The
need to avoid the fantastic genre and to privilege realism seen as the
narration of direct and specific observations of the world and of contemporary
social aspects began to grow stronger in the field of literature in France
in the second half of the nineteenth century. This trend involved drama
as well and Victorien Sardou became one of its most valid representatives.
He was born in Paris in
1831 in a lower middle-class family. After an uneasy adolescence, His first
works did not immediately focussed the critics' attention and had trouble
finding followers. He had the opportunity to make himself known with a
text entitled “The tavern of the students” (1853) that, however, was sonorously
booed when it was staged for the first time at the Odeon. Sardou did not
give in and managed to enter Paris' theatre environment and, thanks to
his marriage with actor Laurentine de Brécourt and his meeting with
Virginie Déjazet, one of the theatre stars of the period, he managed
to stage the work “Figaro novice” (1859) that was actually played by Déjazet.
Sardou finally became successful and famous. Mainly thanks to this text
and to its excellent actor, it focussed the unanimous attention of theatre
admirers and critics of that period. Thus he began to write non-stop new
works. “Les Pattes de mouche” (1860) is a comedy inspired by the vaudeville
genre that had already been dealt with on the stage by Eugène Scribe
(1791-1861).
Sardou, in fact, had the
opportunity to come into Scribe's legacy as his writing qualities made
him create flowing dialogues and complex plots where events, puns and intrigue
intermingle and build the action. A kind of theatre that became increasingly
successful and received the French public's attention for the following
decades was thus born. Eugène Labiche became his ideal successor.
Victorien Sardou's following works were satiric tragedies in which he used
irony and made political and social satire; the situations' tones reminded
the viewers of Aristophanes and Molière: Sardou, for example, criticised
the figure of the republican politician Leon Gambetta in “Ragabas” (1872),
the Commune's revolutionaries in the text “The hatred” (1874), or depicted
the complex features of women's soul in “Let's get divorced” (1880) in
an irresistible way. When he reached top popularity he was elected to the
Académie Française in 1877 and was greatly esteemed and welcome
at Napoleon III's court. The writer focussed his interest and talents even
in historical dramas; so, just to name a few, he wrote “Phedora” (1882),
“Tosca” (1887) that deals with the well-known story of the dramatic end
of Floria Tosca, loved by and lover of painter Cavaradossi who is threatened
and cheated by the loathsome Scarpia.
This story inspired Giacomo
Puccini who wrote the plot of the homonymous famous lyric opera. In 1890
he wrote “Cleopatra”. These texts became very successful also thanks to
the outstanding performance of one of the world's greatest actors, Sarah
Bernhardt. “Madame Sans-Gêne”, written with Moreau in 1893, is a
lighter comedy which became extremely popular at the end of the century
and presents the parvenu in a way that was more suitable for a middle-class
public. In this case the parvenu, in fact, is a woman and is portrayed
with a friendly and good-natured character: Catherine, the duchess of Danzig,
is a woman of the people who married marshal Lefebvre. She is an unaffected
and open woman even when she enters the court of France and is loved by
the public as she expresses and does not hide her popular origins that
most of the spectators who loved Sardou's works shared. Sardou was a precise
and stubborn writer in his plots both in comedies and historic dramas and
a keen observer of human soul and society; he also managed to be remembered
thanks to his excellent talents as a writer and he continues to be staged
still nowadays. Besides Sardou who drew inspiration from Scribe only for
a limited number of texts, there was another author who focussed his activity
in the vaudeville comedic genre: Eugène Labiche (1815-1888). He
wrote about one hundred texts by unwittingly drawing inspiration from the
themes of the classical comic drama.
Among his works are “A straw
hat of Florence” (1851) that inspired René Clair for his 1927 homonymous
film, “Mr Perrichon's journey” (1860), “The grammar” (1867) and “The happiest
of the three” that dates 1870, the year in which Labiche stopped writing
new drama works. In 1875 he reluctantly decided to put together most of
his texts in a volume entitled “Complete drama”.
He depicted a precise and
witty portrait of Paris' middle classes thanks to gay and playful works,
a dynamic humour imbued with common sense and inexhaustible ideas. This
approach also allowed him to criticise the weakness and the habits of the
French bourgeoisie at the turn of the twentieth century.
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