Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style and Other Writings

Michel Saint-Denis, Jane Baldwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134058488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Michel Saint-Denis was one of twentieth century theatre's most influential directors and theorists. This book combines his seminal Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style with material from Training for the Theatre, newly edited to create a work which moves seamlessly from theory to practice.

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• Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style collects five of Saint Denis' key lectures, given during his time in America, and perfectly encompasses his synergy of classical theatre and modern realism

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• Training for the Theatre is a key practical resource for actors, directors and teachers alike. It covers crucial areas such as understanding a play's context, training schedules, improvisation and dealing with stage space, as well as a section on Saint-Denis' use of masks in actor training

Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style and Other Writings benefits from Jane Baldwin's new biographical introduction and annotations, that put Saint-Denis into context for a contemporary audience. It brings a wealth of inspirational material both to the rehearsal space and the classroom.

Part I

The classical theatre

1 The classical French tradition

Contradictions and contributions

The Classical Theatre was drawn from a lecture Saint-Denis gave at Harvard University in 1958 as part of the prestigious Theodore Spencer series. This lecture, although it appears as the first chapter of Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, was chronologically the last of the five contained in the book. Like the other four lectures, it was presented on the occasion of Saint-Denis’s initial visit to the US. The others, sequential in structure, were given at the Plymouth Theatre in New York to an audience of practitioners, critics, and intellectuals. While this was his first trip to the US, Saint-Denis had visited Canada several times for professional reasons, beginning in the 1930s.

Saint-Denis was brought to Harvard by his friend and admirer Robert Chapman, a playwright, and professor at the University. It was Chapman who had conducted Juilliard’s international study of actor training with the objective of finding the consummate artist-teacher to lead the future Drama Division’s programme.

In this chapter, Saint-Denis sets forth themes that will run throughout Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style. The overarching one is the significant role of the past – here French classicism – for the contemporary stage, which he describes at times as a theatre of modern realism, at others a theatre of reality. The variety of approaches to that reality is the basis of Saint-Denis’s concept of style. At moments, he goes beyond the theatre to emphasise that too rigid an adherence to the ghosts of the past, i.e. France’s history and traditions, can block change and progress. In life, as in the theatre, a balance needs to be found, a way to merge polar opposites so that the past informs the present and the present the past. As the lecture continues, he moves from a historical approach to a discussion of contemporary French theatre movements, directors, and playwrights.

Perhaps because the talk was aimed at an academic audience, this chapter is alone in concentrating so heavily on French culture and history. Perhaps too, that audience is the reason his comments on French classicism are rather elliptical.

French classicism is generally called neoclassicism in English to emphasise its roots in antiquity. But as Saint-Denis points out, in France, its connection to the distant past is a minor aspect. Classicism was refined and redefined in its great age, the seventeenth century, often regarded as the apogee of French culture. It affected and infected every art and humanist discipline of French life: literature, drama, philosophy, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and city planning.

In brief, classicism refers to a system of values and aesthetics that were deliberately and consciously applied in pursuit of artistic and social perfection. It should be added that this system was supported by an authoritarian and centralised state whose aims it served. Classicism’s principal values consisted of order, clarity, reason, restraint, and decency. In literature, adherence to these values led to the prizing of form over content, the simplifying and ordering of the French language, and the diminution of the imaginative in the name of verisimilitude or believability. In the theatre, the need for verisimilitude added further restraints, notably the three unities. The unity of time dictated that the play’s plot could not exceed twenty-four hours; the unity of place that there could be no more than a single set representing a single area; the unity of plot prohibited subplots. Despite its rule-bound rigidity, the classical era produced gifted playwrights who, working within the system, developed an individual style. The simplification of language, for example, did not mean that poetry was flat and boring. Rather, it meant the elimination of neologisms and ornamentation for their own sake. Clarity can equal eloquence. In the twentieth century, French theatrical innovators felt it incumbent upon themselves to give new life to these classics, which apart from Molière’s plays are largely unknown outside of Francophone countries.

This lecture, as are the others, is infused with the ironic tone and wry humor that were characteristic of Saint-Denis. Although the lecture was carefully prepared, its style is almost conversational, which is also characteristic. In general, his writings were meant to be spoken, as, for instance, when he worked at the BBC during World War II. In teaching, he frequently gave what he called ‘causeries’ or informal lectures.

Ladies and gentlemen. Knowing the names of the poets, the scholars, and of the men of the theatre who have spoken here before me, I realise the great honour you have paid me in inviting me to speak for the first time in Harvard in memory of a man whom you cherish for all that he did for letters, the arts, and the theatre of your country.¹

I shall try to tell you simply of my experience in the theatre. Next year I shall have been in the theatre for forty years. I began in 1919, just after the First World War; I’ve only been interrupted once in that work, and

that was by the Second World War. I mention the two wars because they have been of great importance to me: in tragic circumstances, they have connected me with other men. It is thanks to these wars, perhaps, that I have avoided being confined to the world of the theatre, the atmosphere of which is sometimes rarefied and artificial.

If I have partly escaped the theatre, I am glad also that I have partly escaped my French nationality. I know that that is a dangerous attitude to take … I’ve spent twenty years of my life, the best years of my maturity, living in England and working with the English theatre. What I probably mean is that I feel in a position to understand my own country better through having been so long away from it.

Now I’ve got to make a final preliminary confession. I’ve always belonged to non-conforming organisations. I began in Paris with Jacques Copeau at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, the beginnings of which were not easy. When I became myself the head of a company – it was the Compagnie des Quinze – I played a repertory of plays of the sort that were not fashionable in Paris at the time. I have established three different schools of the theatre and I have always encouraged my students to join me in discovering new ways of stimulating their creative imagination and an approach to their interpretative work which could give reality to style. I have never directed a play I did not like. I have never directed ‘Boulevard’ or ‘West End’ plays. I must say that I have not often been asked to. The theatre is divided into very definite families.

Finally, in spite of appearances – for I was a part of the Old Vic for six years – I’ve always been much more concerned with the modern than with the classical theatre. I could say of my work that during these forty years it has been, and still is, an experiment directed towards the discovery of all the means by which reality can be given to fiction on the stage.

I have now finished what is called an ‘introduction’: and you know the ghosts and shadows with which I am accompanied in my first contact with Broadway, with the American theatre, with America and Americans.

I am French: there’s no doubt about it. I leave it to you to appreciate the normal consequences of being French. People have many different ideas about it. But from a theatrical point of view these consequences are precise, even if they are not always very well known.

I discovered, once I was outside France, that the English, and, I believe, the American people mean by ‘classics’ all the great dramatists of the past, including those of the recent past; so that in your terms, Ibsen and Chekhov are ‘classics’; and I believe it is true that you even refer to Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill as classics.

With us it is not at all the same. For a Frenchman classicism is a spirit, a philosophy, a form. In fact if you speak to a French purist, and we have a few, you will find him asserting that only one aspect of his own civilisation is worthy to be described as ‘classical’: the period that was born from Rabelais and Montaigne in the pre-classical age, and went on to blossom with Descartes and Pascal in philosophy, Poussin in painting, Lully in music, Corneille, Racine, and Molière in drama. Here we are at the summit of the true French classical period. The sixteenth century is excluded: the style of Louis XIII, easily remembered as that of The Three Musketeers, is too heavy, too fleshy. The style of Louis XV is too mannered, too frail. No, Louis XIV, ‘Le Roi Soleil’, the king who modestly chose the sun as symbol of his glory, stands in the centre of the classical age. Regnard² and Marivaux,³ dramatists of the eighteenth century, will be admitted into it by extension, but the door will be shut in front of Beaumarchais, already corrupted in spirit and form.⁴

It is by a sort of considered need for affiliation that French classicism has recognised its ancestors: the classical period of Greece (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides); Roman comedy (Terence and Plautus); and even the comedians of the Commedia dell’Arte. But those buffoons from the south needed Molière, to give their work shape.

Such is really the nature of the milk by which every French child is nurtured at school and in life. He is educated in the Humanities according to the classical disciplines. The same discipline survives in Universities, in Academies, in literature, in the arts, and in the theatre. To this classical tradition we revert continually; very often to oppose it. But it remains a basic measure, the standard of quality. It is embodied most tellingly in Molière: La Comédie-Française is called ‘La Maison de Molière – The Home of Molière’; it is supposed to have transmitted up till today the traditions of Molière’s company. You can see it symbolised by the very armchair in which Molière died while playing Le Malade imaginaire.⁵ Very often this chair travels with the company. When they went to Moscow they took it with them; they were not playing Le Malade

imaginaire; just as a sign of Molière; complete Molière in wood. And the French National Conservatoire, the official school of dramatic art, is a place where some great actors ‘de la maison’ teach; and they take seriously their function, which is to pass on to the young the traditional way of playing classical texts and consequently the meaning of the classical style.

Now it is very easy to laugh at such a conservative spirit, especially if one is completely foreign to it. We have suffered from this spirit enough, we French, to see the merit in laughing also. It is evident that one cannot transmit a literal tradition from generation to generation and keep it alive. Nobody with any intelligence ever thought that that was possible.

Fortunately we have the texts, which should lead us to the spirit. To be classical is to be impersonal and objective. It does not mean to avoid detailed characterisation, but to create characters which instead of being detailed, with a subjective, realistic psychology, remain objective. It tends to create types which in a balanced civilisation will be generally recognised. The language, usually eloquent, is loaded with human matter. Born of an aristocratic society, this form of art is aristocratic in expression: vigorous and heroic in Corneille, tender and passionate in Racine, more popular in Molière. And in the tragedy of Racine and Corneille, or in high comedy, like Molière’s Misanthrope, the text is written in verses of twelve feet, usually divided in the middle, with a rhyme at the end. Nothing less.

You can imagine that actors do not find this style easy to tackle, though at the same time it has flexibility. Needless to say that to discover this flexibility and to preserve the form of the verse requires considerable art. Similarly the prose, the great prose of Molière, is also calculated, numbered prose, so written that it tends towards prosody.

Now you may find such a style so exacting that it becomes boring. It is the contrary of naturalism: probably the most isolated, but at the same time the highest form of theatre in the whole of Western Europe. It is also, as I know from experience, the most remote from the Anglo-Saxon world. I have had the opportunity of reading some Molière to audiences in London, and they were often pleased; but when I tried Racine, even those English people most familiar with French culture and ready to appreciate a certain form of classicism, could not ‘take’ him. And I had chosen Phèdre, which is rich in dramatic events and tension; but even so they could not accept it – ‘talk, talk, talk,’ they said, ‘it’s too rhetorical, too formal, at the expense of action, of life, of reality.’

One must say that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to find actors capable of playing in the style of Corneille and Racine because the kind of classical measure and discipline it requires goes further and further away from modern life.

I have always worked, I’ve said, with non-conforming people, who, starting afresh from the texts, have re-created the tradition, very often against the rulings of the Comédie-Française.

First of all, in 1913, I saw Charles Dullin play Molière’s L’Avare.⁶ I saw it again in 1922. Dullin was still playing L’Avare when he died, a few years ago. He brought to the role, not realism, but a reality which restored the vitality that a conventional respect for tradition had destroyed.

In 1922 I heard some public readings by Copeau. He was an extraordinary reader. A lot of his influence came through his readings. He read Bérénice. Do you know Bérénice? It is the most motionless of Racine’s plays. Its subject comes from Tacitus and is expressed by ‘invitus invitam dimisit’ – ‘in spite of himself, in spite of herself, they parted’. That’s all. No other matter: solely the movement of lovers quitting and lovers coming back. It concerns four people with their servants. Copeau always said that such plays, instead of being played in the open air, in big places, should be performed in a small auditorium made of wood, where the sound of the text would have the quality of chamber music; the tone of the voices, the variety of pitch, the positions of the characters, their extreme economy of movement and gesture, all must be arranged so that nothing should trouble the air but beautiful sound and rare motion. Racine requires near immobility; the whole of the action being an inner one, it has to be expressed outwardly with the utmost sensitivity. You see that it is all very refined.

In 1920 Copeau gave a production of Les Fourberies de Scapin by Molière. Set on a bare platform, ruthlessly lit like a boxing ring, it recaptured the spirit of the Commedia dell’Arte without any laborious imitation of the past.

In 1923 Le Misanthrope was directed and acted by Copeau. I was the stage-manager. It was performed in front of a tapestry, with four armchairs and a stool in the middle of the stage. A few hats, a few sticks, and a few swords: no other properties. Two letters, I think. When Copeau, who played Alceste, came on to the stage before the show, I used to be told every night that the armchairs, set on a very beautiful carpet, so that I could not mark the positions, were wrongly set. And I assure you that they were always exactly in position. Copeau was in the mood of

Alceste for about two hours before the curtain rose – such was the ‘reality’ needed to animate the great style of the play.

In 1935 there was Jouvet in L’École des femmes,⁷ playing Arnolphe in the famous Bérard set.⁸

In 1949 there was Jouvet in Tartuffe with scenery by Braque.⁹

In 1952 a newcomer, Jean Vilar,¹⁰ was acclaimed as an innovator because of his interpretation of Corneille’s Le Cid, a tragedy in the rhetorical and lyrical style. Gérard Philipe was Rodrigue.¹¹

In 1954 I saw Vilar’s Don Juan by Molière, at the Avignon Festival, a magnificent performance. At the end I was standing on my feet and shouting: the relationship between Don Juan and Sganarelle appeared in a new light, much more illuminating than at the Comédie-Française. Don Juan was more of an atheist than a seducer; and Sganarelle was the common man serving the aristocratic unbeliever and watching with terror and admiration his master’s challenge to God.

All these productions have had a profound influence on the contemporary theatre in France and abroad. I’ve mentioned them because they are milestones: the ‘classics’ have made an important contribution to the modern style. You yourselves have seen here Jean-Louis Barrault¹² in Les Fausses Confidences by Marivaux. Not very long ago Moscow applauded La Comédie-Française in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière, and Jean Vilar in Le Triomphe de l’amour by Marivaux and also in Molière’s Don Juan and Marie Stuart by Victor Hugo. I went to Moscow in June 1957 and when I asked the Russians what they liked best from the repertories

of Brecht,¹³ the Comédie-Française, and Jean Vilar, they answered without any hesitation, Marivaux. I asked them why. They said, ‘Because of its style: it’s something we cannot do ourselves. From Brecht we have nothing to learn, we have done it before him. But the kind of diction and physical elegance required by the French plays of the eighteenth century, that’s what we need.’

Why are the Russians so sensitive to tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword by Sir Peter Hall
• Illustration credits
• Prologue by Jane Baldwin
• PART I The classical theatre
• PART II Classical theatre and modern realism
• PART III Acting guidelines: excerpts from Training for the Theatre