I’ve always loved the idea of tableaux vivants. Enacting a painting, or a scene from a story – in one long frozen moment complete with props and costumes… Half theatre, half illustration. It appeals very much.

I remember reading Behind a Mask, one of Louisa May Alcott’s gothic stories, during a mostly sleepless overnight train ride… Alcott clearly loved her home theatricals – but I wonder what she would make of the fact that what made the story memorable to me is the long scene with the tableaux vivants. It’s an elaborately staged matter of young people redoing historical and biblical scenes, with rich costuming and setting, and Jean Muir runs away with it, upstaging everyone else… how unconsciously she does it, is a matter for debate – and, indeed, for the rest of the tale. I can’t say I liked Behind a Mask very much, but the tableaux, and the deft narrative use Alcott makes of them, masking and revealing, manipulating and foreshadowing, definitely stuck. I’d like to do that, I remember thinking, in my uncomfortable train seat…

In Angels and Insects, Antonia S. Byatt also writes tableaux vivants, performed by children this time, as part of a game of animated charades, with each tableau providing a part of the concealed word… and now I think of it, isn’t there something like that in Edith Wharton too? And in Jane Eyre, even Mr. Rochester plays the game with his guests at Thornfield…

Tableaux vivants seem to have been quite the popular pastime in Victorian times, on both sides of the Pond, for both children and adults – enough to warrant the publication of a number of how-to manuals… Of course there were bound to be varying degrees of elaborateness. Alcott, Brontë, Wharton and Byatt all show the thing at its richest: a society game, usually depicted in detailed set-pieces, always highly symbolic in nature, and in choice of subjects – always conveying revelations, unexpected contrasts, foreshadowing…

A most interesting game to play, both in writing and in person. I still think I’d like to do that… I never have because, frankly, the amount of work that must go into a thirty-seconds performance seems entirely unreasonable – unless you have at your disposal, like Jean Muir’s employers, an English manor house, an attic filled with costumes and very old clothes, and a willing seamstress. Still, the idea remains there, in that Someday limbo where unlikely ideas linger, and makes me appreciate things like this stunning recreation of Caravaggio’s paintings, or this didactic project by the Yale National Initiative.

I especially like the YNI project’s idea of bookending the tableau with a “before” and an “after” spoken scene – which gives me ideas… Hm, suddenly I’m wondering if I couldn’t, after all, find a way to indulge my fascination with the not-quite-lost art of tableaux vivants?