_La Parisienne_ of Henri Becque, like most of his plays, has never lost
its interest, like the topical plays of that period. It is a hard,
ironical piece of realism, founded on a keen observation of life and on
certain definite ideas. It is called a comedy, but there is no
straightforward fun in it, as in _Ma Cousine_, for instance; it has all
that transposed sadness which we call irony. It shows us rather a mean
gray world, rather contemptuously; and it leaves us with a bitter taste
in the mouth. That is, if one takes it seriously. Part of the actor's
art in such a piece is to prevent one from taking it too seriously.
Throughout Réjane is the faultless artist, and her acting is so much of
a piece that it is difficult to praise it in detail. A real woman lives
before one, seems to be overseen on the stage at certain moments of her
daily existence. We see her life going on, not, as with Duse, a profound
inner life, but the life of the character, a vivid, worldly life, hard,
selfish, calculating, deceiving naturally, naturally wary, the woman of
the world, the Parisian. Compare Clotilde with Sapho and you will see
two opposite types rendered with an equal skill; the woman in love, to
whom nothing else matters, and the woman with lovers, the (what shall I
say?) business woman of the emotions.
There is a moment near the beginning where Lafont asks Clotilde if she
has been to see her milliner or her dressmaker, and she answers
sarcastically: "Both!" Her face, as she submits to the question, has an
absurd stare, a stare of profound dissimulation, with something of a cat
who waits. Her whole character, her whole plan of campaign are in that
moment; they but show themselves more pointedly, later on, when her
nerves get the better of her through all the manifestations of her
impatience, up to the return into herself at the end of the second act,
when she stands motionless and speechless, while her lover entreats her,
upbraids her, finally insults her. Her face, her whole body, endures,
wearied into a desperate languor, seething with suppressed rage and
exasperation; at last, her whole body droops on itself, as if it Can no
longer stand upright. Throughout she speaks with that somewhat
discontented grumbling tone which she can make so expressive; she
empties her speech with little side shrugs of one shoulder, her sinister
right eye speaks a whole subtle language of its own. The only moments
throughout the play when I found anything to criticize are the few
moments of pathos, when she becomes Sarah at second hand.
After _La Parisienne_ came _Lolotte_, a one-act play of Meilhac and
Halévy. It is amusing, and it gives Réjane the opportunity of showing
us little samples of nearly all her talents. She is both canaille and
bonne fille; above all she is triumphantly, defiantly clever. Again I
was reminded of a Forain drawing: for here is an art which does
everything that it is possible to do with a given material, and what
more can one demand of an artist?
"LA ROBE ROUGE"
A greater contrast could hardly be imagined than that between these two
plays and Brieux's sombre argument in the drama _La Robe Rouge._ Unlike
_Les Avariés_, where the argument swamps the drama, _La Robe Rouge_ is
at once a good argument and a good play. There are perhaps too many
points at issue, and the story is perhaps too much broken into section,
but the whole thing takes hold of one, and, acted as it is acted by
Réjane, and her company, it seems to lift one out of the theater into
some actual place where people are talking and doing good or evil and
suffering and coming into conflict with great impersonal forces; where,
in fact, they are living. Without ever becoming literature, it comes, at
times, almost nearer to every-day reality than literature can permit
itself to come. There is not a good sentence in the play, or a sentence
that does not tell. It is the subject and the hard, unilluminated
handling of the subject that makes the play, and it is a model of that
form of drama which deals sternly with actual things. It gives a great
actress, who is concerned mainly with being true to nature, an
incomparable opportunity, and it gives opportunities to every member of
a good company. The second act tortures one precisely as such a scene in
court would torture one. Its art is the distressingly, overwhelmingly
real.
_La Robe Rouge_ is a play so full of solid and serious qualities that it
is not a little difficult not to exaggerate its merits or to praise it
for merits it does not possess. The play deals with vital questions, and
it does not deal with them, as Brieux is apt to do, in a merely
argumentative way. It is not only that abstract question: What is
justice? May the law not be capable of injustice? but the question of
conscience in the lawyer, the judge, the administration of which goes by
the name of justice. It is tragedy within tragedy. How extremely
admirably the whole thing acts, and how admirably it was acted! After
seeing this play, I realize what I have often wondered, that Réjane is
a great tragic actress, and that she can be tragic without being
grotesque. She never had a part in which she was so simple and so great.
When I read the play I found many passages of mere rhetoric in the part
of Zanetta; by her way of saying them Réjane turned them into simple
natural feeling. I can imagine Sarah saying some of these passages, and
making them marvelously effective. When Réjane says them they go
through you like a knife. After seeing La _Robe Rouge_, I am not sure
that of three great living actresses, Duse, Sarah, and Réjane, Réjane
is not, as a sheer actress, the greatest of the three.
Réjane has all the instincts, as I have said, of the human animal, of
the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilize. Réjane, in
_Sapho_ or in _Zaza_ for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving
and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable,
horribly human thing, whose direct appeal seizes you by the throat. In
_Sapho_ or _Zaza_ she speaks the language of the senses, no more; and
her acting reminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of
how the senses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in love.
It is like an accusing confirmation of some of one's guesses at truth,
before the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh.
Skepticism is no longer possible: the thing is before you, abominably
real, a disquieting and irrefutable thing, which speaks with its own
voice, as it has never spoken on the stage through any other actress.
In _Zaza_, a play made for Réjane by two playwrights who had set
themselves humbly to a task, the task of fitting her with a part, she is
seen doing _Sapho_ over again, with a difference. Zaza is a vulgar
woman, a woman without instruction or experience; she has not known
poets and been the model of a great sculptor; she comes straight from
the boards of a _café-concert_ to the kept woman's house in the
country. She has caught her lover vulgarly, to win a bet; and so, to the
end, you realize that she is, well, a woman who would do that. She has
no depth of passion, none of Sapho's roots in the earth; she has a
"beguin" for Dufresne, she will drop everything else for it, such as it
is, and she is capable of good hearty suffering. Réjane gives her to us
as she is, in all her commonness. The picture is full of humor; it is,
as I so often feel with Réjane, a Forain. Like Forain, she uses her
material without ever being absorbed by it, without relaxing her
impersonally artistic energy. In being Zaza, she is so far from being
herself (what is the self of a great actress?) that she has invented a
new way of walking, as well as new tones and grimaces. There is not an
effect in the play which she has not calculated; only, she has
calculated every effect so exactly that the calculation is not seen.
When you watch Jane Hading, you see her effects coming several seconds
before they are there; when they come, they come neatly, but with no
surprise in them, and therefore with no conviction. There lies all the
difference between the actress who is an actress equally by her
temperament and by her brain and the actress who has only the brain
(and, with Jane Hading, beauty) to rely on. Everything that Réjane can
think of she can do; thought translates itself instantly into feeling,
and the embodied impulse is before you.
When Réjane is Zaza, she acts and is the woman she acts; and you have
to think, before you remember how elaborate a science goes to the making
of that thrill which you are almost cruelly enjoying.