Toward a New Interpretation of Lenormand's Theatrical Ethos

TOWARD A NEW INTERPRETATION OF LENORMAND'S THEATRICAL ETHOS IN 1951, GABRIEL MARCEL termed H. R. Lenormand, the French playwright, "indisputably the man who contributed most to the French theater between the two World Wars."! This assertion would arouse hot dispute, if not ridicule, from most present-day critics, who have pigeonholed Lenormand's dramas in that obscure drawer marked "out of date and dusty." During the playwright's lifetime (1882-1951), his works were incessantly attacked and deplored by indignant writers proceeding on false assumptions about his dramatic ethos and aims. The most influential of these antagonists was Andre Rouveyre, the powerful drama critic of the Mercure de France. Virtually every time a new play by Lenormand appeared, Rouveyre released a flood of sarcastic epithets, condemning the author as a morbid eccentric, a pathological and essentially un-French dramatist.2 Because some of Lenormand's plays seemed to evoke striking similarities to psychoanalytical theory, casual critics hastened to label him a disciple of Freud. This unfortunate tag has clung persistently, despite Lenormand's denials of any such relationship. Determination of his real connection with Freudian theory and his fundamental purposes in theatrical creation has remained curiously muddled for more than thirty-five years, since the early 1920's, when Georges and Ludmilla Pitoeff brought Lenormand fame in Paris with their presentations of Le Temps est un Songe and Les Rates. Today it is fashionable in France and in the United States to dismiss Lenormand's drama in entirety as tendentious repetition of Freud's ideas. Recent evidence of this critical truism was provided in January, 1959, by Donald Malcolm, a New Yorker theatrical commentator, who poked fun at a production of The Failures (Lenormand's Les Rates in English adaptation) presented by David Ross at the Fourth Street Theatre in New York City.s 1. Gabriel Marcel, "Le Theatre de H.-R. Lenormand," Opera (Paris), February 21, 1951. 2. See, e.g., Andre Rouveyre, "Les Rates," Mercure de France, January 1, 1929, p. 158; and the same critic's comments in Mercure de France, March 1, 1930, pp. 408--412. 3. "It is pleasant to reflect that the discoveries of Sigmund Freud have improved the lives and fortunes not only of madmen but of playwrights as well. Immense new prospects were opened when it became possible for a playwright to exhibit his hero laughing, say, at the funeral of his grandmother, in the comfortable certainty that a few words about the Oedipus complex would restore the sympathies of the spectator and stifle the cenSure of the critics. It is true, of course, that the Freudian drama was not always the miracle of finish and plausibility that we so admire today. Years of experiment were necessary to achieve that refinement. And last week an interesting relic of those years was brought to light (and almost immediately 334 1960 INTERPRETATION OF LENORMAND'S ETHOS 335 One need hardly expect authoritative dramatic criticism from The New Yorker; what is pertinent to note is that Mr. Malcolm's blithe interpretation represents only a simplified instance of the nearly automatic attitude toward Lenormand's plays assumed by most contemporary critics. The equation, "Drama by Lenormand equals psychoanalytical theorizing" is implicitly accepted in advance, even though this identification is more deceptive than illuminating. Brooks Atkinson , usually a careful, perceptive observer of French plays on and off Broadway, also fell into this tempting snare when he reviewed The Failures for The New York Times on January 7, 1959. While admitting that "M. Lenormand's literary style is remarkable" and comparing the technique of his dramatic delineation to "the way Toulouse-Lautrec used his pencil or brush ... relaxed and limpid but also pithy," Atkinson found the play "soft and diffuse." Perhaps, he suggested, spectators in 1959 were no longer moved by The Failures because "we are more familiar now with M. Lenormand's psychoanalytical point of view than audiences were in 1923."4 Was Lenormand actually propounding textbook psychology or a psychoanalytical point of view in The Failures and throughout all his plays, as countless critics have inferred? Close examination of his dramas, considered in the light of the playwright's explanations of his ideals and practices...