Description
RARE POSTER FOR AXËLVilliers de l'Isle Adam's testamentary work was performed for the first time on 26 and 27 February 1894 (5 years after the author's death) at the Théâtre de la Gaîté. Illustrated by Maurice De Lambert, a pupil of Gustave Moreau, the poster also featured a portrait of Villiers by Marcellin Desboutin. A sheet of text indicating a new cast has been pasted onto the poster to conceal the original cast.
Theatrical event and mass in posthumous honour of Villiers "oin which the young generation of idealists communicated with great fervour"(Losco-Lena, p.2), Axël, whose performance lasted no less than 5 hours, provoked the mockery of Jules Lemaître and Sarcey as well as the enthusiasm of William Butler Yeats. It has to be said that Paul Larochelle, both director and performer of Axël, took a daring gamble: Villiers himself, aspiring to a renewed theatre free of the sham, had declared:
Axel's drama was in no way written for the stage and [...] the very idea of its performance seems to the author himself to be almost unacceptable (lecture on Axel, 28 February 1884).
A first attempt to stage the play by Paul Fort, director of the Théâtre de l'Art, caused an outcry among Symbolist poets.
The show staged at the Théâtre de la Gaîté did not shine for its innovative character: the "recitation" of long tirades highlighting the poetry of the text borrowed from the Théâtre de l'Art, while the spectacular effects of the staging evoked melodrama. The richness of the production, however, did not fail to impress: Paul Larochelle invested 20,000 francs in his staging, ordering 4 sets from the Tovascelli workshops in Milan and designing the costumes made by the Garnier workshop. He was also praised for the quality of the acting and the music by Alexandre George - whom Villiers had already commissioned to write incidental music during his lifetime.
The representation ofAxël remains a major event in the history of theatre, solidifying the play's reputation as a "classic".the symbolist theatre bible"(Dorothy Knowles), with one of the final lines "To live? the servants will do that for us".
Losco-LenaMireille. « TheAxël at the Gaîté, Paris, 1894 », Literature71. 2014. pp. 105-118.
Dorothy Knowles, Dorothy. Idealist reaction in the theatre since 1890. Droz, .
Under passe-partout, modern frame. Fold in the centre, wetness at the top left and on the distribution leaf, slight discolouration in the margins.
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