The dream laboratory | The paper

On May 9, 1893, a very laudatory article in «L’Echo de Paris» announced the first performance of Maurice Maeterlinck’s «Pelléas et Mélisande» for the production of Aurelien Lugné-Poe at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiennes. The show will be held on May 17, amidst a few enthusiastic reviews and a lot of irony. Many linger amazed on the essential scenography, created by Paul Vogler, and the costumes «conceived in the same range of colors as the décor, with the characters dressed in black, dark brown, grey, hyacinth, pale green», with the exception of Mélisande who «wears a cream colored bathing suit.’ No one shows enthusiasm for the scenic device which only many years later will prove to be the forerunner of modern theatricality. Symbolism is in fact the first literary movement, and therefore artistic and dramaturgical, to hypothesize and stage total art. It was a model of dramaturgy and representation distant both from the consolidated practice of the nineteenth-century scene and from the new naturalistic tendencies which, in the last few years, had been establishing themselves in Paris thanks to the work of André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre.