The Copeau Years

In 1913, Jacques Copeau, who had founded La Nouvelle revue française (NRF) in 1909 with the support of Gaston Gallimard and a few other authors, including Jean Schlumberger, was looking for an auditorium where he could give shape to his ideas on theatre and challenge both the tradition embodied by the Comédie-Française and the naturalistic movement embodied twenty years earlier by André Antoine. On the Left Bank, he discovered the "Athénée Saint-Germain", a rather old-looking and inconvenient theatre, which he transformed completely to "create an independent stage, free from commercial constraints, a true theatre dedicated to the mind".

"A small theatre, a small stage for a great undertaking", said André Suarès later, one of Copeau's good friends. Copeau started recruiting actors for his future company with Charles Dullin, whom he had met in 1911 at the "Théâtre des Batignolles" where Dullin was playing in Les Frères Karamasov. Among the actors was Louis Jouvet. Copeau had new stage equipment installed, which no longer had to comply with purely decorative criteria, and called the stage the "bare platform". The expression became so popular that some critics started talking ironically about the "Calvin Follies" to ridicule Copeau's aesthetic asceticism. He inaugurated his new theatre on 23 October 1913, with an Elizabethan play by Thomas Heywood, entitled Une femme tuée par la douceur. Then, in January 1914, he staged L'Échange by Claudel, who was still unknown at the time, and played the role of Thomas Pollock. In May, his production of Shakespeare's La Nuit des rois won him great fame.

With the war, all activities stopped at the theatre, but Copeau increasingly sought contacts and opened a drama school. In 1917, President Georges Clémenceau, who had followed his work and wanted to counter German propaganda, proposed to send him on a cultural mission to the United States. Copeau left in October with Charles Dullin and Louis Jouvet, the latter serving as both actor and stage manager. They rented the Garrick Theater, in New York City, and gave 345 performances till April 1919.

First production of Paul Claudel's L'Échange,
at the Vieux-Colombier, in 1914.
On February 20th 1920, André Gide's Saül was created. Copeau celebrated Dostoevsky's centennial with a revival of Les Frères Karamasov, and Molière's tercentennial with Le Médecin malgré lui and Le Misanthrope. He welcomed Russian artists, increased the number of theatre-related activities and intensified the work of his school. And then Jouvet left. Copeau was deeply affected, and he finally left at the end of the 1924 season.

In November 1924, Jean Tedesco, an aesthete, replaced Copeau. He converted the Vieux-Colombier into a cinema where the public was able to discover "avant-garde" films by Abel Gance, Griffith, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, Chaplin, etc.

June 1928 marked the première of La Petite Marchande d'allumettes by Jean Renoir, who had fitted out the Vieux-Colombier into a movie studio to produce his film. However, Tedesco continued to maintain links with the theatre, and Copeau continued giving lectures there.

In December 1930, the "Compagnie des Quinze", consisting of young actors trained by Copeau, performed André Obey's Noé, featuring Pierre Fresnay, a renegade from the Comédie-Française. Other guests included Pitoëff and his company.
In May 1935, the lease was transferred to René Rocher, a former pensionnaire (i.e., contracted actor) from the Comédie-Française. The theatre was renovated by decorator André Boll, and the new director attracted a more traditional audience. During the Second World War, directors kept changing, while promoting the idea of "a small theatre for the initiated". The success achieved by Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis clos, in 1944, caused great surprise and launched the popularity of existentialism.

In September 1944, Jean Vilar and his "Compagnie des Sept" came to give private performances of Dom Juan, followed by 230 uninterrupted performances of T.S. Eliot's Meurtre dans la cathédrale which allowed Jean Vilar to make a name for himself. The Vieux-Colombier also hosted the "Grenier de Toulouse" and put on Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Büchner, Tennessee Williams, Alphonse Allais, Giono, as well as Henri Troyat, Maurice Druon, etc. On January 13th 1947, Antonin Artaud (who had run away from hospital) gave a widely-acclaimed lecture in front of a packed audience of intellectuals and artists; the lecture inspired a play entitled L'Histoire vécue d'Artaud-Momo, which immortalised the event.

A Troubled History
Jean Vilar, who founded the Avignon Festival where he created Maurice Clavel's La Terrasse de midi, revived the play at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in January 1948. Several theatrical milestones followed: Marcel Aymé's Lucienne et le boucher, and especially Guillaume Hanoteau's La Tour Eiffel qui tue which created quite a scandal.

This was the time when clubs were very popular. The Vieux-Colombier created its own, welcoming New Orleans Jazz, Claude Luter and Sydney Bechet. Even Boris Vian came to play the trumpet. This was also the time when comedy and drama mixed, when French and foreign authors mingled freely and spontaneously. Roger Planchon came to direct Adamov's Paolo Paoli. In September 1958, the staging of Audiberti's La Hoberaute by Jean Le Poulain was met with great acclaim.

Bernard Jenny took over the Vieux-Colombier in September 1960 and asked René Allio to install new theatrical equipment. Thanks to the "Théâtre des Nations", Living Theatre was discovered here with Brecht's Dans la jungle des villes, as was the Vienna Volkstheater with Genet's Le Balcon. Léo Ferré, Catherine Sauvage and Guy Béart also sang here. The director himself staged Claudel's trilogy, L'Otage, Le Pain dur and Le Père humilié, over a period of three years.

Laurent Terzieff took over for one year, from October 1968 to November 1969, and directed plays by Murray Shisgal (Les Chinois, Fragments), James Saunders (Les Voisins, Le Triangle) and Andreieff (La Valse des chiens). Following imminent threats to shut the theatre down, Marthe Mercadier did her utmost to save it by diversifying her efforts and welcoming Ellen Stewart and the Mama from New York... Unfortunately, the lease was not renewed, and the Vieux-Colombier closed down in September 1973. There were rumours of demolition, and actors protested.

After being registered as a national historical monument, the auditorium was bought by the State in 1986, and finally assigned to the Comédie-Française in 1989.

Throughout the theatre's troubled history, many actors and stage directors have established links between the Vieux-Colombier and the Salle Richelieu, especially Jacques Copeau who was Managing Director of the Comédie-Française in 1940-41. And as for the quirks of fate: back in the years 1661-65, Molière, Racine and Chapelle used to meet in Boileau's home, precisely in the same street as the Vieux-Colombier, to read their works in public.