Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies

5. The Work of Acting

132 Chapter 5 The Work of Acting By all accounts,Madame Marion’s debut at the municipal theater of Lille in the spring of 1774 was a disaster. As the actress acknowledged, while she performed the role of Cleopatra in Pierre Corneille ’s Rodogune, she could barely deliver her lines over heckling from the crowd. Nonetheless, she completed every last syllable: “I don’t say perform, this would have been impossible for me.”1 Indeed, one Lille theater enthusiast reported that she “bombed like I’ve never seen.”2 Her director Raparlier blamed the actress for her inability to win over the audience,and he used the incident to fire her just weeks into her yearlong contract. Marion, in contrast , attributed the crowd’s hostility to a cabal on behalf of a rival actress— a woman favored by soldiers of the local garrison—with whom she was double cast. Marion protested that the director had no right to punish her for the caprice of the crowd. “The truth,” she argued, “is that I have not broken any of the clauses of my contract,” adding that “if it were necessary for him to fire all [the actors] who met with displeasure here without meriting it, I would defy him to run a theater.”3 Who was in the right, the actress performing (if poorly) the roles for which she had been hired,or the director heeding the will of the public? Marion, suddenly finding herself alone and unemployed in a new city, took her case to France’s royal dramatic theater, the Comédie–Française. THE WORK OF ACTING 133 When Madame Marion signed the contract to work for the director of the Lille troupe, she, like hundreds of other actors and actresses, sought to benefit from the vogue for theater that was taking hold in French cities in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the mid-1770s, we have seen, only a minority of actors and actresses still joined the intimate, collectively run troupes that had defined professional theater in France from the 1580s through the early eighteenth century. Cooperative,profit-sharing companies on the model of the Comédie-Française had already been largely replaced by companies led by directors who took control of administrative and financial affairs. When accepting a position as a pensionnaire in such a troupe, Marion agreed, among other things, to perform a set of roles that included queens, noble mothers, and characters as the director required, to attend all rehearsals and meetings on time, and to provide her own costumes for the annual season. For her efforts she was to be paid a salary of two thousand livres a year, an amount that both she and the King’s Players felt was rather low for such an important set of supporting roles. As a new hierarchical division of labor took shape between directors and their actors, disagreements arose concerning the relative rights and responsibilities of the employer and the employee. Under this new labor regime, the traditional means of settling conflicts, through discussion in a company assembly and voting among troupe members, was no longer practical. Since provincial actors and directors lacked the corporate code or jury of masters that guilds typically used to set standards and resolve labor disputes, contentious issues were often brought before the Comédie-Française. As growing numbers of directors and actors presented their questions and disputes to the King’s Players, they drew the royal company into an active role overseeing the development of France’s theater industry. In her letter to the royal actors, Madame Marion explained that she had hesitated before taking the step of asking for their intervention: “I have not dared until now to address you to ask you to do for me a service of the greatest importance; but my husband inspires me to be more bold in writing to me from Berlin that I can do so with confidence, and that the pleasure that you take in obliging [actors] would gladly extend even to me.”4 Her husband was correct. Over the course of the eighteenth century, hundreds of performers and directors turned to the King’s Players in Paris for information , advice, and arbitration of their conflicts. The Comédie-Française recorded nearly two hundred such petitions from French theater professionals working in the provinces, the colonies, and abroad. Together with the company’s responses, these form a unique resource for scholars.5 To this...