Féerie (), sometimes translated as "fairy play", was a French theatrical genre known for fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects. Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians, to tell stories with clearly defined melodrama-like morality and an extensive use of supernatural elements. The genre developed in the early 19th century and became immensely popular in France throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the development of burlesque, musical comedy and film.
Style
Féeries used a fairy-tale aesthetic to combine theatre with music, dances, mime, acrobatics, and especially spectacular visual effects created by innovative stage machinery, such as trap doors, smoke machines, and quickly changeable sets. Songs always appeared, usually featuring new lyrics to familiar melodies. 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 in féeries were full-view transformations. The last transformation in a féerie, accompanied by a flourish of music, led to the apotheosis: a grand final stage picture, usually involving beautiful supernumeraries descending from the sky or suspended on wires.
These elements, especially the spectacle and stage effects, were far more prominent than the plot. The critic Francisque Sarcey suggested that for a féerie, 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." Théophile Gautier even suggested, with considerable irony, that the immensely successful féerie Les Pilules du diable could be performed as a purely mimed production, so that no spoken words would distract the audience from the spectacle they had come to enjoy. 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. In a review of The Blue Bird, a writer in the Journal des débats commented satirically on the spectacular frivolity of a typical féerie, but positively on the genre's vast potential for creativity:
The plots of féeries were usually borrowed from fairy tales in the French tradition, such as those by Charles Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy; other féeries borrowed from outside sources such as the One Thousand and One Nights, or created original plots. Like melodramas, the form féeries 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. The clear moral tone was heightened by the dialogue, which often included maxims about love, duty, virtue, and similar topics. A full-length féerie often ran for several hours.
Four human characters reliably appeared among the supernatural forces: two young lovers (an ingenue and her heroic suitor), an often comical and grotesque rival for the affections of the ingenue, and a lazy valet obsessed with eating. The supernatural forces in the plot drove these characters through fantastic landscapes and multiple adventures, typically involving magic talismans used to transform people, things, and places. The apotheosis reunited the lovers to dazzling effect.
Origins
The féerie can trace its origins to the ballet de cour ("court ballet") tradition of the Renaissance, in which such court leaders as Catherine de' Medici and Henry IV of France would commission spectacularly designed ballets based on mythological subjects and fables. Another notable precursor is the pièces à machines ("plays with machines") genre, popular at the Théâtre du Marais in the mid 17th-century, again using mythology as source material; Molière's Psyché is a notable small-scale example, and Corneille's Andromède and La Toison d'or also count within the genre. These genres owed much to the theatrical engineering work of Italian architects, especially Nicola Sabbatini. These spectacles paved the way for 18th-century fairground pantomimes (théâtre de la foire), such as Arlequin dans un oeuf at the Théâtre des Jeunes-Artistes, or Les Eaux de Merlin by Alain-René Lesage. The fairground pantomimes, by combining motifs from the Commedia dell'Arte with lavish fantasy created by theatrical spectacle, served as the most direct precursor of the 19th-century féerie.
The French Revolution changed the face of French theatre, with a large new audience to please: the bourgeoisie. Various genres developed to please bourgeois tastes. The féerie, combining the fairground influences with the farcical style of comédie en vaudeville, began as a form of melodrama, but the gap between them quickly became highly pronounced. 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. Notable early attempts toward the genre were Cuvelier de Trie's adaptations of Tom Thumb and Puss-in-Boots, in 1801 and 1802, respectively. The development of the féerie was helped along by a growing French interest in the literary qualities of classic fairy tales, and by the popularity of the One Thousand and One Nights after its first publication in France.
Early successes
The féerie in the full 19th-century sense of the word was born on 6 December 1806, with the premiere at the Théâtre de la Gaîté of Le Pied de mouton ("The Mutton Foot"). The play, written by Alphonse 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.
Le Pied de mouton was widely successful and frequently revived. It codified the standard form of féeries for the next hundred years: a narrative in which the hero or heroes undergo a series of adventures through spectacular scenes, with the sets often "magically" transforming in view of the audience. Scholars continue to cite it as a quintessential example of the genre.
The féerie, once established, quickly flourished; between 1800 and 1820 alone, some sixty féeries were produced. An 1826 "mélodrame féerie" at the Porte Saint-Martin, Le Monstre et le magicien, struck new ground not only thematically—it had a Gothic edge and was based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—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 for féerie effects, the fashion for Gothic fiction onstage subsided by the 1830s. One of Guilbert de Pixérécourt's most famous works in the genre, Ondine or La 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 the water nymph Ondine, who obtains a soul by falling in love with a mortal. Technical advances in stage machinery were quickly woven into new féerie productions: gas lighting, installed in most major Paris theaters by the late 1830s, allowed for more realistic set designs and various atmospheric effects, with limelight becoming especially useful to simulate sunbeams and moonbeams. Similarly, Louis Daguerre's invention of the diorama—a staged tableau animated and transformed by changes in lighting—widely influenced féerie transformation effects.
The first great hit to match the success of Le Pied de mouton was the Cirque Olympique's Les Pilules du diable (1839), from a script by the vaudeville writer Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and two writers for circus productions, Laloue and Laurent. While the stage effects had gotten more spectacular since the initial féeries, the plots remained familiar; in this play, the rich hidalgo Sottinez, madly in love with the ingenue Isabelle, pursues her and her lover Albert through bizarre and spectacular adventures. Les Pilules du diable was widely revived and imitated, and was possibly the most celebrated féerie of all.
Later successful féeries included La Biche au bois, La Chatte Blanche, and Peau d'Âne, all of which borrowed heavily from fairy tales and romances while reframing their stories to suit the tastes of the day. The popular playwright Adolphe d'Ennery had a hit at the Gaîté in 1844 with Les Sept Châteaux du diable, a morality play-like fantasy in which a pair of young couples face temptations in castles representing the Seven Deadly Sins; among d'Ennery's other féeries is the similarly moral Rothomago (1862). Many successful féeries were the work of the prolific Cogniard brothers; their 1843 adaptation of the One Thousand and One Nights, Les Mille et une nuits, introduced exoticism to the genre while preserving its lighthearted vaudevillian dialogue. Other notable Cogniard productions were La Chatte blanche with the café-concert performer Thérésa, the trick-filled La Poudre de Perlinpinpin, and, in collaboration with the vaudeville writer Clairville, the 1858 Variétés production Les Bibelots du diable, a comic spectacle with winking references and allusions to most of the major féeries that had gone before it. The comic strain of Le Pied de mouton and Les Pilules du diable was emphasized in many of these successes, such as Les Sept Châteaux, Perlinpinpin, and Les Bibelots.
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 and equestrian spectacles, took advantage of its deep stage to present expensively mounted féeries; it was eventually replaced by a new auditorium built specifically for spectacle, the Théâtre du Châtelet. The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, originally designed for opera productions, had a stage and machinery well suited to the demands of the féerie, and flourished with the genre under the direction of Marc Fournier.
Evolution of the term The term féerie began as an adjective, used together with more established descriptive terms to advertise a production's genre. Many of the first féeries were advertised as mélodrame-féeries ("fairy melodrama"; half of all féeries 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 included folie-féeries and comédie-féeries. Opéra-féeries, with an increased emphasis on music, first flourished in the 1820s, eventually developing into a form of operetta in such works as Jacques Offenbach's 1874 Le Voyage dans la lune. Most popular of all were vaudeville-féeries, written by vaudeville 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 as féeries, and their particular tone became the standard across the genre.
International variants