Recollections of Rejane

Notes on the Art of the Great French Actress

ARTHUR SYMONS

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 R6jane, 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 schoolboy'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 Rejane 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 byplays with eyes and voice, or rather with 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.

Rejane in "Ma Cousine"

HERE, in Ma Cousine, she abandons herself to all the frank and shady humours of the thing with the absolute abandonment of the artist. It it like a picture by Forain, made of the same material with the same cynicism and with the same mastery of line.

Ma Cousine, on seeing it a second time, is frankly and not too obviously amusing, a piece in which everybody plays at something, in which Rejane plays at being an actress who has a part to act in real life. "Elle est unpayable, cette Riquette!" And it is with an intensely conscious abandonment of herself that she renders this good-hearted Cabotine, so worldly wise, so full of all the physical virtues, turned Bohemian. She has, in this part, certain guttural and nasal laughs, certain queer cries and shouts, which are after all a part of her mitier; she runs through her whole gamut of shrugs and winks and nods. There is, of course, over again, the famous Chahut, in which she summarises the whole art of the Moulin-Rouge; there is her long scene of pantomime, in which every gesture is at once vulgar and distinguished, vulgarly rendered with distinction. There are other audacities, all done with equal discretion.

I am not sure that Réjane is not at her best in this play: she has certainly never been more herself in what one fancies to be herself. There is all her ravishing gaminerie, her witty intelligence, her dash, her piquancy, her impudence, her mastery. I find that her high spirits, in this play, affect me like pathos: they run to a kind of emotion. I compared her art with the art of Forain; I said that here was a picture, made out of the same material, with the same cynicism, the same mastery of line. She suggested, in her costume of the Second Act, a Beardsley picture; there was the same kind of tragic grotesque, in which a kind ugliness became a kind of beauty. The whole performance was of the best Parisian kind, with genius in one, admirably disciplined talent in all.

Melodrama with an Idea

PAUL HERVIEU'S, La Course du Flambeau, which was given by R&jane 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 Rejane 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.

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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 metier, the mastery of her art.

"Madame Sans-Gene"

IN 1893 Rejane created, at the Vaudeville, the woman whose part she had to act, in Madame Sans-Gene. For some reason unknown to me, Rejane 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 Rejane 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 Rejane cannot 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.

Rejane 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 Rejane.

The Ironic Comedy of Becque

LA PARISIENNE of Henri Becque, J 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 grey 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 Rejane is the faultless artist, and her actnig 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 criticise are the few moments of pathos, when she becomes Sarah at secondhand.

After La Parisienne came Lolotte, a one-act play of Meilhac and Halevy. It is amusing, and it gives Rejane 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 Avartts, 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 Rejane, and her company, it seems to lift one out of the theatre 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.

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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 Rejane 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 Rejane turned them into simple natural feeling. I can imagine Sarah saying some of these passages, and making them marvelously effective. When R6jane 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 Rejane, Rejane is not, as a sheer actress, the greatest of the three.

Rejane has all the instincts as I have said of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilise. Rejane, 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. Scepticism 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 Rejane 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 cafe-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. Rejane gives her to us as she is, in all her commonness. The picture is full of humour; it is, as I so often feel with Rejane, 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 Rejane can think of she can do; thought translates itself instantly into feeling, and the embodied impulse is before you.

When Rejane 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.