André Antoine (theater)
Andrew Anthony is an actor, director, theater director and French director, born January 31, 1858 in Limoges (Haute-Vienne) and October 19, 1943 death Pouliguen (Lower Loire, Loire-Atlantique present). It is considered the inventor of the modern staging in France.
Biography
Born in Limoges in 1858, Andre Antoine studied at the Lycee Condorcet, then employed at the gas company.
Unsuccessful candidate for the entrance of the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris, he becomes an actor in an amateur company, then based in the former Parisian comedy, the Theatre Libre in 1887, innovative theatrical motion to open the scene young writers, a style of staging and game players out of the theater opens to boulevard.Le current theatrical current French naturalist writers, playwrights, but also to Scandinavia. In his model, to create free theater in London, Munich and Berlin. Near by Emile Zola, he advocated a popular theater and Social applying the principles of naturalism in drama and staging. He introduced in France authors such as August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy and Henrik Ibsen. There is also mounting plays or adaptations of novels of Zola, Daudet, Balzac, then Jules Renard (Poil de Carotte) and Henry Bernstein (The Market).
In his staging, the actors must live their characters. He stressed the importance of gesture and release the actor's histrionics and conventions, less declamatory for more natural. He wants to give the viewer the impression of watching a "slice of life" based on costumes and decorations modern and realistic down to the smallest detail. He plays with the lighting, installing electricity for lighting effects unprecedented, adopting the dark room for Wagner. The presence of real pieces of meat for the Butchers in 1888 is indeed a scandal. Taking the theory of the fourth wall established by Diderot, it gives great importance to the role of director, who is transformed from a technician to creator.
In 1897, when installed in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs, as the Theatre Antoine, theatrical style takes the form of a calculated provocation aesthetic, supported by the snobbery of the Paris, which turn down the Maurice Maeterlinck, mainly because he put on the stage realism. The works of Francis Curel or Eugene Brieux leave fewer traces than the Weavers by Gerhart Hauptmann, the Power of Darkness Tolstoy or Shakespeare's great tragedies.
In 1906 he became director of the Odeon (he had directed only two weeks in 1897) and then rises in the interest of historical reconstruction, classic works of Corneille (which restores the first performance of the Cid candles), Racine, Molière or Shakespeare. In seven years, he has 364 rooms, an average of one per week, launching its "test nights" of young writers like Georges Duhamel Romains. It is at that time the stage manager of the future director Leonce Perret.
Heavily in debt, he left the scene of the Odeon in 1914 and turned into film. He made between 1915 and 1922, several films under the aegis of the Film Society of Authors and scholars of Peter Decourcelle, adapting literary or dramatic works, including The Earth, The Corsican Brothers and Ninety-Three. Again, it adopts the principles of naturalism, giving importance to the natural setting as "elements of a real critical behavior of its actors", and using non-professional actors who are not " tied up in the old forms of theater ". For Jean Tulard, his approach and his literary reputation goes to "give the film its letters of nobility". Influencing Mercanton, Hervil Capellani and it is "just the father of neorealism".
The revival of the stage he initiated continues without him, Jacques Chip and the Coalition of Four (Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Georges and Gaston Baty Pitoeff), placing himself in a stream also modernizing, but "naturalistic".
He concluded his career as a theater critic and film from 1919 and for twenty years, possibly weekly Information, more sporadic in Le Journal, Le Monde and Comœdia shown, and published his memoirs: Theatre 1932 - 1933.
He has dominated the French stage until the reaction of anti-naturalist Jacques Chip or Combine Four.
See also Dominique de Villepin
wikipedia
