Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend by Gerda Taranow (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 335 SARAH BERNHARDT: THE ART WITHIN THE LEGEND, by Gerda Taranow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. 287 pp., with 16 pp. of illustrations. $10.00 Whether it is created by press agents or by the artist herself, a legend is of great value to a theater artist from the point of view of challenging immediate contemporary interest, but in the long run it often becomes a force for distortion. In the case of Sarah Bernhardt, indisputably the most famous actress of her time, the legend was that of an almost irresponsible eccentric and grande amoureuse. Some of it was based on fact, for the lady was not always strictly conventional in her behavior, but it was all shot through with gross distortions and exaggerations, and as time went on, it tended increasingly to obscure the view of a very great creative artist as most people saw her. Since she knew as well as we do that most theater-goers are much more interested in personality (especially when it has a flavor of the disreputable about it) than they are in art, Sarah must, in her heyday, have come to accept all this more or less philosophically, but I think she would be pleased that Professor Taranow has now gone back of both the legend and the personality to set down on paper the fullest description that has yet been achieved of just what she did on the stage, how and why she did it, and (so far as it can be discovered), what she herself thought about it. Surviving films and phonograph records (all carefully listed and described ) have been of great help here (a re..·recording and re-publication on LP's of all Sarah's old records is a crying need), but it is surprising how much can be learned from contemporary commentaries and reviews if one only has the patience which our author has manifested to dig them out. Her four principal chapters deal with "Voice," "Pantomime," "Gesture and Spectacle," and "Roles and Repertoire," and under each heading she gives us, if not everything we could wish to know, at least much more than we ever knew before. Professor Taranow has not idealized Sarah Bernhardt. She was far from being a convincing theorist in theatrical matters, and she employed a mixture of styles. She opposed the view of Coquelin and his great precedessors that the actor should always stand outside his creation, but she was far indeed from "living" her roles. Perhaps she knew, or sensed, that her public wished to believe that she did this, coming within an inch of really dying in her death scenes and all the other nonsense that has been written about her. But whatever else she mayor may not have known or believed, Sarah Bernhardt always knew exactly what she was doing on the stage, and she knew, too, just how she was going to do it tonight and how she must repeat that effect tomorrow afternoon and again tomorrow night. Particularly interesting is Professor Taranow's account of how she handled her voice. It was the most beautiful speaking voice any of us have ever heard in a theater; it is hard to remember that it was also a comparatively small voice and that its owner had to take infinite pains to make it yield the effects she secured. Finally, I am much interested in Professor Taranow's treatment of Sarah Bernhardt's famous seductiveness. Despite popular impressions, she was not 336 BOOK REVIEWS really "sexy" as sexuality went on the French stage. She excelled in the portrayal of Magdalenes, but she never gave a very effective performance as a really "bad" woman. Vulgarity lay outside her range, and all her best work was steeped in poetry. In the last analysis, the main constituents of her seductiveness seem to have been intense femininity, a super-sensitive responsiveness, and great womanly charm. EDWARD WAGENKNECHT Boston University L'EXPRESSIONISME DANS LE THEATRE EUROPEEN, Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris, 1971. 407 pp. After an eclipse of some thirty years, Expressionism has lately been drawing a good deal of attention. Complex, contradictory and diverse, it affected all the...