Jacques Copeau

They performed Paul Claudel's L’Échange ("The Exchange"); dating from 1894 when he was in "exile" as a diplomat in Boston, the play deals in a poetic way with the relationship between spouses. Again Dullin showed his talent for character creation and Copeau too took a major role bringing to the text an inspired interpretation. A popular revival of the Copeau-Croué adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov saw Dullin once again as Smerdiakov, Jouvet as Feodor, and Copeau as Ivan. In May, the troupe, exhausted but buoyed by its artistic and sometimes critical successes, staged an adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or Nuit des rois to close the season.

The second season opened with a piece by Henri Bernstein, Le Secret, which had already played on Broadway. But Copeau was made aware that he needed to bow somewhat to popular taste if the Vieux-Colombier was to succeed financially. The second offering of the season—Pierre Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro—proved to be both a critical and popular success and maintained Copeau's standards. Among the other successes was Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm in a translation by Agnès Thomsen Copeau with Dullin as Rosmer and Copeau in the role of Kroll.

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.

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

He worked their until his retirement in 1941.

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.

In 1936 Copeau was appointed one of the staff producers at the Theatre Comedie Francaise.

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.

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 June 1929, the Copiaus formed a new troupe, La Compagnie des Quinze, led by Michel Saint-Denis. They returned to Paris where they performed Noé (Noah), a play by André Obey, under the direction of Michel St-Denis. From this point on, Copeau's direct influence over what had once been the École du Vieux-Colombier ended, although his influence on a personal level would remain strong.

At the end of the year, the troupe moved to Pernand-Vergelesses, a village in the heart of the wine-producing region of Burgundy, where Copeau had purchased a house and property better suited to his family and the needs of the Copiaus. From this headquarters the Copiaus would take their increasingly sophisticated offerings to many of the little towns of Burgundy and abroad to Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and eventually to Italy. Copeau, too, continued his heavy schedule of dramatic readings to help support himself and the troupe. In November 1926, he left on a lecture tour in the United States where he was also to direct The Brothers Karamazov in English for the Theatre Guild in January 1927.

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.

In 1924 Copeau retired from acting and moved to Burgundy. There he took a company of 30 young actors and founded a theatre school in Pernand-Verglasses. He developed a training program with the emphasis on movement, gesture, dance, and music. Copeau trained such distinguished French actors as Jean Dasté, Aman Maistre Julien, and Etienne Decroux at his school. His student Juozas Miltinis was the founder of Panevezys Drama Theatre, one of the most interesting experimental centers of culture in Lithuania.

When the 1923/24 season opened, the Vieux-Colombier found itself in competition with former members of the company since Jouvet's and Dullin's theatre drew from the same public as Copeau. Its subscriber base reduced, the Vieux-Colombier no longer held the cherished spot in the heart of those theatregoers who sought quality in the theatre. For Copeau, two events marked the highpoints of the season: the staging of his long-awaited La Maison natale, a work that had its inception in various forms more than twenty years earlier, and the Noh play Kantan with the students of the school under the direction of Suzanne Bing.

The fame of the Vieux-Colombier seemed to reach its apogee in the 1922-23 season. The house was filled for every performance and visitors to Paris complained of the impossibility of getting tickets to any of its offerings. Copeau organized a touring company to the provinces. Invitations to play in other countries in the off-season abounded. When Konstantin Stanislavski, the director of the Moscow Art Theatre, came to Paris in December 1922, he and his troupe were warmly received on the stage of the Vieux-Colombier. The influence of Copeau's principles to which he held without flinching was felt throughout Europe and the United States. Despite the fame, conflict arose.

The highlight of the 1921/1922 season was the opening the School of the Vieux-Colombier in a building on Rue du Cherche-Midi, around the corner from the theatre. Courses began in November under the directorship of Jules Romain, author and graduate of the École Normale Supérieure. Among the teaching staff were Copeau himself who would teach a course on the theory of the theatre and Greek tragedy, and Jouvet who taught a complementary course on the Greek theatre from the point of view of its architecture. Bing taught the beginning course on reading and diction and along with Copeau a course on the formation of the dramatic instinct. Copeau's daughter Marie-Hélène was in charge of a workshop on the use of different materials, on geometric design, on costume design and production.

In 1920 he was back in Paris and resumed seasons at the Theatre Vieux-Colombier. At that time he collaborated with poet Jules Romains.

Certain offerings of the Vieux-Colombier received critical and popular acclaim. To no one's surprise The Brothers Karamazov, with Dullin, who finally arrived in New York in March 1918, in the role of Smerdiakov and later in his well-received role as Harpagon, the miser, counted among the successes. Nuit des rois also burnished the company's reputation. Some plays, such as Octave Mirbeau's Les Mauvais Bergers (The Evil Shepherds), ended with an almost empty house as the audience stalked to the exits during the play before the final curtain.

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.

In the summer of 1916, Copeau received an invitation to organize a tour with the Vieux-Colombier in America, supposedly to counteract the influence of the German theatre in New York City, but also as a propaganda move to continue American support of the French cause. He immediately saw this as an opportunity to bring back his actors from the front and to reconstitute his theatre, but also as a means of shoring up the weak finances of the Vieux-Colombier. But his efforts to free his actors from military duty proved futile and so he left alone in January 1917 for a lecture tour in the United States.

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.

His version of the 'Twelvth Night' (La Nuit des Rois) was premiered in 1914, starring Louis Jouvet. Copeau also produced plays by Henri Ghéon. He trained actors for his theatre and preferred staging with simplistic plain sets or the movable stage. The beginning of the First World War forced Copeau and his actors to move from Paris to New York.

From 1914-1919, Jacques Copeau worked with his company in the New York's Garrik Theatre on west 35th Street. There he produced and directed more than forty plays.

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.

The idea of the renewal of the French stage that Copeau had had in mind since his earliest days as critic and that had been part of his theatre criticism now began to take shape as early as January 1912. He wanted to rid the Paris stage of the rank commercialism and tawdriness represented by the boulevard theatre, and also of the "ham acting" that had become entrenched in the ranks of the professional actors of the day. He realized that the exaggerated realism that had been part of earlier reform movements at the end of the previous century as an obstacle to a substantive understanding of the text and to the real development of character.

The play was staged in April 1911 under the direction of Jacques Rouché at the Théâtre des Arts, receiving favorable reviews. Charles Dullin, who played the role of Smerdiakov, was particularly singled out for a fine performance. A second staging of the adaptation the following October, with Louis Jouvet in the role of Father Zossima, confirmed the earlier critical claim.

"Liberated", as he said, from his duties at the gallery and from management concerns at the Raucourt factory, Copeau launched himself into his work. In 1910, he bought Le Limon, a piece of property in the Seine-et-Marne département, away from the distractions of Paris. He worked tirelessly on a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov along with his friend from school, Jean Croué, finishing it by the end of 1910. He was now ready to work in the theatre as a practitioner not only as critic.

In 1909 he became co-founder with André Gide, Jean Schlumberger, and Paul Claudel of journal La Nouvelle Revue Francaise.

Copeau also edited his new journal from 1909-1911. Copeau opened his own theatre on Rue du Vieux Colombier, near the Place Saint Sulpice on the Left Bank, and named it after its location. The Theatre du Vieux-Colombrier was described by Copeau in his publication as "the brain-child of the group of artists whose ideological understanding and collective practical inclination brought them together under the same banner. " Copeau was the actor, director, playwright and translator for his theatre. His most important productions were plays by Moliere and translations from William Shakespeare.

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), a publication that was to become one of the leading arbiters of literary taste in France.

From 1904-1906 he was a drama critic for the 'L'Ermitage', and , from 1907-1910, for the 'La Grand Revue'. He earned a reputation as a well known literary critic.

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.

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.

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.

He started as an art dealer in Paris during the 1890's.

Jacques Copeau was born on February 4, 1879, in Paris, France.