La Mise en scène au XVIIIe siècle by Pierre Peyronnet (review)

Reviews 363 ception which can distinguish between theatricality and chicanery, pre­ tense and pretentiousness, mysticism and madness, apotheosis and apoplexy, sensation and sensationalism, absurdism and absurdity, per­ versity and perversion, introspection and introversion, symbolism and symbolizers, poets and poetasters, art and artifice. Such distinctions are not plentiful here. Rather, we are urged to be agog with a gag. Writeralchemists boil the brew of the collective unconscious, seasoned with sententiousness, symbols, sex, sadism, ceremony, and sensation. Director circus-masters muster a medley of multi-media ephemera. Actors engage in orgiastic self-indulgence. Alchemical vapors billow from the stage, filling the auditorium where the audience sits squinting, bewildered at the supposed transmutation of its collective soul, hoping to feel a trifle elite in the ethos of the avant-garde. Surely without genius and an acute critical sensibility the alchemy of the Marvelous may turn gold into lead. CHARLES A. BERST University of California, Los Angeles Pierre Peyronnet. La Mise en scène au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1974. Pp. 214 + 7 leaves of plates. 48 Francs (approx. $10). Contemporary critical works on French dramatic literature of the 1700’s and especially on its transposition from page to stage are rare. Scholarly interest in this period of literary arts in France concentrates for the most part on the “literature of ideas” and the development of the “novel”: Rousseau’s political theories, Voltaire’s philosophic tales, Laclos’ narrative techniques, etc. However, a welcome contribution to the area of French Enlightenment studies and the status of its theatrical arts in particular and to the history of world theatre in general is Pierre Peyronnet’s examination of the complex development of the mise-ensc ène in eighteenth-century France. This fertile terrain has long been neglected while histories of French theatre continuously survey the common ground of Molière’s literary progeny, Voltaire’s poetics, Mari­ vaux’s theatre and Diderot’s theories. In filling this lacuna Peyronnet’s book becomes a chronological companion piece to S. W. DeierkaufHosboer ’s Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre français: 16001657 (Paris: Droz 1933; Nizet, 1960) and M. A. Allevy’s La Mise en scène en France dans la première moitié du XIX siècle (Paris: Droz, 1938). In his “Introduction” the author informs his reader that Dumas père’s Henri HI et sa cour (1829) is acknowledged as the first piece in the French dramatic repertory in which detailed prescriptions for its mount­ ing are included. Peyronnet observes, however, that the dramatists of the Romantic period did not come upon the concepts of a fully conceived mise-en-scène as if springing from spontaneous generation. The seeds of French stagecraft were germinating in the “Century of Light,” his par­ ticular field of interest. It is the author’s goal to isolate the various 364 Comparative Drama components of the French mise-en-scène during these embryonic years, to identify the schools of thought and to chart the theatricalization of these ideas. From a general attitude of laissez-faire with respect to the performance of their works in the early 1700’s, dramatic writers of the end of the century are shown to take special interest in the production of them. This change of emphasis was also encouraged by the demands of a critical public which was being transformed from a “listener” of dramatic poetry to a “spectator” of drama. Peyronnet’s book is divided into three major parts: “Le Souci d’unité” (“The Concern for Unity”); “Les Obstacles”; and “Les Transforma­ tions.” This structuring reflects an approach commonly used in the exposition of Enlightenment attitudes toward politics, religion and philosophy. Observation and critical opinion of traditional models comprise a first step in this method. Proposed changes, through the renovation of old forms, are shown to be opposed by the forces of con­ servatism and indifference. A final consideration in a study of this process of evolution, so accentuated in eighteenth-century France, is innovation brought about in the end by the visionary efforts of the xathor-philosophe. In Part I, Peyronnet depicts the poet/writer of dramatic literature of the early years of the...