Nicolas Levasseur

I frequently write about nineteenth-century British actors on this blog, but today I'm going to write about a bygone performer from France, instead.

His name was Nicolas Levasseur, and for a while now, I've kept a postcard of him on my bookshelf. You can see him below in the role of Bertram in Giacomo Meyerbeer's 1831 opera Robert le Diable.

The postcard comes from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and was given to me on the basis of a bit of a misunderstanding, since I am quite interested in the play Bertram by Charles Robert Maturin. Whoops! Wrong Bertram.

No matter. He's still a striking figure. But if I'm going to display his postcard on by bookshelf, I probably should know a bit about him. I mean, other than his living from 1791 to 1871 and making his debut at the Paris Opera in 1813 and that sort of a thing, since anyone can find that out from Wikipedia. Like I did.

No. What's really interesting to me is his performance in Robert le Diable. The Meyerbeer opera had a libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne. It told the story of Robert, Duke of Normandy, a notorious party boy who drank, gambled, and womanized to his heat's delight. In the first act, however, his foster sister Alice warns him against a mysterious companion. That companion was Bertram, originally played by Levasseur.

And who is Bertram? Well the title of the opera should give you a clue. He's Robert's long-lost father who is in league with demonic forces. His plan is to get Robert to sign away his soul to the devil so he can be with his son forever. (See? Family values!) Alice overhears the plot, though, and ends up saving the day.

Levasseur played plenty of other roles, too. The V&A has images of him in the role of Marcel in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots and Bazu in Fromental Halévy's Le Drapier. Neither role is quite as diabolical as Bertram, though.

And the Oscar goes to...

Tonight is the Academy Awards. I previously blogged about one of the nominees for Best Picture, The Favourite, which is not based on a play, but tells the story of the same historical events dramatized in Eugène Scribe's play The Glass of Water.

This got me wondering about other Best Picture winners that started out as plays. Two years ago Moonlight won, and that film was based on Tarell Alvin McCraney's relatively unknown drama In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. I knew of McCraney through his play Wig Out! which I saw at the Vineyard Theatre, but he was basically unheard of when Moonlight won its Oscar. Now, his play Choir Boy is showing on Broadway and he heads the playwriting program at Yale.

The 2010 winner for Best Picture, The King's Speech, was a stage play by David Seidler before being adapted for the screen. It was at a reading of the script at a theatre in London that director Tom Hooper's mother discovered the piece and told him about it. The Academy's 2002 winner, Chicago, was of course adapted from the stage musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, which was itself adapted from a 1926 play by Maurine Dallas Watkins.

Driving Miss Daisy, which won Best Picture in 1989, is based on a play by Alfred Uhry which still gets performed quite a bit. The film, in fact, still feels like a play, which is not true of 1984's winner Amadeus. Peter Shaffer, after having a hit with his stage play, went about completely rewriting the piece for the screenplay. The result was a film that is profoundly different from the play it's based upon, but both are quite good in their own manners.

No films based on plays won Best Picture Oscars in the 1970s, but in the 1960s the musicals West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Oliver! all took away top honors, as did A Man for All Seasons, based on the play by Robert Bolt. Back in 1948, Laurence Olivier's film version of Hamlet won Best Picture. Yeah, you probably knew that was based on a play, but did you know Casablanca, which won in 1943, was based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison?

The 1938 winner, You Can't Take It with You, was of course adapted from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The 1933 film Cavalcade was based on a play by  Noël Coward and went on to win a Best Picture Oscar. That same honor also went to 1932's Grand Hotel, which was based on a play by William Drake, which he had in turn adapted from a German novel by Vicki Baum.

None of the nominees for Best Picture this year are based on plays. Too bad!

Queen Anne on Stage and Screen

Yesterday, I saw the new film The Favourite, which fantasizes about what personal and romantic entanglements might have led to the rise and fall of governments and decisions of war and peace during the reign of Queen Anne. Interestingly enough, the same characters show up in different configurations, but still scheming for love and power, in the nineteenth-century French comedy The Glass of Water by Eugène Scribe.

Here's what we know of history: Queen Anne became sovereign of both England and Scotland in 1702 after the death of her cousin William III. She presided over the Acts of Union, which brought both countries into a United Kingdom in 1707, and reigned until her death in 1714. She was the last of the Stuart monarchs in Britain. This was despite going through 17 pregnancies by her husband, Prince George of Denmark, which resulted in seven miscarriages, five stillbirths, and five short-lived children, the heartiest of whom only made it to eleven years of age, while others lived only a few minutes.

For many years, Anne was quite close with Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough. In The Favourite their relationship is depicted as romantic and sexual, though in Scribe's play that is not the case at all. What both versions of the story agree upon, is that the duchess used her influence over the queen to prolong the War of Spanish Succession in order to keep her husband, the Duke of Marlborough, as commander-in-chief of the army. The duchess also had a cousin at court, Abigail, who ended up marrying Samuel Masham (who is named Arthur for some reason in Scribe's play). Whatever the truth about Abigail was, she has inspired quite a bit of literary speculation.

Scribe places Abigail in the midst of a love triangle involving Masham and the queen. The heart strings of all three are manipulated in the play by Viscount Bolingbroke, a Tory politician who was out of favor for a while under Queen Anne. Historically, Bolingbroke eventually replaced Robert Harley as the leader of his party, with the assistance of Abigail, who (spoiler alert) had become the queen's favorite. The Tories were attempting to end the disastrous war. Scribe portrays Bolingbroke as the key figure in bringing about an end to war with France, while the film The Favourite assigns that role to Harley.

That's certainly not the only difference in the two fictionalizations of history. While Scribe shows Queen Anne infatuated with Masham, The Favourite makes Abigail the object of her affection. Both versions portray the Duchess of Marlborough as a bit of an unscrupulous schemer, though. In addition to continually advocating for war in spite of a great loss of blood and treasure, the duchess historically wrote very unflattering things about the queen. Her spiteful gossip about Queen Anne even included hints that the monarch might be carrying on a lesbian relationship with Abigail, a possibility that The Favourite explores at length.

Both A Glass of Water and The Favourite are great fun, though it's anyone's guess what historically happened at court as various factions vied for power. As Scribe remarked in his play:

Il ne faut pas mépriser les petites choses, c'est par elles qu'on arrive aux grandes!

"Do not despise small things, for it is by them that we achieve greatness!"