Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon by Susan McCready (review)

chapitre à l’autre et de plusieurs fautes de frappe, le lecteur découvrira dans ce livre des pistes de lecture originales. Ripon College (WI) Dominique Poncelet McCready, Susan. Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon. Lanham: Lexington, 2016. ISBN 9781 -4985-2278-6. Pp. xviii + 157. During the interwar years in France, the role of theater director assumed its modern status: that of creator, separate from the text. Theater reformers of the time— mainly director Jacques Copeau, along with the association of art theater directors Charles Dullin, Gaston Baty, Georges Pitoëff, and Louis Jouvet, known as the Cartel des quatre—ushered in a new kind of production characterized by abstraction and fluidity in presentation and more corporeal methods in actor training. Susan McCready approaches this subject in a novel and effective way. In charting the rise of the director in the context of developing theatrical modernism and of wider societal changes during these years of unrest, she limits her examination of play productions to classic repertory (which, according to her research, constituted 28% of works produced) rather than including shows based on contemporary works.She is thus able to compare mises-en-scène during the interwar period with the well-documented production histories of individual classics. The author’s research of French sources contemporary with the shows, including reviews and theoretical writings along with primary documents from the productions, is impressive and is a key feature of her study. McCready demonstrates how the directors’ choice of repertory, part of the modernist aesthetic, shaped the theatrical canon going forward. In individual chapters she describes the staging of the “new” Molière—his farces rather than his comedies, as was the case traditionally; the appearance of a“purified, Racinified”Shakespeare (89); and an updated take on the Romantics, moving away from Hugo and Dumas to the more contemporary-feeling Musset and Mérimée. McCready’s main method is to contrast productions by Copeau and the Cartel with those of the Comédie-Française, guardian of the traditional théâtre classique, seen as the epitome of French culture. A most fascinating aspect of McCready’s book is her exploration of terms such as “traditional,” “French,” and “culture” as they were being debated in interwar France itself, and the role of theater in that discussion. She shows how individual productions were used politically by spectators and critics of the warring right and left, in spite of the fact that the shows were “apolitical or unclear in their political import” (15). McCready explains how, at the same time as the new directors were accused by conservative critics of going against tradition (the academic traditions of French classical theater), Copeau and members of the Cartel, themselves, invoked tradition (théâtre populaire, commedia dell’arte, return to the text) through their theories and 260 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 Reviews 261 methods. Rather than a left/right political divide, she notes a generational, predominantly aesthetic one: Copeau and the Cartel “conquered” the Comédie-Française, all but Baty producing shows there by the later 1930s. It was then the avant-garde directors who, in turn, challenged the modernists. McCready’s insightful and highly readable study made me think about how classic repertory has continued—to the present—to be a site of contestation and creation in French theater; and how questions of tradition and national cultural identity dominate our own times, in theater and beyond. Western Michigan University Cynthia Running-Johnson Mulryan, Michael, and Denis Grélé, eds. Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. ISBN 978-1-61148-770-1. Pp. 132. The authors of this edited volume invite readers to consider a variety of eighteenthcentury escape tales, both historical and literary. These stories differ in many respects: chronology, gender, and the conditions of escape all distinguish the tales presented here. Yet, as the title suggests, the tension “between fact and fiction” provides a link between them. Each author emphasizes the way in which the escape tales they analyze reflected, as well as shaped, changing notions of the individual and his or her relationship to authority in eighteenth-century...