Jacques Copeau - During World War I

During World War I

Planning for the next season began in earnest, but August 1914 brought the outbreak of the First World War. With the men of the troupe called up for duty, including Copeau, there remained no choice but to close the theatre. Remanded to Paris, he kept a thriving correspondence with Jouvet and Dullin about the theatre. With Jouvet, he pondered the various possibilities of stagecraft and how the stage at the Vieux-Colombier could be shaped to fit their ideas about a "nouvelle comédie"—a new comedy reminiscent of the Italian commedia dell'arte. From their discussion came the concept of the "loggia" or a unit set that would be developed and used during the New York years and at the Vieux-Colombier in Paris after the war.

At first, Copeau busied himself with an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale along with Suzanne Bing while news from the front worsened. A telegram in August 1915 from Edward Gordon Craig inviting him to Florence to discuss a possible staging of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Passion According to Saint Matthew was greeted with enthusiasm. A month in Florence discussing with Craig, himself an important reformer of the theatre, helped put many of his own ideas in perspective for Copeau and Craig did not always agree on the means to reach their goal of a theatre renewed. Before the war Craig had founded a school at the Arena Goldoni where his students studied acting and stagecraft. For Craig any reform of the theatre had to begin with the training of the actor but he did not believe, as did Copeau, that it was possible. His idea of the übermarionnette, 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, Copeau stopped in Geneva for further discussions on the theatre with the scene designer Adolphe Appia and with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the musician and founder of the Institut de gymnastique rhythmique ("The Institute of Eurhythmics"). After having observed several of Jaques-Dalcroze's classes, he saw in Dalcroze's methods useful means for training young actors in movement. Upon his return to Paris he and Bing immediately went about setting up training sessions for youngsters using Dalcroze's methods. They soon realized from these initial efforts that the method indeed had a lot to offer, but that they also had much to learn.

In the summer of 1916, Copeau received an invitation to organize a tour with the Vieux-Colombier in America, supposedly to counteract the influence of the German theatre in New York City, but also as a propaganda move to continue American support of the French cause. He immediately saw this as an opportunity to bring back his actors from the front and to reconstitute his theatre, but also as a means of shoring up the weak finances of the Vieux-Colombier. But his efforts to free his actors from military duty proved futile and so he left alone in January 1917 for a lecture tour in the United States.