Joseph Conrad on the French Stage: One Day More as Demain

Abstract

Joseph Conrad on the French Stage: One Day More as Demain Susan McCready (bio) In the summer of 1913, The English Review published the play One Day More, Joseph Conrad’s adaptation of his 1902 short story “To-morrow,” noting that the play had been “performed in 1904 by the Stage Society and also at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, Paris” (Conrad, “One Day More” 16).1 Founded in 1893, Aurélien Lugné-Poe’s Œuvre (the name means “work of art”) referred not to the hall (the Salle Berlioz in the 9th arrondissement) but to the troupe, one of a growing number of “art theater” enterprises around the turn of the twentieth century whose goal was to rescue French theater from the twin threats of commercialization and stagnation. Lugné-Poe produced Alfred Jarry’s infamous Ubu Roi in 1896 and would go on to be a leading light in the art theater movement. The Œuvre’s repertoire was an eclectic array of plays, French and foreign, contemporary and classic. Lugné-Poe argued passionately for international cooperation among theater artists (Dusigne 16) and staged the French premieres of plays by Strindberg, Ibsen, d’Annunzio, and Gorki. However, he never produced a play by Conrad.2 In the spring of 1909, One Day More had played Paris in an adaptation by P. H. Raymond-Duval entitled Demain, but it was at the Théâtre des Arts, not at the Œuvre. It is not clear how The English Review came to make this error or whether it would have been meaningful to its readers, but it was widely repeated in publications that reported on the latest issue of the literary magazine. Would it have mattered to readers of The Cleveland Plain Dealer or The Aberdeen Daily Journal that Conrad’s play had premiered at one Paris theater rather than another?3 To most, probably not, but to those who knew the Paris theater scene well, the substitution of the Œuvre for the Théâtre des Arts would have given a false impression of Conrad’s French theatrical debut. At the turn of the twentieth century in France, the theater was culturally the most important literary genre and commercially the most attractive. Authors [End Page 175] could reach a larger audience and make more money with one hit play than with a string of successful novels, and they could not hope to rival the prestige of Racine and Molière with serializations in newspapers. Still, contemporary commentators warned that the theater in France was in crisis. With an audience subdivided among theaters specializing in various types of entertainment (grand spectacle, café-concert, vaudeville, among others), the “literary theater” had a smaller share of the box office than ever before. More worrisome to the literati was the suspicion that French playwrights were not up to the moment, and perhaps they were not. No French playwright of the period reached the status of Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, or Shaw. Untrammeled by the cultural baggage of the théâtre classique and its nineteenth-century avatar, la pièce bien faite, foreign authors were experimenting more broadly with dramatic form, and were frankly more successful in adapting it to their subject matter. The art theater movement began to emerge in France in the 1880s partly in response to this crisis. André Antoine led the way, founding the Théâtre Libre in 1887; Paul Fort, whose Théâtre d’Art (not to be confused with the Théâtre des Arts, where Conrad’s play premiered) opened in 1890, was not far behind. Lugné-Poe had collaborated with both, and his Théâtre de l’Œuvre was the continuation of Fort’s project, which folded in 1893. Art theaters were generally subscription theaters, that is, private clubs, which allowed them to avoid the rigors of official censorship to which the public theaters had to submit. This meant that they were generally freer in their choice of repertoire, and they used their freedom to push the French theater in new directions. Often this meant in the direction of foreign authors, further stoking anxiety in the theater world that French cultural dominance was on the wane. Art theaters positioned...