35 Facts About Jacques Copeau

The child of a well-off middle-class family, the Paris-born Jacques Copeau was raised in Paris and attended the best schools.

Jacques Copeau's first staged play, Brouillard du matin, was presented on 27 March 1897 at the Nouveau-Theatre as part of the festivities of the alumni association of the Lycee Condorcet.

Jacques Copeau reinserted himself into a small literary coterie of friends, among them now, Andre Gide.

Back in Paris in 1905, Jacques Copeau continued his work as theatre critic, writing reviews of such plays as Ibsen's A Doll's House and Gabriele D'Annunzio's La Gioconda as well an overview of the structure of contemporary theatre published in L'Ermitage in February.

Jacques Copeau stayed at the Petit Gallery until May 1909.

Jacques Copeau was one of the founders of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, a publication that was to become one of the leading arbiters of literary taste in France.

Jacques Copeau finished work on The Brothers Karamazov by the end of 1910.

Jacques Copeau was now ready to work in the theatre as a practitioner not only as critic.

Jacques Copeau wanted to rid the Paris stage of the rank commercialism and tawdriness represented by the boulevard theatre.

Jacques Copeau wanted to move the theatre to a simpler style, freed from the ornamentation that obscured even the finest texts.

Jacques Copeau named the theatre after the street so that it could be found more easily.

Jacques Copeau wanted to entice new playwrights, perhaps those who had despaired that the theatre would ever present works of quality.

Jacques Copeau proposed eventually a school for young actors in order to create a new cohort of actors whose taste and instincts would remain above compromise.

Jacques Copeau staged plays from the classics, fairly recent works of quality, and the offerings of new playwrights from outside the theatre such as Jean Schlumberger and Roger Martin du Gard.

At first, Jacques Copeau busied himself with an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale along with Suzanne Bing while news from the front worsened.

Jacques Copeau's idea of the ubermarionnette, the super-marionnette, to replace the human actor completely was a product of the lack of faith in the possibility of educating the actor.

On his return trip to Paris, Jacques Copeau stopped in Geneva for further discussions on the theatre with the scene designer Adolphe Appia and with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, the musician and founder of the Institut de gymnastique rhythmique.

Jacques Copeau immediately saw this as an opportunity to bring back his actors from the front and to reconstitute his theatre, but as a means of shoring up the weak finances of the Vieux-Colombier.

The next day Jacques Copeau accompanied Mrs Kahn to the Metropolitan Museum.

Jacques Copeau offered to Copeau the Bijou Theatre, a new house that opened in April 1917.

Jacques Copeau chose rather an older theatre, the Garrick Theatre on West 35th Street which housed the Theatre Francais, because he felt that with the proper renovations, among other considerations, it would better suit the unit set he had conceived with Jouvet.

At the close of the New York season, Jacques Copeau took his troupe to Washington, DC and to the Little Theatre in Philadelphia where they presented ten different plays.

Jacques Copeau considered the aesthetic highlight of the season Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande, principally because of the way the unit set with subtle lighting and the judicious use of banners on its several levels allowed an uninterrupted flow of action in this major work of the Symbolist movement.

Jacques Copeau finished the adaptation of The Winter's Tale, which would be the first offering when the theatre reopened in January 1920, and with Jouvet he oversaw the renovations to the stage and the lighting at the Vieux-Colombier.

Jacques Copeau called upon the generosity of the Friends of the Vieux-Colombier who helped fill its coffers.

Jouvet, who understood the economics of the theatre better than Jacques Copeau, knew that a larger theatre and a more profitable pricing system were needed.

Jacques Copeau allowed his young charges to appear in a production of Gide's Saul as the masked demons that taunt the king played by Jacques Copeau himself.

Jacques Copeau's piece dealt with the theme of an autocratic father whose two sons, Maxime and Pierre, have already left the nest to find happiness elsewhere.

Jacques Copeau decided to mount two plays before a group of industrialists in Lille in January 1925 in order to secure financial backing for the troupe with a greatly reduced number of plays and a new plan of attack: "four plays a year, eight months of preparation, four months of stagings, one month in Paris and three months in the provinces and abroad".

Jacques Copeau composed a text, Le Veuf, that the actors began to rehearse on a simple platform in the main hall at Morteuil.

Jacques Copeau continued his work with this troupe as best he could, despite his heavy schedule of readings and lectures.

Jacques Copeau, too, continued his heavy schedule of dramatic readings to help support himself and the troupe.

In 1933 Jacques Copeau mounted a production of The Mystery of Saint Uliva, in the cloister of the Santa Croce in Florence and in 1935 Savonarola, on the central square of Florence.

In 1940, Jacques Copeau was named Provisionary Administrator of the Comedie-Francaise, where he staged Pierre Corneilles Le Cid, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Merimee's Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement.

Jacques Copeau died at the Hospices de Beaune on 20 October 1949.