The Drama of Fallen France: Reading la Comedie sans Tickets (review)

In this book, Kenneth Krauss first underlines that theatres flourished under the German Occupation of France and re-examines whether the Parisian theatres during this "occupation" were sites of collaboration or resistance. The essays gathered in Krauss' book are "attempts to reconcile these two disparate positions" (xiv). He bases his analysis on the reception of plays; that is, on the actual reactions of the spectators. Krauss argues that "a play comprises not only a dramatic text (a script) and a theatre text (the stage elements brought into play through production) but also a text of response, a matrix of spectator reactions, and a history of reception" (xix).

In chapter one, "A Queer Premiere: Jean Cocteau's The Typewriter," Krauss revisits the reception of Jean Cocteau's detective drama La Machine à écrire in 1941 and concludes that this play is in fact an example of "inverted theatre" (34). Krauss sheds new light on the reasons why and how the play was censored by Vichy and the Germans: "The play was not merely theatre scripted by a homosexual but comprises an expression of its author's subculture; to some degree. The Typewriter, in spite of its attempts to resemble a conventional piece, was […] perceived as a discernible expression of contemporary homosexual sensibility" (3–4). Krauss reminds his readers that, on this occasion, collaborationists in Paris were "annoyed that the Germans, who so energetically punished homosexuals within their own borders, should allow these degenerates such liberty in Paris" (13). He also underlines Cocteau's ambivalent position during the Occupation and especially Cocteau's admiration for Hitler's protégé, the sculptor Arno Breker.

In chapter two, "Collabo Beefcake and Resistant Reception: Ambiguity in André Obey's Eight Hundred Meters and The Suppliant Women," Krauss looks at André Obey's version of Les Suppliantes of Aeschylus and at his "drame sportif," Huit cents mètres, which were subsidized by Vichy in 1941. He again demonstrates that a careful reading of the script and of the reception of the plays reveals a far more complex situation to be interpreted. In fact, these plays "seem capable of suggesting ideas about France, the Defeat, and the country's subsequent crisis that were contrary to their own apparently 'fascist' content" (36).

In chapter three, "French Identity: The Intended Audience for Jean Girau-doux's The Apollo of Marsac," Krauss discusses the one-act play L'Apollon de Marsac premiered first by Louis Jouvet in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 and then in France in 1947 (and later renamed L'Apollon de Bellac). Even though the play never found an Occupation audience, Krauss justifies his analysis by stating:

Attempts to formulate the responses of an imagined audience, a group of spectators who in reality never saw the play, to an imagined production, one that was never mounted, can move a reader closer to an understanding of what the play, at least in its playwright's own terms, may have meant to mean.

(65)

While emphasizing Giraudoux's relationship with Germany as "ambivalent," Krauss sees in this "imagined production" of the play "some message of hope," the idea that French self-respect "can be achieved only through the active pursuit of French choices" (78).

In chapter four, "The Limits of Opportunism: Simone Jollivet's The Princess of Ursins," Krauss turns to one of the few plays by a woman playwright presented under the Occupation, La Princesse des Ursins (1942). In his introduction (or "overture," as he calls it), Krauss underlines the autobiographical aspect of the play and why it remained "a self-defeating script about selfdefeat" (xx). This historical drama chronicles the ascent and the defeat "of a woman whose sheer audacity and conniving nearly manage to thwart the misogynist hierarchy. Jollivet herself attempted the same rise in the maledominated theatre of the Occupation; she was the mistress of actor/director Charles Dullin and was well situated to promote and push her own script...