The Representation of French Interiors on the Victorian British Stage: Visual and Material Reinterpretations and Decorative Transfers across the Channel

Résumé En

Since Stephen Stanton’s works in the 1950s, Victorian theatre studies kept pointing the influence of French literature on British theatrical creations of the second half of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the visual aspect of this influence is only rarely discussed, or it is only focused on the gestural performances, such as Henry Irving’s observation after a visit of the Comédie-Française in London ‘the pictures they produced went straight to the heart and needed no language for those of us who could not master French’. However, such contemporary British quotes on French performances could also be understood as acknowledgments of the art of staging. In the frame of constant artistic exchanges between the two countries, this paper aims attention at how the stage directors and artists interpreted the contemporary French visual environment through stage decor. For some plays, like Emile Augier’s or Victorien Sardou’s, the existing Parisian stage sets could have been copied or reinterpreted for the British audience. By contrast, other plays inspired by other French literary forms, like Alexandre Dumas’ novels, were fully-fledged British visual creations. How do British scene painters represented French interiors ? What were their references ? How did French theatre import decorative forms in England ? Through the visuality and the materiality of various British plays created either ex nihilo or imported from France, the study aims to analyse the cultural transferts of decorative forms between Paris and London.