The French Actress and her English Audience (review)

At a dicey moment just after the Boer War, Edward VII thawed a hostile Parisian crowd when he exclaimed to the actress Jeanne Granier: "Mademoiselle, I remember applauding you in London where you represented all the grace and spirit of France." John Stokes doesn't retell that anecdote. He doesn't even mention Jeanne Granier. But he does make dazzlingly clear what Good Old Teddy had in mind. Well, perhaps not exactly, or at least entirely, in mind. To English audiences, for almost all of the preceding century, the French actress had made available a repertoire otherwise unstageable in England, or in English: a repertoire centered on boldly exploring "the emotional and sexual needs of mature women" (178–79). No wonder Victoria's eldest was pleased.

Stokes is a leading member of that remarkable group of British theatre historians—others include Gail Marshall and Richard Schoch—that, on the foundations of Michael Booth's pioneering work, has made theatre and performance indispensable to all serious Victorian study. We can now see theatre-going as a far more widespread and shaping practice in the nineteenth century than, say, novel reading. (A claim that virtually all the Victorian novelists themselves endorse.) After all, you didn't have to be literate to go to the play. But you certainly had to be literate, in French no less, to attend the annual seasons of French theatre that Stokes's account chronicles. One could wish, then, for a more even scrutiny paid to the two sides of his title. What kind of numbers, what kinds of backgrounds, supplied those English audiences? One doesn't really learn that here. Nevertheless, this is a book that many different sorts of reader will be glad to have read: theatre historians and performance theorists, of course, and feminists of every focus, but also anyone concerned with accurately assessing the limits of what the Victorians thought they could legitimately see and respectably consume.

We encounter eight actresses, seven from the nineteenth century and one, Edwige Feuillére, their twentieth-century and final (Stokes insists) avatar. At least one of them, Sarah Bernhardt, remains close to a household name. Others, much less recognizable in themselves, may still ring a bell for readers of Stendhal: Mademoiselle Mars (1820s); George Eliot: Rachel Félix (1840s–50s); Henry James: Madame Arnould Plessy (1840s–70s), and Marcel Proust: Gabrielle Réjane (1890s). But at least two are unknown and astonishing discoveries for English readers, at any rate, even for English readers interested in theatre history: Virginie Déjazet (1840s–70) and Aimée Desclée (1850s–70s). Their chapter-by-chapter catalogue could easily have deflated into something like an MGM calendar number, where, one after another, frozen beauties revolve in perfect period quaintness. But Stokes is too expert and much too alive to the dynamic of performance, and its incessant reformation under the pressure of circumstance, to permit that. Through rich quotation of contemporary accounts he brings vividly alive each actress as a bold and distinctive stylist. I was particularly struck by two. Déjazet, the toast of the Second Empire, performed only in trousers roles, usually as a charming rake of the ancien régime. Every rule was defied. Tight-fitting breeches and waistcoats revealed her every contour, while she not only smoked pipes but, scandal of scandals, exhaled through her nose. For her successor we'd have to wait for I Am My Own Wife (2003). Réjane, by contrast, was Aubrey Beardsley's ideal, at once unabashed clown and haughty dominatrix, staring out through the performance at one or another friend in the audience, often stopping to underline a mot or a movement by glancing at a favorite. Verfremdungseffekt, we might say, avant la lettre.

At the start Stokes suggests his chapters will trace a progress from the grande coquette to the charming bourgeoise to the hysteric. Happily, his practice is nothing like so schematic. Instead, with considerable nuance he unpacks...