Production History of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique
Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique was first performed in Paris at the Théâtre du Marais in 1636. Not much is certain about this initial production. It is believed that Montdory, the actor who would play the lead role Rodrigue in Corneille’s masterpiece Le Cid the following year, played the part of Clindor, and that Matamore would have been played by Bellemore, a comic actor who made a career of playing the miles gloriosus [boastful soldier] stock character. Scholars had thought that sketches and a list of set-pieces from the original design existed in a collection of such documents from Corneille’s time; these describe the play staged in a night-time set with a movable moon and an enchanted mirror. They also mention a magician’s palace atop a mountain, not a cave. But while it would be demonstrated as early as 1920 that these staging notes were likely not connected to L’Illusion Comique, or even Corneille, some of these elements can still be found in later revivals. As for the actual staging of the premiere, French scholar Robert Garapon makes the conjecture that the staging was fairly simple. He suggests that the grotto and the prison would have occupied opposite sides of the stage, with a curtained area in between them for the illusions to take place. Painted canvas backdrops would establish the various settings of the centre area. As Garapon describes it, this initial staging relied far less on spectacle than most later productions.
The premiere was a success and the play was still in performance in 1660, by which time Corneille’s other early comedies were considered dated, but its popularity appears to have waned after Corneille’s death in 1684. Corneille himself famously described L’Illusion Comique as a “strange monster,” but critical opinion of this rule-breaking play was even less kind during the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Representative of the eighteenth-century opinion of the piece, historian and one-time Prime Minister of France François Guizot describes the play as only worth mentioning because “at the very moment when he was so far astray, Corneille was already at work on Le Cid [his masterpiece].” L’Illusion Comique did not undergo a significant revival until 1861. What follows is a brief sketch of some of the important productions of the past 150 years, during which Corneille’s strangest play has risen from an afterthought to a staple of the French theatrical canon.
1861 - COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE, EDOUARD THIERRY.
This production was in honor of the 250th anniversary of Corneille’s birth. Thierry found Corneille’s framing device original and intriguing, but was less interested by the illusion scenes and thought that the romance contained within them was badly dated in light of nineteenth-century standards. He abridged these scenes greatly, especially the monologues, and removed the prison scene entirely. Most notably, he disliked the illusion scene of Act Five (Hippolyte, Clarine, et al), considering it to be “neither tragic nor touching but dangerous.” He replaced it with the first act of Corneille’s heroic comedy Don Sanche d’Aragon, and so became the first of many to present different illusions than Corneille. The scene from Don Sanche is quite different in tone from the tragic illusion of the original: it sets up a romantic intrigue over the love of a queen between three Spanish noblemen and a mysterious soldier of unknown parentage.
1895 – THÉÂTRE DE L’ODÉON, ANDRÉ ANTOINE.
Antoine went further than Thierry in revising the text, apparently removing the illusion of Act Five outright. His relatively realist direction was criticized at the time for failing to capture the “phantasmagoria [and] enchanting unreality” of the text.
1926 – LES COPIAUS, JACQUES COPEAU.
Copeau’s theatre collective performed a show entitled L’Illusion during their time in Switzerland. The piece was part of their effort to find the roots of comic performance and create a ‘new commedia,’ complete (perhaps paradoxically) with novel stock characters of their own devising. The play was not Corneille’s, but used a similar premise: a son runs away from his overbearing father to become an actor, the father sees the son perform and confuses fiction and reality, and a reconciliation results. The piece was performed in mask, and the company that the son joins resembled the Copiaus themselves, working on improvised comedy. Copeau, the master director, played a magician named Alcandre and an Old Actor who gives advice to the group in a prologue, thus conflating the figures of the magician and the director. Importantly in light of Kushner’s addition of an illusion featuring Calisto and Melibea, the play-within-a-play of the piece was a version Fernando de Rojas’ La Célestine, the story of Calixte and Mélibée.
1937 – COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE, LOUIS JOUVET.
This production was also commissioned to commemorate an anniversary: perhaps strangely, the 300th anniversary of Le Cid. Jouvet had worked extensively with Copeau, but was not a member of the Copiaus. The production had a dark but fanciful design, with “a huge grotto draped with black curtains, looking, in semi-darkness, much like a monstrous mouth.” Fantastical set-pieces would rise or fall to the stage, a grotesque ballet was added, and the prison became an enormous bird cage. Combined with colorful costumes amidst the gloomy design, the overall effect was “a strange nightmarish quality.” The staging of Act Five was much debated. Jouvet used the original illusion, but placed it on a set that was obviously a theatre, complete with boxes and applauding audience members; while the effect was praised, some critics were concerned that it lessened the play by rendering Corneille’s device obvious to the audience and making it seem improbable that Pridamant would be fooled. The successful production was a turning point in the reevaluation of Corneille and the rediscovery of his plays beyond Le Cid and the major tragedies. Out of respect for the author, the cast brought out a bust of Corneille during the lengthy ovation on opening night.
1985 – THÉÂTRE DE L’EUROPE, GIORGIO STREHLER.
That Strehler chose L’Illusion Comique as his inaugural production with the Théâtre de l’Europe speaks volumes about the play’s entry into the French theatrical canon following Jouvet’s triumphant revival. Strehler, a prominent director of Brecht, used some devices reminiscent of the epic theatre tradition: for example, Pridamant and Dorante first entered through the audience; Pridamant watched the illusions from a bench on the audience side of the proscenium arch; and the same actor played both Alcandre and Matamore, perhaps implicitly comparing the magician’s powers of illusion with the braggart’s fantasies. Reflective surfaces covered much of the set. The production used the original illusion of Act Five, and unlike Jouvet’s attempted to keep the audience unaware of its theatricality until the final moments. Strehler focussed in particular on the romantic and sexual aspects of the play: Clindor was a romantic rebel against bourgeois conformity who at times displayed a “raw, cynical, almost satanic” sexuality; Matamore’s sword seemed “in a constant state of erection” and began to shoot out sparks whenever he would pretend to draw it.
Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique is still performed regularly in France. Among recent productions, a 2004 staging at Gennevilliers outside Paris featured a rear-projection cyclorama that actors had to cross behind in order to enter the playing space, casting their shadows on the screen; Matamore was clothed in a tutu and swung on a trapeze; and Alcandre was played by leading French theatre theorist Françoise Renault. This heightened the metatheatricality of the production, placing an actual figure of knowledge regarding theatrical artifice on the stage to control the illusions. A Comédie-Française production directed by Galin Stoev is being performed beginning on March 2, 2010, in the Salle Richelieu, where the Thierry and Jouvet productions both took place. The production, a revival of a 2008 staging, features an ultraminimalist set likened by one unimpressed critic to the filthy walls of the entrance to a disused swimming pool. Without comment on the merits of Stoev’s production, it is certainly a curious feature of the afterlives of plays that a work once derided by critics as a monstrosity can later be defended in the name of elegance and good taste.
–Zachary Moull, Dramaturgy Assistant
