His first staged play, Brouillard du matin ("Morning Fog"), was presented on 27 March 1897 at the Nouveau-Théâtre as part of the festivities of the alumni association of the Lycée Condorcet.

[citation needed] During the same period when Copeau was preparing his baccalauréat exams, he met Agnès Thomsen, a young Danish woman seven years his elder who was in Paris to perfect her French.

In 1907, he stayed at Prospect Lodge, then in 1909 at Madeira Villa, both in St Brelade, where he pursued his work on theatrical adaptations, the most well-known being that of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a project co-written with schoolfriend Jean Croué.

[citation needed] The play was staged in April 1911 under the direction of Jacques Rouché at the Théâtre des Arts, receiving favorable reviews.

[5]On the Left Bank, on the rue du Vieux-Colombier, he rented the old and dilapidated Athénée-Saint-Germain, an unlikely venue for the utopian ideals of Copeau, but its location at distance from the commercial theatre district gave a signal that he intended to pursue a new path.

The return of the troupe to Paris at the beginning of September, coincided with the publication in the NRF of Copeau's Un essai de rénovation Dramatique: le théâtre du Vieux-Colombier ("Essay on Dramatic Renewal: The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier"),[6] in which he set forth the principles of this project: first, the choice of place far from the despised Right Bank boulevard in a district closer to schools and the center of artistic life where the new theatre might attract an audience of students, intellectuals and artists with a subscription system that would assure reasonable prices; second, a variety of productions—as many as three different productions a week, which would not only appeal to a wider public, but would offer the actors the opportunity to play several different sorts of roles in quick succession, maintaining the suppleness of their interpretive skills; third, a repertoire both classic and modern would mark the offerings of the company: the classic plays of Jean Racine and Molière—never put in modern dress to keep them à la mode—and the best plays of the previous thirty years.

Lastly, he proposed a simple stage freed from the overworked scenic machinery that had become commonplace: "Pour l'œuvre nouvelle, qu'on nous laisse un plateau nu" ("For our new undertaking, just give us a bare platform"), he wrote (Registres I, p. 32).

He staged plays from the classics, fairly recent works of quality, and the offerings of new playwrights from outside the theatre such as Jean Schlumberger and Roger Martin du Gard.

[citation needed] They performed Paul Claudel's L’Échange ("The Exchange"); dating from 1894 when he was in "exile" as a diplomat in Boston, the play deals with the relationship between spouses.

In May, the troupe, exhausted but buoyed by its artistic and sometimes critical successes, staged an adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or Nuit des rois to close the season.

Stories abound of Copeau and Jouvet working forty-eight hours non-stop to set the lighting and of Duncan Grant, the English artist who created the costumes, chasing after actors to apply one last dab of color just before the curtain was to come up.

With Jouvet, he pondered the various possibilities of stagecraft and how the stage at the Vieux-Colombier could be shaped to fit their ideas about a "nouvelle comédie"—a new comedy reminiscent of the Italian commedia dell'arte.

A telegram in August 1915 from Edward Gordon Craig inviting him to Florence to discuss a possible staging of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Passion According to Saint Matthew was greeted with enthusiasm.

In the summer of 1916, Copeau received an invitation to organize a tour with the Vieux-Colombier in America, supposedly to counteract the influence of the German theatre in New York City, but also as a propaganda move to continue American support of the French cause.

Jouvet constructed a model set, given the dimensions of the stage area at the Garrick while in New York the young Antonin Raymond battled with the Shubert brothers and their architect over the renovations to the theatre.

The freedom of movement did not go unnoticed by the critics, as John Corbin of the New York Times remarked: "it renders possible many combinations and groupings, all sorts of telling encounters.

Among them were ten plays from the first season in Paris but with a different casts since not all the original members of the troupe came to New York: Molière's La Jalousie du Barbouillé, L'Avare and L'Amour médecin, Musset's Barberine, the Copeau/Croué adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Nuit des rois, the adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night shared the stage with Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement ("The Carriage of the Holy Sacrament") of Prosper Mérimée, La Surprise de l'Amour (Love's Surprise) of Musset, and Poil de Carotte (Carrot Head) of Jules Renard.

The fatigue from the exertions of the first season, the hot summer, the rationed food, now that the United States was part of the war effort, took their toll on the spirits of these French actors and actresses.

Copeau considered the aesthetic highlight of the season Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, principally because of the way the unit set with subtle lighting and the judicious use of banners on its several levels allowed an uninterrupted flow of action in this major work of the Symbolist movement.

The critic of The Nation who had consistently praised Copeau's efforts wrote: "The Vieux-Colombier has not only afforded New York a continually varied feast of inspiration and refreshment but it has set for us a new and practicable standard by which American dramatic art may be tested".

The classes, which took place in a room in the courtyard behind the theatre, were devoted to close readings of texts with emphasis not only on the meaning but the rhythms as well as physical exercises and improvisations.

The sessions ended in June with a charade presented before Copeau and a few friends of the Vieux-Colombier which le patron found quite satisfying (Registres VI, p. 225).

Suzanne Bing was again in charge of the young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years old, and Copeau also offered a course of the "History of the theatre."

In January, Copeau staged Henri Ghéon's Le Pauvre sous l'escalier ("The Beggar under the Staircase"), the story based on the medieval tale of the life of Saint Alexis.

La Mort de Sparte ("The Death of Sparta"), a play by Copeau's friend Jean Schlumberger dating from before the war, garnered neither critical nor popular praise.

For Copeau, two events marked the highpoints of the season: the staging of his long-awaited La Maison natale, a work that had its inception in various forms more than twenty years earlier, and the Noh play Kantan with the students of the school under the direction of Suzanne Bing.

(Registres VI, p. 401)[15] The play, performed with masked characters, allowed the young actors to show off to good effect their grace, athleticism and voice training.

In October, 1924, Copeau and his company of young enthusiasts set up shop in what they called ironically the "Château de Morteuil" in a village some seven miles from Beaune.

After the departure of some of the student actors and teachers, Copeau began work with his reduced troupe on the "New Comedy", an attempt to reproduce the Italian commedia dell'arte with masks and an acting style based on improvisation.

At the end of the year, the troupe moved to Pernand-Vergelesses, a village in the heart of the wine-producing region of Burgundy, where Copeau had purchased a house and property better suited to his family and the needs of the Copiaus.