Staging France Between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon by Susan McCready

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging France Between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon by Susan McCready Meaghan Emery McCready, Susan. Staging France Between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon. Lexington, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4985-2280-9. Pp. xviii + 157. Carefully researched, this work explores the radical changes in theater set design and direction that took place in between-the-wars France. Primarily focused on influential director Jacques Copeau and his fellow modernist directors Gaston Baty, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, and Georges Pitoëff, signers of a solidarity pact termed the Cartel, McCready uncovers the evolution of tastes through an examination of critical reviews and theater receipts. Her argument that the performance of classic works reveals more clearly contemporary influences and sources, as distinct from the literary, than would plays written during the time period in question, appears well founded. It allows her to examine directorial innovations that began in smaller independent theaters and gradually took hold of the theater world until they succeeded in establishing an aesthetic in France's national theater, the Comédie-Française. She begins with the premise that these directors and their political backers were invested in maintaining France's cultural heritage and its international preeminence, with playwrights such as Molière, Corneille, and Musset as hallmarks of French literature. Beginning with the Great War, McCready details how Copeau, like Sarah Bernhardt, toured abroad, notably in North America, in order to stage well-received performances of French theater and poetry and to disseminate French national values in an effort to activate international alliances. Copeau's Vieux-Colombier Theater, whose troupe included [End Page 239] Dullin and Jouvet, was for a time based in New York, and these directors, therefore, very much took their role as national ambassadors seriously. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the modernist aesthetic of visual abstractionism increasingly displaced naturalism in the theater-going audience's tastes, preparing for the accession of these directors to the national theater following the 1936 elections that led to the Popular Front government and the hiring of Édouard Bourdet as the director of the Comédie-Française. There Copeau and the Cartel directors—with the exception of Pitoëff due to his status as a "foreigner"—gained a wide audience for their work, which furthermore expanded the theater's repertory. In what is the most compelling aspect of her research, partly designed to dissipate notions that these changes grew from the same impetus that propelled the Popular Front's electoral success, McCready uncovers the disparate nature of the sources that led to the gradual evolution of popular modern theater. She links the objects of her study to the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century and dedicates half of the first chapter to the legacy of director André Antoine, founder of the Théâtre Libre in 1887 based on a patronage model that eschewed commercialism. Antoine had emphasized the defining role of the metteur-en-scène and envisioned the theater as a club, much in the same way that Copeau and Dullin would cultivate a public for their later theater productions. Many of the successive chapters elucidate directors' careers and artistic choices, marked by their different sensibilities and ambitions for the theater. It is an instructive comparison, which highlights the diversity that was at the heart of the twentieth-century French theater's transformation. Meaghan Emery University of Vermont Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French