Strindberg, Antoine and Lugné-Poë: A Study in Cross-Purposes

Strindberg, Antoine and Lugne-Poe: A Study in Cross-Purposes LAURENCE SENELICK • "A PLAY OF MINE HAD BEEN PRODUCED AT A PARIS THEATRE, the dream of all contemporary authors in my country, but one which I alone had realized. But now the theatre was repellent, as in everything that one has attained....,,1 So wrote Strindberg in later years, when the glamor of his Parisian success had tarnished. But the productions of his plays staged by the Theatre Libre and the Theatre de l'Oeuvre between 1889 and 1894 are cited in most textbooks of drama as the breakthrough that won the Swedish playwright the success and publicity that he deserved. Antoine and Lugne-Poe, their directors, are consistently extolled as daring innovators who championed the cause of unappreciated genius and whose productions perfectly embodied what Strindberg had in mind. The textbooks implicitly suggest that the road was now clear for Strindberg's triumphal chariot to travel unimpeded from one succes d'estime to the next, and that owing to the farsightedness of French experimental theatre, his place in world drama was henceforth assured. Such a picture distorts the less happy truth of the situation. No one's dealings with Strindberg were free of frustration and misunderstanding, and this was the case with both Antoine and Lugne-Poe, who were more concerned with the advancement of their stagecraft than the launching of an alien talent. Their primary interest, in which literary considerations played little part, was the ephemera of the green-room. Nor did the Parisian public hoist the hero to their shoulders and bear him off in the face of Swedish animosity and Continental apathy. As Maurice Gravier has pointed out, "too much importance should not be given to these exceptional performances. Strindberg made a sensation more as a woman-hater and alchemist, than as playwright, and never during his lifetime did he succeed in gaining the favors of Parisian audiences.,,2 After Lugne-Poe's production of Creditors closed in 391 392 LAURENCE SENELICK 1894, no Strindberg play saw the light of a Parisian stage for twenty-seven years. The impetus for these first Parisian performances came from Strindberg himself. In 1888, The Father appeared as Le Pere, "traduit de l'auteur,,3 and prefaced by a letter from Emile Zola. Zola's letter, the flattering result of perSistent opinion-gleaning by Strindberg,4 was considered by the Swedish playwright a worthy reference and so he applied to Andre Antoine for production of the play. Antoine, a former employee of the Gas Company, had already made himself a reputation with his naturalistic staging of comedies rosses and tranches de vie, treating taboo subjects and enhancing the illusion of reality with sides of beef and other such attributes of "real life." But perhaps he felt that the pathology of the characters in Le Pere was not clinical enough for his purposes; at any rate, as Strindberg later bitterly remarked to Lugne-Poe, Antoine read the play and "he buried it."s Some of Strindberg's disappointment may be reflected in On Modern Dramq and the Modern Theatre (1889), with its scorn of photographic naturalism, but by 1892, he was even more in need of a non-Scandinavian audience. The legal prosecution of his collection of short-stories, Gi[tas (Marriage or Wedding-Cake), had not only allied the Swedish managers against him, but was endangering his chances for German production. Meanwhile, Antoine, who had been enjoying a succes de scandale with his performances of Ibsen, required fresh material to jolt the jaded sensibilities of his audience, who were gradually growing inured to his subscription season of shockers. Years later, he frankly admitted, "after Ibsen ... I looked around a good deal, always among foreign writers, for other authors capable of sustaining the interest and curiosity of the literary youth, and soon I was to present a quaint pby: Miss Julie. ..."6 This "curious" play had just been translated by the authorized Charles Bigault de Casanove, and was introduced to Antoine by the man most responsible for Strindberg's being staged in France Georges Loiseau. Earlier that year, Loiseau, a mediocre playwright and critic for Le Jour, mentioned to his friend...