La Vie de André Antoine

More than once here have we pointed out the real true fact the many theatrical forms that owe their origins all or in part to France: melodrama, farce, vaudeville, burlesque, revues, even the Grand Guignol. By contrast, the advent of theatrical realism seems a bit muddier as to source. The movement seems to have been international in character, spawned largely in reaction to great leaps in science during the 19th century such as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, the improvements in data collection that made sociology possible, the dawn of the new discipline of psychology, and the birth of the recording arts including photography. That said, France was among the leaders here as well.

Émile Zola, while primarily a novelist and journalist, was also the spiritual father of French realism in the theatre, though its chief facilitator was André Antoine (1858-1943). Antoine was uniquely endowed to bring about change in the theatre of his day because he was an outsider, unaffiliated with official institutions like the Paris Conservatory or the Comédie-Française. Instead, he was a worker, a clerk at the gas company. Rejected in his bid to produce his adaptation of a Zola novel by an amateur drama troupe, he founded his own professional one, the Théâtre Libre (or Free Theatre), in 1887. 

This was the age when most dramatic theatre was conventional and heightened, realizing on stylized gesture and similar artificial techniques for their effects. Antoine’s revolution was to bring every element, the script, the set, and the acting style much closer to reality. He often preferred to hire non-actors to achieve his desired results. The later intensification of Realism, known as Naturalism, strove to the utmost to convey empirical reality on the stage, down to the last detail. Instead of painted flats, the standard for his sets would be the entire contents of an actual Paris apartment, for example, transplanted to the stage. This is when the concept of the “fourth wall” came about. Instead of having hams declaiming to the audience across the footlights, the new effect is though the onlookers were peeping at the events through a window.

Everything in its time. I happen to be a fan of the pure theatricality of hams declaiming directly to the audience, and frequently find myself bored and irritated by unimaginative and half-assed attempts to be “real”. Theatre may be many things. It may be ritual. It may be ceremony. For most of its existence trying to produce an illusory analog of human experience was never on its agenda.

Anyway, in 1894 Théâtre Libre went under and so its founder created Théâtre Antoine, which lasted until 1904. Meanwhile his example was followed in Germany (the Freie Bühne) and England (the Independent Theatre). And naturally both the U.S. and Russia had their homegrown realist movements, and Scandinavia produced Ibsen and Strindberg. There was an element of social consciousness to this all, of course. The idea was to describe and reveal social conditions and forces in order to effect some kind of positive political change. This approach had never died out, though newer ones (notably Brecht’s) have arisen to challenge it.

As did newer technologies. Indeed, in his later years, Antoine was to become the principal successor to the Lumière Brothers in bringing an aesthetic of indexical realism to the cinema. He directed eight silent films between 1917 and 1922. During the last 20 years of his life, he was primarily a film and theatre critic.

For more on related matters please check out my books No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.