Amateur show
with my fisrt" Elves "- 1948
Perrine was a maid ...
Paris, June 1948. We were studying for final exams at the Louis-le-Grand secondary school, but I found the time during my days off and holidays to dedicate myself to running the neighborhood center, in the Motte-Piquet-Grenelle quarter of the fifteenth district of Paris, where I lived with my parents. The young people (Union Scouts) of the Protestant Center, on the Rue de l’Avre very nearby, had adopted me unconditionally. I found the atmosphere very pleasant even though I was not of a religious bent and didn’t attend church services.
We were always looking to scrape funds together for the charitable works of the Center; we also had a plan with the neighborhood Boy Scout troop to organise a sort of fair, with different stands ... you know... fishing for plastic ducks, the pyramid of tin cans to knock over with softballs, the raffle... We’d invite family and friends, and count on their generosity to make this ¨Scrap Happening¨ on June 6 a great success.
Three other teammates and I even dreamed up a way to liven up the event a little - a musical pantomime, that ubiquitous element of all Scout campfires and parties. We’d even been christened, thanks to the newly established reputation of another young quartet, the Brothers John (les Frères Jacques). We chose among other numbers, the old standard Perrine was a maid ... , which lent itself well to a comic sketch. This would be a bit of entertainment that we could present several times throughout the day in the great hall of the Center.
The idea was a hit right away. A few weeks before the date of the fair we started ¨rehearsals" : more like meetings, to work out adequate staging and decide on costumes. Each one of us gave his all, given that we could only meet in the evenings due to our respective occupations : business, administration, studies ... Not only did Perrine take shape but also Back behind our place and Sir de Framboisy, two more old classics! We were having a ball ...
But cruel Fate had other plans! Three weeks before the big day, one of the boys very unluckily broke his ankle : it was too late to find anyone to jump in (so to speak) to replace him. So we tried to redistribute the roles and vocal numbers among the three of us. Four days later, a second member of the group slipped on a sidewalk - and broke his arm! Even so Fate had not yet had the last word ... my remaining partner was hospitalized two days later for an emergency appendectomy. Thus I found myself alone, and completely at a loss, having nonetheless committed myself to providing some sort of ¨entertainment¨ at the fair ...
But you know the motto : ¨a scout is always prepared! ¨ and by chance (or was it Fate, previously mentioned, which had already planned it all out?) I fell upon a little book which has become a Bible for so many : How to build and animate our puppets, by Marcel Temporal. The notion of performing a sung pantomime using puppets seemed to me a life-saving solution. I remembered having been hit by a theatrical lightningbolt, in my childhood, a sort of fascinating revelation when my mother took me to see Guignol in Africa at the Luxembourg Gardens puppet theatre; and suddenly, like a gift from heaven above, here was a detailed and illustrated manual just perfect for helping the amateur find ¨recipes¨ to help get under way ...
So it was that Perrine became a maid in the shape of a clumsy but effective puppet, and I rounded out the program with a (very ideosyncratic!) adaptation of fables and rhymes from the Middle Ages that we were studying at Louis-le-Grand. I’d chosen two : The Saying of the Partridges and The Washtub Farce. The cast of players was limited - I could work all the characters independently of each other because only two were on stage at any one time :
- Perrine was a maid : Perrine, her Lover, the Priest.
- The Saying of the Partridges : the Wife, the Husband, the Priest.
- The Washtub Farce : Jacquinot and his Wife.
The characters were quickly thrown together using bits and pieces of rags : Perrine became the two other female characters by a simple change of hairdo and scarves, Jacquinot also became the Lover by just adding a hat and cape, and the Priest stayed the same throughout the two scenes. Following Marcel Temporal’s book of instructions I managed to construct a sort of ¨puppet theatre¨ with mismatched two-by-fours and old curtains, but the whole thing finally remained standing! After all it only had to be used once ...
Chance and Fate must have smiled maliciously on all these preparations, because this memorable event, this one-time-only event, mounted for a single performance, was strangely to become the jumping-off point of my career, which I was far from imagining ... but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
Finally, June 6 arrives : the weather is splendid and the ¨Scrap Happening¨ is in full swing. There’s a good crowd, the stands draw customers into the shade of the courtyard chestnut trees. A bell rings : the first performance of the Grenelle Puppets, a name we came up with at the last minute, is about to begin. A few rows of audience pile into the hall which usually was used for the church services, and on with the show ...
When I think of it now, I must have been totally clueless, in an altered state, spurred on by the desire to rise to the challenge, to beat stage fright, maybe also carried along by the ¨guts¨ that I had but would really put to the test ... All the same, I moved from one character to another, acting out the plot, without a set script but following the story line, and alternately doing all the voices ... no doubt it was all a bit lacking in discipline and technique, but it achieved its goal : the audience was surprised but enthusiastic, which was clear from the laughter and applause. At the exit word got around and I had to give two more performances in the afternoon, each with a bigger audience than the last ... luckily it was just ¨one time only¨! Little did I suspect at that time, that ¨one time only¨ would lead me on a voyage ¨around the world in fifty years¨. 