Love Play

Gideon Lester introduces the theatre of Marivaux

(reprinted from ARTicles Online vol. 1 no. 3a, January 2003)

Fragonard, The Swing

According to one of his first biographers, the young Pierre Marivaux once arrived a few minutes early at his mistress's house. On entering her bedroom he found her at her mirror, rehearsing the gestures and expressions with which she would later seduce him. The epiphany left Marivaux stunned. Did she love him or were her affections a charade? Were all lovers so duplicitous? Was love just a performance? He fled the house, never to return.

Like many of the stories of Marivaux's life, the story is probably apocryphal. In an age that took fanatical pleasure in gossip and scandal, surprisingly few facts were recorded of the playwright's biography. We know little of his childhood or education, his friends, patrons, or lovers. The most startling aspect of Marivaux's life lies in his work, for his two novels and thirty-five comedies all share a single subject - the birth and death of love.

Marivaux lived in a world that took love seriously. After the death of the repressive, dour Louis XIV in 1715 (when Marivaux was twenty-seven years old) the French aristocracy embarked on a party that lasted almost seventy-five years, until it was cut short by the revolution. The young new king, Louis XV, set the tone with his legendary sexual appetite. He had made a political marriage to a Polish princess, Marie Leszczynska, for whom he felt little affection, and he spent much of his life hunting down mistresses. As the historian Nina Epton reports, "campaigns were ceaselessly waged at Versailles in favor of this or that aspirant to the royal bed. Circles were formed and led by various ladies of the court. Madame de Beauvau led a campaign for the Duchesse de Broglie, Mesdames de Boisgelin and de Prasle for the Comtesse de Noë; Madame d'Estrades was in the running, and later the perfidious Madame de Camvis, a protégée of La Pompadour, who would not have hesitated to betray her." (Love and the French, 1959.) Giacomo Casanova, the notorious Italian gigolo, was a frequent guest at Versailles. His taste for multiple partners from the same family became a vogue at the palace - Mesdames de Mailly, de Vintimille, and de la Tournelle, three of Louis' mistresses, also happened to be sisters. The King was a callous lover, and all three women died forgotten paupers. They may have been lucky - there were rumors that other discarded royal mistresses were poisoned. As the writer and philosopher La Rochefoucauld wryly observed: "If love is judged by most of its effects, it resembles hate more than friendship."

The frenzy at Versailles influenced every aspect of Parisian society. The florid and gilt swirls of rococo replaced the noble restraint of neo-classicism as the reigning aesthetic mode. Seventeenth-century dress had concealed the human form in stiff fabrics, but now clothing became flattering, even revealing. In the mid-eighteenth century every fashionable garden was fitted with a swing, a highly charged erotic symbol, for reasons made obvious by Fragonard's famous painting from the period. New furniture accompanied the new era of intimacy: sofas became de rigeur instead of chairs; society ladies received visitors in their baths, preserving their modesty with almond oil to whiten the water; every bedroom was fitted with an elaborate bidet to ensure proper hygiene. The new technology was not without its teething trouble. Epton tells of a horrified hostess who, "upon inspecting her dinner table before the arrival of her guests, found the new bidet which she had ordered from Paris arranged as a centerpiece. 'What is the meaning of this?' she asked her maître d'hôtel, who innocently replied: 'Why, that is the new soup tureen that came for Madame this morning!'"

Eighteenth-century anonymous etching: the proper way to mount a bidet.

The aristocracy of the ancien regime considered marriage to be little more than a business transaction, and both men and women were expected to maintain lovers. "Marriage as it is understood in high society is a regulated indecency," wrote the moral philosopher Nicolas Chamfort. In the love games of the ancien regime nowhere held more significance than Paris' two great theatres, the Opéra and the Comédie-Française, where aristocrats paraded their new conquests in full view - the boxes and balconies were angled so that the audience could watch their fellow spectators as easily as the stage. The theatres also served as unofficial refuges for abandoned mistresses and courtesans, who avoided imprisonment for indecency if they were able to register as nominal members of the ever-expanding acting companies. Given the composition of the audience, it now seems ironic that strict codes of decorum governed the stage, where male and female actors were not allowed to kiss. Playwrights developed ingenious strategies to circumvent the rule - in La Dispute, for example, Marivaux has two young lovers staring at each others' reflections in a small mirror, moving their faces closer and closer until their lips just happen to touch.

The revolution that brought an end to the excesses of the aristocracy was itself born from a philosophical revolt, the Enlightenment, whose roots lay in the philosophical and mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Newton. Eighteenth-century Paris, the playground of Casanova, the Marquis de Sade, and Choderlos de Laclos (who published Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1782, just seven years before the Revolution) was also home to the rationalist philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire, whose essays, novels, and plays forged a new humanist moral order. Denis Diderot's Encyclopedia attempted to categorize and define man's every experience of the world, and soon dictionary fever swept through Parisian society.

These two apparently contradictory impulses - an explosion of sexual freedom and a search for rational order - governed Paris in the age of Louis XV. They are deeply embedded in the theatre of Marivaux, whose work is a precise mirror of the concerns of his age. Almost all of his plays study the battle between the forces of love and rationalism, with neither side able to declare victory. In The Triumph of Love, for example, two rationalist philosophers, a brother and sister, have both foresworn love as a destructive, anarchic illusion. A princess arrives and, disguising her gender and lineage, seduces both of them in order to gain access to their ward, a beautiful prince with whom she is truly in love. The rationalists are thrown first into disorder -"What am I to do?" breathes the sister, "Love has entered my vocabulary!" - then into despair, as they discover that they have both been duped. Marivaux may mock the philosophers' world-view as naïve and simplistic, but the play is no less critical of the amorous princess, whose quest for love leads her into a maze of duplicity and cruelty. As the brother and sister attempt to assess the fragments of their lives, it is hard not to remember Marivaux's vision of his mistress rehearsing words of love before her mirror.

La Dispute is likewise built on the apparent conflict between untamed sexuality and cool philosophy. Marivaux structured the play around a bizarre rationalist experiment - a group of aristocrats try to simulate the conditions of the Garden of Eden to determine whether men or women are more unfaithful in love. Four babies, two male and two female, are raised in solitary confinement, with no knowledge of the world or of each other's existence. When they reach maturity they are released into a garden where their behavior is closely observed. At first the four youths form two couples, but no sooner have they exchanged vows of eternal love than they meet their counterparts and their affections begin to stray. All order breaks down, and the aristocrats are forced to cancel the experiment.

The refusal of La Dispute, The Triumph of Love, and many of Marivaux's other comedies to privilege either sexual passion or rationalism gave the plays an ambiguous reception. La Dispute now seems to be a small masterpiece, raising timely questions of biological determinism and developmental psychology, but when it opened at the Comédie-Française in October, 1744, Le Mercure de France reported that "since this novelty was not to the public's taste, the author withdrew it after the first performance." (The play remained dormant for almost two hundred years, and was next performed in 1938.) The poor response was due partly to the venue of the production - throughout the eighteenth century the Comédie-Française was an old-fashioned institution, bent on preserving the theatrical traditions of a previous age. Its repertory consisted largely of seventeenth-century neoclassical dramas by such playwrights as Racine, Corneille, and Molière, and the theatre prided itself on maintaining the costumes, sets, and performance styles of that period. Compared to the lofty diction, grand subject matter, and exaggerated heroes of the neoclassical verse masterpieces, Marivaux's prose comedies of love must have seemed slight. They were composed in an entirely different style, as foreign to the audience of the Comédie-Française as to the classically-trained acting company, who can scarcely have known what to make of his plays.

Marivaux developed his craft with a troupe of actors whose theatre could hardly have been less like the formality and pomp of the Comédie-Française. Since 1720 he had worked almost exclusively with a group of exiled Italian performers, who had set up in Paris in 1716 as the "Comédie-Italienne" and based their repertoire on the stock characters and scenarios of the commedia dell'arte. They had first performed in Italian, then silently in pantomime, until they decided that if they were to attract a French audience, they needed to commission a French playwright to produce texts for them. The twenty-two year-old Marivaux was quick to oblige, and generated more than a play a year for the Italian company over the next twenty years. The British director and translator Neil Bartlett describes the theatrical genius of the Comédie-Italienne as "the art of making a great deal out of almost nothing ... of ringing subtle and complex changes on the familiar Italian characters and narratives, on the recognizable stage personalities of a fixed acting company."

Fragonard, The Bolt (detail)

Marivaux kept notebooks in which he sketched out ideas and scenarios that could be fleshed out into plays for the Italian company. Each page is filled with fragments: "Idea of a woman who doesn't believe anyone could betray her;" "First shepherdess: Let us build an altar to fidelity! Second shepherdess: Let's not invent any gods we can't worship;" "There are two kinds of coquette: the first hunts for love, the second allows herself to be hunted." The resulting plays that Marivaux wrote for the group function almost as scenarios for commedia del'arte improvisation. As a result, Bartlett points out, "the inferred yet intense emotion and the erotic charge [are] almost all in the situation, not in the lines." Dialogue is only the tip of the iceberg in a Marivaux play - the actors must develop a strong psychological and physical continuum to support the witty banter that their characters exchange. Such invention was the stock-in-trade of the Italian company, but quite beyond the reach of the actors of the Comédie-Française, whose acting style was oratorical and mannered in comparison. It is hardly surprising that more than two-thirds of Marivaux's plays were never performed by the French company, and that even at the height of his success with the public and monarchy, he only achieved a lukewarm critical reception when his work was staged at the Comédie-Française. One reviewer sniffed that he wrote only of "la métaphysique du coeur," while after Marivaux's death in 1763, Voltaire, who had never liked the playwright's work, gibed, "He knew all the paths of the heart but never found the main road."

Voltaire's damning assessment set the tone for the next two centuries - until recently, Marivaux's plays were regarded as elegant, superficial comedies of love, prized mainly for their bon mots and witty repartee (the term "Marivaudage" still connotes clever banter in modern French.) But in 1973 Patrice Chéreau staged a landmark La Dispute in Paris that revealed deep currents of cruelty and despair under the sunny, aphoristic surface, and the production paved the way for a major re-evaluation of Marivaux's work. Other directors have followed Chéreau's lead - Jean-Pierre Vincent in Paris, Ian McDiarmid and Neil Bartlett in London, Andrei Serban in New York - all of whom have found more profound seams in Marivaux's comedies. It is now common to locate Marivaux as a pre-revolutionary figure who captured the deep anxieties underlying eighteenth-century Parisian society. As Bartlett argues in the introduction to his own translation of La Dispute, there is something brutal and disturbing in this superficially light comedy. "I can't think of another plot that veers from innocent clowning to vicious cruelty so quickly," he notes. "All of the characteristic elements of Marivaudage - the elegant scrutinizing and re-phrasing of love's every variation and subterfuge - are here, but they've been dipped in theatrical acid. What is at stake [...] is much more than the heroine's happiness. It's nothing less than the nature of being human."

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.'s Associate Artistic Director.