Jacques Copeau

Jacques Copeau (4 February 1879 – 20 October 1949) was a French theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist.

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.

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.

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 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.

In mid-April 1905 their second daughter, Hedwig, was born.

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.

Before he founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, he wrote theatre reviews for several Parisian journals, worked at the Georges Petit Gallery where he organized exhibits of artists' works and helped found the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1909, along with writer friends, such as André Gide and Jean Schlumberger.

Twentieth century French theatre is marked by Copeau's outlook.

According to Albert Camus, "in the history of the French theatre, there are two periods: before Copeau and after Copeau."

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

In his opinion, even the venerated Comédie-Française, the "House of Molière", had fallen prey to the artificiality that he considered an obstacle to real artistic creation.

He wanted to move the theatre to a simpler style, freed from the ornamentation that obscured even the finest texts.

With his ideals intact, the platform provided by his editorial position at the NRF, the support of his friends, and the modicum of experience garnered from the several stagings of The Brothers Karamazov, he decided to found a theatre company.

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.