered to be cheap and frustrating.

Copeau's Vieux-Colombier theatre was simple in conception and as harmonious as a Doric temple—at once functional, orderly, and beautiful: soft yellow wall panels, green curtains draped back on the side of the stage; indirect lighting soothing to the eyes; a bare stage permitting direct contact between audience and actors. Copeau embodied in the construction of his theatre all that he had assimilated and felt he could use of the ideas of Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), who believed the theatre to be an independent entity unto itself; a poetic and suggestive force capable of arresting the quintessential elements of an unfolding drama. From Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), Copeau learned the techniques used in exteriorising a character's inner reality, in acting as an ensemble, and in coordinating every aspect of a production into a unified whole.

Copeau made finished and versatile actors out of the unleavened human talent at his disposal. Prior to the opening of the Vieux-Colombier theatre in Paris, he had his troupe come to the Limon, a country home he rented about an hour from the city by train. There his cast rehearsed out of doors. Stage settings were natural: a tree or flower. Copeau made every demand upon his actors, striving to create vigorous and graceful bodies, as physically adept as those of Elizabethan actors, able to fight, run, perform any arduous leap that a play might require. Louis Jouvet and Charles Dullin, who were members of Copeau's troupe, became masters of their bodies and voices, and of dramatic techniques. Productions of Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, Molière's The Miser, Dostoyevky's The Brothers Karamazov, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Claudel's The Exchange were made memorable for their artistry and fresh conception. In The Exchange, for example, the decor consisted of one tree in the foreground and a black cloth representing the sky; emphasis was thereby focused on the actors' movements and gestures, and on lighting, voice, silences, enhancing the atmosphere of mystery and tension.

In the lengthening shadow of what seemed inevitable war, Jouvet was sent to the front; Copeau joined the auxiliary forces; Dullin, an infantryman, went to Lorraine. Lodged in wet, dirty barracks, often exposed to danger, the three managed to correspond. Copeau was brimming with new ideas. After his demobilisation (1915), Copeau went to Geneva, where he met Emile Jacques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), whose system of eurythmics was enjoying a great vogue. Dalcroze's philosophy was based on the firm belief that actors should learn rhythmic dancing so that they could coordinate bodily movements with speech. Dalcroze introduced Copeau to Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), who stressed the affinities between music and dialogue. Appia championed the creation of a three-dimensional stage; since actors are three-dimensional, he reasoned, so should be the backgrounds they inhabit; these reflect their needs, wants, and personalities and also link them to the time-space factor. Lighting was also vital to performance: it underscored dimensionality, showed up movement, attitude, and gesture. For Appia, lighting was a protagonist, and it became one for Copeau.

In 1917 Copeau and his troupe were sent to New York by the French Ministry of Fine Arts as France's unofficial cultural ambassador of good will. Jouvet and Dullin, both released from the army for medical reasons, joined him. After two arduous years in the United States, producing an incredible number of plays (by Brieux, Hervieu, Rostand, Donnay, Augier, Molière, and others), not always to receptive audiences, Copeau and his troupe returned to Paris. It was then that he founded his school, and, together with Jouvet, created his ‘permanent set’ at the Vieux-Colombier, the outcome of the work done at the Garrick Theatre in New York. The permanent set consisted of an architectural whole on the stage which was made up of several levels; there was an arch in the back, stairways on either side, and a projecting apron. It was on this incredibly versatile stage that Copeau created his important productions of plays by Corneille, Maeterlinck, Vildrac, Gide, Romains, Musset, Beaumarchais, Goldoni, and others.

Louis Jouvet (1887-1951) had remained with Copeau for ten years. He referred to himself at the end of this time as a ‘valet of the theatre’ because he had worked in so many different areas: lighting, staging, carpentry, costume design, and of course, as an actor. In 1923 he accepted the position of director of the Comédie des Champs-Elysées. He not only took over much of Copeau's repertoire, as well as his techniques, but he also added his own rich and inspired vision to the performing arts. His productions of Jules Romains' Dr. Knock (1923), Charles Vildrac's Madame Béliard (1925), Bernard Zimmer's Bava the African (1926), Jean Sarment's Leopold the Well-Beloved (1927), and Marcel Achard's Jean of the Moon (1929), to mention but a few, were at once poetic and arresting—simple in concept, a character's truth revealed through the word. Perhaps Jouvet's greatest contributions, however, were his productions of the works of Jean Giraudoux. Had it not been for their collaborative efforts, Giraudoux might have remained the novelist he had been prior to his meeting with Jouvet and not have become one of the most important dramatists of the twentieth century.

Jouvet, a master technician and craftsman, was objective, lucid in his approach to performance. He followed the dictates set forth by Diderot in his Paradox of the Comedian. Emotions must be controlled by the actor who incarnates them; they must be defined, delineated with breadth and exactness. A role has to be studied in all of its nuances: gestures, inflections, intonations articulated so that the text may emerge in all of its beauty and grandeur. Audiences are to be inspired by the word, the visual image on stage, the breathing they hear, and the emotions conveyed. An actor is to be on a par with the dramatist; that is, his interpretation must be creative. Yet, though fantasy and illusion are not banished from stage life, they must be mastered and directed. Nothing is to be left to chance. Sets, decors, sound effects, vocalisations, costume, lighting, are all to be set down prior to the performance. Like Copeau and Dullin, Jouvet considered the text—language—the play's most important asset. It is through language that great theatre is born. Dullin conveyed his passion for lucre through gesture and facial expression; through a voice that trembled and lips that salivated at the sight of riches; through eyes that glowed with lechery. Jean Vilard (1912-71) also participated in Dullin's troupe. He became director of the Théâtre National Populaire in 1950.

Jean-Louis Barrault (b. 1910) studied with Dullin for four years. He called him ‘an aristocrat’ of the theatre. From Dullin, Barrault learned the meaning of integrity; a scrupulous awareness of every facet of theatre—each important detail which goes into the creation of a production. It was in 1935, in a mime-drama based on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, that Barrault made his mark on the theatrical world. His powerful gestural performance, Antonin Artaud suggested, succeeded in organising stage space in an unforgettable manner. As Barrault moved forward on the proscenium, breaking in a wild horse, as he mimed a mother's death agony, controlling his breathing until it became raspy, he shot terror and admiration into the spectators' hearts.

Barrault, who joined the Comédie-Française in 1940, married Madeleine Renaud, already a member of this company, in 1936. Ten years later husband and wife realised a long-cherished dream: they founded their own company, the Théâtre Marigny. Passionate in their devotion to theatre, eclectic in their choice of dramatists, they mounted noteworthy productions of the works of such playwrights as Montherlant, Racine, Molière, Marivaux, Musset, Feydeau, Achard, Sartre, Vauthier, Anouilh, Gide, and Kafka. They also invited directors such as Roger Blin to direct works by Beckett and Genet. It was to Barrault that Claudel entrusted his most personal and poignant play, Break of Noon (Partage de Midi, 1948); a drama which until this time he had forbad all other directors to produce. Claudel knew that as Dullin's descendent, Barrault would ensure that faith and the work ethic prevailed in his theatre; no concessions to facilitate a production would be made.

Another creative force in the contemporary French theatre was George Pitoëff (1884-1939), the son of a theatrical director. Born and educated in Russia, he worked with Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1970) and the stage-set designer Leon Bakst (1866-1924), then with Stanislavsky. His production in St. Petersburg of Chekhov's Three Sisters (1912-14), was unforgettable: the decors consisted only of two screens, two lamps, several chairs, and a velvet curtain for a background. The rest of the burden fell upon the actors. In Paris, where he went to study mathematics, architecture, and law, he met his future wife, Ludmilla. Together they founded the Pitoëff Company (1918) and produced such works as Lenormand's Eater of Dreams (1922); plays by Claudel, Péguy, and Vitrac; Cocteau's Orpheus (1926); and Anouilh's The Traveller without Luggage (Le Voyageur sans bagage, 1937). Some compared Pitoëff's company to a League of Nations because of the many non-French playwrights that were invited to its stage: Gogol, Andreyev, Gorky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Seneca, Turgenev, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Wilde, Strindberg, Goldoni, Pirandello, Ibsen.

Pitoëff never formulated his dramatic theories in a didactic manner. As was the case for Copeau, Jouvet, and Dullin, the text was uppermost for him. The mise-en-scène emerged directly from the written play and was designed to point up its greatness and concretise its verbal images and rhythms, thus filling the proscenium with electric charges. The director's goal, Pitoëff stated time and time again, was to attempt to understand those forces that had motivated the dramatist to create his work and empowered him to bring forth the creatures of his fantasy. It was on a bare stage, ascetic, monastic in quality, that poetic inspiration resided for Pitoëff—under the magic of the actor's play and the director's design. Influenced by Jacques-Dalcroze, as Copeau had been, Pitoëff accorded great importance to rhythm in fashioning a performance, in fleshing out characters and temperaments. Lighting was also used as a powerful evocative force, playing on backdrops of black, blue, or gray velvet curtains and geometrically conceived decors consisting mainly of a few essential pieces of furniture. A Pitoëff performance was a haunting experience.

Mention must also be made of Gaston Baty (1882-1952), an important director during the interwar period. Collaborator of Firmin Gémier, the actor who had incarnated King Ubu in Jarry's play by that name in 1896, Baty helped create plays by Lenormand, Claudel, Shaw, Crommelynck. In 1923 Baty founded his Compagnons de la Chimère. A disciple of Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), who specialised in mass effects, in mob scenes, using an entire auditorium to create atmosphere, frequently placing audiences within the action itself, Baty also enhanced the role and function of the theatrical director. ‘A text cannot say everything,’ he wrote. It can convey ideas and emotions, but only to a certain point. Beyond this another zone takes precedence, that of mystery, silence, creating a certain atmosphere and stage climate. The director's task is to bring a whole dimension of unknown forces onto the stage space, thus endowing it with renewed life and vigour. Unlike Copeau, Jouvet and Dullin, Baty attacked ‘My Lord, the Word,’ in his productions of plays by Musset, Lenormand, Goethe, Shakespeare, Gantillon, and Ansky. His adaptations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1936) underscored the dreamlike nature of the heroine by creating a flowering and sun-drenched arbour where she was seen walking arm in arm with her lover, enjoying a state of veritable rapture. When despair inundated her world, the lights grew weak and dim; the leaves and flowers, once so brilliant and alive, had withered. (In 1927 Dullin, Pitoëff, Jouvet, and Baty formed a cartel. In Entr'acte, the official organ of Jouvet's theatre, they expressed their ideas concerning their aims as directors.)

Michel Saint-Denis must also be included as one of Copeau's heirs. The director of the Compagnie des Quinze (made up of members of Copeau's former troupe), he approached theatre with the same seriousness and intensity as had his master. He imposed upon his troupe a rigorous course of studies which included dance, gymnastics, speech, improvisation, mime, and choral singing. The art of diction took on such musicality and depth that during certain performances it was imbued with unheard of incantatory qualities.

André Obey (1892-1975) offered his new play Noah to the Compagnie des Quinze as the opening fare for its first season in 1931 at the Vieux-Colombier. His spiritualised and humanised vision of Noah took on a universal dimension and the religious intensity of medieval miracle plays. Although Obey's Noah was a twentieth-century farmer whose domestic problems were great, his understanding of God and man was archetypal. When, for example, he talked on the phone to God, his metaphysical anguish was so acute that it flowed into the audience.

Dadaists and Surrealists were the descendants of experimental dramatists: Alfred Jarry (King Ubu, 1896) and Guillaume Apollinaire (The Breasts of Tiresias, Les Mamelles de Teresias, 1917), who had rejected the well-made psychological play as well as romantic and naturalistic dramas with their classical style, their evolving characters, dramatic climaxes, and shattering suspense scenes. Dadaists and Surrealists continued to subvert language and to destroy the logico-Cartesian approach to life and art; by giving precedence to the irrational domain. Tristan Tzara's The Gas Heart (Le Coeur à gaz, 1920) and Breton and Soupault's If You Please (S'il vous plaît, 1920), two highly charged and innovative works, conveyed the absurdity, the eroticism of life as they saw it, in cutting, imagistic, and discontinuous dialogue. The hypnotic power of words, the importance of the chance factor in the deployment of repressed emotions, were techniques used by those who sought to unleash unconscious impulses, until now imprisoned, repressed, crushed. The fantastic works of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, The Hangman from Peru (Le Bourreau du Pérou, 1926), Louis Aragon's spirited The Mirror Wardrobe One Fine Evening (L'Armoire à glace un beau soir, 1924), and Robert Desnos' fantastic Place de l'Etoile (1927) are living proof of the untapped and seemingly endless creative élan of these innovators. For Dadaists and Surrealists, dreams were truer than events lived out in the workaday world; and the word, when released automatically from the unconscious, incoherent though it may have seemed to the rationalist, unveiled a whole other dimension. It is this sphere that now took precedence over the cut-and-dry, the predictable and comprehensible workaday reality.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1949), also a Surrealist, was more of a theoretician of the theatre than he was a playwright. After breaking with Breton and his group (1926), he founded The Theatre Alfred Jarry, along with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. ‘The spectator who comes to us’, he wrote in his manifesto concerning his new theatre, ‘knows that he has agreed to undergo a true operation, where not only his mind, but his senses and his flesh are going to come into play.’ His productions of Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love (Les Mystères de l'amour, 1927) and Victor (1928), as well as some of his own works, made their mark on the avant-garde of his time. Later, in a series of essays he wrote between 1931 and 1935, published in volume form in The Theatre and Its Double (1938), he outlined his views concerning the creation of a Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud's seminal ideas did much to inspire later playwrights such as Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, Anouilh, and Arrabal.

The Flemish/Belgian dramatists Fernand Crommelynck and Michel de Ghelderode reacted powerfully to the provocative ideas of French playwrights and directors. Although they adhered, at least in name, to the basic theatrical conventions, Crommelynck and Ghelderode transcended them by allowing the domain of the irrational to burst forth onstage. Pain, passion, and rage erupted in all of their grotesque grandeur in such farces as Crommelynck's The Magnificent Cuckold (Le Cocu magnifique, 1921) and Ghelderode's Escurial (1927). The stark nature of these comedies—their violence, shrill antics, and savagely evoked joys and horrors as torrents of love and hatred pour forth from their characters—mark these works with a specially fearful quality, a madness, an expressionism perhaps unique in theatre. Audiences experienced a severe malaise when forced to face the hallucinatory world of Crommelynck and Ghelderode: delirious domains where burlesque and sensuality vie with the occult, sadomasochism walks arm in arm with heartfelt piety, and the macabre blends with the priapic.

More conventional than the works of the Dadaists and Surrealists or the Flemish/Belgian dramatists are the mythically oriented works of Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Claudel. Dramatising original experiences, often transcendental rather than personal, Cocteau's Orpheus (1926), Giraudoux's Ondine (1939) and The Madwoman of Chaillot (La Folle de Chaillot, 1945), Anouilh's The Traveller without Luggage (1937) and The Thieves' Carnival (Le Bal des voleurs, 1938), Claudel's Break of Noon, written in 1905, but officially performed only in 1948, are unsettling: they question, triturate, pain and render jubilant—but always in a subtle, nuanced, and sensitive manner. Their characters are recognisable; their sequences, relatively rational, certainly logical by comparison with the dramas of the Dadaists and Surrealists. Their dialogue, poetic, doleful, and poignant at times searing, speaks to the heart as well as the mind. Theirs is a theatre of all time, of all place, Everyman's.

Dramatists, directors, and actors between World Wars I and II gave form to what had existed in the vague no-man's-land of untried formulas. They brought integrity, sacrifice, and beauty to their artistic creations, gave eternity to a new brand of theatre. Each in his own way learned how to convey and instill raw pain and brutality as well as jubilation and tenderness—pointing up the serenity and poetry that accompany real love, and the grotesque and sublime in flights of fantasy or terror, be they deeply spiritual, sexual, or a fusion of both.