Historical Dictionary of French Theater by Edward Forman, and: Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic by Helen Solterer (review)

These two books of French theatre history—one a wide-ranging reference work and the other a close investigation of a specific endeavor and its long-term repercussions—treat both medieval and twentieth-century theatrical manifestations. Beyond coverage that includes those distinct historical eras, the two books have little in common. Yet both make important contributions to understanding a national theatre that is, as Historical Dictionary series editor Jon Woronoff acknowledges in his foreword, second only to the English tradition in terms of world theatre. He adds that "French theater has never been exceeded . . . in its passion" (ix).

That passion surfaces on virtually every page of Helen Solterer's Medieval Roles for Modern Times, both in her diligence at exploring all aspects of a little-known story and in the passions driving the major figures of that story. Gustave Cohen (1879-1958) is a name well known to scholars of French literature but, as Solterer's study demonstrates, unjustly ignored by theatre historians. Cohen's messianic devotion to staging medieval plays with student actors—the Théophiliens, a company Cohen founded and named for their first production, Le miracle de Théophile, by the thirteenth-century minstrel Rutebeuf—gratified audiences hungry for reaffirmation of French values and patrimony in the wake of the Great War. By the 1930s, surprisingly, the Middle Ages had become ardently contested territory for a French citizenry ideologically torn between socialism and conservatism.

Cohen had already published major books on medieval French religious drama as early as 1906. But it was as a lieutenant on the battlefield in the Great War that the Jewish, Belgian-born Cohen committed himself heart and soul to being French, through the war wounds he suffered for France and by embracing a medieval concept of patriotism bound up with religion. Not until 1943 did he go through with his long-desired conversion to Catholicism, a step delayed by various complications attending a public figure after he attained the prestigious position of chair of French medieval literature at the Sorbonne in 1932.

In founding Les théophiliens in 1933, Cohen was also partly motivated by " 'la rage à faire vivant,' the passionate need to make something come alive" (23). Staging medieval dramas was a way of embodying Frenchness. In the original company, a young Syrian Jewish actor named Moussa Abadi (1908-97) played Salatin in Le miracle de Théophile and went on to play the devil in Le jeu d'Adam et Eve and Judas Iscariot in Le mystère de la Passion. Solterer contends that it was the role-playing that Moussa Abadi learned with the Théophiliens that enabled him to adopt the persona of Monsieur Marcel in Nice in 1942 and to save more than two hundred Jewish children from Nazi-ordered deportations. He used skills acquired under Cohen to coach the children at role-playing new personae so that they could be placed in non-Jewish homes for safety.

Medieval Roles for Modern Times is a compelling story that spans the first half of the twentieth century up to the disbanding of Les théophiliens in 1952, when the company had a track record of eleven productions and more than five hundred performances. The study is supported by forty halftone illustrations and copious documentation in footnotes that often occupy a third of the page. While the book focuses on the one amateur company, its contextual framing draws in such major figures as Nikolai Evreinov, Jacques Copeau, Charles Péguy, and Louis Jouvet. Helen Solterer has given us an important book for understanding French cultural vicissitudes in the twentieth century.

There is little overlap between Solterer's and Forman's work. Copeau and Jouvet get...