Paul Hervieu's _La Course du Flambeau_, which was given by Réjane at
the Vaudeville, April 17th, 1901, is first of all a sentimental thesis.
It begins with an argument as to the duty of mother to child and of
child to mother. A character who apparently represents the author's
views declares life is a sort of _Lampadophoria_, or _La Course du
Flambeau_, in which it is the chief concern of each generation to hand
on the torch of life to the next generation. Sabine protests that the
duty is equal, and offers herself as an example. "I," she says, "stand
between mother and daughter; I love them myself; I could sacrifice
myself equally for either." Maravan replies: "You do not know yourself.
You do not know how good a mother you are, and I hope you will never
know how bad a daughter." The rest of the play is ingeniously
constructed to show, point by point, gradation by gradation, the
devotion of Sabine to her daughter and the readiness with which she will
sacrifice, not only herself, but her mother.
The only answer to the author's solution is to reinstate the problem in
terms of precisely contrary facts; we have another solution, which may
be made in terms no less inevitable. The play itself proves nothing, and
it seems to me that the writer's persistence in arguing the point in
action has given a somewhat needless and unnatural air of melodrama to
his piece. It is a melodrama with an idea, a clue, but it is none the
less a melodrama, because the idea and the clue are alike so arbitrary.
One is never left quietly alone with nature; the showman's hand is
always visible, around the corner of the curtain, pulling the strings.
Whenever one sees a human argument struggling to find its way through
the formal rhetoric of the speaker, it is the French equivalent of
sentiment.
The piece is really the comedy of a broken heart, and what Réjane has
to do is to represent all the stages of the slow process of heartbreak.
She does it as only a great artist could do; but she allows us to see
that she is acting. She does it consciously, deliberately, with method.
She has forced herself to become bourgeois; she takes upon herself the
bourgeois face and appearance, and also the bourgeois soul. The wit and
bewildering vulgarity have gone out of her, and a middle-class dignity
has taken their place. She shows us the stage picture of a mother
marvelously: that is to say, she interprets the play according to the
author's intentions; when she is most effective as an actress she is not
content with the simplicity of nature, as in the tirade in the third
act. She brings out the melodramatic points with the finest skill; but
the melodrama itself is a wilful divergency from nature; and she has few
chances to be her finest self. She proves the soundness of her art as an
actress by the ability to play such a part finely, seriously,
effectively. Her own temperament counts for nothing; it is not even a
hindrance: it is all the skill of a _métier_, the mastery of her art.
"MADAME SANS-GÊNE"
In 1893 Réjane created, at the Vaudeville, the woman whose part she had
to act, in _Madame Sans-Gêne._ For some reason unknown to me, Réjane
is best known in England by her performances in this thoroughly poor
play, which shows us Sardou working mechanically, and for character
effects of a superficial kind. There are none of the ideas, none of the
touches of nature of _La Parisienne_; none of the comic vitality of _Ma
Cousine_; none of the emotional quality of _Sapho._ It is full of
piquancies for acting, and Réjane makes the most of them. Her acting is
admirable, from beginning to end; it has her distinguished vulgarity;
her gross charm; she is everything that Sardou meant, and something
more.
But all that Sardou meant was not a very interesting thing, and Réjane
can not make it what it is not. She brightens her part, she does not
make a different thing of it. There were moments when it seemed to me as
if she played it with a certain fatigue. The thing is so artificial in
itself, and yet pretends to be nature; it is so palpably ingenious, so
frank an appeal to the stage! It has about it an absurd air of honest
simplicity, a pretense of being bourgeois in some worthy sense.
Réjane plays her game with the thing, shows her impeccable cleverness,
makes point after point, carries the audience with her. But I find
nowhere in it what seems to me her finest qualities, at most no more
than a suggestion of them. It is a picture painted so sweepingly that
every subtlety would be out of place in it. She plays it sweepingly,
with heavy contrasts, an undisguised exaggeration; one eye is always on
the audience. That is, no doubt, the way the piece should be played; but
I must complain of Sardou while I justify Réjane.