Jean-Gaspard Deburau
Jean-Gaspard Deburau (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ ɡaspaʁ dəbyʁo]; born Jan Kašpar Dvořák;[1] 31 July 1796 – 17 June 1846), sometimes erroneously called Debureau, was a Bohemian-French mime.
His most famous pantomimic creation was Pierrot—a character that served as the godfather of all the Pierrots of Romantic, Decadent, Symbolist, and early Modernist theater and art.
[5] The journalist Jules Janin published a book of effusive praise, entitled Deburau, histoire du Théâtre à Quatre Sous, in 1832.
Théophile Gautier wrote of his talent with enthusiasm ("the most perfect actor who ever lived");[6] Théodore de Banville dedicated poems and sketches to his Pierrot; Charles Baudelaire praised his style of acting.
As Robert Storey has pointed out, Deburau performed in many pantomimes unconnected with the commedia dell'arte: He was probably the student-sailor Blanchot in Jack, l'orang-outang (1836), for example, and the farmhand Cruchon in Le Tonnelier et le somnambule ([The Cooper and the Sleepwalker] late 1838 or early 1839), and the goatherd Mazarillo in Fra-Diavolo, ou les Brigands de la Calabre ([Brother Devil, or The Brigands of Calabria] 1844).
As theater historian Edward Nye writes, "Pierrot had somehow intellectually matured and learnt to moderate his worst excesses, or even to turn them into relative virtues.
His overlarge cotton blouse and trousers freed him from the constraints of the woolen dress of his predecessors, and his abandoning the frilled collar and hat gave prominence to his expressive face.
The "naive scenarios" that "limited" his acting, according to his Czech biographer, Jaroslav Švehla, "did little more than group together and repeat traditional, threadbare, primitive, and in many cases absurd situations and mimic gags (cascades), insulting to even a slightly refined taste.
"[20] The fact is that four distinct kinds of commedia-related pantomime held the stage at the Funambules, and for each Deburau created a now subtly, now dramatically different Pierrot.
The temptation to use such material, devised by such an illustrious poet, was irresistible to the managers of the Funambules, and the "review" was immediately turned into a pantomime (probably by the administrator of the theater, Cot d'Ordan).
Gautier's ex-son-in-law, Catulle Mendès, refashioned it into a pantomime in 1896,[40] and when Sacha Guitry wrote his play Deburau (1918)[41] he included it as the only specimen of the mime's art.
Banville's poem "Pierrot" (1842) concludes with these lines: "The white Moon with its horns like a bull / Peeps behind the scenes / At its friend Jean Gaspard Deburau."
The Goby collection, put together from what Deburau's son, Charles, had been able to recall of the pantomimes and reproducing (as Champfleury observes in his "Préface") only "a repertoire easy to perform in the course of many peregrinations through the provinces" (p. xi), is doubly unreliable: it omits the spectacular pantomime-féerie, the most numerous and most admired of Deburau's productions, and it represents the pantomime of Baptiste much less accurately than that of Charles himself.
