L'Aigle à deux têtes
| L'Aigle à deux têtes | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Jean Cocteau |
| Date premiered | 1946 |
| Original language | French |
L'Aigle à deux têtes is a French play in three acts by Jean Cocteau, written in 1943 and first performed in 1946. It is known variously in English as The Eagle with Two Heads,The Eagle Has Two Heads,The Two-Headed Eagle,The Double-Headed Eagle, and Eagle Rampant. Cocteau also directed a film of his play which appeared in 1948.
Cocteau said that he took his inspiration for the play from the separate stories of Ludwig II of Bavaria and of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Ludwig was found drowned in Lake Starnberg in Bavaria in circumstances which have never been satisfactorily explained. Elisabeth was stabbed in the heart by an assassin while out walking in Geneva. For his portrait of the Queen, Cocteau drew upon the portrait of Elisabeth given by Remy de Gourmont in his Promenades littéraires. He was also concerned to create characters which called for a grand style of acting in a tradition which he saw as being in decline in French theatre. The performances of Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais in the first French production were an essential part of Cocteau's conception of the play.
On the 10th anniversary of the assassination of the king, his reclusive widow, the Queen, arrives to spend the night at the castle of Krantz. Stanislas, a young anarchist poet who seeks to assassinate her, enters her room, wounded; he looks exactly like the dead king, and the Queen shelters him instead of handing him over to the police. She sees him as the welcome embodiment of her own death, calling him Azraël (the angel of death). An ambiguous love develops between them, uniting them in a bid to outwit the machinations of the court politicians, represented by the Comte de Foëhn, the chief of police, and Édith de Berg, the Queen's companion. In order to remain true to their ideals and to each other, the Queen and Stanislas have to play their parts in a bizarre private tragedy, which the world will never understand.
Act 1 takes place in the Queen's bedroom at Krantz: evening.
Act 2 is set in the castle library: the next morning.
Act 3 is again in the library: the following morning.
Cocteau was interested in juxtaposing two characters who represent opposite ideas, a queen with an anarchist temperament and an anarchist with royalist sympathies, and who depart from those identities as they interact with each other as human beings. Other themes which recur elsewhere in Cocteau's work are the poet's obsession with death, and the fulfilment of love in death (Orphée, Le Sang d'un poète, L'Éternel Retour).
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