The Théâtre de l'Œuvre is a Paris theatre on the Right Bank, located at 3, Cité Monthiers, entrance 55, rue de Clichy, in the 9° arrondissement. It is commonly conflated and confused with the late-nineteenth-century theater company named Théâtre de l'Œuvre (or simply, L'Œuvre), founded by actor-director-producer Aurélien Lugné-Poe, who would not take control of this performance space until 1919.
- Venue
- Théâtre de l'Œuvre
- Address
- 55 rue de Clichy, 75009 Paris, France
- Town
- Paris, FR
- Capacity
- 326
The Théâtre de l'Œuvre is a Paris theatre on the Right Bank, located at 3, Cité Monthiers, entrance 55, rue de Clichy, in the 9° arrondissement. It is commonly conflated and confused with the late-nineteenth-century theater company named Théâtre de l'Œuvre (or simply, L'Œuvre), founded by actor-director-producer Aurélien Lugné-Poe, who would not take control of this performance space until 1919. His company is best known for its earlier phase of existence, before it acquired this theatre venue. From 1893 to 1899, in various Parisian theatres, Lugné-Poe premiered modernist plays by foreign dramatists (Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Bjørnson, Wilde), as well as new work by French Symbolists, most notoriously Alfred Jarry’s nihilistic farce Ubu Roi, which opened in 1896 at Nouveau-Théâtre (today, Théâtre de Paris, 15, rue Blanche). It is best to discuss the surviving theater building and Lugné-Poe's several-phase theater production company separately, though they share much of their history. According to the present theatre's Web site, at some point in the nineteenth century, the Duke of Gramont built a rudimentary little theatre on this property, where he had also installed his mistress, opera singer Mademoiselle Coupé. Reputedly, the theatre privately offered a repertory that included risqué, even salacious work. In 1892, the space was renovated as a public concert hall with entrance in the adjoining courtyard area of Cité Monthiers. The hall, which featured orchestra level and three-sided balcony seating, as well as a large upstage organ, was named Salle Berlioz in honor of French composer, conductor, and music critic Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), who had lived nearby on the rue de Calais. Launched in Paris in 1893, the Théâtre de l'Œuvre was among the first theatrical companies in France to provide a home for the artists of the Symbolist Movement of the 1890s. Director Lugné-Poe modeled the enterprise on the experimental structure of André Antoine's independent, subsc