The Popular Theatre Movement

Abstract

Modernists held fast to their artistic visions and aesthetic values while continually grappling with the financial pressures inherent in running their theatres. They expanded their audiences by developing innovative strategies drawn from the burgeoning world of advertising and marketing yet insisted that their theatres embodied authentic art and remained untainted by commercialism. Modern theatre evolved as a powerful self-conscious medium that could shock, confront, and inspire. In the early 1890s the fight against theatrical censorship united theatre directors and writers across the political spectrum. Social and political engagement on the stage however was problematic for modernists who were anxious to have their work acknowledged as art and not criticized for being didactic or utilitarian. By the end of the century the real life politics of the Dreyfus Affair overcame the debates over social and political engagement on the stage. In the previous chapters we saw how these issues played out in the independent Théâtre Libre and the Théâtre de l’Œuvre. We now explore the continuing impact of these issues in a new context: government supported national popular theatre. Broadly speaking the debates over creating a national popular theatre in France expressed competing ideas of the nature of the relationship between theatre and society.