Yeats and the French Drama

YEATS AND THE FRENCH DRAMA THERE IS A FITNESS in considering Yeats and the French drama at this particular moment in the history of the theater. For it is only now, more than fifty years after he had explored its possibilities, that the English speaking theater has become fully aware of the drama of ritual, is applauding Beckett and hastening to sit at the feet of Artaud. The idea of a theater of cruelty, working through symbols and violent physical effects, was completely realised by Yeats in such plays as A Full Moon in March (1935) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939).1 He anticipated some of Beckett's central themes, perfected in a play like Purgatory (1939) a dramatic form which ideally reflects them, and must indeed, through his own work and the exceptionally rich corpus of his dramatic theory, have stimulated a good deal of Beckett's thinking about drama. There has in fact been an interesting interplay of ideas between Yeats and the French. He is now beginning, notably through Beckett, to have his effect on French drama, having in his turn absorbed some of its elements during its symbolist phase of the eighteennineties and early twentieth century. From 1894, when he saw Villiers de l'Isle Adam's Axel in Paris, Yeats attended a great. many performances of French plays, either in the original, in Paris or elsewhere, or in English translations. His taste in these as in other matters was eclectic. He recognised at once the kind of play which had something to offer him, distinguishing, for instance, among the plays of Claudel with fastidious exactness, finding him at times too "deliberate," at others, as in L'Annonce Faite a Marie, extremely moving. He could find elements of the dramatic style to which he was aspiring in works as different as Axel, his "sacred book" and Peguy's Le MysMre de la charite de Jeanne d'Arc. He admired some aspects of Maeterlinck's work, the power of his silences, for instance, while holding a low opinion of much of his drama: he attended Lugne Poe's English production of Monna Vanna, less to see the play, from which he expected little, than the method of performance. 1 In 1934 he was writing to Edmund Dulac apropos of A Full Moon in March "I have been working at something opposed to the clear, bright, dry air of your genius. I do not understand why this blood symbolism laid hold upon me but I must work it out." The Letters of w. B. Yeats, ed. A. Wade (Hart. Davis, 1954), p. 830 • 382 1966 YEATS AND THE FRENCH DRAMA 383 It frequently happened that he enriched his imaginative experience by assimilating styles of production and acting rather than the matter of the works being performed. He attached small dramatic value to Alfred Jarry's Ubu Rai, which he saw in Paris in 1896, finding it superficial and self-conscious, but he learned something about theatrical methods of using symbols from the performance, a lesson he could not have learned from Axel, where the symbolism is so much more literary. Yeats was always prepared to revaluate on the strength of seeing a work in performance; when he saw an English production of L'Annonce faite a Marie in 1917 he recognised for the first time the implausibility of the ending: "The old man who is so serene after all the tragedy is fine when one reads it, but a fool when one sees it."2 So he was able when watching A.E.'s Deirdre, a play unremarkable in itself, to conceive a notion o£~ a new dramatic style simply by observing the stillness of the actors, or when seeing Sara Bernhardt and de Max in Phedre to single out from the whole virtuoso performance the feature relevant to his own interests, their periods of striking immobility. What he assimilated and what he rejected was determined by the concept of an ideal drama which was slowly maturing in his mind during these years. He wrote in 1904 of tragedy as a "moment of intense life" which should be rendered in the barest terms: "An action is taken...