page_title: Journey Through the Impossible
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Journey Through the Impossible / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Drawing by A. Gérardin for Le Monde Illustré (No. 1340, 2 December 1882, page 1), showing scenes from the play Voyage à travers l'impossible. More information about this engraving here.
context_page_description: Journey Through the Impossible is an 1882 fantasy play written by Jules Verne, with the collaboration of Adolphe d'Ennery. A stage spectacular in the féerie tradition, the play follows the adventures of a young man who, with the help of a magic potion and a varied assortment of friends and advisers, makes impossible voyages to the center of the Earth, the bottom of the sea, and a distant planet. The play is deeply influenced by Verne's own Voyages Extraordinaires series and includes characters and themes from some of his most famous novels, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon.
  The play opened in Paris at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on 25 November 1882, and achieved a financially successful run of 97 performances. Contemporary critics gave the play mixed reviews; in general, the spectacular staging and the use of ideas from Verne's books were highly praised, while the symbolism and moral themes in the script were criticized and attributed to the collaboration of d'Ennery.
context_section_description: The play, advertised as une pièce fantastique en trois actes, premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on 25 November 1882. As with the previous Verne–d'Ennery collaborations, Journey Through the Impossible had a gala opening night.
  The play was a pronounced box-office success; however, critical reception was mixed. In the 1882 edition of Les Annales du Théâtre et de la Musique, Édouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig criticized the play for including "Catholico-reactionary mysticism which seeks to elicit tears of holy water from the audience;" Noël and Stoullig suspected that d'Ennery was to blame for the mystical overtones. In Le Temps, Francisque Sarcey panned the play with a brief notice, claiming that all the other plays running that week were "far more interesting and entertaining." He noted the innovative Verne-d'Ennery idea of using the human characters of Volsius and Ox to represent good and evil in the fantasy, rather than resorting to the typical "Good Fairy" and "Bad Fairy" characters in such plays, but added that he "didn't quite see what we've gained by the substitution."
  The Parisian critic Arnold Mortier, in a long review of the play, described it as "beautiful" and "elegant", and highly praised Dailly's performance as Valdemar, but believed the staging lacked originality: "a great deal of money went into this production, but very few ideas." Like Sarcey, he commented with some asperity on the metaphorical use of Volsius and Ox as symbols of Good and Evil, rather than attractive young women playing Good and Bad Fairies: "Is it not time, perhaps, to return to that practice?" An anonymous reviewer for The New York Times said of the play: "I have never seen anything more idiotically incoherent, or of which the dialogue is more pretentious," but predicted that it would be a success because of its spectacular production values. Henri de Bornier gave the play a brief but highly positive notice in La Nouvelle revue, highlighting the elegance of the decor and commenting Verne and d'Ennery had done humankind a "true service" by exploring impossible domains on the stage.
  Charles Monselet, in Le Monde Illustré, praised Taillade and the "curious" nature of the voyages, but found the play as a whole tiresome. On the other hand, two other major illustrated journals, L'Illustration and L'Univers Illustré, greeted the play with wholly positive reviews, particularly lauding the spectacular staging. Auguste Vitu gave the play a largely positive review, praising the actors, the decor, and the use of Verne's ideas, but expressed doubts about the wisdom of combining so many disparate styles—dramatic realism, scientific fiction, and pure fantasy—in one production. Anonymous reviewers in the Revue politique et littéraire and the Revue Britannique, as well as Victor Fournel in Le Correspondant and Arthur Heulhard in the Chronique de l'Art, all wrote similarly mixed reviews, speaking highly of the actors and of Verne's characters and concepts but saying that d'Ennery's dramatizations and revisions were clumsy. In his 1910 history of the féerie, Paul Ginisty hailed Journey Through the Impossible for introducing a "scientific element" to the genre and for bringing characters from Verne's books to the stage, but sharply criticized d'Ennery for putting "furiously outdated" sentiments in the mouth of the character Volsius.
  Journey Through the Impossible ran for 97 performances, and contributed to the ongoing fame of both Verne and d'Ennery. In 1904, the pioneering director Georges Méliès freely adapted the play into a film, The Impossible Voyage.
caption: Scenes from the first production, in an engraving for Le Monde Illustré
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