Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: le théâtre et ses imaginaires ed. by Pierre Glaudes, and Bertrand Vibert (review)

Distinguished guests at the salon of Countess Kalergis-Muchanoff in Munich during July 1869 were greatly surprised when the French writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam stopped reading from his play, La Révolte, loosened his trousers, and clambered on to a piano. Although he would later attribute his actions to palpitations, this incident captures Villiers’s unorthodox conduct as a writer, his tendency to sabotage his own career, and the theatricality that permeated his life. An inveterate performer of his own works, he was rarely satisfied with actors’ renditions and he constantly complained about the inadequate efforts of theatres and their companies on those rare occasions that his works made it to the stage. For Villiers did not enjoy much success as a dramatist. La Révolte (1870) received only five performances and the play for which he is now best known, Axël (1885–86; 1890), was staged at the Théâtre de la Gaîté only in 1894 — after his death. One reason why Villiers’s work was problematic for contemporaries is that his plays are difficult to categorize. Contributors to this volume of essays reflect this in the diverse approaches they adopt. Geneviève Jolly provides a meticulous linguistic analysis of Villier’s ‘polyphonic’ stage directions, and Lydie Parisse argues, citing Beckett, that the stripped-back style of La Révolte anticipates the conditions of modern theatre. In contrast, Guy Ducrey and Florence Naugrette trace the influence of popular Romantic dramas by Sardou, Rostand, and Hugo throughout Villiers’s theatrical works, and Pascale Alexandre-Bergues suggests that the seemingly avant-garde dramaturgy of Le Nouveau Monde (1880) is in fact indebted to the conventions of bourgeois theatre. One achievement of the volume, then, is in drawing together these different perspectives to convey the complex variety within Villiers’s drama. But the volume also encompasses his nondramatic writings. In their own contributions, Glaudes and Vibert examine the figure of the actress and the demi-monde in the Contes cruels (1883); Anne Pellois reviews allusions to actors and the theatre across his work; and Matthew Sandefer outlines a theatrical quality throughout Villiers’s œuvre, comparable to the writer’s public antics. The philosophical, occult, and theological sources of this theatricality, Sandefer suggests, point to deep epistemological and ontological uncertainties about identity. While such formal and philosophical difficulty proved too much for Villiers’s contemporaries, history has been kinder to him: Mireille Losco-Lena shows how the Gaîté production of Axël combined performance with recitation and a broader celebration of Villiers’s achievement. Laure Darcq outlines Joséphin Péladan’s obsession with the same play. Although he felt Axël was a dramatic failure, Péladan discovered in it a system of symbolic allusions to Rosicrucian mysticism and, between 1908 and 1914, assembled his own, shorter version to draw this out. The results are transcribed in full by Darcq and Sophie Lucet. Though of historical value, Péladan’s text is not notable for its literary qualities but it sheds interesting light on Villiers’s varied reception within this engaging and diverse collection.