NOTES ON THE ART OF THE GREAT FRENCH
ACTRESS
Meilhac's play, _Ma Cousine_, which owed most of its success, when it
was produced at the Variétés, October 27th, 1890, to the acting of
Réjane, is one of those essentially French plays which no ingenuity can
ever accommodate to an English soil. It is the finer spirit of farce, it
is meant to be taken as a kind of intellectual exercise; it is human
geometry for the masses. There are moments when the people of the play
are on the point of existing for themselves, and have to be brought
back, put severely in their places, made to fit their squares of the
pattern. The thing as a whole has no more resemblance to real life than
Latin verses have to a school-boy's conversation. Reality, that, after
all, probably holds us in it, comes into it accidentally, in the form of
detail, in little touches of character, little outbursts of temperament.
The rest is done after a plan, it is an entanglement by rule; it exists
because people have agreed to think that they like suspense; the
tantalization of curiosity on the stage. We see the knot tied by the
conjurer; we want to know what he will do with it. In France, and in
such a piece as _Ma Cousine_, the conjurer is master of his trade; he
gives us our illusions and our enlightenment in exactly the right doses.
And Réjane in this wittily artificial play suits herself perfectly to
her subject, becomes everything there is in the character of Riquette;
an actress who plays a comedy in real life, quite in the spirit of the
stage. She has to save the situation from being taken too seriously,
from becoming tragic: she has to take the audience into her confidence,
to assure them that it is all a joke. And so we see her constantly
overdoing her part, fooling openly. She does two things at once: the
artificial comedy, which is uppermost in the play, and the character
part which is implicit in it. And she is perfect in both.
The famous _Chahut_, which went electrically through Paris, when it was
first given, in all its audacity, shows us one side of her art. The
delicate by-plays with eyes and voice, or rather the voice and the
overhanging eyelid of the right eye, shows us another. She is always the
cleverest person on the stage. Her face in repose seems waiting for
every expression to quicken its own form of life. When the face is in
movement, one looks chiefly at the mouth, the thick, heavily painted
lips, which twist upward, and wrinkle into all kinds of earthly
subtleties. Her face is full of an experienced, sullen, chuckling
gaminerie, which seems, after all, to be holding back something: it has
a curious, vulgar undertone, a succulent and grossly joyous gurgle.