Alexandre Dumas's Kean: An Adaptation by Jean-Paul Sartre

Alexandre Dumas's Kean: An Adaptation by Jean-Paul Sartre LOUISE FIBER LUCE On August 31, 1836, Alexandre Dumas brought to the Paris theatergoer Kean, a play based on the life of his contemporary, the celebrated British actor Edmund Kean. Just over a century later the title Kean would reappear in Paris. This time it would be on the playbill of the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Jean-Paul Sartre's adaptation of the Dumas text. The date is now November '4, 1953· Confronted by these two dates and texts, one asks what drew Sartre to this particular Dumas piece? Sartre had, after all, already established his genius for writing for the stage: Huis Clos, Le Diable el Ie bon Dieu and La PUlain respeclueuse had preceded Keall; Les Sequeslres d'Allona would follow. Why would Sartre then (not unlike Camus, Brecht, and Faulkner, for that matter) submit to the constraints inherent in adaptations - to plots previously defined, to characters already playing out their lives? From a historical perspective, one asks as well if the changes in the Sartre adaptation (for in fact there are changes) occur primarily because of evolution in the art of representation? Is it a case of Romantic discourse ceding to new aesthetic tastes, or, rather, do new codes appear in the Sartre text for other reasons, Sartrean reasons, Sartrean relationships played out in dramatic space? Finally - and this is a most serious question - how does one separate Sartre's voice from the voice of Dumas? To respond to these questions, I shall limit my discussion to that one particular subtext of the play where the author's voice is heard unequivocally, that is to say, to the staging notations, including title and roster ofcharacters. In other words, I shall limit myself to what Anne Ubersfeld identifies, in order to achieve the broadest possible referent, as the didascalic subtext. I Indeed, beyond an analysis of the problematic posed by the Kean adaptation, a second pUIpose of this study will be to remind the reader that the didascalic subtext itself can be a significant secondary discourse. Underlying the principal narrative, it LOUISE FIBER LUCE can bring unexpected insights and remind the reader that the staging notations alone belong solely to the dramatist. Outside that space, the playwright's voice falls silent. Instead, one finds dialogue, which by its very nature excludes the authorial subject: actors speak to other actors, characters speak to other characters, and all of these speak to the public. This study, then, in retrieving the authorial subject, will attempt to see in what manner that voice reconstructs the primary narratives ofthe two works. A comparative reading ofthe didascalic subtexts, however, will reveal more than moments of similarity and divergence between Sartre's and Dumas's versions of Kean; the reader will uncover significant ideological shifts which have occurred in the span of a hundred years. Turning to the 1836 work, one recognizes that Dumas's Kean places us historically in the very midst of Romantic theater. It is the world of Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du paradis, of the crowds on the Boulevard du Crime and in the Theatre des Funambules, of the mime Deburau and the inspired actor Frederick Lemaitre, "debraille, eloquent, ... spirituel, cynique et genial."2 Because Lemaitre wants to celebrate Edmund Kean's legacy on stage, he commissions a first scenario ofthe English actor's life from Frederic de Courcy and Theaulon de Saint Lambert, two secondary, yet prolific writers of the period. Dissatisfied with their work, Lemailre next passes the scenario on to Dumas. Dumas in turn breathes his own vitality into the script, rearranging scenes, recasting dialogue, and signing his name only to the finished work.3 In content, the 1836 play follows the expected conventions of the period. One finds the stockcharacters of melodrama, from the delicate ingenue and the villainous tutor to the flamboyant yet gentlemanly lover of the countess. So, too, there are the Romantic trappings ofsecret doors and masked strangers, and the rich local color of the workers' taverns and the theater itself, with its dressing rooms and wings, its balcony and parterre. The Romantic aesthetic is also seen in the British setting, with enough...