Jacques Copeau

Jacques Copeau was an influential French theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist born in Paris. Before he founded his famous Thtre du VieuxColombier in Paris, he wrote theatre reviews for several Parisian journals, worked at the Georges Petit Gallery where he organized exhibits of artists works and helped found the Nouvelle Revue Franaise in 1909, along with writer friends, such as Andr Gide and Jean Schlumberger. He eventually organized a theatre school attached to his theatre and thus influenced the development of theatre through the training of the actor. Twentieth century French theatre is marked by Copeaus outlook. According to Albert Camus, in the history of the French theatre, there are two periods before Copeau and after Copeau.

The child of a welloff middleclass family, Copeau was raised in Paris and attended the best schools. At the Lyce Condorcet, he was a talented but nonchalant student whose interest in theatre already consumed him. His first staged play, Brouillard du matin , was presented on March 27, 1897 at the NouveauThtre as part of the festivities of the alumni association of the Lyce Condorcet. The former president of the French Republic, CasimirPerier, and the playwright Georges de PortoRiche both congratulated him on his work. During the same period when Copeau was preparing his baccalaurat exams, he met Agns Thomsen, a young Danish woman seven years his elder who was in Paris to perfect her French. They first met on March 13, 1896, and Copeau, then a seventeenyearold high school student, quickly fell in love. Eventually, Copeau passed his exams and began his studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne, but the theatre, extensive reading, and his courtship of Agns left him little time to study and kep

Source: Wikipedia