« The Monkey out of its Cage » : Mazurier-Jocko at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin
This article proposes to analyze Charles-François Mazurier’s interpretation of the primate protagonist in the play Jocko, ou le singe du Brésil, by Gabriel Lurieu and Edmond Rochefort (1825), created at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris. Scrutinizing the chronicles of the time, we will examine the transgression of the “fourth wall” carried out by the actor through his acrobatics—indeed, he was acting like a monkey on the loose, jumping from the front of the stage to the boxes, walking on all fours on the balcony, interacting directly with the audience, or stealing their personal items. We will elucidate the semiotic and symbolic transformation of the room that these maneuvers engender. The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin turned-improvised menagerie allowed the spectators to come into contact with an exotic animal embodied by a man, whose acting accounts for the scientific and popular discourses of the first third of the nineteenth century on the wildness of the Quadrumana, and the efforts of humans to tame them.