The Stage's Scribe Article
Master of his craft
Anthony Curtis tells Aleks Sicrz why Eugène Scribe's work should be revived.
Can the well made play make a comeback? Its inventor, French playwright Eugène Scribe, looms large in every theatre history but his work is never seen on the London stage.
Anthony Curtis, who has adapted Scribe's 1827 comedy Le Manage d'Argent as Golden Opportunities, aims to reverse the years of neglect. A veteran writer and former literary editor of the Financial Times, Curtis has been a French theatre enthusiast for years. Today his (Scribe's) plays are difficult to come by. I managed to track down a three-volume edition and I found them tremendously enjoyable to translate.
Golden Opportunities opens at the Warehouse Theatre, Croydon and is a British premiere. As Curtis points out: "Scribe was the master of the well made play and the great thing about the well made play is that it always has parts actors can really relish."
Unlike many contemporary plays which end on a downbeat note and have poorly constructed plots, a typical Scribe drama has a compelling and suspenseful plot with a satisfying resolution. "These plays end on a positive note and audiences seem to appreciate that," adds Curtis.
Golden Opportunities is a comedy about three men, old school friends now in their early forties. It is set in the Paris mansion of the one who has made an enormous fortune. His friends are a successful painter and an ex-soldier who is desperately in debt. The way to solve this problem is to marry money. "It's an ideal play for a revival because it has one set and obeys all the dramatic unities. It's an extremely good play and its cast of seven is well within any theatre's budget. It's also full of wonderful, brittle comic lines."
Not only is the play entertaining but it also," says Curtis, "gives you a great insight into a lost world and its values. Golden Opportunities is all about that period in French history after the fall of Napoleon, when the rising middle class was in conflict with the old restored monarchy. There is a lot about the stock market and this - in our world of hedge funds - is relevant". A couple of years ago, his version of Scribe's 1849 masterpiece, Adrienne Lecouvreur, had a rehearsed reading in Holland Park. "And its success set me off on my quest to rehabilitate Scribe as a playwright," he says.
But why has Scribe been forgotten? "I think the process began in his lifetime when the Romantics, such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, thought that he was too much of a craftsman to be a genuine artist - so they derided him. The result was that he fell out of favour quite quickly after his death in 1861."
Born in 1791, Scribe was a prolific writer. He produced around 400 works, including tragedies, comedies, vaudevilles and librettos for light operas. "He was enormously hard working so people thought he couldn't be any good," says Curfis. "He became stereotyped as merely a theatrical carpenter, whose plays were very thin on character and meaning."
Yet for a while in the 1850's, Scribe was the flavour of the month. "There were seasons of his work, in French, at the St James's Theatre", says Curtis. "And Queen Victoria went several times. In the Pinero period, late Victorian Times, there was a vogue for him but he fell out of favour when the well made play was sidelined in 1956 by the new wave kicked off by Look Back in Anger." Among the casualties of the new. wave, whose 50th anniversary has been celebrated this year, were masters of the well made play such as Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward.
"The well made play was clobbered mercilessly by Ken Tynan and director Tony Richardson. For many years, Rattigan was a dirty word. Only recently, these plays have been rediscovered and, like Scribe's, they have considerable depth as well as great craftsmanship
Curtis points out that Scribe also worked as an opera librettist, collaborating with Verdi on The Sicilian Vespers. Although no play by Scribe has been seen in London in living memory this might soon change - just before Golden Opportunities opens, the Royal Opera is giving a concert performance of Halevy's La Juive in the Barbican, with the libretto by Scribe.
His work is of a consistently high standard," says Curtis. "He's not a one hit wonder. Although I trimmed the long speeches and sharpened some of the dialogue, his play works wonderfully on stage." Curtis quotes a 19th-century French critic when he says "The action of his plays are examples of logical dexterity. How attentively one follows the plot. How cunningly he arouses a universal gasp at this or that character!"
Sounds like fun - it's high time the well made play had a new airing.
Golden Opportunites opens at the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon, on September 29th.