But, in an age of mobile phones, wireless internet and digital radio, why should hapless thespians have to rely on a hissed prompt from the wings to save their blushes? In fact, why bother to learn the lines at all when the words could simply be fed into an earpiece by someone who has the play open in front of him? And that is exactly what the French actor Gérard Depardieu has admitted doing in his latest play, sending the country’s theatre into a hissy fit of dramatic proportions.

Depardieu’s confession has outraged purists but broken a taboo and revealed the widespread use of modern technology in theatres throughout France.

The debate has taken on a passionate tone after a call from the director Jacques Lassale for all actors over the age of 50 to be equipped with earpieces. Lassale says they cannot be expected to learn their lines — a claim that drew an apoplectic response from critics.

The issue arose when Lassale was directing Depardieu in The Beast in the Jungle, a play which is adapted from a Henry James novel, in Paris. It was a rare stage appearance for a man who is not only France’s best known male film star, but also a businessman with investments that range from French vineyards to Cuban tourism. Depardieu, 55, said he was too busy to learn his part. “I do too many things to remember all of it, ” he said.

Lassale, apparently, was sympathetic and supplied the actor with two earpieces. The first was linked to a recording of the work made by Depardieu himself. As he strutted across the Madeleine Theatre, he listened to it and repeated his own lines out loud.

The second earpiece was connected to a prompter sitting in a glass booth in the rafters. The prompter told him when he should get ready to speak and where he should move.

The revelation prompted what one critic described as “a strange form of coming out”, with many performers admitting in private that they used similar devices. One told The Times: “They are becoming more common. I was in a play with an old guy who hadn’t been in a theatre for years and he needed an earpiece as well. He couldn’t remember any of his lines without it.”

However, only Depardieu has talked publicly about his need for electronic assistance.

“I love it,” he said. “It’s the future.” Writing in La Revue Littéraire, a high-brow Parisian literary magazine, Lassale agreed.

He said: “After the age of 50, actors often have problems with their memory. It’s a problem that occurs more and more frequently.”

He said the solution lay in the sort of earpieces employed by Depardieu. “It is not the actor who remembers the part. It is the part that brings itself to the attention of the actor. I am very enthusiastic about this. I have become an unconditional supporter of new technology.”

His comments fanned the flames of a controversy that shows no signs of dying. Critics such as Pierre Assouline of Le Monde were indignant. “The least we can ask of actors is that they know their lines,” he said. “They should learn them, work on them.” Depardieu was less an actor than a businessman. “He prefers to build a golf course in Cuba and to negotiate the sale of one of his wines than to repeat his part”.

Purists such as Assouline pointed out that old-style human prompters, who whisper the occasional line from the wings, were banned by la Comédie Française, the French national theatre company, a decade ago. The company told its actors to remember their parts or face ignominy on stage. “Actors must train their memory for two or three hours a day,” said Assouline. “They’ve all gone mad.”

Fabrice Pliskin, another critic, writing in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, took Depardieu’s side. “Some people accuse him of blurring the line between nature and artifice. But isn’t that precisely what an actor should do?”

FORGOTTEN LINES AND AD-LIBS

• Tom Stoppard’s play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour concerned political oppression in Soviet Russia. In a 2002 performance in Philadelphia a bed collapsed and the lead actor Richard Easton forgot line after line. His fellow actor Paul Hecht then did the same and both men had to ad-lib, with limited success
  
  
• Mary Martin made her final US stage appearance in 1986 in a national tour of James Kirkwood’s comedy, Legends. She wore a radio device to prompt her
  
  
• Her son Larry Hagman, JR in the Dallas TV series, appeared in the 1980 Royal Variety Show with his mother and in front of the Queen, but forgot his lines
  
  
• Spike Milligan played in a 1964 dramatisation of Oblomov, the 19th-century Russian novel. Three weeks in, he forgot his lines, shouted for a prompt and had to ad-lib. The cast was heckled and the production forced to change theatres, but critics hailed him as a genius
  
  
• Jack Lemmon’s first lead role was in a school play aged nine. He forgot his lines and walked off to be prompted by a teacher. The audience laughed — and he did the same for every subsequent line. He was an instant hit

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