Journey Through the Impossible
Journey Through the Impossible (French: Voyage à travers l'impossible) is an 1882 fantasy play written by Jules Verne, with the collaboration of Adolphe d'Ennery.
A stage spectacular in the féerie tradition, the play follows the adventures of a young man who, with the help of a magic potion and a varied assortment of friends and advisers, makes impossible voyages to the center of the Earth, the bottom of the sea, and a distant planet.
Upon his return to England, where he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital, his young son Georges was confided to the care of the aristocrat Madame de Traventhal, of Castle Andernak in Denmark.
During the voyages, Volsius reappears in the guise of Georges's heroes: Otto Lidenbrock at the center of the Earth, Captain Nemo on a journey on the Nautilus to Atlantis, and Michel Ardan on a cannon-propelled trip to a distant planet, Altor.
The play's most prominent thematic inspiration is Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires series, which it freely invokes and refers to; in addition to plot elements taken from Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, and Around the Moon, the character of Doctor Ox reappears from the short story "Dr. Ox's Experiment," Mr. Tartelet is derived from a character in The School for Robinsons, and the hero Georges is described as the son of Captain Hatteras from The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.
[2] Like many of Verne's novels, the play is deeply imbued with themes of initiation, echoing the traditional mythic pattern of a young hero coming of age and reaching maturity through a dangerous and transformative journey.
[3] In Journey Through the Impossible, the young Georges, initially trapped by obsessions similar to those that drove his father mad, resolves his inner torments during a harrowing series of experiences in which Ox and Volsius compete as substitute father-figures.
[5] The play also features an ambiguous and multifaceted portrayal of scientific knowledge, celebrating it for its humanistic achievements and discoveries, but also warning that it can do immense harm when in the hands of the unethical or overambitious.
Adapted with the collaboration of the showman d'Ennery, the play invented and codified the pièce de grand spectacle, an extravagant theatrical genre that became intensely popular in Paris throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
[10] Verne began playing with the idea of bringing a mixed selection of Voyages Extraordinaires characters together on a new adventure in early 1875, when he considered writing a novel in which Samuel Fergusson from Five Weeks in a Balloon, Pierre Aronnax from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days, Dr. Clawbonny from The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, and other characters would go around the world together in a heavier-than-air flying machine.
Another novel featuring a similar trip around the world in a flying machine, Alphonse Brown's La Conquête de l'air, was published later that year, causing Verne to put the idea on hold.
Paul-Félix Taillade, who had appeared in The Children of Captain Grant, was cast as Doctor Ox, and Marie Daubrun, a well-known féerie actress who was also the mistress and muse of Charles Baudelaire, played Eva.
[14] The play, advertised as une pièce fantastique en trois actes,[1] premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on 25 November 1882.
"[13] The Parisian critic Arnold Mortier, in a long review of the play, described it as "beautiful" and "elegant", and highly praised Dailly's performance as Valdemar, but believed the staging lacked originality: "a great deal of money went into this production, but very few ideas."
[21] Henri de Bornier gave the play a brief but highly positive notice in La Nouvelle revue, highlighting the elegance of the decor and commenting Verne and d'Ennery had done humankind a "true service" by exploring impossible domains on the stage.
[24][25] Auguste Vitu gave the play a largely positive review, praising the actors, the decor, and the use of Verne's ideas, but expressed doubts about the wisdom of combining so many disparate styles—dramatic realism, scientific fiction, and pure fantasy—in one production.
