Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic Emine Fisek (bio) Helen Solterer . Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010; 287 pp. If the title of Helen Solterer's fascinating new book, Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic gives us a brief glimpse into the palimpsestic worlds that lie therein, it nonetheless only begins to signal the complicated relationships that the book will unpack: precisely how "modern" desires and impulses fashioned themselves through "medieval roles" in early twentieth century France as well as how the most institutionalized form of role-playing, the "theater," imagined national identity at a time when the "French Republic" was undergoing rapid changes. The result is a work whose research trajectory is dizzying and whose keen analytic moves will resonate with scholars in a range of disciplines and working within a variety of historical eras, from performance studies to French cultural studies and from medievalists to scholars of interwar political life. Medieval Roles for Modern Times traces the history of the amateur theater troupe founded in 1933 by Sorbonne professor Gustave Cohen: the Théophiliens. Dedicated to reviving a medieval theatrical repertoire, the group drew on the evocative power of the Middle Ages at a time when doing so meant negotiating contradictory impulses. As Solterer demonstrates, medieval French culture was often referenced to brand the Middle Ages with a sense of national patriotism that made little historical sense but said much about the consolidation of French identity during the years leading up to the Second World War. For the Right, the Middle Ages held out the promise of a world of hierarchy and obedience to authority, all the while re-emphasizing the [End Page 963] theatrical repertoire's Christian framework. For the Left, troupes such as the Théophiliens materialized the Popular Front's promise of theater as a public, egalitarian and in many ways modern and secular good, revolutionary rather than regressive. "What poses a challenge, then," Solterer notes, "is grasping the full political force of medieval revival across the spectrum—from Right to Left" (4). Over the course of Solterer's book, this involves placing the Théophiliens' "full life cycle of medieval revival" (12-13) into conversation not only with interwar cultural policy and political conflict but also with the collaborationist French state, the Holocaust and the early years of the Fourth Republic. Importantly however, Solterer's understanding of theater neither renders the practice into an aesthetic mirror of political change nor focuses exclusively on the content of the Théophiliens' literary remains. Instead, there is relentless emphasis on the three-dimensionality and generative potential of theater. Solterer asks how we might consider the corporal dimensions of medieval enactment at a time when theater practitioners from Europe to Russia conducted experiments in acting and embodiment. Following a prologue that canvasses the political paradoxes of the Théophilien revival, the first chapter traces the twin trajectories of Belgian Gustave Cohen and Russian director Nikolai Evreinov, artists who occupied the two parallel yet distinct ends of an early twentieth century interest in miracle and mystery plays (and who would both eventually find themselves stationed in Paris). For Cohen, as for many others, medieval drama helped make sense of the massive human sacrifice that the Great War demanded of the French public. Additionally, it allowed the foreign-born and Jewish Cohen to render "his work on medieval Christian drama a matter of civic service and commit it to the ongoing campaign of laicizing the French Third Republic" (33). For Evreinov, medieval religious drama and in particular the French repertoire served as the groundwork for an artist "in search of primordial techniques of role-playing" (34) while sacrificial role-play and the mise-en-scène of impassioned crowds bore a more-than-passing resemblance to public life in St. Petersburg in 1905. The second chapter traces Cohen's initial ventures with the Théophiliens, an adaptation of thirteenth-century Parisian poet Rutebeuf's Miracle of Théophile (which stages the encounter between the clerk Théophile and the...