He founded the landmark Paris theatre company, the Théâtre de l'Œuvre,[3] which produced experimental work by French Symbolist writers and painters at the end of the nineteenth century.

[4] Like his contemporary, theatre pioneer André Antoine, he gave the French premieres of works by the leading Scandinavian playwrights Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

[5] In 1887, at age 17, Lugné-Poe and friend Georges Bourdon created an amateur theatre group called le Cercle des Escholiers, which sought to perform "unpublished or, at the very least, little-known works.

Lugné-Poe staged the first half of the season back at the Comédie-Parisienne, with a line-up that included Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved, Kālidāsa's The Ring of Shakuntalā, and Oscar Wilde's Salome.

Most notably, they premiered Ibsen's Pillars of Society (22-23 June 1896) and Peer Gynt (11-12 November 1896); Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (9-10 December 1896); Bjørnson's sequel to Beyond Human Power (25-26 January 1897); Hauptmann's fairy drama The Sunken Bell (4-5 March 1897); Bataille's Your Blood (7-8 May 1897); Ibsen's Love's Comedy (22-23 June 1897) and John Gabriel Borkman (8-9 November 1897); Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector General (7-8 January 1898); and Romain Rolland's Aert (2-3 May 1898) and The Wolves (18 May 1898).

By the close of the nineteenth century, Lugné-Poe's company had successfully established half a dozen Parisian theatres as sites for daring, challenging, and at times outrageous modern drama.

In 1895, Jakub Grein and the Independent Theatre Society invited Lugné-Poe and his troupe to present a season of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, and Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist L'Intruse and Pelléas and Mélisande in London.