Jacques Copeau - Early Life and Formative Years

Early Life and Formative Years

The child of a well-off middle-class family, Copeau was raised in Paris and attended the best schools. At the Lycée Condorcet, he was a talented but nonchalant student whose interest in theatre already consumed him. His first staged play, Brouillard du matin ("Morning Fog"), was presented on March 27, 1897 at the Nouveau-Théâtre as part of the festivities of the alumni association of the Lycée Condorcet. The former president of the French Republic, Casimir-Perier, and the playwright Georges de Porto-Riche both congratulated him on his work. During the same period when Copeau was preparing his baccalauréat exams, he met Agnès Thomsen, a young Danish woman seven years his elder who was in Paris to perfect her French. They first met on March 13, 1896, and Copeau, then a seventeen-year old high school student, quickly fell in love. Eventually, Copeau passed his exams and began his studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne, but the theatre, extensive reading, and his courtship of Agnès left him little time to study and kept him from passing his exams for the licence, despite several attempts. Against his mother's wishes he married Agnès in June 1902 in Copenhagen. Their first child, Marie-Hélène (called Maiène), was born on December 2, 1902.

In April 1903, the young family made its way back to France where Copeau took up his duties as director of the family's factory in Raucourt in the Ardennes. He also reinserted himself into a small literary coterie of friends, among them now, André Gide. While living in Angecourt in the Ardennes, Copeau frequently travelled to Paris where he made a name for himself as theatre critic-at-large for several publications. Back in Paris in 1905, 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. In mid-April their second daughter, Hedwig was born. In July 1905, he took on a job at the Georges Petit Gallery where he assembled exhibits and wrote the catalogues. He stayed at the Petit Gallery until May 1909. During this period he continued to write theatre reviews and garnered a reputation as an astute and principled judge of the theatre arts. The sale of the factory in Raucourt gave him the financial independence that allowed him to pursue his literary activities as one of the founders of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), a publication that was to become one of the leading arbiters of literary taste in France.

"Liberated", as he said, from his duties at the gallery and from management concerns at the Raucourt factory, Copeau launched himself into his work. In 1910, he bought Le Limon, a piece of property in the Seine-et-Marne département, away from the distractions of Paris. He worked tirelessly on a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov along with his school boy friend, Jean Croué, finishing it by the end of 1910. He was now ready to work in the theatre as a practitioner not only as critic. The play was staged in April 1911 under the direction of Jacques Rouché at the Théâtre des Arts, receiving favorable reviews. Charles Dullin, who played the role of Smerdiakov, was particularly singled out for a fine performance. A second staging of the adaptation the following October, with Louis Jouvet in the role of Father Zossima, confirmed the earlier critical claim.