Porte-Saint-Martin, Théâtre de la

Porte-Saint-Martin, Théâtre de la, Paris, celebrated playhouse, built in 1782 to replace the Opéra, which had been burnt down. The opera company remained there until 1794, and the building was apparently not used as a theatre again until 1810, when one of the first plays to be presented was a melodrama by Pixérécourt. In 1822 an English company appeared unsuccessfully in Othello and in 1827 Frédérick played for the first time with Mme Dorval, whose career was to be linked spectacularly with the Porte-Saint-Martin. The great days of the theatre were in the 1830s, when it saw the first night of the elder Dumas's Antony and Le Tour de Nesle and Hugo's Marion Delorme and Lucrèce Borgia; but with the decline of Romantic drama the fortunes of the theatre also declined and in 1840 it closed after the banning of Balzac's Vautrin. When it reopened it had no settled policy, but continued to present revivals and commonplace and lachrymose melodramas such as Dennery's Marie-Jeanne; ou, La Femme du peuple (1846), in which Mme Dorval made her last appearance. It was burnt down in the rioting of 1870 and rebuilt on the original plans, but somewhat smaller. It had a further moment of glory in the 1880s when it was acquired by Sarah Bernhardt, who had appeared there 18 years earlier in the fairy-tale play La Biche au bois and now returned in a revival of Meilhac and Halévy's Frou-Frou. In 1898 the record run of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac again made the theatre one of the most popular in Paris. Because of its great size it was later unable to compete with the cinema, and from 1936 to 1978 it was devoted almost entirely to musical comedy. Marcel Marceau then took it over as a base for his École de mimodrame. It housed the Comédie-Française when the latter was strike-ridden, and in 1989 staged an adaptation of Camus's novel La Peste.