The audacious French theater director André Antoine felt compelled to write to an author whose play he had accepted for production that he would have to cancel the performance. “Your play, which might possibly be performed among intimates, is not playable to a public audience,” he explained on May 26, 1891. At the read-through, the actors, case-hardened as they were to “naturalistic” subjects, had been aghast at the boldness and violence of the central concept. Antoine admitted that he had let himself be won over by the play’s literary qualities, but “I do not think that, after this trial, an auditorium of 1,200 persons could accept coolly such an inordinately abnormal and impassioned situation.” Were the author to insist on his rights, “we simply run the danger of having the Théâtre Libre closed by a huge scandal which would be quickly exploited by someone you know and which you do not seek ultimately any more than we do.”
What could have provoked such a nervous reaction? Antoine, an employee of the gasworks, had founded his Théâtre Libre in Paris in 1887 precisely to challenge conventional dramatic taste. It was located in an obscure neighborhood on the unfashionable Left Bank and employed amateur actors. The evenings were usually made up of three or four one-act plays accompanied by a lecture to provoke discussion. In the past, one-acts had been mere comic curtain-raisers or afterpieces. Under Antoine, they were naturalistic “slices of life,” drawn from the seamy side of society. The subject matter was often as raw as the sides of beef Antoine had hung on stage in a play about butchers. There were frequent protests from the press and the public.
As a rule, Antoine had no qualms about shocking his audience. He declared that he preferred “license” to “liberty.” The year before his apologetic letter, he had staged Linert’s Conte de Noël (Christmas Story), in which an illegitimate newborn is thrown to the pigs, while an offstage choir intones “Venite adoremus” (Come let us adore him). However, in the case of this newly submitted “strange and powerful” play, he had no choice but to turn it down for performance. “When I speak of convention which we all detest,” he wrote, “I refer to that wholly British hypocrisy peculiar to people in aggregate who, as individuals, indulge in lots of smuttiness without the least shame.” In other words, what might be acceptable in private was bound to be rejected in public.
So far as we know, the author, Gabriel Mourey, did not complain. Instead, he published the play as a pamphlet and prefaced it with Antoine’s letter. Mourey (1865-1943) was a prominent Parisian art critic who wrote libretti for Debussy. A collection of his poems had just been published. So he was no rank beginner whose efforts could be dismissed as inept. What made his play unperformable was that its subject was sex between women.
The title of the one-act is in English: Lawn-tennis. At this time French high society was infected with Anglophilia. Such terms as “le week-end” and “le fif o’clock” (high tea) had entered the language. Lawn tennis was a genteel Victorian innovation, and 1891 was the year in which the highly exclusive French Championships in Lawn Tennis were founded. Mourey, who had written a book about London, was well-informed about these cross-cultural exchanges.
The action takes place on an elegant country estate on a fine summer’s day. Japanese fans, a rocking-chair, and tea tables indicate wealth, fashion, and social status. The manor belongs to the newly wed Georges Marville. His bride, Elaine, seems nervous at the impending arrival of her girlhood friend Camille (a unisex name in French). They were raised as sisters, and Georges confesses, jokingly, that during his courtship he had been jealous of their intimacy.
Camille, who hasn’t seen Elaine since the marriage, praises her ardent nature and loyalty. George suspects that Elaine had had a lover before they met and wants to know who it was. He doesn’t understand her present coldness. “She stayed in bed two days, gripped by fever … and words, indistinct words issued from her mouth, a name … whose? A strange name. And she was calling you too … in her delirium. … But that name! that name! Oh! I could have killed him.” What he doesn’t know is that his own name, Georges, was also the name Camille had adopted as her “butch” persona.
No sooner has Georges made his exit into the house than Camille erupts into a Sapphic rhapsody (note that the many ellipses are in the original text):
My head is spinning … my blood is boiling. It has been so long! … And this is your hair … your hair! … These are your eyes … your eyes! … These are your lips … these are your lips … Elaine … you see, I’m weeping like a little girl … (She sobs) With happiness … I thought I had lost you forever … I wanted to fling in his face. Yes, she was mine, before she was yours. It is the taste of my kisses you find on her mouth … on her eyes … her shell-like ears … her hair … all over her flesh … I was there first!
Camille then recalls their first night of passion, when they were dressed as twins and she draped herself in Elaine’s hair. Elaine, who has been trying to be a good normal wife, is terrified yet mesmerized by these remembrances.
ELAINE, as if from afar. Georges! (Camille puts her hand over her lips.)
CAMILLE. Elaine! (She opens the top of Elaine’s blouse, reveals her bosom, glues her lips to it). Ah … ah … Elaine … Elaine … You hear me! – Adored soul … adored flesh … I was dead … and now I am alive again … How lovely the sunlight is!… Nature never changes!… Neither do we!… My God!… Elaine!
In the midst of this transport, Elaine bursts out, “No, no, no … you horrify me! … Go away! … Do not touch me again … I am pregnant!”
CAMILLE (utters a cry of rage). Oh! … then you do love him, that man! (She squeezes her neck with her hands, her arms; starting as caresses). Your neck! … my place in your neck! … God … blood … your blood! Elaine! … (And since she has hurt her with her nails, she presses her mouth to the wound) Elaine …
ELAINE (choking). Georges! …
Camille. Pregnant!… A-a-ah! … (She strangles her.)
ELAINE, in a faint voice. Georges ! …
CAMILLE. That name!… (Very gently, her mouth against the mouth of the writhing Elaine). Yes … I am here … here I am … Georges … your Georges … who loves you …
ELAINE, expiring. Farewell! … I love you …
CAMILLE. Dead! … God! …
At which point, a house guest bounds in saying, in essence, “Anyone for tennis?”
As Antoine pointed out, this overheated crime of passion, with its Grand-Guignol climax, was simply too much for any public stage at the fin de siècle. Still, it contains a number of popular motifs in current art. Elaine’s Arthurian name suggests her otherworldly nature. Camille’s murderous action seems a kind of Wagnerian Liebestod. The femme fatale was a ubiquitous literary type. The idea that becoming pregnant was a token of true love was part of common folklore.
The play also encapsulates a number of period preconceptions of the lesbian. Not so much the mannish spinster who was portrayed in fiction and popular imagery as a hard-featured virago dressed in a simulation of masculine attire, Camille and Elaine are instead variants of the oversexed woman or Bacchante. In his book on turn-of-the-century corruption, also published in 1891, Léo Taxil, describing lesbianism in brothels, dwelt on the intense jealousies and emotional outbursts of women in relationships. Also prevalent was the Svengali theme—popularized by George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby and its dramatizations—that powerful natures could dominate weaker minds. Even the American National Police Gazette headed one of its sensational reports (Dec. 7, 1895): “Hypnotized by a woman. Unnatural affair. Female Svengali … Tried to drug her friend.”
The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was obsessed with the theme of a stronger psyche overcoming a feebler one, inhabiting and inseminating it with its ideas. It is no coincidence that the first lesbian in modern drama appears in his play Comrades (1888). Although later Strindberg was to characterize lesbians as vampires, at this point he simply saw them as denatured creatures who lacked a woman’s irrational instincts for survival. In his play, Abel is a friend of a young married couple, Swedish artists transplanted to a Parisian garret. Strindberg based Abel on Louise Abbema, a painter and lesbian-about-town whom “Sarah Bernhardt allowed to adore her.”
AXEL [the husband]. Tell me, Abel, you who have the common sense of a man and can be reasoned with, tell me how it feels to be a woman. Is it so awful?
ABEL (facetiously). Yes, of course. It feels like I’m a nigger. […]
AXEL. Abel, have you really never had any desire to love a man?
ABEL. How silly you are!
AXEL. Have you never found any one?
ABEL. No, men are very scarce.
AXEL. Hmm, don’t you consider me a man?
ABEL. You! No!
AXEL. That’s what I fancied myself to be.
ABEL. Are you a man? You, who work for a woman and go around dressed like a woman?
AXEL. What? I, dressed like a woman?
ABEL. The way you wear your hair long and go around with your shirt open at the neck, while she wears stiff collars and short hair; be careful, soon she’ll take your trousers away from you.
At this point Strindberg imagined lesbians to be asexual and liberated from a normal woman’s innate nymphomania. Later on, aggravated by his wife’s female friendships, he changed his mind and bought into the same perfervid nightmares that suffuse Mourey’s play.
When Lawn-tennis appeared in print, few publications chose to notice it. The avant-garde Le Livre moderne praised its “incontestable power,” but the more staid Mercure de France couched its few sentences in the learned language of Latin. The most surprising allusion appeared in a work by the American-born critic Georges Polti (1868-1946). Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations (1895) was for decades a basic textbook for playwrights. He uses Lawn-tennis as the prime example for why lesbianism is a bad theme for drama. His reason is that “this vice has not the horrible grandeur of its congener [i.e., male homosexuality].” “Weak and colorless, the last evil habit of worn-out or unattractive women, it does not offer to the tragic poet that madness, brutal and preposterous, but springing from wild youth and strength, which we find in the criminal passion of the heroic ages.” In other words, male homosexuality has the imprimatur of the classical Apollo/Dionysus tension that might enable it, under the right circumstances, to have dramatic appeal. As a “vice” exclusive to women, lesbianism is too specialized for a general public.
Even so, La Prisonnière, Édouard Bourdet’s 1926 drama of Sapphic obsession, adopts much the same plot as Lawn-tennis, and proved to be a commercial success, praised by no less an expert in lesbian performance than Colette. Once again, a young wife is under the influence of a dominating female lover, endangering her marriage. Bourdet’s ingenuity lay in keeping the dangerous lesbian off-stage and concentrating on the interchanges between husband and wife. As a subject for drama, lesbians had no independent existence: their function was to threaten the stability of the bourgeois household. The Parisian stage may have advanced to the point where such a theme could be accepted in a boulevard drame. Abroad, Antoine’s trepidation was still warranted. The American adaptation of Bourdet, The Captive (1927), was raided by the New York police and forced to close.
Lawn-tennis may have left one other trace. Nijinsky’s ballet Jeux (1913) has a tennis-playing threesome at its core. Those dance historians aware of Mourey’s play have said point-blank that there is no connection between it and Nijinsky’s choreography. I’m not so sure. The music for the ballet was commissioned by Claude Debussy. He and Mourey were friends and collaborators, the former providing libretti and lyrical texts for the latter. Nijinsky, on the look-out for subjects for an up-to-date ballet, was attracted to tennis because of its upwards swinging movements. He also hoped to create gender confusion by dancing in toe shoes; this idea was negated, although in performance he did wear a red tie, international badge of cruising males.
Debussy may, as a joke, have mentioned Mourey’s Lawn-tennis to the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. We know that Diaghilev, with his homophilic predilections and fondness for scandal, would have preferred the trio to be all male. Ultimately, it was Nijinsky, who often chafed at Diaghilev’s playing “the stronger,” who made the ménage à trois two women and a youth. The ballet ends with the boy and one of the girls exiting into the shrubbery. When the composer was presented with the scenario, he boggled at the suggestiveness. He needed to have his fee doubled before he undertook to compose the score. If the depiction in a ballet of modern-day heterosexual “troilism” (three-way sex) in a ballet could shock so cultured a person as Debussy, two women pairing off would have been unthinkable. Audiences still needed to be shielded from lesbian love.
Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
