"THE PLAY'S THE THING" IN FRANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 40, 29 March 1940, Page 9

"THE PLAY'S THE THING" IN FRANCE

nation. For them, even more than for us, "the play’s the thing." The French theatre proper came into being when Cardinal Richelieu conceived the ambition of making the finest national theatre in Europe; to this end he has built a special model theatre for the display of changing scenes. In the French Academy members ceaselessly debated the theories of dramatic art. A glance through the section devoted to theatre in Diderot’s Encyclopédie shows the astonishing activity put into theatrical enterprise in the eighteenth century. Forsaking the few simple pulleys and wheels which had served to change scenery in the Greek and early Italian theatres, a highly complicated system of machines for the staging of vast spectacles was evolved. The actual stage itself was full of trapdoors. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Comédiens Francais acted in the Théatre de la Comédie Francaise, the shell of which still stands, later the company shifted quarters several times. By 1812 Paris had many hundred theatres. Napoleon, by his Decrét de Moscou, gave the city two weeks in which ~to close them, leaving eight alone to be thoroughly developed. The clauses of the famous decree still, with little amendment, govern the theatres of France. The celebrated Theatre Frangais is a reconstruction made after a fire in 1900. "i HE French have always been a play-going

In 1887 André Antoine, one of the most able men of the theatre in France founded the Théatre Libre, which saw the production of plays by the serious writers of the time. One of the standard French works on acting is Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le Comédien, which was prompted by the earlier work, Garrick, ou les Acteurs Anglais. The work enlarges the idea that, while inferior players are poor puppets whose strings are pulled by the playwright, the fine actor is a collaborator and contributes qualities undreamed of by the author. Curiously enough it was a dancer who made many people aware of the significance of mime in the theatre — Isadora Duncan. Auguste Rodin, Henri Lavedan, and Eugene Carriere are among the Frenchmen who paid tribute to her unique power. Yvette Guilbert also demonstrated basic dramatic principles. She proved that an artist of the theatre may be creative, deriving from literature and other arts, but forming an utterly distinct art. In this century the French theatre is still in the forefront. In the theatre generally great advances and experiments have been made. In Russia, in Germany, even in England, regisseurs and producers are constantly trying new forms of dramatic expression. Thus Paris to-day sees a wide variety of playsfrom Moliére, Racine and Corneille at the Théatre Francais to light things such as Giradoux’s Ondine, from orthodox theatre to surrealist theatre. — ;