A case of Vive La Révolution, but not on the stage
Over the years I’ve become used to youthful theatre companies announcing that they intend to bring a bold new outlook and energy to the stage, producing challenging work relevant ‘to the world we live in now’. Powerful stuff. It usually adds up to a flurry of four-letter firepower distributed equally between the sexes, and occasional bits of simulated sex. The writers’ friends and relatives crowd in, madly enthusiastic. It always reminds me of the comment by the late Peter Cook.
‘You know, I go to the theatre to be entertained… I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction … I can get all that at home,’ he said.
The joke comes from the Fifties when plays by sophisticated writers like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan were being abandoned in favour of kitchen-sink-style dramas like Look Back in Anger, and Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.
There’s nothing particularly new about all that. Even here, the Gate, with its legacy from Hilton Edwards, and Micheál
Mac Liammóir has always been a contrast with the Abbey’ s concentration on the trials and tribulations of the nation, beginning with Synge and O’Casey: hence the Gate/ Abbey irreverently being labelled Sodom and Begorrah.
But it’s surprising to think of the former revolutionary France still insisting on classical rules well into the 19th century. Its conservative audience wanted to preserve the classical unities of time and place, originating with the Greeks, and revived in the 17th century. Everything should happen within a time range of 24 hours. There was a taboo about showing violence and death on stage, about mixing comedy with tragedy, and using vulgar language. But the Romantic movement wanted a complete change: more passion and realism, blood, guts and lust. And the leader of the Romantics was Victor Hugo. The Les Misérables author was determined to take on the classicists, and the production of his play Hernani at the Theatre Francaise in 1830 was deliberately pitched at causing uproar.
Hugo rounded up a group of over 100 supporters whose job was to arrive early and cheer every speech and action that broke the classic rules. But the classical supporters were also there in force, and the production became a riot. What’s interesting is that it was the style that was at issue, not the actual play, which is a red-hot melodrama with lusty predatory men, a fair maiden and a trio of suicides. But after the Hernani riots, the Romantics held the theatrical upper hand.
Much later, Bizet’s opera Carmen ran into the same kind of problems when it opened in 1875. Musicals and opera at the Opéra Comique did not have to be comic, but they had spoken dialogue between arias, not sung-through, Italian-opera style. Carmen had dialogue, but the Opéra Comique
‘Hence the Gate/ Abbey irreverently being labelled Sodom and Begorrah’
was a placeof family entertainment and here was Bizet putting on an opera whose main character was a promiscuous Spanish gypsy.
Worse, Carmen was to be stabbed to death on the stage.
While Bizet refused to dilute the story, many of the patrons of the Opéra Comique thought the respectability of the theatre was damaged by this vulgarity. In fact, as word got round, audience numbers improved.
But for poor Bizet it was too late. He died just three months after the premiere. Naturally, everyone said he was very talented and would be badly missed.