Spectacularising the commonplaces. Crafting and animating the domestic environment in Victorien Sardou’s Maison Neuve (1866) and Mrs Musgrave’s Our Flat (1889)

Résumé En

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rise of domestic drama and its success showed that according to G.B. Shaw’s words, the ‘commonplaces’ became ‘the most unexpected novelties’. While history plays were produced in precise and archaeologically accurate environments, comedies taking place in the contemporary world were performed in modern accessorised interiors the audience could relate to. The profusion of objects and their interactions with the actors on stage brought the drama to life and gave information about the characters’ background. This identification was all the more essential as these plays often tackled the issues of social distinction, upward mobility and decay. Materialising the social evolution of the characters, furniture and accessories were manipulated, animated and spectacularised, appeared and disappeared on stage, emphasising the dramatic or comedic potential of the play. In Victorien Sardou’s Maison Neuve (1866), the spectators followed the adventures of a Parisian couple moving in a new flat and furnishing it to the latest fashion in order to climb up the social ladder – and obviously, their later downfall, leading to actors emptying the stage decoration during the performance. Based on the same model, Mrs Musgrave’s comedy Our Flat (1889) also spectacularised the domestic interior of a young couple seeking fame and success by hiring a luxurious flat in London despite their debts. These two plays, staging the performance of furnishing or clearing out a room as part of a play, responded to the demand of the Victorian audience to see in detail a realistic fiction (Meisel, 1983) while exaggerating and spectacularising the domestic world, showing it as a continuity of the human characters’ personalities and stories. Analysing the crafts and visual aspect of both plays and their reception, this paper aims to demonstrate the importance of the material environment in contemporary comedies, and how the realistic and materialised stage met the expectations of an audience who could see in the fictional space the mirror of their own interior.