Jacques Copeau

Early life and formative years

The child of a well-off middle-class family, the Paris-born Copeau was raised in Paris and attended the best schools. At the Lycée Condorcet, he was a talented but nonchalant student whose interest in theatre already consumed him. His first staged play, Brouillard du matin ("Morning Fog"), was presented on 27 March 1897 at the Nouveau-Théâtre as part of the festivities of the alumni association of the Lycée Condorcet. The former president of the French Republic, Casimir-Perier, and the playwright Georges de Porto-Riche both congratulated him on his work.

During the same period when Copeau was preparing his baccalauréat exams, he met Agnès Thomsen, a young Danish woman seven years his elder who was in Paris to perfect her French. They first met on 13 March 1896, and Copeau, then a seventeen-year-old high school student, quickly fell in love.

Eventually, Copeau passed his exams and began his studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne, but the theatre, extensive reading, and his courtship of Agnès left him little time to study and kept him from passing his exams for the licence, despite several attempts. Against his mother's wishes he married Agnès in June 1902 in Copenhagen. Their first child, Marie-Hélène (called Maiène), was born on 2 December 1902. In mid-April 1905 their second daughter, Hedwig, was born.

In April 1903, the young family made its way back to France where Copeau took up his duties as director of the family's factory in Raucourt in the Ardennes. He reinserted himself into a small literary coterie of friends, among them now, André Gide. While living in Angecourt in the Ardennes, Copeau frequently travelled to Paris where he made a name for himself as theatre critic-at-large for several publications. Back in Paris in 1905, Copeau continued his work as theatre critic, writing reviews of such plays as Ibsen's A Doll's House and Gabriele D’Annunzio's La Gioconda as well an overview of the structure of contemporary theatre published in L'Ermitage in February.

In July 1905, he took on a job at the Georges Petit Gallery where he assembled exhibits and wrote the catalogues. He stayed at the Petit Gallery until May 1909. During this period he continued to write theatre reviews and garnered a reputation as an astute and principled judge of the theatre arts. The sale of the factory in Raucourt gave him the financial independence that allowed him to pursue his literary activities. Copeau was one of the founders of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF),:61 a publication that was to become one of the leading arbiters of literary taste in France.

The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier

Copeau wanted to rid the Paris stage of the rank commercialism and tawdriness represented by the boulevard theatre. He wanted to move the theatre to a simpler style, freed from the ornamentation that obscured even the finest texts.

On the Left Bank, on the rue du Vieux-Colombier, he rented the old and dilapidated Athénée-Saint-Germain, an unlikely venue for the utopian ideals of Copeau, but its location at distance from the commercial theatre district gave a signal that he intended to pursue a new path. He named the theatre after the street so that it could be found more easily. In the spring of 1913, with the help of Charles Dullin in whose Montmartre apartment the auditions took place, Copeau started to assemble a company. Besides Dullin and Louis Jouvet, whom he took on principally as stage manager, he hired, among others, Roger Karl and Suzanne Bing.

During the summer of 1913, Copeau took his troupe to Le Limon, his country house in the Marne valley. The return of the troupe to Paris at the beginning of September, coincided with the publication in the NRF of Copeau's Un essai de rénovation Dramatique: le théâtre du Vieux-Colombier ("Essay on Dramatic Renewal: The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier"), in which he set forth the principles of this project: first, the choice of place far from the despised Right Bank boulevard in a district closer to schools and the center of artistic life where the new theatre might attract an audience of students, intellectuals and artists with a subscription system that would assure reasonable prices; second, a variety of productions—as many as three different productions a week, which would not only appeal to a wider public, but would offer the actors the opportunity to play several different sorts of roles in quick succession, maintaining the suppleness of their interpretive skills; third, a repertoire both classic and modern would mark the offerings of the company: the classic plays of Jean Racine and Molière—never put in modern dress to keep them à la mode—and the best plays of the previous thirty years. Copeau wanted to entice new playwrights, perhaps those who had despaired that the theatre would ever present works of quality. And, fourth, he held in disdain ham acting or cabotinage, so common in the commercial theatre.

He proposed eventually a school for young actors in order to create a new cohort of actors whose taste and instincts would remain above compromise. Lastly, he proposed a simple stage freed from the overworked scenic machinery that had become commonplace: "Pour l'œuvre nouvelle, qu'on nous laisse un plateau nu" ("For our new undertaking, just give us a bare platform"), he wrote (Registres I, p. 32).

During World War I

Planning for the next season began in earnest, but August 1914 brought the outbreak of the First World War. With the men of the troupe called up for duty, including Copeau, there remained no choice but to close the theatre. Remanded to Paris, he kept a thriving correspondence with Jouvet and Dullin about the theatre. With Jouvet, he pondered the various possibilities of stagecraft and how the stage at the Vieux-Colombier could be shaped to fit their ideas about a "nouvelle comédie"—a new comedy reminiscent of the Italian commedia dell'arte. From their discussion came the concept of the "loggia" or a unit set that would be developed and used during the New York years and at the Vieux-Colombier in Paris after the war.

At first, Copeau busied himself with an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale along with Suzanne Bing while news from the front worsened. A telegram in August 1915 from Edward Gordon Craig inviting him to Florence to discuss a possible staging of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Passion According to Saint Matthew was greeted with enthusiasm. A month in Florence discussing with Craig, himself an important reformer of the theatre, helped put many of his own ideas in perspective for Copeau and Craig did not always agree on the means to reach their goal of a theatre renewed.

Before the war Craig had founded a school at the Arena Goldoni where his students studied acting and stagecraft. For Craig any reform of the theatre had to begin with the training of the actor but he did not believe, as did Copeau, that it was possible. His idea of the übermarionnette, the super-marionnette, to replace the human actor completely was a product of the lack of faith in the possibility of educating the actor.

On his return trip to Paris, Copeau stopped in Geneva for further discussions on the theatre with the scene designer Adolphe Appia and with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the musician and founder of the Institut de gymnastique rhythmique ("The Institute of Eurhythmics"). After having observed several of Jaques-Dalcroze's classes, he saw in Dalcroze's methods useful means for training young actors in movement. Upon his return to Paris he and Bing immediately went about setting up training sessions for youngsters using Dalcroze's methods. They soon realized from these initial efforts that the method indeed had a lot to offer, but that they also had much to learn.

In New York

Several laudatory articles in the New York press preceded his arrival. In the New York Times for example, an article by Henri-Pierre Roche carried the title: "Arch-Rebel of the French Theatre Coming Here." Copeau's presence in New York City attracted the attention of many, but none more influential in regard to his goals than Otto H. Kahn, the philanthropist and patron of the arts. Kahn invited Copeau to dinner at his mansion on East 68th Street and then from the table to the theatre to see George Bernard Shaw's Getting Married.

The next day Copeau accompanied Mrs. Kahn to the Metropolitan Museum. Sufficiently impressed by what he learned from Copeau and from others, on 19 February Kahn offered to Copeau the directorship of what was known as the Théâtre Français, the French-language theatre that had been languishing under the directorship of Etienne Bonheur. He offered to Copeau the Bijou Theatre, a new house that opened in April 1917.

Copeau chose rather an older theatre, the Garrick Theatre on West 35th Street which housed the Théâtre Français, because he felt that with the proper renovations, among other considerations, it would better suit the unit set he had conceived with Jouvet. For the renovations, he hired a young Czech architect, Antonin Raymond, whose modernist concepts coincided well with his ideas of stagecraft. From March through April he delivered some dozen lectures on topics such as Dramatic Art and the theatre Industry, The Renewal of Stagecraft, and The Spirit in the Little Theatres.

When the inauguration of the Théâtre Français de New York took place at the Metropolitan Opera on 17 May 1917, Copeau had negotiated a generous contract with Otto Kahn and the board of directors and was ready to return to Paris with a letter of credit for $18,000 to cover the costs of preparation for the season in New York City.

The summer in Paris proved to be a busy one: the repertoire for the coming season needed to be chosen; costumes, assembled; and his troupe, reconstituted. The latter proved a daunting task. Jouvet was finally given leave from his duties at the Front, but the authorities refused to release Dullin. Jouvet constructed a model set, given the dimensions of the stage area at the Garrick while in New York the young Antonin Raymond battled with the Shubert brothers and their architect over the renovations to the theatre.

The Paris years: 1920–1924

The theatre and the School are one and the same thing.—Notebook of Suzanne Bing

Upon his return to Paris, Copeau needed a period of rest and reflection, but certain pressing tasks demanded his time. He finished the adaptation of The Winter's Tale, which would be the first offering when the theatre reopened in January 1920, and with Jouvet he oversaw the renovations to the stage and the lighting at the Vieux-Colombier. A unit set compatible with the dimensions of the stage area and the installation of an innovative lighting system controlled from backstage—baptized jouvets—were installed. More important in the eyes of Copeau, a school of dramatic arts remained essential if he was to realize the renewal of the theatre that had been his dream for over a decade.

The theatre opened its doors on 9 February 1920 with The Winter's Tale on the renovated stage. The almost bare stage and the gray walls in the background puzzled critics and the public alike. The next offerings, Charles Vildrac's Le Paquebot Tenacity (The Steamboat Tenacity) and Prosper Mérimée's Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement elicited both critical and popular favor. The story of two young men, Ségard and Bastien, waiting for the S.S. Tenacity with its love interest—Ségard runs off with a barmaid, Thérèse, to live out his life in France and its sense of both adventure and loss: Bastien leaves for Canada—was more readily acceptable.

By the end of the season, which ended with La Fontaine's La Coupe Enchantée ("The Enchanted Goblet"), a holdover from New York, the company had also performed Georges Duhamel's L'Oeuvre des athlètes ("The Athlete's Work""), Jules Romains's Cromedeyre-le-Vieil, and Emile Mazoud's La Folle Journée ("What a Crazy Day"), works by contemporary writers newly initiated into the theatre. After two years in New York, this was a company of proven theatrical skills in plays from various eras and of diverse styles.

By the end of February auditions were being held for the "Classes at the Vieux-Colombier", an undertaking Copeau asked Suzanne Bing to organize. Some of the students worked already for the Vieux-Colombier, others were students of actors at the Comédie-Française, but in all a rather mixed group with widely different backgrounds. The classes, which took place in a room in the courtyard behind the theatre, were devoted to close readings of texts with emphasis not only on the meaning but the rhythms as well as physical exercises and improvisations. The sessions ended in June with a charade presented before Copeau and a few friends of the Vieux-Colombier which le patron found quite satisfying (Registres VI, p. 225).

The Burgundy adventure: the "Copiaus"

The word "school" is no longer valid from that time on.—Suzanne Bing (Registres VI, p. 416)

In October, 1924, Copeau and his company of young enthusiasts set up shop in what they called ironically the "Château de Morteuil" in a village some seven miles from Beaune. In effect Copeau at first tried to re-establish the school of the Vieux-Colombier in this new context. But, lacking funds, he needed to lecture frequently to pay expenses. He decided to mount two plays before a group of industrialists in Lille in January 1925 in order to secure financial backing for the troupe with a greatly reduced number of plays and a new plan of attack: "four plays a year, eight months of preparation, four months of stagings, one month in Paris and three months in the provinces and abroad" (Journal II, 219).

Copeau's request for funds and the plays failed to garner the needed financial support and he continued his lectures both in France and Belgium. At this point both actors and apprentices were given their freedom to leave and, given his reduced financial status, he devised a new approach.

After the departure of some of the student actors and teachers, Copeau began work with his reduced troupe on the "New Comedy", an attempt to reproduce the Italian commedia dell'arte with masks and an acting style based on improvisation. He composed a text, Le Veuf (The Widower), that the actors began to rehearse on a simple platform in the main hall at Morteuil. The residents of the surrounding villages, now accustomed to the fanciful lives of the actors, their costumes and their parading through their towns, baptized them les Copiaus.

Starting in May 1925, the Copiaus performed plays by Molière as well as those written expressly for them by Copeau, using masks of their own invention. Their presentations were preceded by a parade of the entire troupe, accompanied by drums, horns and colorful banners. They performed on a bare platform in village squares or whatever indoor space they could find. Copeau continued his work with this troupe as best he could, despite his heavy schedule of readings and lectures. But given their inventiveness and creativity, his control over the troupe lessened.

Later life

In 1933 Copeau mounted a production of The Mystery of Saint Uliva, in the cloister of the Santa Croce in Florence and in 1935 Savonarola, on the central square of Florence. In Paris, he directed an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing and Molière's Le Misanthrope at the Comédie-Française in 1936. In 1937, again at the Comédie-Française, he directed Jean Racine's Bajazet, followed in 1938 by Le Testement du Père Leleu, a reprise of Roger Martin du Gard's play from the days of the Vieux-Colombier.

In 1940, Copeau was named Provisionary Administrator of the Comédie-Française, where he staged Pierre Corneilles Le Cid, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Mérimée's Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement. Unable to follow the orders of the German occupiers, he resigned his position in March 1941 and withdrew to his home in Pernand-Vergelesses. Le Miracle du pain doré ("The Miracle of the Golden Bread"), his own work, was staged at the Hospices de Beaune in 1943 and the following year, his play about Saint Francis of Assisi, Le Petit Pauvre (The Poor Little One) was published.

Death

Copeau died at the Hospices de Beaune on 20 October 1949. He and his wife are buried at the church graveyard in Pernand-Vergelesses.