ABSTRACT

Anyone who has studied the work of Michael Chekhov has inevitably encountered the name of Georgette Boner, who was associated with his peregrinations from his sojourn in Paris up to the years spent at Dartington Hall. Yet relatively little is known about this Swiss German artist, who offered Chekhov financial support, but was also his collaborator during a crucial period when he was adjusting to the realities of exile in Europe and had begun to test and write down his acting method. This article, which is based on Boner’s publications and her Zurich archive, seeks to throw some light on her role as his assistant and the initial draft of his method that Chekhov prepared with her help in Paris and Riga. Georgette Boner, the youngest of three daughters, was born on 4 February 1903 in

Milan into a well-to-do, upper middle-class Swiss family. When she was eight her family returned to Switzerland, first to Baden, a municipality in the canton of Aargau, and then to Zurich, where they lived in the Villa Rouge in the heart of the prestigious Rieter Park. Boner’s passion for the theatre began during her years in high school. She subsequently studied German philology, defending a doctoral thesis on the female characters in Arthur Schnitzler. She had come to Paris to join her sister Alice, who was a painter and sculptor and had just created the “German Studio in Paris,” or Deutsche Bühne Paris, located in the Champs-Élysées. She had been living in Paris for two years when she met Michael Chekhov who, in the spring of 1931, was acting in the Atelier Theatre in a series of productions of his new theatrical group.1