High and Low

What kind of tales do you want to read? Who do you want to read your tales?

How Sarcey Defined a Play

Francisque Sarcey was the great drama critic in Paris from 1860-1899. In those years he promised many times to write a volume comprising all his theories of playmaking. He never got round to it, but he did write an essay on the topic.

In this essay, alas, he did not write about one of his most famous ideas, that of the scène à faire (or ‘Obligatory Scene’ as Archer translated it). But he did define a play: to Sarcey, the business of a play —

is to represent life to a crowd

(My translations here are from Brander Matthews. Sarcey’s original line is: ‘Il s’agit de représenter la vie humaine devant une foule.’
— Quarante Ans de Théâtre Vol 1, p. 129)

— and he spent much of the first part of his essay insisting on the ‘crowd’ or audience, and writing on the effect the crowd had on the play.

The Low

For Sarcey, a play is not a play without its audience, and the audience must be more than one soul. He insists on this point so strongly that even when he admits that a play acted out for an audience of one is, in truth, a ‘play,’ he has to torment his words and logic and say that this one viewer, be he King or a lowly theater janitor, stands in for and represents the necessary crowd.

Why did Sarcey feel he had to go so far? He says he does so,

because from this simple fact we can derive all the laws of the theater without a single exception.

(‘parce qu’il est en effet le point de départ, parce que de ce simple fait nous allons tirer, sans en excepter une, toutes les lois du théâtre.’
— Quarante Ans de Théâtre Vol 1, pp. 128–129)

But I think it was because he wanted to speak of the commercial theater of his day, and had much to say about the crowd’s effect upon the actors and upon its own members. But when he came to consider ‘the Theater’ in the abstract, he felt he must start with definitions to answer ‘What is a play?’ — though indeed he didn’t need to do so, and the conflict drove him to absurd stands such as the following:

The king represents the absent audience; he is the crowd all by himself. And likewise the famous solitary spectator at the Odéon in the old days—the one whom Lireux provided with a foot-warmer,—he was the representative of the absent multitude. This legendary spectator was not only a spectator, he was the public. He included in his own person the twelve hundred truants who should have occupied the vacant seats above him. They had delegated their powers to him; it was they who applauded with his hands and who bore witness of their boredom when he opened his mouth to yawn.

(‘Ce roi figure le public absent; il est la foule à lui tout seul. Et de même le fameux spectateur l’Odéon des anciens jours, celui auquel Lireux faisait apporter sa chaufferette, il était le représentant de la multitude absente. Ce spectateur légendaire n’était point un spectateur, il était le public. Il ramassait en sa personne les douze cents infidèles qui auraient dû occuper les places vides autour de lui. Ils lui avaient délégué leurs pouvoirs; c’était eux qui applaudissaient par ses mains, qui témoignaient de leur ennui quand il ouvrait la bouche pour bâiller.’
— Quarante Ans de Théâtre Vol 1, pp. 128)

But when I read these words, I am struck by Sarcey’s bourgeois bent. He ever insisted on a popular theater, as though popularity set the Seal of Quality upon a play, and as though popular success were the one great goal to which all plays and playwrights must aspire.

The High

A very different point of view would be to take the opposite approach and break the crowd up into its individual members, and say that

A play is a representation of life acted out before an audience of individuals sitting together.

From this we could talk of how the performances and the logical development of the play works upon each man’s heart and mind.

But the result of such a definition is to bend to the inherent quality of the piece in its words, its progress, and the gestures and readings of its players. This looks for the Seal of Quality some place other than mere popularity.

Two Camps of Tales, and of Talesmen

All this speaks of a distinction between a Popular tale and a tale of Quality. Between the tales told for the crowd in the camp and marketplace, and those tales that are told for the few, the rare, the men of high taste.

Sarcey, the bourgeois critic who insisted he spoke for the average, paying theater-goer, set his foot firmly in the Popular camp. He wrote of popular plays and judged how the crowd would like them. And many of his critics and rivals would rather have plays that appealed to the few; to them gross popularity was more a sign of vulgarity and shallowness than of depth and refinement.

It helps you, as talesman and audience both, to know in what camp you mean to make your home. We don’t always have to choose, but in the main and for most of the hours we do so choose, and we tent to stick to our home camp through most of our telling and our reading.

I stand with the Low Tales of Popularity.

So you must take what I say here with that thought in mind. If you would write, or read, the High Tales of Refinement, then you must be skeptical of all I say, and ask yourself often, ‘How does this or that apply not to the Low Tales but to the High? Does it say anything at all of the High Tale?’

(Note: Sarcey’s Quarante Ans de Théâtre can be found online in the original at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k550157/f416.table )

(Composed with pen on paper Monday, March 24, 2008)