Féerie (French pronunciation:[feʁi]), sometimes translated as "fairy play",[1] was a French theatrical genre known forfantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects.[2]Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians,[3] to tell stories with clearly definedmelodrama-likemorality and an extensive use ofsupernatural elements.[4] The genre developed in the early 19th century and became immensely popular in France throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the development ofburlesque,musical comedy andfilm.[2]
Féeries used a fairy-tale aesthetic to combine theatre with music, dances, mime, acrobatics, and especially spectacular visual effects created by innovative stage machinery,[3] such astrap doors,smoke machines, and quickly changeable sets.[5] Songs always appeared, usually featuring new lyrics to familiar melodies.[6] Transformation scenes, in which a scene would change as if by magic in full view of the audience, were an important component of the style; until 1830, nearly all scene changes inféeries were full-view transformations.[7] The last transformation in aféerie, accompanied by a flourish of music, led to theapotheosis: a grand final stage picture, usually involving beautifulsupernumeraries descending from the sky or suspended on wires.[8]
These elements, especially the spectacle and stage effects, were far more prominent than the plot. The criticFrancisque Sarcey suggested that for aféerie, the crew in charge of design and stagecraft should be regarded as more important than the writers, noting that the scripts themselves were so incoherent that "one can put the beginning at the end, and vice versa."[9]Théophile Gautier even suggested, with considerable irony, that the immensely successful féerieLes Pilules du diable could be performed as a purelymimed production, so that no spoken words would distract the audience from the spectacle they had come to enjoy.[10][a] The total effect was one of a dazzling, dreamlike array of visuals, harkening back to fairy-tale traditions and a childlike sense of wonder through the use of innovative stage technology.[9] In a review ofThe Blue Bird, a writer in theJournal des débats commented satirically on the spectacular frivolity of a typicalféerie, but positively on the genre's vast potential for creativity:
Nothing is more rare than a féerie which is not an absurd mixture of ridiculous adventures and burlesque inventions and which consists otherwise only as an exhibition of tricks, costumes and decors … Nevertheless what resources are offered by the féerie to the poetic imagination![11]
The plots offéeries were usually borrowed from fairy tales in the French tradition, such as those byCharles Perrault andMadame d'Aulnoy; otherféeries borrowed from outside sources such as theOne Thousand and One Nights, or created original plots.[9] Like melodramas, the formféeries involved a stirring battle between forces of good and evil. However, where melodrama merely suggested the existence of these extremes,féeries made them unabashedly literal by embodying them as witches, gnomes, and other supernatural creatures.[12] The clear moral tone was heightened by the dialogue, which often included maxims about love, duty, virtue, and similar topics.[13] A full-lengthféerie often ran for several hours.[9]
Four human characters reliably appeared among the supernatural forces: two young lovers (aningenue and her heroic suitor), an often comical and grotesque rival for the affections of the ingenue, and a lazyvalet obsessed with eating. The supernatural forces in the plot drove these characters through fantastic landscapes and multiple adventures, typically involving magictalismans used to transform people, things, and places. The apotheosis reunited the lovers to dazzling effect.[8]
Theféerie can trace its origins to theballet de cour ("court ballet") tradition of theRenaissance,[3] in which such court leaders asCatherine de' Medici andHenry IV of France would commission spectacularly designed ballets based on mythological subjects and fables.[14] Another notable precursor is thepièces à machines ("plays with machines") genre, popular at theThéâtre du Marais in the mid 17th-century, again using mythology as source material;Molière'sPsyché is a notable small-scale example,[2] andCorneille'sAndromède andLa Toison d'or also count within the genre.[3] These genres owed much to the theatrical engineering work of Italian architects, especiallyNicola Sabbatini.[3] These spectacles paved the way for 18th-century fairground pantomimes (théâtre de la foire), such asArlequin dans un oeuf at theThéâtre des Jeunes-Artistes,[2] orLes Eaux de Merlin byAlain-René Lesage.[10] The fairground pantomimes, by combining motifs from theCommedia dell'Arte with lavish fantasy created by theatrical spectacle,[10] served as the most direct precursor of the 19th-centuryféerie.[2]
TheFrench Revolution changed the face of French theatre, with a large new audience to please: thebourgeoisie. Various genres developed to please bourgeois tastes. Theféerie, combining the fairground influences with the farcical style ofcomédie en vaudeville,[3] began as a form ofmelodrama, but the gap between them quickly became highly pronounced.[10] For the nineteenth century audience, the two genres stood at opposite ends of a spectrum: at one end was melodrama, with its plots calculated to make audiences weep;féerie filled a place at the other extreme, providing entertainment designed to make audiences laugh.[3] Notable early attempts toward the genre were Cuvelier de Trie's adaptations ofTom Thumb andPuss-in-Boots, in 1801 and 1802, respectively.[4] The development of theféerie was helped along by a growing French interest in the literary qualities of classic fairy tales, and by the popularity of theOne Thousand and One Nights after its first publication in France.[10]
Theféerie in the full 19th-century sense of the word was born on 6 December 1806, with the premiere at theThéâtre de la Gaîté ofLe Pied de mouton[3] ("The Mutton Foot").[5] The play, written byAlphonse Martainville in collaboration with the actor César Ribié, follows the quest of a lovesick hero, Guzman, to save his lover Leonora from the hands of a villainous rival. With the help of a magic talisman (the mutton foot of the title) and under the watch of a fairy who espouses the value of virtue and duty, Guzman braves his way through a series of spectacular trials, spiced with music, ballet, and duels. Thanks to stage machinery, magical events flow freely through the play: portraits move, people fly, chaperones transform into guitarists, food disappears. In the end, love conquers all, and the fairy intervenes once more to ensure the triumph of good over evil.[5]
Le Pied de mouton was widely successful and frequently revived.[2] It codified the standard form offéeries for the next hundred years: a narrative in which thehero or heroes undergo a series of adventures through spectacular scenes, with the sets often "magically" transforming in view of the audience.[3] Scholars continue to cite it as a quintessential example of the genre.[5]
Theféerie, once established, quickly flourished; between 1800 and 1820 alone, some sixtyféeries were produced.[12] An 1826 "mélodrame féerie" at the Porte Saint-Martin,Le Monstre et le magicien, struck new ground not only thematically—it had aGothic edge and was based onMary Shelley'sFrankenstein—but also literally: an English designer, Tomkins, was brought in to install a complex new system of trapdoors in the stage floor. While the trap doors became a staple forféerie effects, the fashion for Gothic fiction onstage subsided by the 1830s.[15] One ofGuilbert de Pixérécourt's most famous works in the genre,Ondine orLa Nymphe des Eaux (1830), marks the beginning of a popular trend for plots featuring romances between mortals and supernatural beings; it tells the balletic, often aquatic love story of thewater nymph Ondine, who obtains a soul by falling in love with a mortal.[13] Technical advances in stage machinery were quickly woven into newféerie productions:gas lighting, installed in most major Paris theaters by the late 1830s, allowed for more realistic set designs and various atmospheric effects, withlimelight becoming especially useful to simulate sunbeams and moonbeams.[6] Similarly,Louis Daguerre's invention of thediorama—a staged tableau animated and transformed by changes in lighting—widely influencedféerie transformation effects.[6]
The first great hit to match the success ofLe Pied de mouton was theCirque Olympique'sLes Pilules du diable (1839),[2] from a script by the vaudeville writerAuguste Anicet-Bourgeois and two writers for circus productions, Laloue and Laurent. While the stage effects had gotten more spectacular since the initialféeries, the plots remained familiar; in this play, the richhidalgo Sottinez, madly in love with the ingenue Isabelle, pursues her and her lover Albert through bizarre and spectacular adventures.[16]Les Pilules du diable was widely revived and imitated,[16] and was possibly the most celebratedféerie of all.[4]
Later successfulféeries includedLa Biche au bois,La Chatte Blanche, andPeau d'Âne, all of which borrowed heavily fromfairy tales andromances[2] while reframing their stories to suit the tastes of the day.[3] The popular playwrightAdolphe d'Ennery had a hit at the Gaîté in 1844 withLes Sept Châteaux du diable, amorality play-like fantasy in which a pair of young couples face temptations in castles representing theSeven Deadly Sins; among d'Ennery's otherféeries is the similarly moralRothomago (1862).[17] Many successful féeries were the work of the prolific Cogniard brothers; their 1843 adaptation of theOne Thousand and One Nights,Les Mille et une nuits, introducedexoticism to the genre while preserving its lighthearted vaudevillian dialogue. Other notable Cogniard productions wereLa Chatte blanche with thecafé-concert performerThérésa, the trick-filledLa Poudre de Perlinpinpin, and, in collaboration with the vaudeville writer Clairville, the 1858 Variétés productionLes Bibelots du diable, a comic spectacle with winking references and allusions to most of the majorféeries that had gone before it.[18] The comic strain ofLe Pied de mouton andLes Pilules du diable was emphasized in many of these successes, such asLes Sept Châteaux,Perlinpinpin, andLes Bibelots.[15]
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Because of the large scale of the spectacle, the biggest and most technically equipped Parisian stages became the most in-demand venues for the shows. The Cirque Olympique, formerly an arena used for political andequestrian spectacles, took advantage of its deep stage to present expensively mountedféeries; it was eventually replaced by a new auditorium built specifically for spectacle, theThéâtre du Châtelet.[19] TheThéâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, originally designed for opera productions, had a stage and machinery well suited to the demands of theféerie,[7] and flourished with the genre under the direction of Marc Fournier.[2]
The termféerie began as an adjective, used together with more established descriptive terms to advertise a production's genre. Many of the firstféeries were advertised asmélodrame-féeries ("fairy melodrama"; half of allféeries presented between 1800 and 1810 were so described), a description which fell out of favor during the 1810s.Pantomime-féeries, developed by the mime Deburau, became highly popular in the 1840s. Other popular descriptors includedfolie-féeries andcomédie-féeries.[20]Opéra-féeries, with an increased emphasis on music, first flourished in the 1820s,[13] eventually developing into a form ofoperetta in such works asJacques Offenbach's 1874Le Voyage dans la lune.[7] Most popular of all werevaudeville-féeries, written byvaudeville playwrights and featuring more songs and jokes than other productions did. This style became so widespread that by the late 1840s,vaudeville-féeries were known simply asféeries, and their particular tone became the standard across the genre.[20]
James Robinson Planché, after seeing aféerie at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on his honeymoon in 1821, brought the genre to England as the "fairyextravaganza." He staged some twenty fairy extravaganzas in London between 1836 and 1854.[21] The nineteenth-centurypantomime also had strong similarities to theféerie, with one critic for a New Zealand newspaper describingLes 400 coups du diable as a "fairy play which in everything but in name is very much like our own Christmas pantomime".[22] With its fairy-tale themes, theféerie can be also compared to later English "fairy plays" such asJ. M. Barrie'sPeter Pan[11] or to American fairy-tale extravaganzas such asL. Frank Baum's musical version ofThe Wizard of Oz.[23]
In Spain, thecomedia de magia [es], a genre very similar to theféerie,[5] began a rise to prominence in 1715 with the works ofJuan Salvo y Vela [es].[24] The form was well-established there by the timeJuan Grimaldi [es] adaptedLe Pied de mouton for the Spanish stage in 1829. Grimaldi's version,La Pata de Cabra, was a pronounced popular success and was widely imitated.[5]
In Russia, the concept of fairy-tale spectacle merged withnarrative ballet to create theballet-féerie ("fairy ballet").[25] This form took its name from the French genre and its dance characteristics from the Italianballo grande style. It was often considered a lower-class, more commercialized entertainment than traditional ballet; many late-nineteenth-century Russian critics attacked it, describing it as a foreign threat to national ballet traditions. Nonetheless, theballet-féerie form attracted considerable artistic attention:Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky'sThe Sleeping Beauty andThe Nutcracker are bothballet-féeries.[26] Like the Frenchféerie, theballet-féerie emphasized spectacle and stage effects. Where previous dance stagings had emphasized the technique and solo virtuosity of theprima ballerina, the new genre put the focus on ensemble dances, magical transformations, and shifting stage pictures created with movement and color.[26]
By the mid-nineteenth century,féeries had become one of the foremost venues for fairy-tale storytelling in popular culture,[9] and had gained the fascination and respect of some of the foremost writers of the day.[12]Théophile Gautier often reviewed them in his capacity as a writer on the theatre,[12] comparing the shifting scenes and magical occurrences of theféerie to a dream:[8]
What a charming summer spectacle is a féerie! That which doesn't demand any attention and unravels without logic, like a dream that we make wide awake … [It is] a symphony of forms, of colours and of lights … The characters, brilliantly clothed, wander through a perpetually changing series of tableaux, panic-stricken, stunned, running after each other, searching to reclaim the action which goes who knows where; but what does it matter! The dazzling of the eyes is enough to make for an agreeable evening.[27]
The popularity of theféerie had its first peak in the 1850s;[28] by the end of the decade, around the time ofLes Bibelots du diable, the focus had shifted from the fairy-tale plot to extravaganza on its own terms. Siraudin and Delacour's 1856 satireLa Queue de la poêle parodied the conventions of the genre, much asFrédérick Lemaître had done to melodrama in his version ofL'Auberge des Adrets.[29]
Though seen as somewhat old-fashioned during the 1860s, the genre saw a second surge in popularity from 1871 through the 1890s, in which ever more lavish versions of the genre's classics were mounted.[7] In his 1885 dictionary of theatre arts,Arthur Pougin noted that "audiences always show up in great numbers to any [féerie] on offer, because they adore this truly magical entertainment", and praised theféerie as "surely a delightful entertainment when it is in the hands of a true poet. It freely enters the whimsy of his imagination and can both delight the viewer's mind and enchant their eyes."[30]
One of the poems inCharles Baudelaire'sLes Fleurs du mal, "L'Irreparable," was inspired by aféerie he had seen,La Belle aux Cheveaux d'Or, starring Marie Daubrun, an actress with whom he was smitten.Gustave Flaubert even wrote a full-lengthféerie,Le Château des cœurs, in 1863, though it was never performed.[12]Jules Verne made his own contribution to the genre in 1881 withJourney Through the Impossible, written in collaboration with Adolphe d'Ennery and featuring themes and characters from Verne's well-known novels.[31]Maurice Maeterlinck's 1908 playThe Blue Bird was likewise described by contemporary observers as aféerie, though critics noted that it was a more overtly poetic and intellectual example of the genre than the classic Châtelet productions.[11]
From 1875'sLa Voyage dans la lune onward, someféeries began to show a trend for incorporating scientific and technological themes into their plots,[32] a novelty due in part to the popularity and influence of Jules Verne's works.[7] A related and very popular genre was also derived from Verne: thepièce de grand spectacle, an extravagantly lavish production built on a colorful but not fantasy-based plot. The genre was launched with Verne and d'Ennery's smash-hit 1874 dramatization ofAround the World in Eighty Days, quickly followed by two further adaptations from the same team,The Children of Captain Grant andMichael Strogoff.[33] The style of thepièce de grand spectacle was so close to theféerie that some critics found the terms interchangeable;Alphonse Daudet calledAround the World "the most sumptuous, the most original of allféeries",[34] whileJules Claretie said he overheard a theatregoer describe the show asLa Biche au bois "by locomotive".[35] Eventually,Around the World andMichael Strogoff, both immensely successful, codified thepièce de grand spectacle as a genre of its own, in competition with the similar but magic-based form of the "classical"féerie.[36]
Theféerie fell out of popularity by the end of the 19th century, by which time it was largely seen as entertainment for children.[4] It disappeared from French stages just as another medium, the cinema, was beginning to supplant it as a form of storytelling spectacle.[3]
With his 1899 film version ofCinderella,Georges Méliès brought theféerie into the newly developing world of motion pictures. Theféerie quickly became one of film's most popular and lavishly mounted genres in the early years of the twentieth century, with such pioneers asEdwin S. Porter,Cecil Hepworth,Ferdinand Zecca, andAlbert Capellani contributing fairy-tale adaptations in theféerie style or filming versions of popular stage féeries likeLe Pied de mouton,Les Sept Châteaux du diable, andLa Biche au bois. The leader in the genre, however, remained Méliès,[37] who designed many of his major films asféeries and whose work as a whole is intensely suffused with the genre's influence.[38]Jacques Demy's 1970 filmPeau d'Âne also shows a strongféerie influence, using elements of theféerie of the same name by Emile Vanderburch, Evrard Laurencin, and Charles Clairville.[39]
With its explorations into ways of integrating spectacle, comedy, and music in the theatre, theféerie also influenced the development ofburlesque andmusical comedy.[2] In recollections of his career making films in the Méliès tradition, Ferdinand Zecca reflected on the genre's power: "It's not in the dramas and the acrobatic films that I put my greatest hope. It was in the féeries."[40]
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