Page "Jacques Copeau" Paragraph 12

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 October 22, 1913 and opened with its first public performance on the next evening with Heywood's A Woman Killed By Kindness (" Une femme tuée par la douceur "), 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 (" The Louverné Sons "), 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 (" The Miser ") and the troupe showed its physical dexterity in Molière's farce, La Jalousie du Barbouillé (" The Jealous Barbouillé ").

They also performed Paul Claudel's L ’ Échange (" The Exchange "); dating from 1894 when he was in " exile " as a diplomat in Boston, the play deals in a poetic way with the relationship between spouses.

Again Dullin showed his talent for character creation and Copeau too took a major role bringing to the text an inspired interpretation.

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 de 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 startling 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 " ( Kurtz, p. 31 ), but the run closed as scheduled for the troupe was off to Alsace on tour.