Jacques Copeau
Jacques Copeau was a French theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist. Before he founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, he wrote theatre reviews for several Parisian journals, worked at the Georges Petit Gallery where he organized exhibits of artists' works and helped found the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1909, along with writer friends, such as André Gide and Jean Schlumberger.
Twentieth century French theatre is marked by Copeau's outlook. According to Albert Camus, "in the history of the French theatre, there are two periods: before Copeau and after Copeau."
Early life and formative years
The child of a well-off middle-class family, the Paris-born Copeau was raised in Paris and attended the best schools. At the Lycée Condorcet, he was a talented but nonchalant student whose interest in theatre already consumed him. His first staged play, Brouillard du matin, was presented on 27 March 1897 at the Nouveau-Théâtre as part of the festivities of the alumni association of the Lycée Condorcet. The former president of the French Republic, Casimir-Perier, and the playwright Georges de Porto-Riche both congratulated him on his work.During the same period when Copeau was preparing his baccalauréat exams, he met Agnès Thomsen, a young Danish woman seven years his elder who was in Paris to perfect her French. They first met on 13 March 1896, and Copeau, then a seventeen-year-old high school student, quickly fell in love.
Eventually, Copeau passed his exams and began his studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne, but the theatre, extensive reading, and his courtship of Agnès left him little time to study and kept him from passing his exams for the licence, despite several attempts. Against his mother's wishes he married Agnès in June 1902 in Copenhagen. Their first child, Marie-Hélène, was born on 2 December 1902. In mid-April 1905 their second daughter, Hedwig, was born.
In April 1903, the young family made its way back to France where Copeau took up his duties as director of the family's factory in Raucourt in the Ardennes. He reinserted himself into a small literary coterie of friends, among them now, André Gide. While living in Angecourt in the Ardennes, Copeau frequently travelled to Paris where he made a name for himself as theatre critic-at-large for several publications. Back in Paris in 1905, Copeau continued his work as theatre critic, writing reviews of such plays as Ibsen's A Doll's House and Gabriele D’Annunzio's La Gioconda as well an overview of the structure of contemporary theatre published in L'Ermitage in February.
In July 1905, he took on a job at the Georges Petit Gallery where he assembled exhibits and wrote the catalogues. He stayed at the Petit Gallery until May 1909. During this period he continued to write theatre reviews and garnered a reputation as an astute and principled judge of the theatre arts. The sale of the factory in Raucourt gave him the financial independence that allowed him to pursue his literary activities. Copeau was one of the founders of the Nouvelle Revue Française,:61 a publication that was to become one of the leading arbiters of literary taste in France.
Copeau and his young family visited the island of Jersey on two occasions. In 1907, he stayed at Prospect Lodge, then in 1909 at Madeira Villa, both in St Brelade, where he pursued his work on theatrical adaptations, the most well-known being that of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a project co-written with schoolfriend Jean Croué. André Gide, a visitor to Jersey in 1907, played a pivotal role in Copeau's career at this stage.
He finished work on The Brothers Karamazov by the end of 1910. He was now ready to work in the theatre as a practitioner not only as critic.
The play was staged in April 1911 under the direction of Jacques Rouché at the Théâtre des Arts, receiving favorable reviews. Charles Dullin, who played the role of Smerdiakov, was particularly singled out for a fine performance. A second staging of the adaptation the following October, with Louis Jouvet in the role of Father Zossima, confirmed the earlier critical claim.
In 1910, he bought Le Limon, a piece of property in the Seine-et-Marne département, away from the distractions of Paris.
The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier
Copeau wanted to rid the Paris stage of the rank commercialism and tawdriness represented by the boulevard theatre. He wanted to move the theatre to a simpler style, freed from the ornamentation that obscured even the finest texts.File:Copeau Brothers Karamazov.jpg|thumb|Set design by Louis Jouvet for Copeau's production of The Brothers KaramazovOn the Left Bank, on the rue du Vieux-Colombier, he rented the old and dilapidated Athénée-Saint-Germain, an unlikely venue for the utopian ideals of Copeau, but its location at distance from the commercial theatre district gave a signal that he intended to pursue a new path. He named the theatre after the street so that it could be found more easily. In the spring of 1913, with the help of Charles Dullin in whose Montmartre apartment the auditions took place, Copeau started to assemble a company. Besides Dullin and Louis Jouvet, whom he took on principally as stage manager, he hired, among others, Roger Karl and Suzanne Bing.
During the summer of 1913, Copeau took his troupe to Le Limon, his country house in the Marne valley. The return of the troupe to Paris at the beginning of September, coincided with the publication in the NRF of Copeau's Un essai de rénovation Dramatique: le théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, in which he set forth the principles of this project: first, the choice of place far from the despised Right Bank boulevard in a district closer to schools and the center of artistic life where the new theatre might attract an audience of students, intellectuals and artists with a subscription system that would assure reasonable prices; second, a variety of productions—as many as three different productions a week, which would not only appeal to a wider public, but would offer the actors the opportunity to play several different sorts of roles in quick succession, maintaining the suppleness of their interpretive skills; third, a repertoire both classic and modern would mark the offerings of the company: the classic plays of Jean Racine and Molière—never put in modern dress to keep them à la mode—and the best plays of the previous thirty years. Copeau wanted to entice new playwrights, perhaps those who had despaired that the theatre would ever present works of quality. And, fourth, he held in disdain ham acting or cabotinage, so common in the commercial theatre.
He proposed eventually a school for young actors in order to create a new cohort of actors whose taste and instincts would remain above compromise. Lastly, he proposed a simple stage freed from the overworked scenic machinery that had become commonplace: "Pour l'œuvre nouvelle, qu'on nous laisse un plateau nu", he wrote.
At the beginning of October, there appeared on the kiosks of Paris a poster announcing Copeau's appeal to the youth to reject the commercial theatre, to a literate public who wanted to see preserved the classic master pieces of both the French and foreign theatre and to all those who wanted to support a theatre that would excel through its fair prices, variety, and quality of its interpretations and staging. Many years of hard work preceded his Appel, but the "Old Dove-cote" theatre was now ready to open.
During the first season, Copeau kept his promises. He staged plays from the classics, fairly recent works of quality, and the offerings of new playwrights from outside the theatre such as Jean Schlumberger and Roger Martin du Gard. The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier was inaugurated with a little ceremony on 22 October 1913 and opened with its first public performance on the next evening with Heywood's A Woman Killed By Kindness '''', but the Elizabethan melodrama did not impress the critics and the public remained indifferent. Molière's Amour médecin, however, received a more promising reception. The Schlumberger offering, Les Fils Louverné, a rather austere drama about sibling conflict, was followed by Alfred de Musset's Barberine, a delightfully poetic piece that charmed the public and showed off the talents of the young company on a bare stage. Dullin triumphed in his signature interpretation of Harpagon in Molière's L’Avare and the troupe showed its physical dexterity in Molière's farce, La Jalousie du Barbouillé.
They performed Paul Claudel's L’Échange ; dating from 1894 when he was in "exile" as a diplomat in Boston, the play deals with the relationship between spouses. A popular revival of the Copeau-Croué adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov saw Dullin once again as Smerdiakov, Jouvet as Feodor, and Copeau as Ivan. In May, the troupe, exhausted but buoyed by its artistic and sometimes critical successes, staged an adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or Nuit des rois to close the season.
Both in its preparation and mise-en-scène, Nuit des rois has entered into legend. Stories abound of Copeau and Jouvet working forty-eight hours non-stop to set the lighting and of Duncan Grant, the English artist who created the costumes, chasing after actors to apply one last dab of color just before the curtain was to come up. The play garnered both critical and public acclaim. With Jouvet as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Suzanne Bing as Viola, Blanche Albane as Olivia, and Romain Bouquet as Sir Toby Belch, in a startlingly simple stage setting, the play called upon the audience's imagination in a way that had not been seen on a Paris stage since Paul Fort, an earlier reformer who had worked in the theatre in the 1890s. Enthusiastic crowds finally queued up to see this rendition of "real Shakespeare", but the run closed as scheduled for the troupe was off to Alsace on tour.