ANDRE ANTOINE
By EDWARD OWEN MARSH
WITH the death of Andre Antoine in France, Europe loses one of the greatest men of the contemporary theatre. In the first year of the German occupation another great figure of the French stage passed away almost unnoticed in this time of stress ; Georges Pitoeff, not himself a Frenchman, was responsible more than any other producer for making the Paris theatre between wars one of the most artistic and cosmopolitan in any European capital. He was continuing the tradition of Antoine, who introduced Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoi and Hauptmann to a doubting public at the end of the 'eighties in the first years of his famous Theatre Libre, the source of the salutary stream of " Little Theatres " from which modern Western drama can be said to flow.
Born at Limoges in 1858 of a family of petits employes, Andre Antoine had a passion for the theatre at an early age. After his family had moved to Paris when he was eight, he had a few years at school and started work as an errand boy at the age of thirteen. Later he became a clerk at Hachette's and finally at the Gas Company. A voracious reader, he devoured the " modern " spirit, and, seeing the battle largely won in the realm of music, painting and the novel, he dreamed of applying the new " naturalism " to drama. He was a regular attender at the theatres, and soon reduced his costs-by acting as a member of the claque. He joined an evening class for acting and production (acting was a popular interest in Paris then), appeared in walking-on parts once or twice and pre- sented himself without success at the Conservatoire. At last he joined an amateur society called the Cercle Gaulois and quickly outlined some of his ideas to his fellows.
In this way, after some difficulty in assembling the new talent he had been talking about, he offered his first dramatic evening of four one-act plays, all of the " naturalist " type, the last on the programme and the most successful being 7acques Damour, adapted from Zola by Leon Hennique. At this first night in 1887 the Prologue stammered and forgot his lines, the settings were by no means complete (though Antoine had pushed some of his mother's furniture to the theatre on a wheelbarrow) and the first three plays were unfavourably received. But Yacques Damour was so successful that it was asked for by the Odeon, although they had refused it when it was offered a short time before. The few Press notices were encouraging, and Antoine was inspired to continue the experi- ment. After a second evening a few months -later he gave in his resignation to the Gas Company and decided to devote himself to the organisation of the Theatre Libre, as his venture had been called. Without strong moral support, having a few vague ideas about acting and producing, and with no money at all, Antoine initiated a movement which brought the most famous literary figures of the day to his small experimental theatre and revolutionised dramatic art. He started the subscription audience to provide some financial guarantee and thereby also avoided having to submit his Plays to the censor. • Artistically at least the new movement was successful, though Antoine was always harassed with debts. Zola's ideas, as expressed in Le Naturalisme au Theatre as early as 188r, were taken up enthusiastically, and the new dramatists tried to reflect the banality of daily life on the stage. In production Antoine also made war on the stiff manner of the conventional theatres ; he was the first to use real knockers and door-handle; on the sets, and in the early
days the audience laughed at him when he turned his back on them on the stage and dared now and then to speak his lines without looking straight out over the footlights. Atmosphere, power of analysis of character, subtlety of staging and natural acting grew in importance and replaced ingenuity and novelty of plot, which had. for some time been the principal remaining virtues of the Paris theatre.
With Tolstoi's The Power of Darkness in February, 1888, began the line of foreign plays that he introduced to Paris audiences, among which were such masterpieces as Strindberg's Mademoiselle Hauptmann's The Weavers and Hannele, and Ibsen's The Wild Duck and Ghosts (of which George Moore attended the dress rehearsal). After the first fifteen months he had produced twenty- three plays which were new to French audiences, nearly half of them in two or more acts. He had, in fact, presented several times as many new plays as the State-endowed theatres, and both the Odeon and the Comedic Frangaise accepted plays from his list. His laboratory theatre, as he liked to consider it, had rejected the conventions of a romantic hero and a happy love story, stereotyped acting and decor, and had created the genre thedtre libre, child of the realist novel and the comedie rosse.
In three years Antoine lost many of his leading actors to the larger theatres and the first fine flowering was over. By this time there were numbers of sensation-seekers among the audience of supporters, and Antoine himself was not very satisfied with the levity with which the plays were occasionally treated. Some critics accused him of setting up another formula, probably worse than its predecessor. " A la place des automates de sentimentalite ou de gentillesse on a mis des automates de vice et de crapule," said one, and there is no doubt that " revolting " subjects, vulgarity and mots de nature were a large part of its attraction. The sad and colourless lives of the poor were presented as antidote to the optimism of Scribe, and minute realism in detail was set up against the vagueness of the romantic.
Alphonse Daudet, Henri Becque, Emile Zola, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Edmond de Goncourt, Jean Jullien, Theodore de Banville, Catulle Mendes, Paul Bonnetain, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte, Henri Lavedan and many others were soon friends of Antoine and supporters of his theatre. Of the thirty-four important dramatists who were writing in 1887, says Professor Chandler, three (Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou) were long-established, and fourteen, almost half, of the rest belong to the Theatre Libre. By the time the Theatre Libre closed its doors in 1896 he had blazed the trail for the varied and ceaseless advance of stage technique in the last fifty years.
After an extended tour in Europe Antoine returned to the Theatre Libre (which he had ceded to Larochelle), and acted both there and at the Gymnase, then he became producer at the Renaissance Theatre. He was appointed co-director with Ginisty of the Odeon, but resigned in less than three weeks ; he was appointed stage-manager of the same theatre a few months later but again resigned almost imme- diately. In 1897, back from a tour in South America, he decided to risk a theatre for the larger public and opened the Theatre Antoine. Het struggled to gain the interest of the public for some years until i9I 1906 he was appointed sole director of the Odeon, where he made daring innovations and added to the fame, but ruined the finances: of France's second theatre. After his resignation from the Odeon in 1914 he devoted himself to dramatic criticism.
Antoine's new organisation was the model to groups in other countries as well as in France (where the Thatre de (' Application, Cercle des Escholiers, Grand Guignol, Theatre des Arts, Thichre des Pokes, and, perhaps the most famous L'Oeuvre, the theatre of Lugne- Poe, trace their origin to it) and the Freie Biihne in Germany and Grein's Independent Theatre in London owe their inspiration largely to Antoine. He had created in acting and in production the ideals that were to mould the work of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Court Theatre, the Abbey Theatre and the numerous experimental theatres of Europe. Modern realistic acting and the experiments of producers and designers from the foundation of the Theatre Libre to the Great War were precipitated if not fashioned by him, and the " Little Theatres " which in such numbers have followed his lead have been the greatest revolutionary influence in the theatre of this century.
Previous page
