Je le proclame,
Les mains de femme
Sont les bijoux
Dont je suis fou....
or the ancient with the two brass buttons in the back of his surtout and the patience of an English politician, who recites inaudible and probably unintelligible poetry before passing the hat. Supper in the Place du Tertre is an appropriate prelude to the Cirque Medrano because of the dog that watches all evening from the tin roof of an impossibly ruined house, and the women straight out of the French Revolution, the days of ’48 and the Commune, who stand about with their great naked arms akimbo, and their strong sharp chins, high cheek bones, and eagle eyes waiting for the liberty cap to crown them. The dog and the women, they are the audience and the show. They are the Cirque Medrano.
This circus is a golden bowl. At the bottom, no sawdust but a carpet of hemp, a great “welcome” doormat without the lettering; we take the deed for the word. Outside the ring is a parapet nicely carpeted in yellow; one of the clowns finds it amusing to roll round this track on his shoulders. Above the parapet rise steep rows of seats, half of them in bright orange for the spectators with fifty or sixty cents to spend. Higher up the thin and graceful pillars which support the roof cut across the vision a little; here there are only benches and the dévotés. At opposite sides of the ring, walled passages lead out to the greenroom and public entrances which circle underneath the seats. Exits for the audience pierce the rows at the four quarters. From the disk of the dome above, sixteen great lamps blaze down on the ring, and sometimes a spotlight or two punctuate the darkness.
If you like to take your pleasure sentimentally, a performance at the Cirque Medrano is like opening old letters—with a comic valentine now and then for tonic. Huck Finn saw a one-ring circus; but Gentry’s Dog and Pony Show is the farthest that the present generation ever get from the three-ring-and-two-stage monstrosity which deafens our ears and dulls our eyes.
The Cirque Medrano is the proper place for artists and connoisseurs. The fifteen hundred people that it holds can study—and do study—with the minute intensity of an anatomical clinic, M. Grossi and Coquette, as the horseman, quite as proud as his mare, puts her through five minutes of marching to music. They turn their eyes with just as much appreciation to watch the aerialists, plunging into their dangerous pastimes under the lights. Here M. Lionel, Roi du Vertige, gets the sort of attention he could never win on the vaudeville stage; it must seem to him sometimes, as he manœuvers gingerly on a chair balanced by its right hind leg in the neck of a bottle which is perched in turn on a ten foot pole, that the towering rows of seats are about to topple over on the strange career which he has made of himself.
There is no question, then, about the sight-lines of the theater which Copeau should make out of the Cirque Medrano. There never was such an auditorium for sheer visibility. The last rows are better than the first; they take in the whole audience as well as the show, while all you can say for the front seats is that they would show you half of the laughing or crying crowd of men and women, hanging over the actors in far from mute adoration. The slant of these seats is greater than the slant in Max Littmann’s theaters in Munich, but, because the rows swing all round, you never get that feeling of awful vacancy and gap which comes to spectators in the upper rows of the Prinzregenten and the Künstler Theaters in Munich. And there is no proscenium arch to press down upon the poor midgets at the bottom of the playhouse.
“But their backs? How about the actors’ backs?”