Louis Jouvet Research Articles

Дмитрий Бушен на сцене театра «Атеней». Эскизы для костюмов к спектаклям Луи Жуве

The aim of the research is to examine and analyze the works created by the artist Dimitri Bouchène (1893-1993) for Louis Jouvet’s Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris. The paper studies the costumes designed by Bouchène for the performances of “Tessa” and “Electra” in 1934 and 1937 respectively, shining a light on the reviews by critics on these productions and their staging. The scientific novelty of the research lies in gathering previously scattered information and images related to the creation of “Tessa” and “Electra”. These are the only dramatic productions where Dimitri Bouchène, who is known primarily for his work in musical theatre scenography, was involved in the set design. The research highlights a stage in the artist’s creative path, which coincided with the period of developing his individual style and distinctive character. The early stage of Bouchène’s work for the theatre in Paris is marked by diversity and a search for his own direction and creative signature. The paper emphasizes the high praise given by critics to Bouchène’s work, particularly regarding the play “Electra”.

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

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

Les Bas­fonds, un film de Jean Renoir (1936) d'après la pièce de Maxime Gorki

The transition from Russian to French has made the movie The Lower Depths by Jean Renoir , an adaptation of a stage play into a strange hall of mirrors. The transposition demonstrates a substantial misconception of the Russian context. Maxim Gorky wrote Na Dne in 1902 , in the midst of a revolutionary ferment, while Renoir made his film in 1936 at the time of the victory of the leftwing Popular Front. In contrast to the hopelessness at the end of the play, the film finishes with an optimistic outlook, in the manner of Charlot . As in Chaplin’s Modern Times, we see the hero and his fiancée escape a miserable destiny and leave , hand in hand , to seek their happiness. The director asked the eminent author Evgenii Zamyatin to write the screenplay and assigned a central role to Vladimir Sokoloff, two Russians ; there is little of their Russian influence in the overall tone and the film stays remote from Russian reality. To satisfy the audience he called in two great stars of French cinema , Louis Jouvet and Jean Gabin. Taking the viewer’s subconscious back into a purely French context, the film is completely detached from Gorky's work.

Simone Weil and theatre: from attention to the descending way

ABSTRACTTheatre artists and philosophers all over the centuries have often pointed out the existence of two levels within every phenomenon; we call this thought “Dualism”. During the last centuries, many have focused on a specific, although traditional, example of dualism, which envisions a superior, transcendent reality – that is not connected to ours -. The performer can create such a connection, through her work on “verticality”, touching the superior invisible realm, which must then descend back to our everyday dimension. This article analyses one of the main tools used in order to set up a connection between these two dimensions, that is attention, according in particular to one of the main thinkers of the twentieth century: Simone Weil. In this regard, the author explores the last pedagogical work of French actor and theatre pedagogue Louis Jouvet and the last period of research by Jerzy Grotowski and his pupils, both focused on that “attention” and “descending way”, which works on the same line of what is better known as “Verticality”.In the second part, Campo comments on Weil’s selected passages.

“Pedant Needs More Paunch”: Reviving Robertson Davies’s Annotations from his Performance Copy of The Taming of the Shrew

Director Robertson Davies’s 1949 production of The Taming of the Shrew with the Peterborough Little Theatre won the Louis Jouvet Trophy for best direction at the Dominion Drama Festival in Toronto, garnering critical praise as the DDF’s first full-length Shakespearean play. Davies’s performance copy for this production has recently been discovered in his personal book collection, donated to Queen’s University’s W. D. Jordan Special Collections and Music Library. Never previously examined or transcribed, this text incorporates director’s notes and critiques, music cues, blocking, omissions, and alterations, offering invaluable insights into Davies’s 1949 Elizabethan interpretation of this play. Reviving Davies’s annotations reveals new information about this specific production, one that challenged mid-twentieth century Canadian staging conventions. PLT’s Shrew emerges as a lighthearted and detail-oriented comic romp invested in historicity, its Commedia dell’Arte flavour likely imported from Tyrone Guthrie’s 1939 Old Vic production in which Davies acted. The mentorship model that Davies implemented with PLT he replicates in his first novel, Tempest-Tost (1951), where he draws directly upon his Shrew notes and directorial experience as well. Revising the “maturation myth” narrative of Canadian theatre, McKague’s study of Davies’s play situates nonprofessional theatre as intrinsic to the fabric and history of Canadian culture.

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

Reviewed by: Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon by McCready Susan Colin Foss McCready Susan. Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, 157 pp. Susan McCready's Staging France Between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon brings together two major discussions into a slim and engaging volume. Detailing an account of theater in times of war, McCready situates this story within the larger stakes of her book, arguing that changes to the mainstream or canonical French theatrical tradition in the interwar period took place thanks to the institutionalizing efforts of a band of directors: Jacques Copeau and the Cartel des quatre (Gaston Baty, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, and Georges Pitoëff). Convincingly, she claims that these directors normalized theatrical modernity through a gradual redefinition of who could claim authorship of a performance. Specifically, these interwar directors "shifted emphasis from the verbal to the visual," (10) implicitly and often explicitly posing the metteur-en-scène as a "theatrical artist in his own right, apart from the author" (xiii). McCready's description of the legitimization of stagecraft ends with Copeau fully realizing his efforts to transform theatrical institutions, through his appointment as director of the ComédieFrançaise in 1940. The structure of Staging France subsumes the changes to theater performance wrought by the two World Wars within a broader history of institutions, showing how political events are internalized and processed by the stewards of cultural heritage. McCready's first chapter, "Subject to Interpretation," describes the theoretical tenets of the modern metteursen-scène Copeau and André Antoine, who viewed their performances as preserving authenticity, and defined authenticity as the returning of French classics to their historical and cultural specificity, unmooring them from their textual or verbal primacy. McCready focuses on this paradox—modernity [End Page 167] via historical sensitivity—as a central tension of a twentiethcentury querelle des anciens et des modernes. Another central distinction introduced in the first chapter, the preference of these interwar directors for French classics rather than contemporary plays, continues throughout the book. In Chapter 2, "Mobilizing the Canon," we find that the classics took on nationalist importance during the First World War, when French theater was enlisted to celebrate national heritage, becoming a "source of inspiration for its soldiers" (22). McCready presents a wide range of performances during the interwar period performed in France and in the United States, where Sara Bernhardt and Jacques Copeau were on tour as a sort of evangelizing mission for the French war effort. Mixing textual analysis with contextual writings of directors, actors, and authors, McCready argues that the plays themselves mattered less and garnered less critical and journalistic attention than the way they were performed. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, McCready offers a series of classic plays that were enlisted into the modernism of Copeau and the Cartel. These central chapters, which amount to a series of case studies of what could be called the visual turn of theater performance in the interwar period, allow McCready to showcase the various ways these directors applied their visual aesthetic and the equally varied responses they received from critics. Chapter 3 uses Molière as a litmus test for explaining the differing performance aesthetics of Copeau, Baty, and Jouvet. Chapter 4 uses productions of Racine and Shakespeare to introduce the politics of the interwar period, when directors de-politicized Shakespeare's foreignness against the backdrop of the fascist riots of 1934 and the Popular Front government of 19361937. Chapter 5 establishes the modernist directors as inheritors of the Romantic playwrights of the early nineteenth century, and ends with the modernist revival of Musset and Mérimée. With the dearth of quality contemporary authors to stage, these modernist directors reshaped Romantics into their own image. How did modernism become mainstream? Chapter 6 suggests that by the 1930s the directors of the Cartel benefitted from the comparison with the more radical avant-garde, particularly that of Antonin Artaud. Their relatively modest innovations, their reverence—albeit a modern reverence—for the canon, and their desire...

“Pedant Needs More Paunch”: Reviving Robertson Davies’s Annotations from his Performance Copy of The Taming of the Shrew

Director Robertson Davies’s 1949 production of The Taming of the Shrew with the Peterborough Little Theatre won the Louis Jouvet Trophy for best direction at the Dominion Drama Festival in Toronto, garnering critical praise as the DDF’s first full-length Shakespearean play. Davies’s performance copy for this production has recently been discovered in his personal book collection, donated to Queen’s University’s W. D. Jordan Special Collections and Music Library. Never previously examined or transcribed, this text incorporates director’s notes and critiques, music cues, blocking, omissions, and alterations, offering invaluable insights into Davies’s 1949 Elizabethan interpretation of this play.

Charlotte Delbo: la vie retrouvée by Ghislaine Dunant

Reviewed by: Charlotte Delbo: la vie retrouvée by Ghislaine Dunant Virginia Osborn Dunant, Ghislaine. Charlotte Delbo: la vie retrouvée. Grasset, 2016. ISBN 978-2-246-85995-6. Pp. 593. In paying homage to Delbo, Dunant has created a substantial biographical work based on over seven years of research, which fill in many of the gaps concerning Delbo's life and texts. Through extensive research into Delbo's recently archived writings and correspondences (Fonds Delbo and Fonds Jouvet) donated to the Bibliothèque nationale in 2013, and thanks to interviews with Claudine Riera-Collet between 2010 and 2013, Dunant retraces Charlotte's extraordinary life and literary journey. Dunant adds to her archival information a long list of contacts from whom she was able to gather personal information and anecdotes. Dunant also visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and Raisko, as well as "l'ancienne gare de Breteau" which was Charlotte's "maison de campagne" since 1961 (7–8). Dunant's work received the Prix Femina essai in 2016. Dunant traces Delbo's life from her humble beginnings as the grand-daughter of Italian immigrants—riveters, who passed the tradition down to Charlotte who"choisira de riveter les phrases" (18). Dunant provides additional insight into Charlotte's first writings in Les cahiers de la Jeunesse, a monthly journal created in 1936 under the direction of Georges Dudach, and explains how an interview with Louis Jouvet turned into a lifetime friendship and inspiration for many of her texts. Dunant discovers that in 1946 Charlotte was asked to write about her experiences, which become part of her larger project Auschwitz et après (105–10) published over two decades later. During the summer of 1959, Charlotte was sent to the USSR by the [End Page 252] United Nations as an administrative secretary and interpreter. It is during this journey that Delbo kept a detailed journal of her travels and observations: "[E]lle gardera ces impressions à chaud, des phrases entières, dans le récit qu'elle va écrire à son retour. [...] c'est une voix qui lui vient, sa voix qu'elle écoute et restitue" (185). Dunant notes that Charlotte's writing style established itself after these travels: "Charlotte écrit vite, pense vite, observe, analyse and synthétise immédiatement [...] sa mémoire a gardé tout ce qui l'a frappée, ses réactions, ses réflexions et le ton vient au moment d'écrire" (193). Dunant underlines the continuous difficulty Charlotte had in publishing and selling her books in France, which she juxtaposes to the excitement and rapidly growing interest in the United States, particularly during the 1970s and 80s. What is ultimately revealed in this biography is exactly what the title suggests: a richer understanding of Charlotte Delbo, her upbringing, her motivations, what inspired her as well as haunted her, and how her writing actually began quite early in life rather than after the war. For scholars of Delbo, most will be familiar with the research presented, except for unpublished manuscripts and personal anecdotes from interviews. Dunant's text will appeal to a large reading public, particularly in France where she is less well-known, and to those who study literary responses to World War II and twentieth-century French women writers. Virginia Osborn Florida State University Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

Pavel Tchelitchew and Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine

Abstract The article treats of the artistic collaboration between writer Jean Giraudoux, actor Louis Jouvet and painter Pavel Tchelitchew (Chelishchev) in Paris in the 1930s. While reference is also made to precedents such as Christian Bérard’s interpretations at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, the main subject of discussion is the production of Giraudoux’s Ondine in 1939 with Madelaine Ozeray in the lead role and with Tchelitchew’s eccentric stage sets, backdrops and lighting—and costumes for dramatis personae Ondine, Bertha and Hans. Also discussed are the connections between these designs and Tchelitchew’s major studio paintings such as Hide and Seek.

Charlotte Delbo: Transmission of a Poetical and Theatrical Vision of Her Concentrationary Experience

A survivor of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985) left literary writings intended to honour the memory of her comrade detainees and to make known what happened there. Knowing did not mean for Delbo information about or understanding of the concentrationary world but making readers “see” and “feel” an unimaginable traumatic experience. For that purpose she called on her visual memory and her theatrical formation, served by poetic language. In this paper I examine particularly how images have been retained by Delbo in her memory, the “objects” making up these images, the way they are presented to express the horror of the situations, the bodily representations of suffering and death and the linguistic strategies which support them. Reflecting the influence of Louis Jouvet, the well-known actor and theatre director to whom she was a secretary, Delbo confronts her readers with powerful, often unbearable scenes. I aim to show that the theatrical and poetical dimensions of Delbo’s writing are the main factors which allow us to “see” the reality and “feel” the trauma she experienced.

Risk Prevention in Medicine: from a Population-Based Approach to a Personalized Approach

Suffice it to say that the type of diseases or conditions that affect us is evolving, with a growing prevalence of chronic diseases. Caption: Louis Jouvet in Knock (1951) © DR The infectious diseases that largely determined life expectancy and mortality in previous centuries are now giving way to cancers and degenerative disorders. Along with this trend, our societies are demonstrating increasingly high expectations regarding the quality of care and the need to be shielded from the risk of ...

Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? by Robert W. Goldsby (review)

Reviewed by: Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? by Robert W. Goldsby Felicia Hardison Londré Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? By Robert W. Goldsby. New York: Anthem Press, 2012. xx + 202 pp. $39.95 paper. Among Theatre Communications Group’s annual listings of the ten most-produced plays on the professional American stage since 1994–1995, a play by Molière makes the list only once: Tartuffe in 2006–2007. Robert W. Goldsby’s book just might be the impetus to give us more Molière. Goldsby’s long experience as an actor and director of the Molière canon undergirds his passion for the plays and his generous-hearted understanding of the personal motives and relationships behind them. In seventeen chapters grouped into four “acts” that loosely correspond to phases in Molière’s life and career, the book intertwines biography with textual and production analysis of the plays as vehicles for the stage. Goldsby’s warm association with Molière goes back to the Comédie-Française’s 1947 revival of Le Misanthrope in which wartime Resistance hero Aimé Clariond reprised his role as Alceste. As a student on the G.I. Bill in the 1940s, Goldsby had the good fortune to attend the play’s first postwar performance. The communal intensity of “joy and grief” (4) generated that evening led to a theatre career that included chairing the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and directing professionally. Eleven plays by Molière in fifteen different productions (including some in his own translation) figure among the 153 productions Goldsby has directed. He writes about Molière from intimate acquaintance. The first brief chapter summarizes Molière’s life up to 1658 when he won the favor of Louis XIV along with the means to settle his troupe in Paris. The lively writing throughout the book yields abundant nuggets like this: “[Molière] learned that though he loves tragedy and tragediennes his true talent is making people laugh, even, unfortunately, in the tragedies” (10). Subsequent chapters each analyze dramaturgically one or two plays in chronological order even as they continue tracing Molière’s biography in relation to his work. The method involves frequent use of the phrase “we can imagine” as Goldsby deftly ties dramaturgical tidbits to what was apparently going on in Molière’s personal life. Yes, Molière loved women, and Goldsby shows how the playwright’s passions led to the great roles he created for actresses. Through Tartuffe’s attempted seduction of Elmire, Arnolph’s doting on young Agnès, and Alceste’s helpless fixation on Célimène, “Molière confronted on stage his own passion for Armande” [End Page 285] and turned his “deepest feelings” into a “subject for laughter” (62), even—as in the case of Agnès—when Armande Béjart did not play the role she inspired. Beyond the biographical material and the analysis of Molière’s plays for the stage, the book functions as a kind of theatregoing memoir or vicarious experiencing of important productions and directors (and even a range of translators) of the plays from the original creations to our own time. For example, chapter 14 on Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671) celebrates Jacques Copeau’s 1920 production with Louis Jouvet playing Géronte, Jouvet’s 1951 production with Jean-Louis Barrault as Scapin, and Goldsby’s own 1958 Berkeley production for which he used the translation by Lady Gregory. The dramaturgical analysis constitutes a directorial case study in putting farce on the stage. Goldsby’s analysis of the act 2 scene in which Scapin dupes Géronte incorporates snippets from Lady Gregory’s dialogue as well as examples of farcical devices like the “bright idea,” the “turn and go” exit, the “magic prop”; and then Goldsby moves on to the famous “sack scene” and breaks it down into ten playable beats with fine fodder for any director. Chapter 7, which covers Tartuffe, includes case studies of “brilliant entrances” (53). Chapter 8 on Dom Juan; ou, le Festin de Pierre shows how directors like Stephen Wadsworth and Jacques La Salle milk the...

Charlotte Delbo's Voice: The Conscious and Unconscious Determinants of a Woman Writer

Charlotte Delbo's Voice: The Conscious and Unconscious Determinants of a Woman Writer Nicole Thatcher Rentrer du camp rentrer dans le rang après l'histoire le tous les jours après le maquis le traintrain de la vie. [..·] Sortir de l'histoire pour entrer dans la vie essayez donc vous autres et vous verrez. (Mesure de nos jours, 82) THESE VERSES, WRITTEN AFTER Charlotte Delbo's return to France from Nazi concentration camps, encapsulate the considerable shift in the relationship of women with war brought by World War II. The total war character of this conflict gave women the opportunity to play an increasing role in the action: not only did they participate in the war effort through their work, but they also appeared as combatants, even in commanding positions in the case of the Soviet armed forces. Furthermore, as Billie Melman reminds us, with the German occupation of many countries, such as France in 1940, "the impact of the war on entire populations blurred the borderlines between 'front' and 'rear' in their gendered perspective,"1 allowing women, like men, to take an active part in the war in non-traditional ways, one being underground resistance. In this newly defined battlefield, women were able to make a personal decision to join the fight, with the accompanying risks of injury, arrest, imprisonment, torture and death. It was very consciously that Delbo chose to become involved in the French Communist resistance. Abandoning the South American tour of Louis Jouvet's theatrical company, in which she held the post of Jouvet's secretary, she rejoined her husband, Georges Dudach, in Paris, in November 1941. There, attached to the Communist underground resistance movement, they both worked at publishing clandestine material. Arrested by the French police in May 1942, and imprisoned in La Santé, they were transferred to the Gestapo. Dudach was executed in May 1942 and Delbo sent to Romainville prison, and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in January 1943, in a convoy of 230 women. Delbo's involvement in the French resistance and her 35 months of capVol . XL, No. 2 41 L'Esprit Créateur tivity may have been a short period in her lifetime (1913-1985), but they were a watershed which affected her to the end of her life. In this essay, I aim to analyse how her writings reflect her war experience and what singularises them as feminine, although Delbo declared that she was not a woman in her writing.21 will look firstly, and more particularly, at the representation of her specific experience in a Nazi extermination-concentration camp, and secondly at her view of war, with its accompanying concepts of patriotism, sacrifice and heroism. The predominant representation of war in Delbo's writings is that of the Nazi concentrationary universe, and more particularly of Auschwitz-Birkenau : it is a firsthand account of her own and other women's experience. This character of participatory witness of war until recently was mainly the prerogative of men, and consequently "sets apart her representation, alongside that of other ex-detainee women writers." However, having segregated them, the Nazis did not treat women and men differently in concentration camps, and thus it would seem that a woman's account should be similar to a man's: women and men were both subjected to ill-treatment, strenuous physical and often senseless work, in abysmal conditions of hygiene, nutrition and accommodation . They were made to work to the limits of their physical strength, before dying of exhaustion, lack of food, water and medical care. However, as Marlene E. Heinemann remarks: "Even the most impartial and sensitive male observer will be unable to provide an inside picture of women's experiences in the Nazi camps, since male and female prisoners were segregated in separate camps."3 Thus the singularity of Delbo's representation results in part from the segregation of men from women. It is a convoy of women and a women's extermination camp, Birkenau, placed under the supervision of female guards and SS that Delbo makes us "see," in her trilogy Auschwitz et après4 in particular; it is her experience and that of other women detainees that she makes us share...

The Playwright in an Institutionalized Theatre: France

To write of the situation of the dramatic author in present-day France is no easy task, since, inevitably, it involves making a largely negative report. Traditionally, the text in the theatre has been king; in schools and in universities, plays are above all read, and it is often – though perhaps not often enough – a revelation to those who study them to discover that the texts written by, say, Racine or Shakespeare, take on a different kind of existence when they are made flesh in the theatre. One of the qualities of such theatre is, of course, that it can be read and appreciated without any form of mediation, such as that provided, for example, by actors or directors. And it is perhaps odd that we may arguably derive as much from reading the plays of a Giraudoux, for whom the critical collaboration of his director, Louis Jouvet was crucial, as from seeing them performed. Could it be that the partnership of such a self-conscious writer with so committed a practical man of the theatre represents some kind of golden age in the relationship between the author and the director?

The Director-Playwright Relationship of Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux

Theatre historians often discuss the rise of the director in the twentieth century by citing a number of important collaborations between playwrights and their directors. Stanislavsky and Chekhov, Kazan and Williams, and Jouvet and Giraudoux are examples; in each case, the symbiosis between theatre artists produced a distinct theatrical style. Most of these relationships have been unambiguous and carefully documented. The relationship of Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux, however, is an enigmatic one. Perhaps that is why it is often described only in the most general terms. Donald Inskip's Jean Giraudoux - The Making of a Dramatist, which recounts the production history of Giraudoux's plays, is typical in the unspecified praise that it assigns to the working relationship of Jouvet and Giraudoux.

The Director-Playwright Relationship of Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux

Theatre historians often discuss the rise of the director in the twentieth century by citing a number of important collaborations between playwrights and their directors. Stanislavsky and Chekhov, Kazan and Williams, and Jouvet and Giraudoux are examples; in each case, the symbiosis between theatre artists produced a distinct theatrical style. Most of these relationships have been unambiguous and carefully documented. The relationship of Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux, however, is an enigmatic one. Perhaps that is why it is often described only in the most general terms. Donald Inskip's Jean Giraudoux - The Making of a Dramatist, which recounts the production history of Giraudoux's plays, is typical in the unspecified praise that it assigns to the working relationship of Jouvet and Giraudoux.

Les Centres dramatiques nationaux de province by Kenneth White

Reviews 85 be sure, but reason all the same. Of what use is it to ignore the main­ stream, as Brashear does, when Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness from his P h en om en ology o f M in d (consciousness as divided nature, a contra­ dictory self) stands as the prototype of so much in Nietzsche’s subjective predicament? And is not Husserl’s “internal time consciousness” carefully reasoned fuel for Spengler’s visions of time? The wonderfully libelous comments Schopenhauer was making about Hegel— even resorted to call­ ing him an “old windbag”— ought not to lead us to believe that his thought, in its very subjectivity, is that independent of Hegel. Brashear’s very engaging book, in an instructive but dangerous way, takes the utterance of visionaries full circle and brings it, perhaps unin­ tentionally, back to its source through reason. For so much of what is in T he G orgon ’s H ea d is an admirably clear spirit of Hegel worth every student’s time— at least for use to grate against that old “friend-nemesis,” the tragic vision, made here a bit more lucid. This kind of work lends critical intuition a glimmer of sanction and respectability. A unique book in its own right. Highly recommended. JOHN CHIOLES Stan ford U n iversity Kenneth White. L es C en tres dram atiques nationaux de provin ce. Las Vegas: Utah Studies in Literature and Linguistics. Peter Lang, 1979. Pp. 256. White has done theatre lovers a tremendous service. Heretofore, Paris was thought to be the initiator of the finest theatre in France. Not always so, maintains White. Innovators such as Jean Dasté sought to decentralize theatre and accomplished such goals with the establishment of provincial theatres in Toulouse, Saint-Etienne, Villeurbanne, Bourges, Strasbourg, and Saint-Quentin. White studies their contributions from their inception (1945 for the most part) until 1965. His study is meticulous and fascinating. The Grenier de Toulouse, founded by Maurice Sarrazin and students of the theatre whose passion remained undaunted and indomitable in face of financial problems, has offered audiences plays by André Roussin before he was famous and by Anouilh, prior to his international celebrity. The production of the latter’s E u rydice (1946) and H erm in e (1947) almost brought disaster to the company. Louis Jouvet was so interested in helping Sarrazin’s troupe that he agreed to deliver a lecture in Toulouse to enhance their prestige; so did Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. Dullin was “adopted” as their guide. The group worked hard producing plays by Plautus, Achard,, Musset, Shakespeare, Molière, Giraudoux, and many others. Finally, by 1964, they inaugurated their newly built theatre—the Daniel Sorano—with Armand Gatti’s Poisson N oir, a drama about third-century China with a modern twist: can revolutionaries remain revolutionaries and, if so, do they become reactionaries in time? Jean Dasté, Jacques Copeau’s son-in-law, founded the Comédie Saint-Etienne in 1945. Having been trained by an admirable director and by the Vieux-Colombier group, his productions of Cervantes, Molière, Anouilh, Labiche, Brecht, Frisch, Betti, Claudel, and many others were first rate. Struggling always with only a small government subsidy, he tried desperately and succeeded in time in making a go, even economically, of his theatre, according to White. Hubert Gignoux was the inspiration behind the founding of the Centre Dramatique de l’Est (Strasbourg) in 1947. Actors such as André Reybaz and Catherine Toth played in this group and subsequently became well known. Mauriac, Passeur, Shaw, Courteline, Musset, Ibsen, Calderon, Merimée, and the French classical dramatists were given spectacular productions. Imaginative and sensitive, they drew crowds of theatregoers to their doors. The Comédie de l’Ouest (Rennes) founded by Guy Parigot and Georges Goubert (1945) also offered innovative productions of Synge, Jarry, Salacrou, Strindberg, Schiller, Pirandello, and the usual French staples. Here, too, students, bourgeois, and whitecollar workers as well as working people were enthusiastic about the productions, and were able to relate to ancient and modern theatrical notions. La Comédie de Provence, whose founder Gaston Batey infused life into formerly dead pieces, drew accolades from his audiences...

Gurdjieff’s Movement Demonstrations: The Theatre of the Miraculous

Drawing on pre-Christian Assyrian, Phrygian, Armenian, Zoroastrian, Sufi, Tibetan, and Persian elements at the time of the Russian Revolution, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff attempted to create a school of thought that would coordinate and expand Western man's anatomic and intellectual centers of energy Into newly dynamic forms. Certain physical and mental activities, Gurdjieff believed, could bring about a total alteration of consciousness. For over sixty years his philosophy has found adherents among the intelligentsia of the Russian, French, and English-speaking world. Directors, choreographers, musicians, designers, painters, writers, and psychologists like Nikolai Evreinov, Sergei Diaghilev, Thomas de Hartmann, Alexander and Jeanne Salzmann, Louis Jouvet, Felix Labisse, J.B. Priestley, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Peter Brook have all sought artistic inspiration in the esoteric teachings of the Russian-born mystic.

Art et politique [La tournée du théâtre Meyerhold à Paris en 1930

Gérard Abensour, Art and politics. Tour of the Meyerhold Theatre in Paris in 1930. On basis of articles and critical reviews published at the time in French, German and Russian newspapers, the author endeavours to revive the atmosphere of the Meyerhold Theatre in Paris in 1930. After a stormy tour in Germany foreshadowed by its established reputation as iconoclast and revolutionary, this Theatre presents disconcerting versions of two classical works of the Russian repertory: The Revizor of Gogol's and The Forest of Ostrovskij 's. Whilst in Moscow starts for Meyerhold an era of friction with a bureaucracy that does not acknowledge him as corresponding to its image, he hopes to achieve a brilliant success in Paris with the vanguard public. Unfortunately and in spite of the interest of Gaston Baty, Louis Jouvet and Charles Dullin, his much too personal conception of a "popular" theatre will not arouse immediate response. It is only in the post-war period that the ideas of Meyerhold will penetrate in the theory and practice of the French theatre.

Louis Jouvet'sl'ecole des femmesin New York City

Louis Jouvet's presentation established? for the first time, the existence of American interest in French companies of actors. Despite the language harrier, this presentation and subsequent performances by other French companies have received substantial popular and critical acclaim.