Playing to the Gods

by Peter Rader

  The greatest emancipation for Duse was the fact that she would now be choosing her own plays. While Ibsen had yet to be translated into Italian, Eleonora could now perform works by rising local playwrights like Giuseppe Giacosa, Giovanni Verga, and Marco Praga. She also ventured into comedy, a genre that Bernhardt generally avoided; other than the occasional revival of Molière and later Cyrano de Bergerac, Bernhardt chose to appear almost exclusively in tragic roles—better suited, she thought, to her style of acting. Comedy required more spontaneity, timing, and strong listening skills—all of which came quite naturally to Eleonora, which is why she liked to include comedies in her repertoire. If nothing else, comedies provided a way to help shift her mood, which drifted often toward the morose. Eleonora did not respond, however, to contemporary Italian comedies; she chose, instead, to revive classic Goldoni comedies from the prior century.

  Shakespeare—at Boito’s prodding—was also in the mix. Flush from his success in writing the libretto for Otello, Boito began adapting Antony and Cleopatra into Italian for Duse. A literary snob, Boito was contemptuous of popular theater, including most of the plays in Duse’s current repertoire, with which she was touring with modest success around Italy. She had made very safe choices in her first season as a manager—a series of proven hits by Sardou and Dumas, all of them made popular by Sarah Bernhardt. Duse also added the deeply personal Denise. Though Boito joined her for a performance in Palermo, he was unimpressed. The only way to do justice to the theater was to put on impeccable plays—hence, his idea of translating Shakespeare.

  While Duse revered him deeply, his mind at least, there were ways in which she and Boito were deeply incompatible. Boito was secretive: he insisted their affair remain hidden, conducted through a series of clandestine rendezvous in remote locations. They would never go out in public in major cities, where he (and even she, now) was likely to be recognized. The relationship had its challenges when they were apart, too. Eleonora, in Boito’s eyes, was overly passionate and emotionally needy—writing three letters to him in a single day, on occasion. At times he would disappear on long retreats, which only increased Eleonora’s anxiety. Boito, in fact, had another secret mistress.

  Marriage was unlikely, for Eleonora could not divorce; she harbored fantasies, nonetheless, of a makeshift family with Boito and Enrichetta under one roof. She craved a sense of normalcy. Boito, however, hinted that Eleonora would have to give up acting for their relationship to become serious, something she would never consider.

  Antonio e Cleopatra—or Cleop, as Eleonora called it—would be the first major test of their already complicated relationship. The role of Cleopatra was becoming a must for any rising actress in the late nineteenth century. Boito made significant cuts to the original text, but his translation was nonetheless ambitious. There were thirty-eight scene changes and twenty speaking parts. Eleonora only had a dozen actors in her company, so half were forced to play multiple roles.

  Still secretive about their relationship, Boito asked for his name to be removed from the playbill and did not attend the 1888 premiere, which saddened Eleonora. But what doomed the play was the disconnect between the mythic grandeur of the Egyptian queen and the understated simplicity of Eleonora’s style. It was a combination that the public could not accept. Critics panned the play, too; it would be the biggest flop of Eleonora’s career. Take this excoriation by William Archer, writing for the World:

  It is said that Signora Duse understands no English; and this fact, if fact it be, is the explanation and excuse of her Cleopatra. If she could read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra she would either drop the part from her repertory or act it very differently. She would realize that the play is not a badly constructed domestic drama in outlandish costumes, but a glorious love-poem. . . . Signora Duse’s Cleopatra is never for an instant that incarnation of love and luxury of all that is superb and seductive in womanhood, which has haunted the minds of men for nineteen centuries. She is simply a bright little woman like her . . . [Goldoni heroine] Mirandolina. She is not Cleopatra, she is Cleopatrina, Cleopatrinetta.

  The critics were likewise vicious on the matter of Boito’s butchery of the original text, where he had drastically pruned the role of Antony and cut entire scenes. Boito was ashamed of the failure, later writing to Eleonora: “We only thought about one thing and that was: taking from this powerful poem all the divine essence of love and pain and we shut our eyes to everything else. That was a mistake.”

  Duse forgave him, but the failure stung. She was hurt that he had forced her into a grand role, then disowned the play by removing his name. But what bothered her most may have been that she had discovered her limits as an actress by finding a role she was unable to perform.

  For Sarah, however, Cleopatra was simply another role that confirmed her stardom. In 1893, her Queen of the Nile would mark another triumph for the nearly fifty-year-old Bernhardt, though the play was simply another Théodora in disguise—sumptuous palaces and improbably elaborate costumes, transplanted from Byzantium to Alexandria and culminating with Sarah clutching a live, writhing snake onstage for the suicide scene. The Parisian audience was enthralled.

  In Milan, however, Eleonora performed her Cleopatra only twice before shelving it. To replace Cleop with something reliable, she sighed and chose Bernhardt’s standard: La Dame aux camélias.

  • • •

  In the fall of 1899, needing a change of scenery, Duse decided to go on tour. It would be her first time overseas as the manager of her own company, and Eleonora chose an unlikely destination: Egypt. She was determined to give Boito’s adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra another go—and what better place than in the land in which it was set? Better still, Bernhardt had toured Egypt herself earlier that same year. By performing in the same theaters for the same audiences and critics, it would allow Eleonora to gauge her artistry against that of her idol in a low-profile setting. In five short years, they would be plotting dueling productions in London; for now, Duse was content to test herself against Sarah indirectly.

  Alexandria was a bustling port city under British rule, situated at the mouth of the Nile with access to the Suez Canal and trade routes to the East. One quarter of the city’s population was foreign, primarily British, Italian, and French. Eleonora felt hardly rapturous upon landing in Port Said. “A hateful country,” she wrote to Boito, “a hateful place to work . . . Alexandria is nothing but a Bazaar—with stupefied people who smoke from morning to night—dazed by the sun—asleep—huddled up.” She was disgusted by the beggars, whom she saw as “dirty and wretched”—they reminded her too much, perhaps, of her now distant youth.

  The French quarter of Alexandria was the largest, and its inhabitants largely avoided Duse’s performances—out of snobbish allegiance to Sarah, who had played there some months earlier. The Italians showed up though, along with locals, who were much more receptive to Cleopatra, as Eleonora had hoped.

  Duse rarely mingled with her actors on tour—preferring instead to keep a strict separation between her personal and professional side. But she detested meals in solitude, so she had recruited a French traveling companion on this trip: a young Parisian named Marthe, who had been introduced to her in Palermo by the Marchesa di Ganzaria, and could provide interesting conversation; it also gave Duse a chance to practice her French. A much-discussed topic, of course, was Paris, a city Duse was starting to take an interest in.

  The tour moved on to Cairo, where Eleonora marveled at the Pyramids. But she was taken ill with influenza after a few shows and had to cancel the rest of her engagement. While Sarah’s tour earlier that year had included Egypt, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, and Russia, Eleonora’s was far more modest; once she was well, the company set off for Spain, their last stop.

  Spaniards seemed to understand her. Perhaps it was the similarity of Italian to Spanish—a factor that had assisted her popularity in Latin America. Her run in Spain proved a success, both commercially and critically; Duse was pleased that audiences were b
eginning to appreciate what she was bringing to the stage. Between shows, she attended bullfights and fended off Spanish gentlemen. But this leg of the tour was cut short, too, when cholera broke out in Spain.

  As her company returned to Italy, Eleonora decided to take a side trip to Paris, Sarah’s hometown. Though it would be years before she gained the confidence to play on a Parisian stage, Eleonora wanted to see why the City of Light was considered a theatrical mecca. She secretly attended a performance at the Comédie-Française and was horrified by what she saw, describing the actors as being “hacks,” the actresses “painted dolls.”

  While in Paris, however, Duse had an experience that moved her to tears: she met the sixty-five-year-old Alexandre Dumas fils, who had written Denise for her, the play that told the story of the death of her infant son. The playwright felt honored to meet Duse and offered her roses from his garden—the feeling was mutual. Duse knew she was at her best when she could connect to the women she portrayed; she yearned for an Italian writer who could create the parts that she craved. Boito, it seems, was not he. But there was another playwright in their circle who showed promise: Giuseppe Giacosa, the man who had brokered her ticket to the premiere of Otello.

  Giacosa was one of the few playwrights working in the new style of realistic narrative. Eleonora had acted in his last play, Tristi amori (Sad Loves), about a married woman who must choose between her husband and her lover—similar in some ways to the melodramas of Dumas. But the text felt entirely different in its details and execution. It begins with a kiss on the mouth (specified in the stage directions) between the heroine and her lover, who declares his undying love to her. But do you like me, she responds. Fending off his kisses, she poses the question three times. Do you like me?

  Later in the play comes a scene where the wife, even as her marriage risks collapse, must go over the household accounts with the maid. The combination of scandalous passion and humdrum daily life was very new, and Duse loved it.

  She did not perform in the play’s 1887 premiere. It opened with another actress who failed to grasp its modernism—and the play bombed. Duse loved taking on parts in which other actresses had had a misstep; she liked that challenge. And she felt a kinship with Giacosa’s heroine, Emma.

  The name was a clear reference to Emma Bovary, the similarly adulterous heroine of Flaubert’s novel. When Madame Bovary was first published in 1856, it had caused a scandal. A story of a woman who tries to escape her suffocating petit-bourgeois life through an illicit love affair, the novel was an outright rejection of romanticism. Madame Bovary became the subject of an obscenity trial, in which the prosecutors argued not only that the novel was immoral, but also that realism in literature was, in itself, an offense against art and decency.

  Flaubert prevailed against the prosecutors in France, but the novel remained banned in Italy for nearly a decade. While Flaubert’s tragic heroine took arsenic in his finale, Giacosa’s Emma, one generation later, would make the more practical choice to try and save her marriage. Her husband takes her back, despite himself, for the well-being of their daughter—a simple, painful compromise that is impossible to act with poses and artifice, which is why the play initially flopped.

  Eleonora mounted her own production of Tristi amori in Turin later that year. The house was enormous, with a seating capacity of two thousand, but every seat was filled, and people even stood in the aisles, many of them students eager to experience Eleonora’s new style of performance. As a critic described the play, “There are no scenes written for effect, no tirades, no display of fine sentiments or ostentation of wicked passions. . . . A glance, a gesture, a silence—and the state of her soul appears to the public in its true light.” It was a modern drama for a modern audience. Yet it failed, ultimately, to win a broad audience beyond the rapturous opening night crowd in Turin.

  Two years later, to Duse’s shock, Giacosa announced that he would be writing his next play in medieval verse—for Sarah Bernhardt.

  “Does he have a fungus on the brain?” Eleonora wrote incredulously to Boito. She could not fathom why, when most artists in their circle were experimenting with new forms, Giacosa would favor an arcane style and a bygone star. “Ask him if he wants me to send him Dr. Morisani,” she wrote. Morisani, her gynecologist, had been treating her for a fungal infection.

  Boito was equally flummoxed. “It’s true,” he responded. “The Hebrew seductress has seduced our friend.”

  But by encroaching on Duse’s domain, Sarah was also paying Eleonora a compliment: their rivalry was now official.

  • • •

  The icy winter was just beginning to thaw in March of 1891, when Duse arrived in St. Petersburg for her first tour of Russia. It was exactly ten years after Sarah had traveled the country, when Turgenev and Chekhov had mocked her as “a grand poseur.”

  The idea of touring Russia had come to Duse from Count Alexander Wolkoff, a wealthy expatriate living and painting in Venice. Eleonora had traveled to Venice several years earlier in the hopes of a romantic weekend with Boito. But the librettist, who had begun work on Verdi’s Falstaff, failed to show; so Eleonora occupied herself with the allure of the canals and the attentions of the foreign aristocrat. She had become frustrated with the dispassionate and noncommittal Boito and was yearning for a new source of inspiration. Though Wolkoff was married to an Englishwoman at the time, he and Eleonora became lovers.

  Wolkoff was handsome, moody, and complex—a philanderer, very charming, and well connected. Praising Eleonora’s sensitivity and her beauty, Wolkoff promised to make introductions for her to Russian society: “a cultivated audience” with which she was sure to have success.

  With the exception of America, perhaps, no country was more primed to latch on to realism than Russia. Serfdom, the system that tied Russian peasants to their landlords, had been abolished by Tsar Alexander II in 1861, just a few years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. With this came a rapid rise in literacy and an eightfold increase in the number of university students. Though socialism had its roots in romanticism, the Bolsheviks, in their desire for art to reflect and impact social reality, adhered to realism in theater and literature. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev were early proponents of this form. Maxim Gorky, who had become a vagabond at age eight after being thrown out of his grandparents’ home, wrote fourteen plays in which he depicted the most miserable of human lives so realistically that audiences were afraid to sit in the front rows. Anton Chekhov, another abandoned child, whose abusive father deserted the family to avoid his creditors, wrote plays thick with tension and subtext.

  Wolkoff was convinced Russia would be the ideal place to recognize Eleonora’s subtle genius. She selected La Dame aux camélias for her debut on the Russian stage—the very play that Sarah Bernhardt had used to open her first Russian tour. While radicals like Chekhov and Turgenev had sneered at Bernhardt, certain Moscow critics had been effusive. Following a command performance at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Sarah had curtsied before Tsar Alexander II, who had cut her short, saying: “No, it is we who must bow to you.”

  By opening with Camille, Duse threw down the gauntlet in a competition that was becoming evident to all; the New York Times was already calling Eleonora “Bernhardt’s Italian rival.” Rivalries among stars were common in the theater world, sometimes even within families. But this showdown would become larger than all those that had preceded it—Bernhardt and Duse’s rivalry would change the art itself.

  • • •

  Despite successes in Spain and Latin America, Duse was largely unknown in Russia; her first few performances were marked by half-empty houses. Part of the problem was the language barrier. While French was a second, if not first, language for many Russian aristocrats, Italian remained incomprehensible. That was another reason Duse had chosen Camille—a play that everyone knew. Eleonora hoped her features and gestures would convey universally recognizable emotions. Latvian/Norwegian writer and psychologist Laura Hansson certainly thoug
ht they did, noting that Eleonora acted “in such a natural . . . and lifelike manner, that a knowledge of the language was not absolutely indispensable to the enjoyment of the piece.”

  Gradually, the Russians began to take note. Alexey Suvorin, the most influential critic in St. Petersburg, wrote in the conservative Novoye Vremya: “La Duse is a truly remarkable artist. She does not command Sarah Bernhardt’s gift for advertising, but she surpasses her in talent, in extraordinary rightness of tone.” Suvorin’s review was widely read and caused Duse’s next performance, four days later, to sell out. It was Boito’s Antonio e Cleopatra, the second of sixteen plays in Eleonora’s current repertoire. Among those in attendance was Anton Chekhov, who had begun writing his own plays, though still without acclaim, due in large measure—he contended—to the boring, wooden actresses who were unable to interpret his plays.

  Watching Duse perform, he had an epiphany. “I have just seen the Italian actress Duse in Shakespeare’s Cleopatra,” he wrote that midnight in an impassioned letter to his sister. “I do not know Italian, but she acted so well that I felt I was understanding every word. What a marvelous actress! Never before have I seen anything like it.”

  Eleonora’s success in Russia stemmed from her being embraced not merely by the aristocracy but by the proletariat as well, who saw their own struggles in the complex heroines she portrayed. Her immense capacity to express anguish seemed to touch the heart of even the most cynical Russians—“purifying our souls,” proclaimed Aleksandr Kugel, one of the most articulate critics of the day. As Catherine Schuler wrote in Women in Russian Theatre: “Duse’s emotionally lacerated heroines touched a chord in the Russian spirit that Bernhardt, with her callous calculations, Parisian cynicism, outrageous fashions, and scandalous escapades, could not.”