The Theatre Transformed

Theatre in the Belle Époque became a laboratory for exploring modern psychology and social issues. Henrik Ibsen's plays, though Norwegian, found their greatest audience in Paris. "A Doll's House" (1879) sparked fierce debates about women's rights. When Nora slammed the door on her marriage, she opened a door for countless women in the audience.

"I went to see Ibsen's play prepared to be shocked," wrote the feminist journalist Séverine. "Instead, I saw my own life on stage. How many of us are dolls in our husbands' houses, pretty toys with no legal rights, no money of our own, no existence outside marriage?"

André Antoine's Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887, revolutionized staging. Rejecting painted backdrops and declamatory acting, Antoine created naturalistic environments. For a butcher shop scene, he hung real meat on stage (until the smell forced him to substitute painted replicas). Actors turned their backs to audiences, spoke in conversational tones, lived their roles rather than performing them.

The Symbolists created their own theatrical revolution. Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre staged Maeterlinck's mysterious dramas in dimly lit, dreamlike settings. When Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" opened in 1896 with the nonsense word "Merdre!" (a barely disguised profanity), it caused a riot that made theatrical history. The play's savage satire and absurdist logic anticipated twentieth-century avant-garde theatre.