CLAUDEL (Paul). Autograph manuscript, entitled "Mes idées su - Lot 153

CLAUDEL (Paul). Autograph manuscript, entitled "Mes idées sur la manière générale de jouer mes drames". [1912]. 4pp. in-4, splits at folds. Instructions for actors, in a manuscript originally published in facsimile in the October-December 1912 issue of L'Œuvre magazine, on the occasion of the premiere of L'Annonce faite à Marie in December 1912 at the Théâtre de L'Œuvre, directed by Aurélien Lugné-Poe. It was the first time one of Paul Claudel's plays had been brought to the stage. "1 The actor is an artist, not a critic. His aim is not to convey a text, but to bring a character to life. He must therefore become so imbued with the spirit and feeling of the role he's playing, that his language on stage seems no more than its natural expression. It's not a matter of detailing and nuancing and coloring the role equally and indifferently, but of focusing in each scene on the peaks of expression that command everything else. Often, what's most moving about an actor is not so much what he says, but what you feel he's going to say. It's a completely different thing to understand as an intelligent man and to understand as an artist and creator. It is through a proper sense of the relative importance of its various parts that a role is truly composed. 2. The most important thing for me, after emotion, is music. A pleasant, clearly articulated voice, and the intelligible concert it forms with the other voices in dialogue, are already an almost sufficient treat for the mind, independently even of the abstract meaning of the words. Poetry, with its subtle sense of timbre and chord, its images and movements that reach to the soul, is what allows the human voice to be fully employed and deployed. The division into verses that I have adopted, based on the repetitions of breathing and cutting the sentence into emotional rather than logical units, will facilitate the study of the actor. When you listen to someone speaking, you hear that at a variable point towards the middle of the sentence the voice rises, and falls towards the end. These two beats and the modulations in between make up my verse... Because of this musical principle, I shy away from anything in the flow that is too violent, too jerky, too abrupt. You can't break the enchantment that binds the characters together. Without excessive violence, it seems to me that there is a way to reach the heart of the spectator and achieve the bitter and biting. The screams, if any are needed, are rare, but all the more effective for that... 3 Similarly, in acting and gestures, avoid anything that is abrupt, violent, artificial or jerky, and never lose a certain sense of group and attitude. I particularly abhor what I call the stage walk: two large steps and one small step followed by a stop. No grimaces or convulsions. In pathetic moments, the tragic slowness of a movement unfolding towards its end is preferable to all explosions... The principle of great art is to severely avoid what is unnecessary. Now, the evolutions of the actors who continually walk up and down the stage under the pretext of filling it, who stand up, who turn around, who sit down, are perfectly useless. Nothing annoys me like the actor who tries to paint in detail on his face every emotion that his partner's speech gives him. He should know how to remain quiet and motionless when he needs to, even at the cost of a certain awkwardness for which the spectator will be grateful. Every moment in the drama has its own attitude, and gestures should be nothing more than the composition and decomposition of that attitude. The actor must be capable of the selflessness of a great artist, preoccupied not with success, but with the best realization of the work of art to which he must give life. -And it is perhaps precisely in this insouciance of the audience that lies the best secret of reaching and moving them." Joint: Barrault (Jean-Louis). Autograph letter signed [to Max Brun]. S.l., February 5, 1964. "It was with great joy that I learned this very day of Claudel's ideas on the general way of performing his dramas. And I thank you for thinking of me. This is an important document for those who will approach it, especially those who, through intellectual deformation, turn art into didacticism. I've rediscovered what Claudel told us, and the taste I shared with him. Like him, I'm moving more and more in the direction of music. It's through rhythm that power can emerge.