Performing Time in the Revolutionary Theater

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

CJF hough not entirely devoid of literary merit, the Revolutionary theater was Ls essentially a propaganda machine. What better way to reach a large and largely illiterate audience with the message of the Revolution? The performance of Revolutionary plays mirrored and deepened the experience of members of the audience, for whom the doctrines of the Revolution must have remained distant and abstract, even as the changes brought about by the Revolution were immediate and material. Several plays of this period, including Le reveil d'Epimenide a Paris (1789) by Carbon de Flinsdes-Oliviers, Le jugement dernier des rois (1794) by Sylvain Marechal and L'an 2000 (1789) by Retif de la Bretonne, stage this gap between abstract doctrine and lived experience as a gap in time. In the first play, Epimenide has been asleep since the time of Louis XIV, and in the second play, the Old Man has been in exile since the time of Louis XV. Both characters know only the France of the past, of the Ancien Regime; and both plays proceed with a sort of parade of characters, a performance within the performance, to bring the main characters (and presumably the audience) up to date, by filling in the breach in time with the performance. Retifs play is structurally different, but deals with many of the same themes. Set in the projected future (the year 2000), the play simultaneously makes the present past and the future present to the audience of 1789. In all three plays the question of time is both raised by the situations presented and banished by the radically present time of performance. Le reveil d'Epimenide a Paris was first performed on January 1, 1790, and was popular enough to inspire at least one plagiarist to claim the play and produce it on a competing stage. Based on the Greek philosopher who, according to legend, slept for fifty-seven years and awoke to find his brothers old men, the character of Epimenide appears in no fewer than six plays in the eighteenth century. He is an ambivalent figure, representing both change and constancy: in pre-Revolutionary plays by Henault, Poisson and Retif de la Bretonne, the moral of the play is that though the world around us changes, l'honnete homme is still the same. All of these plays (and the later play by Flinsdes-Oliviers is no exception) derive some comedy out of the rapidity of change, as the newly-awakened sleeper fails to recognize some common object which the audience has already learned to take for granted. This device is used both for comic effect and as a vehicle for social critique, as in the 1789 version. By way of epigraph, let us consider briefly Retifs 1788 play sage journee (one of two versions of the Epimenide myth he wrote that year) because there, the object chosen for scrutiny is particularly significant: on seeing a clock, the main character, who has slept seventy-five years, wonders about the second hand. When told what it is, he cries: Quelle imagination Le temps ne s' enfuit-il pas assez vite, sans rendre visible sa rapidite Otez cette aiguille desesperante Qu'on la brise ! But the servant replies that he cannot: Monsieur ! he says, La pendule n'est pas a vous ! (1:66). This exchange is emblematic of what is being staged in all of these plays and which has a particular resonance in the later, Revolutionary context: first, a dizzying recognition of the passage of time and then the desire, left unfulfilled, to stop it. In the re-telling of the Epimenide story by Flins-des-Oliviers, the Greek main character has been asleep for one hundred years. When he wakes, he finds Paris transformed by Revolution. The play has no dramatic conflict to speak of and consists almost entirely of a procession of characters representing different professions comparing their current lives to life under the Ancien Regime. Only a few characters are unhappy with their lot, including an Abbe (distraught that he will no longer be able to support his