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WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 15, Number 1 Winter 2003

Editor Marvin Carlson Contributing Editors Harry Carlson Antoinette Di Nocera Rosette Lamont Yvonne Shafer Phyllis Zatlin Editorial Staff Erik Abbott, Editorial Assistant

Christopher Balme Miriam DAponte Marion P. Holt Glenn Loney Daniele Vianello

Joshua Abrams, Managing Editor

Philippe Caubre. Photo: Michle Laurent

Edwin Wilson, Executive Director James Patrick, Director

Jill Stevenson, Circulation Manager Mark Ginsberg, Assistant Circulation Manager Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2003 ISSN # 1050-1991

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

To the Reader
Each year our winter issue is devoted entirely or in part to a particular country or a special theme. The previous two special issues, marking the beginning of the new century, looked in different ways at the European theatre as a whole. That of 2001 reported on the current theatre scene from twenty different Western-European countries., and that of 2002 moved from the national to the increasingly important international scene, tracing some of the implications of the new term and concept of Eurotheatre. In this current issue we return to our project of focussing upon a single country, France, as we have previously focussed upon The Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Germany. Despite a long tradition of attempts at decentralization, the French theatre remains dominated by Paris, and even though a number of cities elsewhere in France today have thriving theatre operations, a combination of touring and of joint productions (an increasingly common phenomenon throughout Europe) guarantees that many of these productions, wherever they originate, will eventually find their way to the capital as well. We begin this issue, therefore, with a series of reports on recent work in Paris, which include reviews of a wide variety of productions, some interviews with, and commentary on the ambiguous reaction of the Parisian theatre to the Victor Hugo Bicentennial. Following these, Oliver Neveux, a specialist in modern French political theatre, offers a more general analysis of one of the most important trends in recent French theatrical production, the return to a politically engaged theatre in France after the long relatively quiescent period that followed the disillusionment with Soviet Communism and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. As samplings of the current theatrical scene outside of Paris we also offer two reports from other important centers. The first is from Strasbourg, whose theatre holds a unique position as the only National state-supported theatre outside the capital, and now home as well to the National Conservatory for the training of actors. The second is from Nice, a city which provides a good example of a theatrical culture far removed from Paris. These reports make up the majority of this issue, but as usual, we also include a number of articles covering important theatre manifestations elsewhere in Western Europe. Three articles on the London theatre present a range of recent work, from prominent offerings in the major theatres (Stoppards new work at the National) to striking new experimental work in the Fringe (Forkbeard Fantasies). Three new productions by the internationally admired Catalan director Calixto Bieito, whose work has often been noted in these pages, are reviewed, along with the recent International Theatre Festival in Almagro, Spain. Finally, there is a report on the combination Carnival and experimental theatre festival in Cologne called the Stunksitzung. Western European Stages (ISSN# 10501991) is published three times a year, in Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $15.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. For subscription inquiries please contact: Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 100164309. Queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309 or email mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.

Table of Contents
Volume 15 Number 1 Winter 2003

Theatre in France Paris, Summer 2002 ...............................................................................................................Bruce Kirle Paris Theatre 2002 ..............................................................................................................Barry Daniels Didier Bezace Stages Chre Elna Serguivna................................................Manuel Garca Martnez Report from Paris, January 2003 .....................................................................................Marvin Carlson What Victor Hugo (Bi)Centennial?: An Interview with Jean Luc Jeener ...........................Jean DeCock New Struggles, New Theatre(s):? Contempotorary Engaged Theatre in France ..............Oliver Neveux Philippe Caubre: Molire Forever.....................................................................................Sophie Proust Stphane Braunschweig and the Theatre in Strasbourg...................................................Marvin Carlson The Theatre at Nice.............................................................................................................Sophie Proust A Review of the 2002 London Theatre Season .........................................................................Robert Skloot Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, National Theatre, London, Autumn 2002............................Noel Witts Station House Opera, Mares Nest; and Forkbeard Fantasy, Frankenstein .............................Greg Giesekam The Twenty-Fifth Annual Festival Internacional de Teatro Clsico in Almagro, Spain ..........Celia Braxton A Masked Ball, Die Fledermaus, Threepenny Opera: Calixto Bieitos 2002 ....................Maria M. Delgado Alles nur Spass: Colognes Carnival Stunksitzung ........................................................................Erik Abbott Notes on Contributors 5 11 21 29 35 41 49 55 61 67 77 79 85 91 101 107

Clmentine Clari in Madame Sans-Gne. Photo Courtesy: Thtre Antoine

Paris, Summer 2002


Bruce Kirle duction opportunities that make Parisian theatregoParisian theatre, always diverse and intering so unique and delightful. esting, extends to the museums and streets in the Perhaps the most interesting production I summer. This being the bi-centennial of the birth of saw in Paris was Matthias Langhoffs adaptation of Victor Hugo, Paris celebrated with a variety of Bchners Lonce et Lena, which he managed to Hugos plays and with a fairly extensive exhibit of merge with the same authors novella, Lenz, production photographs as well as set and design inspired by the German Storm and Stress dramatist, sketches covering the playwrights canon at the under the collective title Lenz, Lonce et Lena chez Victor Hugo Museum in the Marais. The Htel de Georg Bchner. Born in Zurich and raised in Ville paid tribute to Yves Montand, with an indoor Germany, this was Langhoffs return to the exhibit and a huge outdoor screen featuring film Comdie-Franaise after a 1996 staging of clips of Montand performing some of his bestStrindbergs Dance of Death. Twenty years ago, he known songs. At the Centre Pompidou, Cocteau staged his first great success in France, an adaptaand the surrealists were honored with an outstandtion of Bchners Woyzeck entitled Marie Woyzeck ing selection of works from both private and public at the Avignon Festival. His fascination with collections. Perhaps the most theatrical day of the Bchner focuses on the fragmentary nature of the summer, however, is 21 June, which heralds the dramatists work; for Langhoff, Lonce et Lena and annual Fte de la Musique. This year, the celebraLenz complement each other and help shed light on tion was as rowdy as ever, with virtually every the incompleteness of each. Langhoff seems to be major square and backstreet filled throughout the searching for clues to Bchners exploration of the night with music ranging from Lenny Kravitz to collective psychosis of a repressive social contract. classical music, from jazz-funk to an occasional He includes a narrator, played by popular French French chanson. The streets are all but impassible, film star and Comdie member Denis Podalyds, and its best to approach this holiday as if one is who emphasizes the autobiographical connections enjoying a concert during rush hour in a crowded between Bchner and his creations, Lonce and New York subway car. More traditional theatre can Lenz, each of whom exhibits a radical refusal to be almost as intense, however, and this summer preaccept the system. sented a variety of bold choices and unusual pro-

Matthias Langhoffs Lonce et Lena. Photo Courtesy: Comdie-Franaise

Rather than view Lonce et Lena as a comedy, Langhoff stresses its expressionist nature. Both Lonce and Lenz embark on symbolic journeys, which Langhoff physicalizes with a set of railroad tracks near the false proscenium. Lonces journey is toward marriage, but the fruits of that marriage social conformityare to be questioned, just as Lenzs journey into madness studies the societal causes of the illness of the human spirit. Langhoff emphasizes Bchners scientific approach to character by opening and closing the production with projections and slides of fish and amphibian dissections, recalling Bchners Strasbourg thesis, Memoire sur le systme nerveux du barbeau and his later lecture, On Cranial Nerves. He also intersperses, if I caught them correctly, lines from Woyzeck, whose protagonist similarly undergoes a journey that parallels, to some extent, those of Lonce and Lenz. Langhoffs dark view of Lonce et Lena seems to reside, at least partially, in the plays intertextuality and elements of literary pastiche. One can detect hints of Musset and Tieck, not to mention similarities between Lonces servant Valerio and Beaumarchaiss Figaro, who similarly schemes against the injustice of the status quo. Langhoff treats the final marriage ceremony between Lonce and Lena as a spectacle of automatism, in which two robots are resigned to fulfilling their societal functions. In fact, Lena breaks down and sobs after the marriage ceremony. In Langhoffs production, Bchners young couple question the nature of existence. The same questions mark Lenzs journey into madness. If the connections between the texts are fascinating, they are often a bit confusing, since one inevitably wonders if Lonce is part of the Lenz story or vice-versa. This is helped somewhat by the sets and costumes. Langhoff juxtaposes contemporary settings in Lonce et Lena, such as a metro station and the gardens of the Palais-Royal with nineteenth-century renderings of the mountains and countryside when the play shifts to the Lenz material. The ideological tapestry of this melding of texts strikes a contemporary resonance: the system today, as it did two hundred years ago, cuts loose those who question its values. Why, Langhoff asks in his production notes, do we continue to make the same mistakes? Why do we pursue that which will destroy us? If it is possible to help eradicate injustice, hunger, and privation, why do we expend energy waging costly, futile wars? The questions are 6

complex, but Langhoff is not alone in recognizing Bchners relevance to a contemporary world. Another production of Lonce et Lena was recently mounted at the Odon, whereas one of the biggest successes of this years Parisian theatre season was Georges Lavaudants staging of Dantons Death. This summer, Thomas Ostermeier will stage a new production of Lonce et Lena at Avignon. It is hard to imagine a first-class production of Madame Sans-Gne, perhaps Sardous most famous play, anywhere but in Paris, if for no other reason that the authors well-made historical dramas, including Thodora, Tosca, and Cloptre, are as expensive to stage today as a musical. Madame Sans-Gne has fifty-six characters, demands elaborate period costumes, and multiple sets. Adaptor Pierre Laville and director Alain Sachs have mounted a handsome production, but managed to streamline the cast down to sixteen actors at the Thtre Antoine. Sardous plot, written in collaboration with mile Moreau, chronicles the adventures of Catherine, a laundress. Through her marriage to Lefebvre, a Napoleonic soldier, she becomes a titled member of the Emperors court. At first, she is ridiculed by the court and by Napolons sisters, who complain to their brother that Catherine lacks the requisite social graces to avoid embarrassing her husband. On meeting Napolon, however, Catherine charms him, not only with her plain-spoken honesty, but with her flirtatious revelation that she once delivered laundry to his rooms before he rose to power. She becomes embroiled in an intrigue between an Austrian military diplomat, Neipperg, and the Empress. As the title suggests, through her fearlessness and forthrightness, she manages to save the day, as well as Napolons fragile male vanity. Written in 1893, the role of Madame SansGne was originated by Rjane, who repeated her performance in silent films. On stage, it has been recreated by actresses as diverse as Mistinguett and Madeleine Renaud. On film Gloria Swanson starred in a 1925 silent version, Arletty, in a 1940 French adaptation, and Sophia Loren in an unsuccessful 1970 Hollywood remake. The character has become synonymous with the French spirit of individualism and joie de vivre. In this production, Catherine is played by stage, film, and television star Clmentine Clari, who captures the appropriate insouciance, bravery, bawdy sexuality, and humor. Frdric van den Driesssche makes a dash-

ing Lefebvre, while Michel Vuillermoz is selfinvolved and cunning as the opportunistic Fouch, the role that Jean-Louis Barrault played opposite Madeleine Renaud in the 1957 revival at the Thtre Sarah-Bernhardt. I found Sachss direction a bit mechanical and filled with tricks, but, after all, this is Sardou, whose plays are nothing if not mechanical and filled with coups de thtre. Sachs takes full advantage of the opportunities the comedy presents. For example, Napolon is discovered in his quarters, which reveal a long staircase that faces a terrace. Whenever the emperor becomes agitated, Sachs has him run up or down the full flight of stairs to predictable laughs. Napolon snaps his fingers for a servant to move a chair and no servant appears. When he fails to snap his fingers, the servant appears to move the furniture. These bits of stage business are omnipresent in this production and occasionally distract from the action, but this is a relatively small quibble when one has the opportunity to see a careful remounting of a rarely-produced classic, one that entered the repertoire of the Comdie-Franaise in 1938 but vanished from the Salle Richelieu in 1953. An added delight is the Louis Jouvet exhibit in the foyer, which includes rare posters, programs, costumes, and photographs from productions such as Jules Romainss Dr. Knock, Sartres Le Diable et le bon dieu, as well as Jouvets celebrated collaborations with Jean Giraudoux. The revival of Henry Bernsteins Elvire provided an unusual opportunity to see a play by this seldom produced French playwright. Born in 1876 in Paris to a rich, Jewish family, Bernstein began his career in 1900 with Andr Antoines production of Le Marche. Almost thirty plays followed, including Samson (1907), La Rafale (1905), Le Voleur (1906), and Le Secret (1913), which was last revived in Paris in 1987 at the Thtre Montparnasse. Another Bernstein play, Aprs moi, which dealt with the Dreyfus affair, was briefly presented at the Comdie, but was withdrawn when it was denounced by an anti-Semitic claque. His final play, Evangeline, was produced in Paris in 1952, after he returned from the United States, where he found shelter during World War II. Bernstein was perhaps as famous for his flamboyant offstage life as he was for his boulevard dramas. He was a sportsman and playboy during la Belle poque, a familiar figure in society between the wars, the lover of women like Coco Chanel, Eve 7

Curie (daughter of Marie and Pierre), Liane de Pougy, and many others, as well as a man who occasionally settled his personal and professional disputes by dueling, either with a sword or with a pistol. Artistic director of the Gymnase and later the Ambassadeurs, Bernstein was probably the inspiration for Lucas Steiner, the Jewish theatre impresario in Francois Truffauts film Le dernier mtro. As a Jew, Bernstein made clear his opposition to the Nazi horror to a public that was not yet ready to confront its fears. Bernstein wrote Elvire for the famed actress Elvire Popesco in 1940. Less than two years previously, Hitler had annexed Austria. Soon after the Anschluss, Hitler invaded Prague. By 1940, war seemed inevitable to some, despite efforts at appeasement by many others. Elvire was Bernsteins warning that the individualism of the French spirit was in peril, that an era of innocence was about to end. According to one critic of the time, the French were too close to the crisis to view Hitlers threat with an objective eye. Some questioned Bernsteins political message as overdrawn and unconvincing. Ironically, the play was forced to close when it became clear that the Nazis were marching toward Paris. Bernstein frames his political message within the conventions of a boulevard romance. As the play begins, Jean, a wealthy French attorney, Claudine, his beautiful young mistress, and Andr, his best friend, are discussing whether or not Claudine will leave her husband to marry Jean. The situation is stock until Jeans valet introduces Elvire, an Austrian aristocrat, who brings a letter of introduction to Jean. She seeks political asylum in France. A political enemy of the Reich, her husband has been sent to a concentration camp. Elvire, who has lost her home and her family, reluctantly explains that she has also been tortured by the Nazis. The two men generously offer to help her remain in Paris. Eventually, Claudine returns to her husband. Jean begins an affair with Elvire, whose husband has been murdered by the Nazis. In the final act, Elvire confides to Andr that she intends to leave Jean to work as a foreign correspondent in Poland. She explains that her future is questionable and that she has already lost her past. Concerned about Jeans happiness, she arranges for him to meet a young French girl, whom she predicts he will marry. If the Nazis invade France, he will not be compromised by marriage to an Austrian refugee. Patrice Kerbat has directed with great deli-

Caroline Silsol as Elvire and Jean-Pierre Cassel as Jean in Elvire. Photo Courtesy: Thtre dEsch

cacy. The character of Elvire, of course, dominates the proceedings. Caroline Silhol exhibits the pride and stature of an Austrian aristocrat, while simultaneously manifesting a warmth and compassion that is all the more haunting when one learns of the horrors she has endured. Silhol uses a slight accent and foreign inflections, which make her all the more charming and sympathetic. The cast is uniformly good. Jean-Pierre Cassel is dignified and distinguished as Jean, and Philippe Magnan conveys Andrs shy reticence and his love for Elvire through a wry, sardonic sense of humor. Anne Consigny is lovely and gracious as Claudine. The set is simple but enough to convey a wealthy attorneys fashionable home. It is the play and performances which shine, particularly Silhols work, which haunts the playgoer after the final curtain. Nominated for seven Molires, the production is being performed at the appropriately named Salle Popesco (after Elvire Popesco), the small theatre adjacent to the Thtre Marigny. Where but in Paris could one see a costly, first-class adaptation of the old Ernst Lubitsch film The Shop Around the Corner? And, where but in Paris would it be rapturously received? Like Elvire, La Boutique au coin de la rue earned seven Molire nominations. Certainly, one can see its musicalization in the United States, She Loves Me, but here 8

director Jean-Jacques Zilbermann and adaptors Evelyne Fallot and Zilbermann focus on the social context of the film in a way that the more sentimental American musical ignores. I was skeptical that such a memorable movie could be adapted faithfully to the stage without losing most of its magic, but, if anything, Zilbermann has added to its luster by emphasizing its cultural context. Actually, the play promotes much the same message as Elvire, but in a more subtle fashion. The story of Matutschek and the employees at his book store (it is a perfumery in the musical) emphasizes the social structure of Budapest before Hitler. The core of the plot confirms the importance of the social contractthe optimism that if one behaves properly and decently, the system will protect its citizens. This is a social hierarchy whose innocence is about to change forever, and it is treated with affectionate acuity, not just nostalgia. The performances are all first rate. Samuel Labarthe is a handsome and convincing romantic hero. Florence Pernels Klara has little of the fragile dignity of Margaret Sullavan in the film, but succeeds on her own terms by stressing the characters insecurity. Manuel Bonnet is a convincing heel and Wotjek Pszoniak is an excellent Matutschek, at once despotic and paternal. The sets by Stfanie Jarre and the costumes by Catherine Gorne-Achdjian are

handsome and attentive to the smallest detail. Cuba for New York with his companion, dancer Indeed, the entire production is lovingly mounted. Macha Martinez. Chano played with the Dizzy The play works as a charming romantic comedy, Gillespie orchestra in 1947, concertized at Carnegie and, on another level, as an ode to a lost era of innoHall, and eventually toured Europe. His career was cence, that, like Elvire, rings uncomfortably true in cut tragically short when he was murdered in 1948 the aftermath of September 11. in New York by an irate drug dealer. Chano Pozo, un Cubain New York, comSavarys conceit here is to trace Chanos posed by Cuban percussionist Anga Diaz and life through an African-American saxophonist, American saxophonist and actor Allen Hoist, is the ostensibly the grandson of Charlie Parker, who goes brainchild of Jrme Savary, now director of the to Havana to research Pozos life through surviving Opra-Comique. Savary is an acquired taste. His relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Musically, the productions are incredibly popular, and seem built show is a tribute to Cuban music, which is particuto suit a wide audience, if not always a discriminatlarly popular these days in Paris. In addition to traing one. With Chano, Savary seems to be savoring ditional jazz tunes, Savary includes be-bop solos, a taste of anti-Americanism, or, at the very least, an salsa, rumbas, bossa novas, and mambos. For the ahistoric disregard for musicology. Before the perfirst half-hour or so, the musical is fascinating, since formance began, the director introduced himself to Savary contradicts the Broadway dictum that jazz the audience and spoke about the title character, a and musical theatre are mutually exclusive. Jazz celebrated mid-twentieth-century Cuban jazz percussionist and bongo player born in Havana in 1915. According to Savarys curtain speech, Chano was the first drummer to depart from the standard snare drumthat is, before Chano, no American played the bongo or experimented with percussion. Of course, this pretty much obliterates nearly two hundred years of African-American music, and rehistoricizes New Orleans jazz off the musicological map. It also makes one wonder what Savary thought Desi Arnaz, also a Cuban, was doing on Broadway in 1939 when he sang She Could Shake the Maracas to Diosa Costello in Rodgers and Harts Too Many Girls while accompanying himself with a hot bongo solo. Despite Savarys claims, the Conga predated Pozos appearance in New York in 1946, as did Cuban bongoplaying. Savary has fashioned a book musical of sorts around the life of Pozo, who apparently was a magnet for beautiful women, a party boy who indulged in alcohol and drugs, and a dandy who would change his clothes as often as three times a day. In 1941 he headlined the Tropicana, a Cuban nightclub, where he popularized the Conga and his brand of percussive bongo playing. He La boutique au coin de la rue. Photo Courtesy: Thtre Montparnasse also sang and danced. In 1946, he left 9

artists have long attempted to write Broadway musicals with little success, including Duke Ellington, with Beggars Holiday (1946) and Pousse Cafe (1966), and Johnny Mercer, most notably with St. Louis Woman (1946). As recently as 2001, Harry Connick, Jr. tried to adapt jazz to musical theatre with the disastrous Thou Shalt Not, an adaptation of mile Zolas Thrse Raquin. Savary begins his musical quietly, with Parkers grandson singing a wistful, jazz ballad at the airport as he plays his saxophone. Once in Havana, the set changes to the exterior of a home in a poor Cuban neighborhood, which is appropriate both to the story and to Savarys purportedly tiny budget. Allen Hoist sings and plays another jazz tune, as he flirts with a young married woman once he arrives in Havana. In both cases, there was little staging, just a terrific African-American singermusician onstage, playing jazz and performing a simple vocal. To my surprise, the effect was mesmerizing, and the audience responded with a rapturous ovation. Savary had prepared me with these opening scenes and numbers for a book musical, with simple, clear staging that focused on an audiences willingness to watch a jazz performer, rather than on its need for visual tricks and special effects, which has long been the practice on Broadway and in London. Unfortunately, Savary lost the courage of his convictions early in the evening. As soon as the plot, such as it was, became established, Savary brought on fourteen sexy, scantily-clad dancers from the Teatro America dance troupe, as well as some flashy headliners, including Armando Galindo Sotomayor, a grotesquely obese male singer with a huge tenor, who was featured wearing only a grass hula skirt as he swivelled his ample hips, and Juana Cacollo, an 86-year old Cuban chanteuse who supposedly knew Chano and played with Charlie Parker. Also featured was Miguel Ango Diaz, a drummer who played bongos in Chanos style. The excuse for incorporating these performers into the plot was flimsy, at best, and the evening often was reminiscent of a Vegas floor show, or, more appropriately, something one might see at the Lido or Moulin Rouge, minus the elaborate sets and costly budget. Occasionally, Savary wandered back from revue to musical theatre. Toward the end of the show, Chano is murdered. As his girl friend sobs over his body, percussionist Diaz comments on the tragedy with an extended bongo solo. Unlike the 10

jazz numbers at the beginning of the evening, however, the virtuoso drumming distracted from the dramatic picture center stage. Instead, we saw the image of the dead Chano, while Diazs bongo solo was every bit as long as Brother Julians death scene in Tiny Alice. Another plot complication involved an American entrepreneur booking the modern Cuban dance troupe for a United States tour. This was Savarys opportunity to ridicule American show business and its capitalist impressarios. Dressed in a grotesque blond wig and dark glasses, the American promoter exploits the Cuban entertainers by booking them into a snowbound roadhouse in Alaska. Had Savary stuck to his opening premise and presented a jazz book musical, I might have bought the anti-Americanism, but given Savarys easy capitulation to a safe, revue-like format, the American entrepreneur seemed no more exploitive than his French counterpart at the Opra-Comique. Typically, the entire cast gathered onstage for an extended finale, which is a time-honored convention with operettas and musicals in Paris. Unfortunately, I sat in a box at the back of the theatre next to the sound man. Three of the dancers in the troupe were herded into the sound booth as ringers, clapping and shrieking to the onstage music presumably to spur the audience to a similar reaction. The sound engineer kept holding his ears and asking them to quiet down, and I was tempted to do the same. The audience, I must confess, adored it all, as the cast eventually climbed down from the stage, singing, dancing, and cavorting up the center aisle of the auditorium into the foyer of the theatre, where CDs and audio cassettes of the music were ruthlessly hawked. Obviously, Savary knows his audience. Given his obviously limited budget, I wish he had focused on the idea of a jazz musical with an emphasis on story and masterly musicians practicing their art, without the tricks or distractions of the current Broadway musical theatre. I think a fundamental difference between French audiences and their American counterparts (outside of the fact that the French generally hate musicals), involves the Parisians deep love of jazz and willingness to hear rather than to see music. It would be wonderful if Savary, or someone else, trusted this without bending to more surefire commercial tactics. But if there were any other dissatisfied musical theatre curmudgeons in the audience, they could look forward to the Fte de la Musique.

Paris Theatre 2002


Barry Daniels restaurant. Alice, Blasons daughter, who works in I. June, July an office, is more outgoing and aggressive than The theatre season in Paris winds down in Ulysse. The young couple are engaged to be marJune, although the Comdie-Franaise and a numried. ber of commercial theatres remain open in July. I Vinaver has a good eye for the minute managed however to see some good productions. details of his characters, but his plot is a bit fantasAs always in Paris the choices involved an interesttic for the realism of his technique. In Act II, dividing mix of classical and modern works. ed into nine sequences spanning a year, the smooth Michel Vinaver, who began writing plays surface of the convivial relationships is broken. in 1955, is one of Frances most important living Laheus savings, a cache of gold bricks, is stolen, playwrights. Alain Franon, artistic director at the presumably through knowledge provided by Ulysse Thtre de la Colline, has revived Vinavers Les to one of his clients. This client may have had relaVoisins (The Neighbors), whose original production tionships with both Blason and Laheu. Without this he staged in 1986. The three-act play, performed savings, Ulysse and Alice are unable to purchase the without intermission, tells the story of two families property they had hoped to turn into a restaurant. In who share adjoining patios and have fallen into the Act III, Alice and Ulysse have opened a hot-dog habit of dining together. In the first act situation and stand while their fathers, both of whom have lost characters are established. Two single fathers head their jobs, have forgiven each other and have each household. Blason owns a china factory, but is formed an antique business in which Laheu seeks essentially an artisan. Laheu is a businessman with pieces which Blason restores. a passion for statistics. He is more upper class in his Franons staging of Les Voisins is simple manners and tastes than Blason. Ulysse, Blasons son is a retiring sort who works as a salesman in his and effective. The actors, Pierre-Flix Gravire (Ulysse), Herv Pierre (Blason), Julie Pilod (Alice) fathers business and dreams of owning his own

Les Voisins. Photo: Pascal Gely/Agence Bernand

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and Vladimir Yordanoff (Laheu) are excellent. Although the play seems to include mild satire of French middleclass habits and attitudes, I must say I found it not terribly interesting. It was rather like a soap opera with particularly sharply observed characters. Jean-Daniel Magnins Opra Savon (Soap Opera), a new play, which premiered at the Thtre du Vieux-Colombier (Comdie-Franaise) in May, is an amusing satire on conceptual art and mediamania. It is set in the environment created by Marsusan artist believed to be deadand located in the foundation museum run by his daughter, Solange (Vronique Vella), and Pirole (Yves Gasc), the museum guard who has cared for her since her fathers death. Two characters, a product supervisor, Demierre (Claire Vernet), and a free-lance writer, Ramseyer (Michel Favory), have come to the museum ostensibly to learn about modern art, but both harbor a desire to enter into the more glamourous world of art. Also present are a Bulgarian filmmaker, Petar Mouchk (Laurent Montel) and his cameraman, Kristov Vrrt (Chistian Gonon), who are seeking funding to make a documentary about Marsus. Eric (Laurent Natrella), a Canadian Indian who has completed a thesis on Marsus, arrives. Eric

reveals that Pirole is really Marsus, who faked his suicide when his wife Mildy left him to become a soap opera star in Hollywood. The play includes scenes from the soap opera and from a soporific talk show hosted by Schulman (Michel Favory). In the course of the action the characters discover an object in the environment that places them in virtual reality. When they activate it they find themselves in the world of the soap opera starring Mildy (Claire Vernet) and Ron (Yves Gasc). Marsus and Mildy are reunited with their daughter who will marry Eric. All of this is delightfully complicated and a little bit loopy. The classically trained ComdieFranaise actors seem to thoroughly enjoy playing these satirical characters and farcical characters. All are excellent. Sandrine Anglade has directed the production with flair. She starts the evening in the lobby with the pre-show entrance of stars, Ron and Mildy. Theatre staff seeks autographs. A filmed Vasmoline commercial is projected on the front scrim before the play begins. The scenes in TV Land are in black and white with clever costumes by Jrme Kaplan and masks and wigs by Daniel Cendron. Acting is broad in the TV scenes and more natural in the museum scenes. Although the

Opra Savon. Photo: Vincent Pontet/Agence Enguerand

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pace is fast and the action often chaotic, the playwright and director include a moment of peace when father and daughter and Eric sit around a campfire in the moonlight. It is a pause and a grace note that solidly seals our sympathy for these characters and underlines the humanity beneath the sparkling surface of the play. I was looking forward to the Thtre de la Collines production of Jean Genets Les Paravents (The Screens) [See WES 14:2, 19-22]. This epic drama about the plight of the Algerians under French colonial rule could not be more relevant in the context of the current conflicts in the Middle East. The production, staged by Frdric Fisbach, was a major disappointment for me. I felt that Fisbachs decision to use marionettescreated by the Thtre de Marionettes Youkiza from Tokyo for all the characters except Sad, his mother and his wife, Lela, was a mistake. This choice may help focus attention on and clarify the action which centers on Sad and his family, but this is at the expense of several important meanings that are clear in Genets text. Genet wanted the colonial characters to appear larger than life, dwarfing the Arab characters. Using the marionettes erases this strong visual idea and, in fact, reverses it. More importantly the marionettes are cute in a way that diminishes the savagery of Genets vision. Fisbachs concept emphasized postmodern concepts of textuality. Two readers, placed at the side of the stage in the first part and moving about the stage in the second, read all the parts performed by marionettes. Thus performer and speaker of text were separated. The three live actors were miked to create a distance between the live actor and the amplified voice coming through speakers. Some scenes were presented on film or with slides while the readers recited the text. The production concluded with a bare stage and the sound of a recorded text. The first part of the play was staged using some of the screens described by Genet, but Fisbach mostly relied on a series of projection screens for a combination of abstract and figurative images. The readers remained at the side of the stage. The plastic environment and complex technology (designed by Emmanuel Clolus) was often dazzling. The second part of the play used a constructivist arrangement of platforms against a black background and for a few scenes, a large projection screen separating the upstage from the downstage section of a large platform. The costumes by Olga Karpinsky 13

were realistic for the marionettes. Lela and the Mother wore Arab robes. Sad wore red pants, a white tee shirt with a blue motif, and a plaid sportcoat. The acting was problematic. Most effective was Benoit Rsillot as Lela, who wears a mask to hide her ugliness. He brought the character to life in a way that was very moving. Laurence Mayor used vocal pyrotechnics and physical dexterity to cover up her inability to bring to life the character of the Mother. Giuseppe Molinos Sad was simply bland. Valrie Blanchon and Christophe Brault displayed virtuosity in creating the many different voices for the marionettes. The Screens was written as a critique of colonialist attitudes. It reverses expectations by creating sympathetic Arab characters. Moreover his protagonists are doubly discriminated against, as they are pariahs in Arab society. Although the play helps us understand why the Arabs hate the Europeans, it interestingly does not introduce the issue of religious beliefs. Fisbachs production diminishes the socio-political content of Genets work and focuses on Genets language through its stylized postmodern effects. The result is an intellectual exercise almost devoid of content, which I feel is a great disservice to Genet and to one of the twentieth centurys most important plays. Distinguished designer Yannis Kokkos has been directing for over a decade. His most recent production, for which he also designed scenery and costumes, was A Midsummer Nights Dream for the Thtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. For the set Kokkos used nonsymmetrical sidewalls that diminished in perspective to a back wall with an opening and an arch in it. Each sidewall had three cutouts representing distorted trees. For the court scenes the trees appeared to be in silhouette, while light shone through them in the forest scenes creating patterns through which the actors moved. The stage was mostly bare except for swings and ladders used in the fairy scenes. The predominant color was blue. Theseus and Hippolyta wore respectively gold and silver breast plates, black pants and capes with long trains. The lovers costumes were vaguely Elizabethan, made of gold metallic fabric although they discarded most of their outer clothing during the forest scenes. The rustics wore working clothes in earth colors with some touches of blue. Titania wore an exotic white silk, fringed robe while Oberon was given a more masculine black, fringed robe. The attendant fairies wore black chorus girl

Dominique Pinon as Puck in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Photo: Vincent Pontet/Agence Enguerand

type costumes. Puck wore furry britches held up by suspenders that made him look like a satyr. For the last act all the courtiers wore tuxedos. Puck, as performed by Dominique Pinon, was a blatant sexual creature with a deep guttural voice. His double entendres and obscenities set the tone for the fairy world. Sexual excess and ambivalence were highlighted by stylized erotic movement and were embodied in Edith Scobs performance of Titania. Although interesting at times, I found the fairy scenes a bit forced and the stylized movement of the attendant fairies slowed the action and was more often than not distracting. Fodor Atkine played an oddly asexual Oberon. Scob and Atkine doubled as Hippolyta and Theseus. There was little difference between Atkines Theseus and his Oberon. Scob chose to play Hippolyta as a raging bitch, a not very interesting choice. Kokkos was more successful in directing the lovers scenes. Guillaume Durieux (Lysander), Gal Chaillat (Dmtrius), Catherine Tartarin (Hermia) amd Laetitia Lebacq (Hlna) played with conviction and charm. Kokkos chose to make the characters practically indistinguishable, which made the forest scenes even more confusing in an amusing way. The sexual innocence of the young Athenians stood in contrast to the dark sexuality of the fairies. Although uneven, Kokkos production was 14

full of striking visual compositions and was wonderfully lit by Patrice Trottier. Perhaps one of the most beautiful images was the final one. The rustics had made a circle out of flour to delimit their stage. For Pucks final speech and the epilogue, the stage was bathed in blue light while the ring of flour glowed a luminous white. Russian director Anatoli Vassiliev has a kind of guru status in the Europe where he directs productions and conducts workshops in the acting technique he has developed. The ComdieFranaise went to great expense to mount Vassilievs staging of Molires Amphitryon. This involved an extended rehearsal period during which Valrie Drville, a student of Vasilievs, drilled the actors in the vocal technique. At the same time the actors trained in the martial arts to improve their physical dexterity. The production unfortunately was both tedious and pretentious. Like most of the audience I left after the first three acts, which took two hours to perform. The set, designed by Vassiliev, was inspired by a painting of the amphitheatre at Pompeii. The stage floor was divided by a series of openings parallel to the proscenium line, and across which actors were forced to leap. On top of this was the amphitheatre structure, which looked rather like the skeleton of a tiered wedding cake. It was topped by a mast rising into the flies to which was attached

a rope that the actors used to swing from level to level. The set looked a lot like the constructivist work of Meyerhold and the acrobatic acting also recalled Meyerholds work. Various elements from oriental theatre were also a regular motif in the production. Boris Zaborovs off-white costumes were Japanese in inspiration. Vocally actors were required to elongate pronunciation and use a fairly neutral tone. The result was slow, destroying the structure of Molires verse and killing any possibility for comic effect. Among the actors, Thierry Hancisse gave evidence that left to his own devices he would make a very good Sosie. Cline Samies performance of Sosies wife had so much verve that she seemed to be visiting from another production entirely. The Comdie-Franaise fared much better with a revival of Jacques Lasalles staging of Molires Dom Juan, originally created at Avignon in 1993. It was a splendid and thought-provoking production of one of Molires most fascinating plays. Designer Rudy Sabounghi provided handsome period costumes. His set was spare but elegant, consisting of large wooden plank walls at the back and sides of the stage whose elements could move to create entrances, columns, and a raised level for the tomb. A large red curtain pulled up in

swags to create interiors. Bunched above the stage this curtain became treetops. Spread out across the floor of the stage it became the wet sand of the beach in Act II. Lasalle staged the first scene as Dom Juans toilette during which he dons the makeup and elaborate costume of a court dandy during the reign of Louis XIV. This was a brilliant reminder of the artificiality and extravagance of court life in the seventeenth century as well as of the fact that Dom Juan was not unlike the hypocrites and libertines in Molires audience. Andrzej Seweryn was a superb Dom Juan, effete and sensual in the first two Acts, he became increasing driven in the second half of the play. His shift from libertine to hypocrite was chilling. When I saw the production Thierry Hancisse had taken over the role of Sganarelle and was excellent in the role. Lasalle has emphasized Sganarelles serious side and downplayed his comic qualities. Both Dom Juans servants, Sganarelle and la Violette (Johan Daisme), were increasingly horrified as they witnessed Dom Juans behavior. They serve as a kind of moral center to the play, and as observers of the action they were a link with the audience. Florence Viala (Charlotte) and Jrme Pouly (Pierrot) played the peasant love scene in Act II with

Le Menteur. Photo: Pascal Gely/Agence Bernand

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The Seagull. Photo: Pascal Gely/Agence Bernand

such charm that Dom Juans seduction of Charlotte and beating of Pierrot seemed startlingly cruel. Franoise Gillard spoke Elvires first Act monologue with vehemence. She was heartbreaking in Elvires final scene. After Mesguichs cluttered and fussy production of this play earlier this season, Lasalles staging was a model of simplicity and clarity. Lasalles production emphasized the ideas that make the play so complex. Some of the comic potential of the play was sacrificed, but the production was a thrilling evening in the theatre. As it did last year, the Thtre Hbertot, a commercial house, chose to end its season with a classic text that might attract summer tourists through July. Corneilles delightful comedy of manners, Le Menteur, written in 1640, proved to be a very good choice this year. The plays hero, Dorante, has finished his studies in Poitiers and come to Paris to seek his fortune and find a spouse. He expresses his delight in the wonders of the capitol, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place Royale (Place des Voges), the Palais Cardinal, etc. Dorantes youthful imagination fabricates elaborate fantasies that he uses to charm the young women of Paris, and then to extract himself from complications he confronts in his pursuit of a young woman, Clarice, whom he has met in the 16

Tuileries Gardens. Corneilles play is not unlike a Marivaux comedy although his attitude towards love is more cynical. Dorante is simply in love with the idea of love. His interest shifts conveniently from his orginal love to her friend when it becomes a convient way to untangle the plot. And as the play ends Dorante is already flirting with his fiances maid. Director Nicolas Brianon has set the action in the nineteen-twenties, a period that seemed a perfect match for Corneilles light-hearted plot. Pierre-Yves Leprince designed lovely flowered dresses for the women and provided an attractive set consisting of trees in the side wing postions with a drop depicting the Tuileries Palace for Act One and a drop representing the Place Royale for the subsequent acts. The acting was excellent. Nicolas Vaude played Dorante, the liar, with such boyish exuberance that his lies were forgiven. He was a cute puppy dog who would do anything to please. Henri Courseaux as Cliton, Dorantes crusty valet, became increasingly aghast at Dorantes fabrications. Marie Piton was a spirited and witty Clarice, the object of Dorantes affections, and Christine Chollet was amusing as the soubrette, Sabine. I think the best production of my summer stay in Paris was Philippe Calvarios staging of

Chekhovs The Seagull, which premiered at the Thtre national de Bretagne in March and then was presented at the Bouffes du Nord in a run that was extended until the end of June. Calvario, who trained as an actor with Chreau, had staged the production of Cymbeline at Nanterre that I had liked very much a few seasons ago. In both Cymbeline and The Seagull, Clavario used devices associated with post-modern theatre. For The Seagull he used the vast open space of the stage and forestage of the Bouffes du Nord. Designer Aurlie Maestre used a carpeting resembling grass that covered the floor, descending from a hill upstage right. A small proscenium stage was placed at the back left of the forestage. It was rolled into the center of the forestage for the performance of Treplevs play in Act I. It faced upstage where atop the hill Arkadina and her friends sat watching the play. A leather deco style armchair was placed in the center of the forestage and a makeup table was placed at the stage right side of the forestage. Props were changed to create the interiors for Acts II and III. For Act IV, the carpet-grass was removed revealing a rocklike formation that had formed the hill. Treplevs writing desk was placed on this rock and furniture created the drawing room in front of it. A set of French doors was placed upstage left. Like the set the costuming was not realistic. Masha was given a punk look with a black leather bustier and tutu like skirt. Nina wore simple dresses that looked vaguely 1930s in style. Arkadina wore elaborate sculptural gowns that made her look like a rock star circa 1890. The men wore contemporary clothes with the exception of Chamraiev, who like his wife, wore 1830s period clothing. Throughout the pre-show various recordings of Over the Rainbow were played. This was used in the scene changes and for underscoring of some scenes. Although it sounds like an obvious device to underscore the unfulfilled longing of the characters in the play, it was in fact theatrically effective. The sound of the young Judy Garlands voice perfectly captured Ninas innocence and vulnerability. But what was most important in this production was the pain and frustration experienced in different ways by all the characters in the play. If the surface of the production was far from realistic, the work of the actors was astonishingly heart-felt. Jrme Kirchner, as Treplev, portrayed wonderfully the youthful pride of the would-be author. His final scene when Nina, whom he still loves, confesses she 17

still loves Trigorin, we saw in his face his whole world collapse. Guy Parigot was an elegant and charming Sorin, courtly with Nina and sweetly affectionate with Treplev, for whom he is clearly a surrogate father. Florence Giorgetti was a vain and thoughtless Arkadina with just enough self-awareness of her situation to create pathos. Johan Leysens Trigorin was worldly and cynical as well as thoroughly self-aware. His monologue about a writers life was spellbinding in intensity. Film star Irne Jacob was an innocent, pure Nina, whose madness seemed to be a direct result of her inability to achieve the cynicism of characters like Trigorin. Calvario was suitably foolish and inept as schoolteacher, Medvenko, who marries Masha knowing she does not love him. Chlo Rjon was thoroughly convincing in her portrayal of Masha as a frustrated young women living in a provincial town with no apparent options for escape. JeanClaude Jays Dorn was a perfect blend of false optimism and shallowness. Calvario chose to comically exaggerate the crudeness of Chamaiev (Georges Tarn) and Paulina (Maria Verdi). This was the productions only false note. The production opened with Masha and a shirtless Medvenko waking from a tryst in the grass. Masha took a mike and sang with vehemence I Cant Get No Satisfaction. Its a striking contemporary image, a bit trite perhaps, but typical of Calvarios work. What is interesting in his work is that the grab bag of effects, references, and often breathtaking stage pictures does not distract from the inner core of meaning in the play. With Cymbeline he found a core of feeling that sustained the awkward drama. With The Seagull the delicacy and nuance of feeling created by the actors was unforgettable and deeply moving. II. November, December When I returned to Paris in November the theatre season was well underway and the variety of productions being offered was wonderful. I had most looked forward to seeing Jules Romains Knock ou le Triomphe de la mdecine at the Athne. This production was to be the capstone to this theatres last season, which had honored Louis Jouvet. Knock, created in 1923, was one of Jouvets greatest successes. The revival featuring wellknown film actor Fabrice Luchini was a tremendous box office success. Although I enjoyed Luchinis restrained, ironic and somewhat mannered performance as Knock, Maurice Bnichous staging was

flat. The company did not succeed in finding the comedy in the cross-section of provincial characters duped by the good doctor. Romains happy idea is amusing but this production didnt provoke very much laughter. I saw two productions of classical texts in radically modern stagings. Stphane Braunschweig staged Prometheus Bound at the Thtre national de Strasbourg, where he became artistic director in 2001. This production was invited to Paris where it was performed as part of the season at the Thtre de Gennevilliers. Braunschweig used a double turntable with a narrow outer ring and a large inner circle with a large projection screen. He created striking images for this play whose hero has defied authority and is punished by the gods. Claude Duparfait was a passionate, youthful Prometheus. He was strapped to what looked like a very high tech operating table that when rotated into vertical position became the rock to which Prometheus was chained. Barren rocky landscapes were projected onto the screen. Lis Erbs performed the greatly reduced choruses and accompanied them on the cello. She also created some underscoring for dramatic scenes. Claire Aveline was moving as the tormented Io. Rotating the inner turntable allowed Braunschweig to vary placement of the projection screen while the outer turntable brought characters magically into the space. Although Braunschweig created really beautiful stage pictures, he sacrificed much of Aeschyluss grand poetry. His choice was to emphasize the ideas and the drama and in this he succeeded admirably. Peter Sellarss English language production of Euripidess The Children of Heracles premiered in Germany in September and after touring in Europe will be seen at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston. In Paris it was performed at MC93 (Thtre municipal) in Bobigny. In each city where the production is performed, Sellars seeks out refugee children or children of refugees to perform the silent chorus in the play. Debates with refugees and activists from city in which the production is being performed are held during the first hour of the performance. The play itself is followed by the screening of films that deal with the plight of refugees. In this way Sellars brought the ideas that are central to his conception of the play close to each audience where it was being performed. It also attracted a lot of media attention. And I must confess that it was exciting to see the very large main theatre in Bobigny filled with attentive spectators. 18

The stage was almost bare except for a few chairs and a table. The only scenic unit was a stepped platform center stage that was covered with rugs. On top of it was the musician who served as the chorus. This platform was surrounded by a rectangle of neon lights placed on the floor, which served to delimit the space of the temple where the children sought refuge. The stage was open to the sidewalls and the back wall, where translation of the text was projected. For me Sellarss hyped-up modish production mostly worked. As with Prometheus there was not much poetry to the work, although the musician, Ulzhan Baibussynova, played and sung traditional Kazakhstani music that served as an eloquent and beautiful counterpoint to the violence of the plays action. Actors wore modern dress and were miked. Czech actor Jan Triska gave a stirring performance as Iolaus, the aged protector of the wandering children. His debate with Copreus, herald of Eurystheus, the King of Argos, who seeks the childrens death, is a stunning opening to the production. Sellars has cast the herald with a woman, Elaine Tse, whose performance of the arrogant, unethical politician made one think she represented Bush (She actually looked a bit like Condoleezza Rice). Demophon, here called the president of Athens, was performed by Brenda Wehle as a compassionate and thoughtful leader. The debate between the use of force and making ethical choices could hardly be more current and Sellars underlined the parallels with the present in an obvious, even simplistic, manner. Nonetheless, and thanks largely to the passionate conviction of the actors, the production was often compelling. One of the high points of the production was the scene in which Jalyena Soelistyo gave a heart-rending performance of Macaria, who offers herself up for sacrifice to save her brothers and sisters. For me, where Sellarss production runs into trouble is the final section of the play. The description of the battle, performed as a rap number, was so drawn out it became tedious. Alcmenes plea for revenge and the death of Eurystheus are at odds with the ethical ideas that dominate the rest of the production. The play itself seems to go off course, something that is only exacerbated by the strong clarity of Sellarss presentation of the ideas prior to the battle and capture of Eurystheus. At the Thtre de la Colline I saw two contemporary French plays that seem to me to represent one direction French playwriting seems to be tak-

ing. Like the work of Valre Novarina, these plays were non linear and vaguely surreal in style. Normalement by noted young novelist Christine Angot is an hour long monologue of an apparently slight mad woman whom may have once been a dancer. A repeated motif in the work plays on the link between the idea of the equilibrium of a young dancer and the idea of mental unbalance. The piece was staged by Michel Didym and the author in the small theatre at the Colline, with distinguished actor Redjep Mitrovista giving a tour de force performance. Since the monologue seemed to be the voice of a woman, I was disturbed by the change in gender of the character, although, for me, the text doesnt really amount to much. Light changes, platform set and staging in general were not very helpful in making the text a work for the stage. In reality, Normalement reads better than it plays. After reading Olivier Cadiots Retour definitive et durable de ltre aim (The Definitive and Lasting Return of the Loved One), I was afraid I was in for another difficult evening at the Colline. Cadiot is a novelist and song writer who had a success in the theatre when Ludovic Lagarde staged his Colonel des Zouaves in 1997. Retour, apparently a sequel to this earlier work, is a series of surrealistic narratives that are the thoughts of a man who has escaped a particular boring party by going out on the terrace. Lagardes staging of the work on the main stage at the Colline, selected from the published text and split the narrator among three very talented performersValrie Dashwood, Philippe Duquesne and Laurent Portrenaux. All three brought life to the often amusing fragments of text. The staging was spare but visually dynamic. Actors were miked which enhanced the textuality of the evening. A large screen hung at the back as a kind abstract color field painting whose colors varied throughout the evening. Text, music, movement and light combined to create an evening that had the effect of a happening. Although I found the text both facile and slight, director Lagarde and his performers made it into an engaging, though hardly memorable, performance. The most disappointing production for me of the Fall season in Paris was Eric Vigners staging of Marguerite Durass Savannah Bay at the Comdie-Franaise. Durass beautiful text brings together an aging actress and her grand daughter. It is a series of exquisite scenes that deal with memory, loss, and love. Catherine Samie, the doyenne of the Comdie-Franaise played the aging actress. 19

Catherine Heigel played the grand daughter. Both actresses gave stagy performances, never seeming to connect to the character or to each other. Vigners directing was busy and the production was over-designed. A gold curtain covered the front of the stage for a sort of prologue. This was dropped to reveal an elaborate and quite beautiful beaded curtain that was dropped towards the end of the evening to reveal a blowup of a photograph of Duras and a young woman. None of this visual bric-a-brac made much sense. There was also little sense of the structures and rhythms of the text. I was also disappointed in the production by the Belgian troupe Tg STAN of Thomas Bernhards ber allen Gipfen ist Ruh. Retitled and adapted as Tout est calme (All is calm), the production was performed at the Thtre de la Bastille as part of the Autumn Festival. The play is about a famous and fatuous German writer, Moritz Meister, who has recently retired to the luxurious villa offered him by a small town in the country. He is visited by a young woman who is completing her thesis on Meisters work. Bernhard makes fun of the pretentiousness of Meisters wife and the vapidity of the scholar. Meister himself is both shallow and puffed up with self-importance. I usually like the work of this young directorless collective of actors, and visually the production was quite lively and hip. Set on the villas terrace overlooking a valley, the troupe used a large projection screen onto which a video showed the valley with changing light and weather as well as traffic moving on the roads. A large nineteenth-century table was placed center stage and loaded down with upper middle class objets dart, china, silver, etc. This was a perfect metaphor for the Meisters and a non-realistic effect placed in front of the realistic video, which, ironically could also be seen on a small television placed near the table on the ground. Tiago Rodriguez performed the role of a kind of stage manager who holds the prompt-script and occasionally corrects the French of the performers. He also filled in for several minor characters, although for no explicable reason the troupe cut the important scene between Meister and his editor. Unfortunately Damiaan de Schijver and Sara De Roo were unable to capture the pomposity and selfimportance of the Meisters. Jolente De Keermaeker was better as the simpering student. Alain Ollivier chose Brechts The Exception and the Rule as the opening production of his first full season as artistic director at the

Thtre Grard Philipe in Saint Denis. Brechts tale of the exploitation of a worker by his master is simplistic, but Brechts theatricality and his ability to create lively characters is more powerful than his didacticism. Olliviers staging was, I think, very Brechtian. Natural materials were used in the set, props and costumes, all of which were simple but appeared to be lovingly crafted. Daniel Jeanneteaus set was a series of boards with six inches of spaces between them that made a gentle arc across the stage descending towards the forestage. This barrier between the elevated upstage and the forestage served as the desert, a kind of obstacle course for the actors working on it. Paul Dessaus music was used and had the appropriate distancing effect. Ollivier gave a nuanced performance as the merchant, unconcerned with anything but his commerce. Bounsy Luang Phinith was suitably servile, but also dignified, as the Coolie. The rest of the company was very successful in bringing the secondary characters to life. Brecht was also present as one of the evenings of a two productions presented in repertory at the Thtre de la Commune in Aubervilliers. I went on a day when it was possible to see the company perform both productions. Dinner was served at long communal tables set up in the smaller theatre. A band was hired to entertain us while we ate and relaxed between the two productions. As the theatre is a bit far from the subway a free shuttle bus to Paris was provided after the performance. The first production was Dear Elna Serguivna, a 1981 Russian play by Ludmilla Razoumovskaia, in which four graduating high school students visit their mathematics teacher. Ostensibly they have come with gifts to celebrate her birthday. But in reality they have come to try to convince her to provide them the answers to an upcoming exam that they need to pass in order to graduate. Their amorality and total lack of ethics horrifies Elena. Her soul and spirit is gradually broken down as their arguments are replaced with threats of violence. Didier Bezace, artistic director of the theatre, wisely chose to stage the play with the actors seated at a long table placed towards the front of a bare stage. The only scenic effect he used was the crashing to the floor of a bookcase at the dividing point in the action. Placing the text in a non-naturalistic environment and keeping the actors mostly seated heightened the horror of the psychological torture. Sylvie Debrun gave an astonishing per20

formance as the highly ethical, somewhat prim and devoted teacher. Daniel Delabesse, Thierry Gibault, Donatien Guillot and Lisa Schuster were excellent as the students. Gibault, as the slick and cynical ringleader who hopes to be a politician, was especially chilling to watch. The companion production brought together Brechts early one-act play, The Wedding with some scenes from Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. The Wedding was performed in confined box set beige in color with blond wood furniture. The actors from Dear Elena were joined by an additional four to create Brechts savage satire of middle class values. Bezace staged it with a quick pace and sure sense of the comic. The performers couldnt have been better in nailing the gist of Brechts satire. In contrast to the rowdy comedy, the scenes from Fear and Misery were somber, performed on the bare stage with a black surround and using only minimal props, a few chairs and the table used in Dear Elena. Bezaces conceit was to connect the two plays by giving the characters nameswhich Brecht doesnt doso that we see the fate of characters from The Wedding when they return in scenes from Fear and Misery. The idea seems to be that the cynicism and amorality of Germany in the 1920s led to the Fascist state of the 1930s. I believe this also demands that we consider what will happen to the young generation depicted in the companion production, Dear Elena Serguivna. All in all it was a thought-provoking and exciting day of theatre. [See also the reviews of these productions later in this issue.] In retrospect, I see that I have chosen to focus on productions from the major subsidized theatres in Paris and its suburbs as well as a few other subsidized houses with interesting seasons. This is, of course, a very personal selection, and hardly represents all the options a theatergoer has in Paris. I was struck though by the high quality of production and the skill of the acting in what I did see. And I would remind you that ticket prices varied from twelve euros for subscription tickets to a high of twenty-five euros for seats at the ComdieFranaise. The theatres were full of audiences that were often more than half under the age of thirty. Many of these theatres have comfortable lobbies with libraries and bars and, often, small restaurants where one can have a meal before the performance. They are convivial and inviting environments. All this is part of the pleasure of theatre-going for me in Paris.

Didier Bezace Stages Chre Elna Serguivna


Manuel Garca Martnez Didier Bezac was co-founder (along with duction, and the attention of the spectator was held Jacques Nichet, Jean-Louis Benot and others) of during the hour and a half running time without any the Thtre de lAquarium in 1970. He was relaxation. involved in all of the productions of the group, Thus these two productions, the plays of either as actor or as director. Since 1997, he has Brecht and of Razoumovskaa, played in sequence directed the Thtre de la Commune, the Centre on certain days of the week, seemed to show respecDramatique National dAubervilliers, in a suburb of tively the effects of the rise of Nazi totalitarianism Paris, where has created an original and brilliant and those of the post-Communist era, like two simbody of work as a director while continuing to work ilar portraits of separate coercive situations. as an actor in films. The plot of the Russian play is basically At the Thtre dAubervilliers he presentsimple but offers many echoes. Four graduating ed, from 12 October 12 to 21 December 2002, one students, three boys (Volodia, Vitia, and Pacha) and of the outstanding productions of this fall in Paris, one girl (Lialia), hoping to go on to the University, Chre Elna Serguivna, a play written by contemgo one evening after their exams to visit one of their porary Russian author, Ludmilla Razoumovskaa. professors, Elena Serguivna, under the pretext of The production was given in alteration with the wishing her a happy birthday and giving her a presstaging of two works of Brecht: La noce chez les ent. Moved, she invites them into her home to share petits bourgeois and Grand-peur et misres du a cake. Soon the adolescents reveal the true aim of TroisimeReich. their visit: they want Elena Serguivna to arrange Didier Bezace staged the two Brecht pieces for all of them to receive high grades on the final together in order to show the evolution of the bourexamination that three of them have just failed, or geoisie during the Third Reich, from the initial for her to lend them the key to the closet where the euphoria to the fear and poverty once the Nazis test copies are kept. were in power. The production began and ended This play shows the confrontation of two with the same image, that of the bourgeois family different ways of conceiving time: on the one side, seated at their table, immobile, as if in a tableau the youngsters, who want to get rich in a hurry and vivant, emphasizing the evolution of the characters look at the future in a clear and cynical way, and on and of the situation in which they lived. Many the other, Elena, whose position is a conservative aspects of the production were both astonishing and one, that of preserving the values that she has remarkable, as for example, in Grand-peur et misupheld all her life, who has lead an everyday exisres du TroisimeReich, the constant presence of a tence, without reflecting much about it, limiting herchorus behind a table, rarely moving, made up of self to her duties as a teacher. At the beginning of different characters, and gradually diminishing in the play she believes herself to have been successful number as the production continued. This suggestin her task, having transmitted the value of doing ed the fear and the developing situation in a striking right: What is important, is that you remain honest manner, while the remarkable performances of the in all circumstances. The ideals that we have nouractors maintained the tension. For the director, the ished in you from your childhood, toward and staging of these plays, while faithful to the spirit of against all things, will live on in you . . . Let us the author was also a specific partisan response to drink to your humanity, to the path that is opening certain political events in France in 2002 (see the before you, honest and brave! she says in speaking following interview). to the youngsters early in the play. She is comThis staging was a marvel of artifice from pletely ignorant of the nature of the youngsters faca rhythmic point of view, offering an astonishing ing her. Thus the development of the play is based intensity. Building upon a non-naturalistic base, the on the successive attempts of the students and upon production created a tension, within a simple setting Elenas growing understanding of the true nature of and without large gestures or major variations in the her students, and of the corrupting effect of the capvoices of the actors, sustained only by subtle variaitalist system on young minds. tions and the actors precision of tone. Their excelAt the opening of the play the actors are lent performance created the ambiance of the proseated side by side behind the same table with a 21

long tablecloth. They gesture and in particular have the same youthful facial expressions as if they were facing each other although they are in fact addressing the audience. The actorsadults who are playing adolescentsface the public, as if they were attempting to show and tellin the manner of Brecht or of agit-prop theatrethe story they are presenting. Thus each actor is a witness for the character he plays. This staging results in an effect more surprising and more violent than if the students and professor confronted each other directly. Nothing could be less realistic than this encounter, side by side behind a table, while within the fiction the characters are facing each other. And yet the subtle accuracy of the performance gives the illusion of reality. The actors sometimes only suggest the movements that they are presumably making simply by miming their beginning, as, for example, when the actors playing Volodia and Elena Serguivna remain seated, smiling, after they have made a movement as if beginning to get up, while within the fiction of the play, these two characters

are dancing. The spectators attention is held, all during this first part, despite the immobility of the actors, since each actor employs a strikingly different rhythm. The movements and expressions of the characters, like their costumes, clearly distinguish them. Each one offers a different image of the Russian youth of the post-Soviet era, obsessed by money and material goods. Volodia, performed by Thierry Gibault, represents the son of nouveaux riches, corrupt and unscrupulous social climbers. He is intelligent with a strong personality, determined to achieve his goals. Pacha, played by Daniel Delabesse, comes from a less privileged social class than Volodia. He desires money and social recognition, a Dostoyevskian character. He needs the protection of Volodias father and, a weaker character, follows his comrade in his projects. Lialia, played by Lisa Schuster, is a young girl in love with Pacha, but, in her own words, not enough so that I would not give him up for someone with more money should the occasion present itself. She has decided

Dear Elena Sergueievna. Photo: Agence Enguerand

22

to retain her virginity for the fianc who can offer her the best social position. Vitia, the least gifted of the group, already an alcoholic, is played by Donatien Guillot. And finally, Elena Sergueievna, the professor, played by Sylvie Debrun, is a woman on in years, a defender of the moral values that the spectator will recognize as those of the Soviets. The tension is equally maintained by the tone of each response, which indicates in the clearest way the speaking situation in which each character finds himself, as well as by the very rapid but always precise succession of the different tonalities, and by the rhythm of the questions and replies. Different sequences are marked by often subtle changes of lighting, providing special emphasis to the person speaking, putting him in relief in relation to the others, and thus directing attention to him. Didier Bezace compares this technique to that of foregrounding in cinema (see the accompanying interview). There is, however, little use of music, except for the dance sequence at the beginning of the play. Thus the perception of continuity is encouraged primarily by these slow and scarcely perceptible shifts in lighting. The staging is divided into two parts, reflecting the division of the dramatic text, which is in two acts. The first part is primarily characterized by an almost total lack of movement by the actors, who remain sitting behind the table, only leaning forward a bit over it from time to time. The second part offers a significant change in setting. The cloth disappears from the table. The curtains which mask the sides of the stage left and right fall, revealing cupboards containing large books. Several of these fall to the ground, creating an impression of disorder and violence. The actors shift positions. Vitia goes to sleep, first leaning on the table, then on the ground. Lialia also sleeps, her feet on the table, stretched out in a chair. Only Volodia, now seated next to Elena, and Pacha continue to exert pressure on Elena Serguivna. The actors do not move much. Never do the adolescents physically touch Elena Serguievna. Elena Serguivna only gets up for a moment and stands near the table in order to reject their urgings to corruption and their threats (Volodia proposes to Elena Serguivna that she use her influence on her father to get Elenas sick mother transferred to the clinic of a famous doctor, professeur Popov), while the lighting isolates her during this exchange. The actors move closer to the table, to show their direct involvement in the action, or, on the contrary, keep 23

a bit of distance, leaning on the backs of their chairs to suggest that they are moving into the background (see the accompanying interview). Volodia loads Pachas arms with books, as they both pretend to give way. This provokes a reaction from Lialia, who warns Elena Serguivna that all this has been calculated to force her to submit. At the end of this section, the actors are again seated in their initial places behind the table, suggesting the end of a cycle, emphasizing both the arc of the play and the reality hidden behind the friendly appearances of the adolescents at the beginning of the performance. Vitia reacts by threatening Volodia with death if he does not give over the key. Volodia gives in to this threat and leaves his comrades, but not without insulting them and expressing his scorn for their weakness. He leaves by the rear of the stage carrying his chair. Then each of the adolescents, ending with Lialia, similarly leave the stage. At the end of the production, the curtains partly close from both sides around the figure of Elena Serguivna, who remains alone in the light and in solitude, stunned by the discovery she has just made. An Interview with Didier Bezace at the Thtre dAubervilliers WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES : The rhythm of your production seems remarkable to me. Among all the qualities of this performance, that is perhaps the element that most struck me. Do you consider rhythm to be very much present in your work ? DIDIER BEZACE: Indeed, rhythm is intuitively very much present. Indeed, I do not think it is possible for a director to stage a work without working rhythm into it almost physically. Still, this is the sort of thing that one discovers rather later in a production. That is to say it is rare, at least in what occupies me, that I know the rhythm, even the length, before I begin to work. I am incapable of defining it in relation to the text. I do not have a precise idea of it; I discover it gradually, and when I come to a point in the work when I begin to glimpse an idea of the whole, then I can effectively as myself, or more exactly I can sense the a spectator is going to react to a certain choice. Then I can make decision about the order of the dramaturgy or of the production. I think that it is at this moment that the structure of the production is created, along with its esthetic, the vocabulary one is going to use to com-

municate things to the audience, and then the question of timing arises. This is when one begins to see exactly what one is going to present to the audience. WES: In your staging of Chre Elena Serguivna, I got a strong impression of continuity. DB: Yes and no. There is continuity because there is a story and a particularly strong dramatic construction, a structure of suspense, since a woman is asked to do something and she refuses. How long will she refuse? Will she refuse up to the end? Will she give way? This creates a sort of suspense, but in the way I work, the sort of time that gradually appears in the course of rehearsal is not, I hope, that of the action, but another time, that of the subjective consciousness of the character Elena. As is often the case, we began the first rehearsals without being at all certain about the conclusion of the project. This play, which is very naturalistic in concept, appeared to us to be totally denaturalized. I decided to make it into a map of a mental voyage, the nightmare experienced by this woman. Thus there is of course the time of the action itself and the time of the performance, which had to be discovered and which one never knows before beginning work on the staging. In this case this is an hour and fiftyfive minutes with some cuts in the text . . . Yet there is another time, the one which allows us to see, to think, to feel, and this time is unique to this production. WES: It was quite successful, because the audience lost track of time. DB: I think this is due to the system created within the production: it is a conversation which involves a moral, political, and existential struggle . . . beginning the moment when this conversation was placed at a table and we chose to project it into the infinitude of the auditorium instead of confining it to the stage. If our gamble succeeded, the spectators were drawn into the action, and the very fixity of the theatrical image allowed them to be taken over by the forces involved in this conversation. This made them forget the passing of time . . . The action lasted a whole night. WES: The motives of the characters are clear in each of their lines, there is no ambiguity. And yet there are movements where a gesture begins and then is followed by immobility, such as in the dance. 24

DB: Since we had decided to denaturalize the action, it did not appear very interesting to me to have them dance. What interested me was, at the moment when the dance took place, which is a moment of pleasure, while the other characters can withdraw, not engaged, leaving only a general impression of sensations, the emotions of Elna remain with us, she who has not danced for years and who suddenly seems to be dancing as if it were her regular custom. There are different levels of organization. There is a primary level and other less accessible levels, suggested by the lighting or simply by the withdrawal of the actors fifty centimeters or so from the table. No more than that. The actors perform between the support that they receive from the back of their chair and the ability to move nearer the table. And in the end, this suffices to place Elena on the first level and the rest subordinate to her. WES: This denaturalization of the action through the use of the table also implies a different rhythm. DB: Yes, since of course the words, the ideas, the conversation are essentially developed out of the action, while in this production, the characters do things sitting at table. Representing this involves another time, what one might call the time of the action. Here this is rather a mental time. It is produced by the characters, as they exchange ideas and points of view. I would like the audience to hear and also in a certain way to see the enormous struggle that takes place between these four young people and this woman who passes from dream to nightmare. It is also a play about learning. It is not only a professor who teaches her students but a professor who receives knowledge from her students. This is what makes the confrontation interesting for menot the givens of the plot which say that she lives in a small apartment and one evening some students come to see her: this doesnt interest me at all. What does is the idea of learning and of the extremely painful mental experience that she undergoes in the course of the night, in the course of the conversation. WES: Did you quickly discover the method of denaturalizing the play? DB: One never finds such a system immediately. You work with several hypotheses about how the

play might be staged. I knew that I did not want to stage it in a naturalistic way, but having said that, it still remained for me to discover what esthetic was going to work. We created this action with its indirect conversation, in which they never spoke to each other, rather they spoke into a mirror hung at the back of the auditorium. This was a long process, since for the actors, this was not an obvious choice. It is convention which creates a work. But as soon as the rules for this production had been found and worked out on stage as the action unfolded, from that moment onward we could see that this resulted in effects on time and rhythm that I found very interesting, because they involved the spectators themselves in subjectivity. WES: Do you think that it was your own choice of rhythm or the rhythm of the text, which determined the rhythm of the staging? DB: I am inclined to say that the staging itself develops the rhythm, because the text in itself, of a book or a play (since I have often staged adaptations of books), can result in very different productions. At the end of the day, it is the artistic decisions that are made in the staging which result in timing and rhythm, which can operate quite differently. WES: I suppose this also applies to your stagings of the plays by FeydeauLonie est en avance, Feu la mre de Madame, On purge bbwhich you put together in a production called Feydeau Terminus DB: Yes. Feydeau Terminus was a lovely project, which I loved very much and which was at one time very successful. Concerning time, dramaturgical decisions were made at the outset, which resulted in an idea of time in the performances that the plays themselves did not contain. I staged three little oneact plays about couples that Feydeau wrote near the end of his life. When I decided that the same couple appeared in each of these plays and arranged the plays in order, I was led to the idea of a production that would trace the course of a life. None of the plays contained this, since each play showed only a moment. But putting together these moments and having the moments enacted by the same characters led me to the idea of a life, in a certain sense the birth of a couple and the death of a couple. This was an idea of time that resulted from the staging and dramaturgy. In speaking of time in these plays, one 25

might say that passages in Feydeau are acted rather than that they act. That is, time is very powerful, but it is mental. When characters speak, they are not strongly involved in speaking to each other. Each has his own obsession, and the speed with which they act or speak is always controlled only by what comes out of themselves. Things can move very rapidly, but in this rapidity there can be moments of interruption, moments when movement ceases, when one seems otherwise engaged, or when the characters suddenly almost escape from the performance, as if they were going somewhere else. They pay attention neither to the unfolding action, nor to their partners, nor even to themselves. They somehow escape. This is very interesting. The author shows this in his writing, and obviously the performance must take it into account. Globally, what seemed to me important from a temporal point of view was to be arrange things so that the three plays became a voyage in three stages. WES: In Grand peur et misre de Troisime Reich you created a chorus which grew smaller and smaller and which remained almost unmoving. This was both very interesting and very strange from a rhythmic point of view. DB: The idea of rhythm and time is often involved with intermissions or the absence of intermissions. These are theatrical tools, which have important consequences for the timing of the performance. In the Brecht project, for example, at the time of its creation, some six or seven years ago, it was part of a trilogy on Europe in the thirties and the relationship between humanity and History. In creating it, I made a dramaturgical decision was made to juxtapose La noces chez les petits bourgeois with sequences from Grand peur et misre du Troisime Reich, which allowed us to look again at these petits bourgeois several years later. But our concern was chronological, that is, we said: In 1927, people were laughing; when we look at these people ten years later, in 1937, they are weeping. This is a somewhat schematic resume. And the ellipsis, which allows us to move from one situation to the other, is the intermission. Time almost became material on stage since in La noce chez les petits bourgeois, I showed two pregnant women, and ten years later I showed a child who comes to join the chorus (the other one has disappeared). Time was physically marked by the presence of that child and

Dear Elena Sergueievna. Photo: Agence Enguerand

our action was chronological, going from 1927 to the beginning of the war. The chorus did not diminish. It lived through each sequence of Grande peur et misre du Troisime Reich on the forestage, and then retired to the rear of the stage at the end of each sequence, where it reconstituted itself as a chorus to submit to the speeches of Hitler. The curtains closed and they were discovered again behind their table, to live through something else. Rhythmically, this gave another impression. These were people who were living through a trial in front of us. Moving off, leaving, going to the rear of the stage to live through another sequence, a very short one, composed of a speech they submitted to, after which they found themselves seesawing back in front of us to live through another episode. There was a kind of movement, which brought them back and forth from upstage to downstage, wearing them out but still maintaining a chronology. Within each sequence, a certain time passed, a seasons chronology, winter passed, then summer. When I took up this project again, I was certainly influenced by the situation we were living through in France at the time of the fall elections of 2001, when the left having been eliminated in the second round of the elections, the extreme right gained this second round, an event which aroused considerable surprise. Therefore what interested us the most was to speak of this rise, of this unexpect26

ed event. This led me to suppress the intermission, to suppress the ellipsis, and to have the action unroll not over a period of ten years, but in perhaps a few months, perhaps a year. It was not arithmatically defined, but in fact, instead of giving the impression of following a group of people at one time in their lives and then looking in on them again ten years later, a group of characters is taken up and they are turned upside down in a moment when they are not expecting it, when they did not wish to see this. Then six months after this beginning they are seen again in a terrible state. Thus the work is more occupied with surprise, which is important for the time of fiction, with something which suddenly interrupts time and transforms people both on the political and personal level. Time weighs down heavily. The work changed from that pursued at the time of creation; that is why I selected immobility. We worked on the fact that they are together: something happens, life passes, they thin out, they disappear, they break apart, and when they are seen again in new groupings, they are completely transformed. The performance concludes with an image, which is neither more nor less than an echo of the opening image. The characters are around the table in the same position as that they used in beginning La noce, but it is not really the same. The same things are not on the table. The cloth is not the same, nor are the faces. It is not at all the same rhythmically, since there is no intermission, the

characters do not leave the room. The spectators enter the auditorium and take their seats. The curtains open, the bourgeois characters celebrate in front of them, laughing and joking with the pubic, and the audience finds themselves at the end of two hours witnessing characters who are in a state of anguish, near death. Here we have two very different concepts of time, though the production is the same. The chorus in a certain sense is arhythmic. The performance is punctuated by opening and closing curtains, a kind of curtain that I have often used. They serve as erasers. I find it quite lovely to expunge something and then to rediscover the same there. There is something quite moving in this way of leaving these people and then in finding them again, both identical and yet somehow more deeply observed. WES: While you are working on, staging a scene in a production, do you give precise suggestions for its rhythm to the actors or is this one of the things that you work on afterward, in the polishing of the scene? DB: This was a primary concern in La noce chez les petits bourgeois. La noce chez les petits bourgeois was a play in which I cut very little. I left out ten lines in the entire play, very few indeed. A play can last a long time if one wishes. The director is in a sense the master of time. But La noce chez les petits bourgeois, in general runs in production about an hour and a quarter to an hour and twenty minutes. We performed it in an hour, so we were playing very quickly. I was extremely careful during the work with the actors to insist that they perform as quickly as possible, so that they would not become involved in the logic of the dialogue, of the responses, but rather in a logic of verbal anarchy. That is, as the actors were speaking, their lines overlapped each other. Sometimes we would hear nothing of the end of a line, and this was entirely whimsical. I wanted to create an effervescent feeling, where all the senses were joined together to achieve a sequence of astonishment, of confusion, of anguish, where conversation becomes rarefied. There is much less speaking in Grand peur et misre du Troisime Reich than in La noce chez les petits bourgeois. We worked constantly on rhythm. La noce chez les petits bourgeois is a burlesque, a farce. Not only does it involve the rhythm of the actors 27

performances and the text, but there is also the rhythm of the destruction of material (of the stage furnishings) which becomes involved at a certain point. This was a major undertaking, but quite empirical. Few new questions were raised at the revival since most of the actors who created the original production were still with me. They already knew the play and the previous staging. But in the original production I didnt work on detail at all. I first established the pace of acceleration and the overall rhythm, even before working on particular characters. I conducted the rehearsals as improvisations and emphasized above all the rapid forward movement of the play. The energy of the rehearsals was devoted primarily to work on speed and anarchy. Gradually, as this speed was mastered, I was able to work on character detail, to gradually enrich them because by then an overall view had been achieved. Often this problem is undertaken in the reverse order. One begins by constructing the characters, if there is an idea of characters, by mastering the action and relationships between them, and then one decides whether to play slowly or rapidly. The anarchic chorus of La noce chez les petits bourgeois is not the same chorus as that of Grand peur et misre du Troisime Reich. If the spectator is attentive, if he enjoys himself and lets the production carry him along, he will realize that in its course he has processed many things simultaneously. WES: There is a general rhythm that arises from the staging, but there is sometimes a rhythm that you have developed in order to make a certain point. DB: I think this is an intrinsic given, rhythm is the way of telling. It is part of the pulse, a physical matter. Something told slowly is not the same thing as if it is told rapidly. This is part of the message. Whether this question arises in the course of the telling or afterward, in any case there will come a time when one is forced to consider it. WES: Rhythm controls the perception of the spectator. DB: La noce chez les petits bourgeois is a rather special case in my work. In general I know that I tend to slow things down. I love to work with

emptiness, with vacancy, with material in suspense. I don't plan to work with such things, but they interest me. I am aware that theatrical time is perhaps slower than other fictional time. One looks at it in a different way. I think that the gaze in the theatre, time in the theatre, is not at all the same as in the

cinema. In the theatre, one can die in an hour if one wishes, and one can speak at length while one is dying. The reality of time is compromised to achieve a different vision and a different comprehension. (Translated by Marvin Carlson)

28

Report from Paris, January 2003


Marvin Carlson In Paris for a brief visit early in January of Face, offered on the experimental stage of the 2003, I was presented, as always, with a rich selecThtre de la Ville, the Salle des Abbesses, by Dan tion of choices in the more than one hundred and Jennett, who presented an extremely popular fifty regularly operating theatres of the capital. Twelfth Night at this same theatre last season. Unlike the British, the French have never developed I was also amused to note in repertoire at a strong interest in American or American-style the Petit Thtre de Paris Eve Enslers The Vagina musical theatre, preferring their own operetta or Monologues alternating with an evening of sketches variety tradition, yet even an example of that genre from Monty Pythons Flying Circus translated into could be found in a major revival of I Do! I Do!, French. At the huge Palais des Sports, Robert which could be seen at the Palais des Congrs. Hossein was offering the latest in his series of specMuch more in the French tradition of spectacular tacular historical epics, CEtait Bonaparte, with musical variety show was Jrme Savarys new cremassive scenery and armies of actors while a very ation at the Opra Comique, Le Belle et la toute different fixture of the modern French stage, Marcel petite bte, the story of a pop star who falls in love Marceau, presented at the Salle Antoine-Simone with a dwarf disguised as a hedgehog at a masked Berrieu a Nouvelle Compagnie du mimodrame ball. The Comdie Franaise, which for many years featuring the immortal Bip, created by Marceau has opened its doors to Shakespeare, Ibsen, and more than fifty years ago. Strindberg, was offering an all-French repertoire Aside from Chereau, the directors in Paris recalling those of half a century agoMolires best known to Americans are, of course, Ariane Don Juan and La malade imaginaire, Hugos Ruy Mnouchkine and Peter Brook. Although Blas, Feydeaus Dindon, and a set of short works by Mnouchkine is preparing a new work to open in the Courteline. The second national theatre, the Odon, spring, reportedly on current French social probwhich had turned in a distinctly European direction lems, there was nothing available in January at the under the leadership of Giorgio Strehler, also Cartoucherie. Peter Brook, on the other hand, was returned to its national roots with a production of represented by two productions. His own theatre, Phdre, directed by Patrice Chereau. Although this the Bouffes du Nord, was offering a French version opened 15 January, near the end of my stay, I was of the Hamlet that he first offered at this theatre in quite unsuccessful in obtaining a ticket, as a new English [See WES 13:2, 21-22]. Another Brook production of this major classic by one of Frances revival, Le Costume, by Can Themba [See WES most revered directors made this the most sought12:2, 7-8] opened on 14 January at the Thtre de after theatre event in Paris. lOeuvre. French works, of course, also dominated Unable to get a ticket for the Chereau the offerings of the rest of the Parisian theatres, and Phdre and having already seen the two Brook one could easily teach a course in the history of the pieces, I decided to use my brief time in Paris to French theatre from the selections presented, beginsample attractive productions in each of the three ning with medieval drama (la farce du cuvier and major types of Parisian theatres, one national house, the Jeu dAdam), continuing through the great clasone of the private independent theatres which sics, then to Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Hugo, make up the great majority, and one from the suburFeydeau, Labiche, Anouilh, Beckett and Ionesco to ban theatres, the major resources today for experidozens of contemporary works. No other individual mental work and emerging young actors, directors, national theatre was strongly represented, but in designers, and playwrights. addition to one classic Greek revival (The LibationMy first visit was to one of the most presBearers), there were four or five works each from tigious of Pariss private theatres, the Athne, the American, English, Italian, and German tradifounded by and forever associated with Louis tions, as well as two Ibsens (A Doll House and Jouvet. In recent years I have particularly enjoyed Hedda Gabler) and a few works from Eastern the Shakespearean productions of Daniel Mesguich Europe. Among the more unusual offerings was a here and regretted being unable to be here for his new French adaptation of Middleton and Rowleys upcoming Anthony and Cleopatra in February. In The Changeling, somewhat inexplicably called Dog January, however, I was pleased to attend a power29

Hedda Gabler. Photo Courtesy: Agence Enguerand

ful and original production of Ibsens Hedda Gabler, offered by one of the leading contemporary Belgian directors, Phillipe Sireuil, and with a strong company of French actors led by Nathalie Cornet as Hedda. The approach was an unusual but effective mixture of realistic and formal elements, which could be seen operating in all elements of the production, in scenery, costume, lighting, and acting style. The set, designed by Vincent Lemaire, was a simple, indeed stark room composed of towering gray walls, and a large ornate chandelier hung high above in the center. In the middle of the rear wall a tall arched opening led to a slightly higher passageway going left and right, behind which was a very large window, normally covered with a red drape, one of the few color accents on the set. The right wall was blank, although a substantial ceramic stove stood just to the right of the upstage opening. In the middle of the left was the portrait of General Gabler, a florid romantic piece with the head a rearing horse and a pistol held in the Generals outstretched arm. There were no other windows or doors, although the space downstage of the sidewalls on both sides was used for entrances and exits. Aside from the stove, the only furnish30

ings were twelve to fifteen identical small black chairs, arranged in different groupings for each act. The lack of conventional furnishings and indeed of much color, was amusingly and vividly emphasized by a silent opening sequence in which Bertha appeared in the up center arch with a large bunch of roses in a vase and then wandered rather helplessly about the stage, looking for a surface for them, finally leaving them, in desperation, on the floor down center. The costumes, designed by Catherine Somers, were basically Victorian (or Edwardian) in style, but with a distinct hint of exaggeration and stylization, especially in the case of Tesman (Francesco Mormiro), whose variety of casual and more formal wear, with their colors and striking plaids, gave him always something of a cartoonish feeling. Eilert Lvberg (Andr Baeyens), of course, sported flowing Bohemian dress while Judge Bracks (Patrick Descamps) impeccable grey suit and top hat exuded cool elegance. The top hat contributed to several key moments as well. Brack gently tapped it against Heddas stomach when he first hints archly at her possible pregnancy, and later he holds it suggestively over the region of Eilerts

wound for his wonderful line Somewhat lower. Finally, before Hedda makes her final exit she sets it jauntily on his head for his new role as cock of the walk. Thea (Anne Claire), like Eilert, is dressed in loose, flowing garments, accentuating her long, flowing brown hair, while Hedda, of course, is much more constrained and severe, with closecropped hair, light, almost white in color, long but much tighter skirts and tight-fitting jackets, most strikingly a red jacket with piping that gave her a distinctly military look. Heddas occasional use of red, against the consistent grays, browns, yellows, and greens of the other characters, associated her primarily with this color, and so it seemed somehow appropriate, if calculatedly shocking, to end the play with the other characters in a frozen tableau, looking offstage, while she strutted haughtily across the stage, pulling closed the final blood-red act curtain somewhat in the manner of a kabuki stage assistant, but wrapped in the leading edge of it like a costume. To add to the shock of this final image, the music, which hitherto had served as a muted, vaguely classical means of setting the mood or emphasizing certain points, now blared forth in heavy rock rhythm with the lyrics (sung in American English) Hedda Gabler had a very funny face. Hedda Gabler hated the whole human race. Hedda Gabler, shell go down in history. Hedda Gabler, shes a total mys-

tery. I was reminded of the effect of Honni Coles swing dances and vaudeville songs added by Robert Wilson to his production of When We Dead Awaken at the American Repertory Theatre and, I must admit, found both choices, while memorable, also jarring and inadequately justified. Still, I must admit that this metatheatrical ending to Hedda, jarring as it was, did not jolt the production into a totally new dimension. Much of the performance, and the interpretation of Hedda in particular, was highly presentational. Cornet frequently played straight out into the audience for extended sequences and even when she was not involved in a scene, allowed the play of her emotions to register clearly in her audience-directed glances. It was almost as if the entire play were a kind of expressionistic projection of Heddas own fantasy life, and perhaps the ending was designed to underline that impression. Two properties deserve special mention, the portrait and the chandelier. The portrait, striking in itself, served an unusual special function. Hinged to swing out from the wall, it revealed behind a wall safe which contained the famous pistols. This was very effective symbolically, but less so dramatically, because it prevented a clear tracing of the pistols in the later part of the play. The chandelier, a strong visual element from the beginning, became much

Hedda Gabler. Photo Courtesy: Agence Enguerand

31

more so in the final act, which began with this massive unit lowered to the floor and Hedda lighting its candles as she performed the opening scene. Later, Berta, in the upstage hall, slowly cranked the chandelier up into place during the sequence when Hedda, downstage, is revealing to Tesman that she burned Eilerts manuscript. Finally, and rather melodramatically, the chandelier shook ominously with the echoes of the offstage shot. Like the red visual accent and act curtains, its flames gradually became associated with the inner torments of the leading character. The suburban theatres that surround Paris were originally designed by the French government as part of a project to decentralize and democratize the French stage. It was hoped that their location in working-class suburbs would make them cultural centers for those communities. In fact the audiences, from the beginning, have been overwhelmingly from outside the district and these suburban theatres have come to serve a quite different function, as major experimental centers, somewhat analogous to the Brooklyn Academy of Music or the DUMBO performance spaces in New York. One of the most consistently interesting of these suburban theatres has been Gennevilliers, in the north, and it was presenting the most praised suburban production in January, a new production of Brechts Galileo, actually premiered at the National Theatre of Brittany at Rennes and a major success at the most recent Avignon Festival. Its director was one of the leaders of the new generation of French metters en scne, Jean-Franois Sivadier. The setting for the production, designed by Sivadier in collaboration with Christiane Tirole, had a quite Brechtian looka large empty playing space surrounded by dark drapes and defined only by a square floor made up of unfinished wooden planks with spaces between them, rather like a rude decking. This was not used in a particularly Brechtian way, however. During the course of the evening this apparently simple surface was continually adjusted and rearranged. Sections of it could be shifted, raised, lowered or pivoted to form smaller side stages, open traps and holes, or create higher staging areas. Some sections, lifted out, had folding legs beneath them and so could be quickly converted into benches or tables. Other sections could be simply pivoted upright to suggest pillars or backing elements of various kinds. The production utilized a number of Brechtian techniques, but departed distinctly from 32

the production tradition of this particular play. Instead of the large, bear-like Galileo, epitomized by Charles Laughton, Nicholas Bouchard offered a much more lithe, sprightly figure, full of bouncy energy. Instead of beginning the play in a wooden washtub, he appeared in front of a small cloth screen downstage center, much like a sideshow barker. Speaking to an entranced Andrea (Stephen Butel) who stood directly in front of him, and beyond Andrea, to the audience at large, Bouchard worked his way through the context of the opening scene in the manner of a game of charades, acting out words and concepts until they were recognized and called out either by Andrea or the audience. In somewhat similar fashion, the Carnival scene was also staged very presentationally, as something between a police line-up and the testimonies of a revival meeting, as master of ceremonies Galileo asked each lined-up cast member in turn what the triumph of science meant to them, eliciting a variety of exaggerated comic responses but almost no coherent information except that the world had been turned upside down. Although one could not precisely characterize it as Brechtian, a self-conscious and highly presentational style was employed throughout, sometimes suggesting popular entertainment and utilizing direct audience address, as in the opening scene, sometimes suggesting painterly composition, when all characters on stage except the one speaking would form a tableau vivant though which the speaker would move. There was always an emphasis upon the theatrical and the performative. At one point, for example, two bright red curtains were hung on a line stretched between two upright sections of the stage to provide backing for a scene. When it was over, two of the actors, Eric Gurin and Nadia Vanderheyden (who also played Madame Sarli) wrapped themselves in these curtains to play the cardinals Bellamin and Barbarini. As this example suggests, each of the eight members of the company, except Bouchard, played multiple roles, adding to the sense of theatricalization. The interpretation of one scene in the first act I found extremely puzzling, that when the papal astronomer, Clavius, examines Galileos theories. The scene takes place in an antechamber where a troubled group of monks are awaiting word of Claviuss conclusions. During this scene Clavius (Christian Tirole) gradually worked through page after page of manuscript seated behind a tall desk far upstage, while most of the rest of the cast

appeared downstage as the anxious monks, their faces covered, in rough heavy robes and wearing flat wooden slippers that made a great racket as they shuffled about the stage. So far the staging, though somewhat unusual, did not trouble me. But then a section of the flooring near Clavius opened, and from it gradually rose a large blue balloon, held by a strange figure dressed somewhat like the other monks, but with his face powdered white and his scraggly white hair spread out like a fight wig suggesting a grotesque clown. The other monks greeted him warmly and even improvised a kind of special podium for him by placing a number of their flat wooden shoes together and raising him up into the air. I finally recognized the figure as the old monk, who delivers the rather hysterical attack on Galileo in this scene, but while I appreciated the theatricality of the moment, it seemed visually far out of proportion to the rest of the sequence and indeed to the surrounding scenes. It was not until late in the production that this odd sequence was satisfactorily and effectively explained. We have reached the scene of Galileos recantation, with his followers huddled fearfully downstage while Virginia (Aurlie Du Boys), chanting quietly throughout the scene, moves about the

stage pulling up pieces of planking from the floor that each have on their underside a mounted candle which Virginia lights. At last the bell is rung as a sign of Galileos recantation, and the defeated Galileo slowly makes his way onto the stage. He is clothed in rough garments, his face is powdered white and is framed by ragged unruly white hair. Above his head bobs a large blue balloon. He has become the double of the reactionary old clown/monk of the early scene! Since Galileo continues to play the role of the faithful repentant until the end, this costume and the balloon now never leave him, but they take on a very different dimension when Andrea comes to see him for the last time. The Discoursi that he has written in secret are not hidden in the room, but are contained in packets of writing strapped to Galileos body under the rough robe. When he opens the robe and removes them to give to Andrea, he is nude beneath them. As Andrea expresses his delight and wonder at this discovery, leafing through the pages downstage, the nude figure of Galileo cavorts with his balloon upstage, bouncing and riding on it in triumph. So athletic a body, clearly in the prime of life, is far from the aging, sedentary, heavy figure a more realistic production would likely employ, but

Galileo. Photo Courtesy: Agence Enguerand

33

the adolescent joy in his intellectual activity that Galileo has shown throughout rreturns in this symbolically appropriate if realistically questionable sequence, At the end, Andrea wraps up the papers around his own body, covers them with his cloak, and exits out into the world, through the audience. To complete my brief sampling of Parisian theatre, I attended one of the national theatres, but not the longer established subsidized houses, with whose fairly traditional fare I was already familiar, but to the newest such house, the Thtre National de la Colline, led for some years by Jorge Lavelli and now under the direction of Alain Franon. I was attracted by the title of the offering on the experimental stage of the Colline, La Comdie de Macbeth, by Jean-Marie Patte. The title led me to expect something in the absurdist vein, like Ionescos Macbett or even Jarrys Macbeth-like Ubu Roi, but Pattes play was something else altogether. Written twenty years ago, in response to the mass murders under the Pinochet regime and revived now in an era of rising international tensions and threats of new death and destruction, the play is in fact an elegaic meditation on violence and bloodshed which shows Macbeth (Manuel Le Livre) in a Beckettian limbo somewhere after his own death. He primarily carries on a rather abstract dialogue, larded with quotations from Shakespeares play, with a kind of double called only The Other (Sbastien Bravard). They stand, sit, or lie down with little movement in different parts of the stage, face different directions, and with sharply different lighting (front or back in some sequences, from one side or another in others),

present a series of brief scenes separated by blackouts, lasting in all just under an hour. Perhaps even more Beckettian was another figure, The Third (Kimon Dimitriades), who spent the entire performance up to his chest in a grave-like hole to the right of center stage, assiduously sewing on a large anonymous piece of fabric (a shroud?) and only occasionally interjecting a word or a short phrase (Yes, No, Someones knocking.). During the final scenes a fourth figure, The Bleeding Sergeant (Thomas Nedelkovitch) joined the third in this pit, but with a much clearer agenda. Although apparently one of the victims of Macbeths carnage, he offers an alternative to the dark images of death and the piling up of corpses that marked the dialogue of the previous scenes, making a plea for healing and hope. The kings touch, he recalls, can heal, can close his bleeding wounds. In Shakespeares Macbeth, the bloody sergeant opens the sanguinary spiral of gore that inundates the play. Patte reverse this movement, not to return Macbeth to life, but to human connection. His rapport with the sergeant allows the fragmented parts of the tyrant to leave this murderers limbo or purgatory for peaceful oblivion, like the ghost of a pacified warrior in a Noh drama. Help me to die, pleads the sergeant, seeking this cure from the king, and Macbeth, in pitying him, is able finally to die with him. In the final tableau none of the four figures appear on stage, only the fabric at the edges of the open pit. After a moment it slowly is pulled into the pit as well and all trace of both play and players disappears.

34

What Victor Hugo (Bi)Centennial?: An Interview with Jean Luc Jeener


Jean DeCock Believe it or not, I must report with indignation that the anniversary of the patriarch of French Literature, born two centuries ago in 1802 (he died in 1885, a date which for Shattuck in his Banquet Years signals the beginning of the twentieth century) went by almost unnoticed by the cultural powers that be. It would seem the main function of the National stages subsidized by the Ministre de la Culture should be the preservation and promotion of the French cultural heritage. Not so. The Comdie-Franaise made little effort to remember the major author of the nineteenth century whose towering production in fiction, drama and poetry is unequaled. Taking no chances with lesser known or seldom performed plays, they were satisfied with yet another production of Ruy Blas, his most popular drama. Chaillot, la Colline and the Avignon festival totally ignored him. Fortunately, there was Jean Luc Jeener and his Thtre de lElan created with Eric Laborey in 1976. They have since given performances in various nooks and corners of Paris wherever there was interest and an open space (La Conciergrie, la Cit Universitaire, in churches and crypts). They have alternated the classics with contemporary writers, traditional pieces and new creations. Jeener, an openly Christian believer, focused on such major recurrent themes as the nature of evil, of sin and redemption. Finally in 1997 he found his proper venue in a passage close to the Grands Boulevards and the Faubourg Montmartre, in a music-hall where legend says Piaf met Cerdan, the singer and the boxing champ creating the love affair of the 40s. Later it became a neighborhood movie house. There, in the Thtre du Nord Ouest, his magnificent obsession came to fruition: the concentration on one single playwright in harmony with his basic idea of the theater as spirituality and incarnation. What followed were seasons devoted entirely to the works of Mote, then Racine, followed by Musset, Corneille and this year Victor Hugo. This location is divided into two houses; a small intimate space (once the offices, redesigned by Jeener and his architect), and a wider cinemascope span downstairs with horseshoe stairways, where the cabaret and projection rooms once were. The two houses thus complement each other, providing differing explorations of theatrical experience. 35 JLJ: First comes an affinity for a particular writer and the possibility of relating his work to my concept of theatre as Incarnation, if not in terms of rational intelligence perhaps in human depth of emotion. Im not about to deal with Ionesco, for instance. The greatest is Racine; next year it will be Claudel. I have just received an unconditional agreement from his grand-daughter. Then comes the choice of a director. There are two possibilities here: either someone dedicated approaches me motivated to stage a particular play, or I propose a project myself to someone whom has I feel the proper personality or symbiosis. Once assigned, he is totally free in the selection of house and actors, though I may suggest that one is better than the other in terms of the size of expected audience. Paradoxically I chose the smaller intimate house for Ruy Blas, Hugos most popular masterpiece, because I believe in a scenography of proximity which emphasizes the incipient tension by body language, when the viewer becomes aware of the slightest movement of the lips or the eyes. Torquemada, on the other hand, called for greater openness and spatial depth of space. To sum up, the house is always chosen for artistic reasons. Actors are chosen by auditions or reputation. Some are well known, like Michel Leroyer, who is sensational for Salluste in Ruy Blas. Others are new talents, like Valerie Baurens, who plays the Queen. Once rehearsals have started I retire, so to speak. I see everything only afterwards. Needless to say, sometimes I am not in agreement either for esthetical or philosophical reasons. As for technical problems, I know the lighting in the houses very well and always handle my own. In Torquemada and Marie Tudor we use smoke effects which blend with the projectors, and we are dependant on the smoke machine, sometimes temperamental, so it may look different for each performance. I never use music if I can do without. Sometimes, as in Torquemada, the staging is more ambitious. It needs something for the ear as well as for the eye; it punctuates entrances and exits. I reread all of Hugo and fell in love with this play. Yes, there are cuts. Right now it is almost three hours long; the extended text would run twice as long. But theatre should remain pleasurable.

In terms of budget, we work on a FF 400 000 ($35,000 or Euro) state subsidy for the whole year. The City of Paris promised an additional subsidy we have not received yet. If it does not come we may have to give up and close since the creditors are always waiting. Am I a disciplinarian ? Not really, I choose people on the basis of their human as well as artistic qualities. Basically I trust them and rely on them, so they take their own responsibilities, have entire autonomy. This doesnt happen in one day; I talk with everyone, discuss and explain my idea of a theatre, my philosophy. Since everybody is paid on the principle of equal participation, that means we have no personnel, no stage hands or stage manager, no press person, no box office employees, and have to deal with basic, menial, down-to-earth problems of maintenance. We also work in co-production with subsidiary companies created by the actors themselves, who start on their own, so that later, in some ten years from now, perhaps they might request their own subsidies. WES: Personally, I am troubled by the your lack of recognition in the press, in Le Monde or Liberation, for example, considering the incredible enterprise under your helm. I cannot repeat enough how admirable such an adventure as yours represents. I feel as if there is a conspiracy of silence which I cant explain . . . JLJ: You reap what you sew, it seems. I certainly dont feel like a victim. There may be three reasons: being a drama critic myself (in the Figaro), I know my colleagues quite well, which may be a sensitive issue for them; second, we have no money for publicity at all; and third, my whole concept goes against the grain. I stand against what goes elsewhere in the Paris scene. This brings up the problem of subsidies; I consider it is not for us to blow our horn and say our endeavour is useful, it is the responsibility of the powers that be to recognize this. On opening I send flyers to all journalists and since we cant advertise, that is it. WES: What about the scandalous ignorance, or at best the appalling indifference towards Hugo? JLJ: There is an advantage to being poor; our folly depends on that. We have no sets; props and costumes are as trimmed as our salaries. We do everything ourselves; that pertains to the very philosophy of our theatre. Official theatres are too rich to take 36

any chance on this type of dedication, Their actors and technicians would never accept our conditions; they are bound by elaborate, incredibly costly sets. Chaillot for instance was initially conceived as a flexible space. Of course it would be fun to play around with alternating elements and pieces there, but nothing moves because it would be too much work. WES: I cant say how much I appreciate the youth and enthusiasm of your team. Yes, I like to see old characters performed by young thespians, it amuses me . . . Would you like to make some concluding statement? JLJ: Maybe you need to have trust in life (and the Lord, he adds, sotto voce). Jeener is 53 years old and has a little daughters three years old named Ysein homage to the heroine of Claudels Partage de Midi. I know of no endeavor comparable to his anywhere (except projects to present the complete Shakespeare of course). In the span of some seven months the entirety of Hugos theatre was presented. Before leaving Paris I saw ten of the nineteen plays scheduled. The energy and courage displayed were overwhelming. The overview of one author allows the revelation of recurrent patterns and theme; to name a few: the odd couple of King and Buffoon, the seductive trap for the dangerous womanizer defeated by the strength of Hugos women, the interplay of Age and Youth, of Love and Death. Didactic exploration, pleasure and discovery all converge. Let me start with the two most outstanding productions I saw. Torquemada is Hugos last play; it took some twelve years of (re-)writing before it was finally published in 1882. A pyramid of a play, a pessimistic testament of sorts, it deals with the corruption, the use of power and the nature of belief. Torquemada is, in popular culture, associated with the evil of The Inquisition: the Monster incarnate. With him fanaticism justifies the worst: genocide and holocaust, all in the name of (Catholic) Faith. In Hugo Torquemada wants to save the soul by sacrificing the body at the stake in order to escape burning in hell. The dominant metaphor is Fire, in hell and on earth. One of the most challenging scene occurs when Torquemada, who survived being buried alive himself by the Dominicans, is now on his way to Rome to confront the corrupt Pope Alexandre

Torquemada. Photo: Cyrille Charboneau

Borgia. Travelling by foot, his wanderings bring him face to face with the hermit Franois de Paule, meditating in the desert. Three faces of Faith are shown: cynicism and lewdness reigning in the Vatican, the militant crusade of Torquemada and the peaceful renunciation of the hermit. The epic takes place around 1490; the background is actually the birth of Spain. To stop Arab expansion, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Reyes Catholicos, need, accept and take over the assets of the Jews while banning them from Burgos. Jeener directs this ambitious epic fresco, his staging a masterful study in contrast and density sculpted by light. Sacha Petronijevic, of Serb origin, is totally inspired as the title character. Julien Gauthier and Julie Schaaf are luminous as the innocent youths in white gowns. Marie Tudor (1833) is a shameless and totally enjoyable melodrama of passion, jealousy, betrayal and revenge. It is a variant on the age-old theme of the powerful matron and a weak woman in love with a dangerously handsome Italian, who is, of course, much younger than she is, just as in our 37

present soap operas. Fabiano prefers an immaculate prey, an eighteen-year-old orphan raised by an honest artisan. Nobody knows that she is actually the heiress daughter to a Lord except the Jew who rescued her. The lover of the queen kills him and Gilbert the godfather becomes a suspect. Both are arrested; which one will be beheaded? The whole process is engineered by Richard Simon, the French envoy of the suitor to Mary, the King of Spain. As so often in Hugo, this premise is played out against a complex historical plot building towards a suspenseful resolution. Directed by the Company of Pascal Faber and Jean Louis Serrato, the production is outstanding. Nicole Gros is a heart-wrenching divided helpless woman, half Lion Queen, half Slave of love. Stephane Dauch is a sexy fox, a commoner and a scoundrel, as she should be, and Sacha Petronijevic is again a disquieting, lurking political deus ex machina, who sets the trap for the lusty Italian. I saved the Queen and England (from the destructive power of animal passion) are the last words of the

Marie Tudor. Photo: Cyrille Charboneau

38

play.

How should one perform Hugo today? I International political intrigues are still the name of the game, but passion has become far more explicit and love more openly involved with lust. Both of these plays were performed in the downstairs stage, more appropriate to the scope of these dramas in their changing sequences: street, graveyard, prison or bedroom. Both plays raise the delicate question of nineteenth-century antisemitism since they each include a Jewish character. Hugo does use the Bible as inspiration and yet at the same time conveys conventional medieval cliches: the Jew as devious double agent, greedy pawnbroker, and hater of Christians. Stealing and lying, thats the Jew says the despicable Fabiani, but in the same vein, the Catholic Kings in Torquemada rob the Jewish Rabbi and his community (humble, kind, loyal and wishing to be left in peace as they are). They reap their gold and offerings before banning them. Awkward and ambiguous as they may be, these suggestions of fascist positions are always expressed by the more cynical and loathsome mouthpieces. I would like to think (as does Jeener) that Hugo is a generous, tolerant writer incapable of racism, as illustrated by his entire output. Hugo shifted slowly from

Catholicism to generic disbelief, from political royalism to militant republicanism, from verse to prose, from classical structure with its constrictive three unities of action, time and place to a more liberal position, as Shakespeare crossed the Channel. The best example of his generosity is his plea against capital punishment, a short novel written as early as 1829, later adapted by himself to the stage by himself, a plea only answered some one hundred and fifty years later by Mitterand. Often performed as a monologue, Le Dernier Jour dun Condamn is here presented in its complete form, framed by a discussion of the book in a Parisian salon. This is a classical genre called Critique or Impromptu, and it serves as a foil to the chilling darkness of the actual performance of Alain Leclerc as directed by Jean Marc Doron. Hugos most convincing argument is the pure inhumanity of the procedure , as written and then narrated by He-who-isgoing-to-die. We never discover why and how he got there; he is simply one of the wretched of the earth in the hands of the righteous. Hugo wanted to be the protector of the Common People, giving them his voice. This is also shown in Les Gueux (1874), a play here resurrected with mixed results, about street people and the homeless: beggars, thieves,

Marie Tudor. Photo: Cyrille Charboneau

39

winos, and a philosopher under the influence, expressing his contempt for money and the dignity of fallen men. The nineteenth century can rightly be considered, for the French, as Hugos. He devoted fifteen years of his young life (from 1827 to 1843) to the theatre. His dedication was to reach a new popular public born from the Revolution, the crowd from the Grands Boulevards (see Carnes Les Enfants du Paradis) and raise it to the level of great literature. From scandal and parade to indifference, entropy and total failure, from lyrical Romantic drama in verse then in prose, to misunderstood epic to more contemporary, playfully realisic thtre en libert. Hugo was also ahead of his time in his view of Europe, which he same as a geopolitical spectrum surrounding the Mediterranean. In the eyes of the French, Spain and Italy were lands of passion, in contrast to the post-Napoleonic greyness of France. Spain was the inspiration for two major Hugo plays. Hernani or The Honor of Castille (1830) concerning Age versus Youth, caused one of the most famous riots in the history of the theatre. Ruy Blas, on the other hand, written in 1838, became his most popular drama. In it a valet falls in love with the (German) Queen of Spain, a worm in love with a star, which will mean their undoing. I was unable to attend the Thtre du Nord-Ouests opening, but caught Anne Delbe s courageous reprise of Hernani in the open air on a warm night in July in the seventeenth-century courtyard of the Bibliothque de la Ville de Paris, a striking contrast with the claustrophobic Comdie-Franaises Ruy Blas, a lugubrious affair in a cardboard simulatedleather box. Eric Ruff, now the companys young male lead, seemed to fight unsuccessfully against the ghosts of his illustrious predecessors Grard Philipe and Jean Marais. Rachida Brakni, a new actress, added fire to the moody direction with her vibrant proscenium lament. Italy gave us Lucrce Borgia (1833), with Woman as the Beast: lust, murder, incest, in one beauteous incarnation. It is an amazing play in which the worst brings out its redemption. Again, a mature woman falls for a young man in a variant of motherly love. Actually she is the mother of the youth, her son, lost and found. Set in poisonous Ferrara/Venice in 1500, it is here directed by Fabrice

Merlo in the vein of the sixties, performed barefoot and tinted with a Caribbean flavor. Not too convincing, his production was mainly memorable because of the intense savagery of the agon between a man and his wife. Renaud Castel was the cruel Duke to his attractive mulatto Lucrce. In seventeenth-century Paris Hugo found the subject of Marion de Lorme (1829) subtitled A Duel under Richelieu. A high class courtesan is torn between her protector and her young lover Didier, providing a defense and rehabilitation of the purehearted prostitute through love and death, in the context however of the intricate, familiar political web and the religious fanaticism of the young The hero prefers the scaffold to impure salvation. As directed by Franois Boursier, the Nord-Ouest production was a total failure, strained by mugging and unbearably grotesque. It caused to recall by contrast a successful earlier version by Julien Kosellek at the Thtre du Marais, a triumph for a stunning group. Cedric Orain was unforgettable in a John the Baptist impersonation, and Nathalie Sprenger a blond, limpid and delightful Marion. There were many other productions at the Nord-Ouest: among them a dusting-off after Vitez of Les Burgraves (1843), directed by Damiane Goudet, performed as a Germanic Rheingold nightmare and an oneiric Midsummer Nights dreamland, ironically titled Mangeront-ils? ( Will they eat?, 1867) where the actors seemed more inspired than their director Sylvain Vazey . Tempted by the musical, Hugo himself wrote his own little opera based on Notre Dame de Paris, with music by Louise Bertin, called La Esmeralda (1836) here directed by Alexandra Galibert. Hugos radiant influence extended also to opera: his Le Roi samuse (1832) became Verdis Rigoletto and his Angelo, Tyran de Padoue (1835) the source for Ponchielli & Boitos La Gioconda. Hugo gave us monsters and angels. His pessimism was inverted humanism. He was the voice of the wretched of the earth, the Miz, the destitute and the illiterate, the misfit and the cripple, the convict and the prostitute, the slave and the colonized, the anarchist and the rebel, the individual against the state, the repressed. He deserved better than the neglect of the establishment. Long after Vilar and Vitez, Jeener is the only one who paid the all-encompassing homage due to him.

40

New Struggles, New Theatre(s)? Contemporary Engaged Theatre in France


Oliver Neveux In the autumn of 1995, several hundred French citizens gathered in the streets, a powerful social manifestation protesting the reforms proposed by the new conservative majority. Political observers and the militants were in agreement in considering this confrontational autumn as signalling the resurgence of political struggles long absent from the French political scene. A few months later, the san-papiers (those without papers) movement at the Saint-Bernard church, and the size of its mobilization, provided further proof of the establishment of a real, if minority radical current in this society. The hunger strike of these immigrants, their brutal expulsion on the orders of the Minister of the Interior, and the struggle against the proposal of a law relating to residence permits for foreigners have all indicated the emerging of new political offensives. This resurgence of struggle in the political field corresponds to activity in the artistic one. After many years of withdrawal, preoccupied with esthetic or intimistconcerns, the French theatre has clearly recently reoccupied a political space. The question of the real has undergone a more or less inspired resurgence of interest which has incorporated a whole range of different dramatic gestures,from realistic reports to militant performance. In this report we will confine ourselves only to explicitly confrontational theatre. Heiner Mller, in 1977, in his Farewell to the Didactic Play wrote: I am not going to budge an inch until a (revolutionary) situation develops... What therefore is left? Only isolated texts awaiting history. More than ten years later, the fall of the Berlin Wall allowed certain writers to predict the end of historyand the eternal condemnation of liberalism. Under these circumstances, it would have seemed vain to confront an historic hope, now definitively dead . . . to produce texts awaiting a history that would never come. Little by little, the future ceased to be that fatal final process, that linear and inescapable development of a capitalist teleology. Nevertheless, as Isabelle Sommier and Xavier Crettiez have noted in their recent book, La France rebelle, The majority of contemporary resistant movements seem to differ from their predecessors by the absence of any seriously eschato41 logical project, foreseeing a radical transformation both of institutions and of world-views. This gradual transformation of struggle is also sharply reflected in contemporary political theatre, which, whether as inspiration or catalyst, has espoused certain militant modes and methods of combat of its time. Engaged theatre, which has for such a long time been dismissed, has recently become both urgent and necessary once again. It comprises a movement which in size and in the variety and multiplicite of its approaches, gives witness to a new enthusaism for the development of a political theatre. Whether they are original or inherited, confused or clear, the forms of these new theatre expression are still too hesitant for one to draw up a history of them or prepare an exhaustive report. And yet at the moment it is possible to point out some of the different directions they are going, the perspectives they are opening, the voids they are filling and the long-silenced debates that they are reactualizing. The Revival of a Theatre of Intervention The militant theatre of the seventies, basically reliant on the great Marxist narratives, suffered greatly from the failure of the hopes of Communism. It would however be too great a simplification to forget that outside the popular reports of the media, certain artists never ceased to pursue, in different ways, a revolutionary program, or at least one of confrontation. If, for the most part, the social and political field has been in effect detached from revolutionary movements, certain figures, somehow or other, at whatever cost, have kept alive this memory and this perspective. For example, the director Andr Benedetto, an important figure in political theatre, has never ceased to question the world in his Thtre des Carmes at Avignon. His most recent production, in July of 2002, Gnes 2001, Le jeune homme expos, is directly inspired by the death of young Carlo Giuliani during the demonstrations at Genoa against the G8 Summit. This developing counter-globalization movement has been treated by a number of companies: the Thtre du Levant has mounted productions denouncing the ravages of globalization; the militant clown Jean Kergrist and his Thtre

National Portatifsimilarly continues to spread its subversive message (about agricultural production and nuclear power); a company inspired by Augusto Boals Forum theatre has taken as its name: N.A.J.E: Nous nAbandonnerons Jamais lEspoir. (We will never give up hope.) This theatre of the moment, in the highest sense of the word, has been built out of the urgency of the struggle that made it necessary. The Jolie Mme company presented an urgent cabaret,a delightful street manifestation, last year against the intervention of NATO in Afghanistan. During seven hours scholars and actors took turns at Vincennes presenting like clockwork a series of sketches and speeches providing information and mobilizing opinion against this imperialist war. Its success was so great that many spectators were not able to join the overflowing crowd. The Cartoucherie of Vincennes, a central location for radical political manifestions during the seventies, became at least for one afternoon again a meeting place for the discussion of a newly motivated and remobilized left. Two recent plays have also brutally exposed the conditions of both the employed and unemployed, without the mediation of professional actors. The absence of these stories from the traditional media, and the evacuation of their political dimensions, has made it necessary to have recourse to other forms of alternative expression. In May and June of 2000, women hired by the Levis company decided to stage a performance, 501 blues, at the exit to a accounts office. This has been touring ever since and has inspired many discussions. Returning in this way to a self-activating theatre (the only difference being that according to the circumstances a professional director may assume the over-all responsibility for the production), this theatre perhaps heralds the rebirth of a theatre of struggle, created and motivated by socially-engaged actors. From the same perspective, several months ago the maison de la culture of Amiens presented a production with the explicit title Mords la main qui te nourris! (Bite the Hand that Feeds You !). The play was inspired by a meeting between the militant journalist Daniel Mermet and young trainees in rehabilitation. Mermet collected their words and Franoise Berge created a production dealing with these young people. This production functioned as a direct staging of these testimonies. These two experiments in theatrical adaptation of reality belong, in their originality, to the tradition of documentary cinema, which for some years has occupied 42

a dominant position among the new forms of artistic intervention. Struggle and Memory Alongside these theatrical experiments which can be considered to a greater or lesser extent part of the network of intervening political forms, there are many plays which explore the theatrical and political patrimony, seeking, if not models, at least experiments to interrogate, even though their work has not always fully succeeded in maintaining the complexity of the relationship to these revered and respected imaginative works of the past. Thus, for example, the Jolie Mme company has revisited the militant theatre of Brecht with La Mre, the anticlerical texts of Prvert with La Crosse en lair, and, under the inspiration of Adamov has mounted a piece on the Paris Commune, Barricades. The director Benot Lambert has sought in the trilogy Pour ou contre un monde meilleur to interrogate the Communist dreams of the twentieth century. The alternatives suggested by the title of the piece directly challenge the disenchanted attitude which has dominated political discussion since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Has not the historian Franois Furet, in his essential book against the idea of Communism, Le pass dune illusion, concluded that from now on we are condemned to live in the world where we live? A contrario to this thesis, the work of Lambert does not present itself as yet another in a series of indictments, but as an observer of that ardour which cannot be reduced to the crimes of Stalinism. It is thus the totality of the aspirations and the stimulations provided by the communist militants that are examined here. After an opening short sequence, Prolgomnes, la Conversation interrompue, the work plunges into the struggles from the October Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and proudly displays the signs, the images, the icons of a history that many would prefer to see completely obliterated: the barricades, the red flags, the raised fists. Le Bonheur dtre rouge, the final part of the triptych, reconstitutes the portrait of a former militant member of the Communist Party, from the days of the international Brigades until his expulsion in 1977. Lmbert affirms, with the distance time has given, the right and the dignity of those workers, engaged in the transformation of the world and mislead by their leaders and the bureaucrats. The director Dominique Fret has utilized a more recent and less dense historical incident in

his 1998 work, Les Yeux rouges, to attempt the rediscovery of a closer militant past, working with the Lip affair. In 1973, the employees of the Lip company rejected a layoff and decided to manage production themselves. Thus they became striking symbols of a potential, however limited, to transform social relationships: It is possible to create, to sell, and to pay oneself. Lip thus became a rallying point for the entire alternative and revolutionary left. At that time a company named Z created a production directly based on this event, Arthur o tas mis les montres ? and Dario Fo came to perform at that location his Mistero Buffo to support the workers. Dominique Frets production revisits this experiment, which lasted several years. Built out of interviews gathered by the production team, the performance followed a documentary structure, recreating the interviews successively on the stage, these serialized experiences into a collective memory. The words of each of the interviewees were woven out of an intimate and subjective impulse, not stimulated by political or ideological considerations. Les Yeux rouges represented the first major attempt to re-immerse outselves in the red years. That autumn, the productions of Philippe Caubre, 68 selon Ferdinand (Octobre and Avignon) in turn contributed to a return to the spirit of 68. Around the figure of his hero Ferdinand, Caubre gathered the deadlocks but also the flashes of illumination of the epoque and the generation which provide the plot of all of his creations. The subjective prism utilized by the author allows him, in the event, to affirm the critical affection that he retains concerning his own participation in these events. History confronts the history of his hero, Ferdinand Faure, in an indivisable dialectic. [See article on Caubre later in this issue.] Political Laughter The militant philosopher Alain Badiou has never ceased at the heart of his organization to promulgate a political strategy resistant to the Party, and to discover again the word worker, which years of social-democratic government rule has reduced to invisibility. With his director, Christian Schiaretti, he has created a tetralogy around a new character: Ahmed. Developed from the tradition of Sganarelle, Arlequin or, even more recently, in his play Les Citrouilles, from the comedies of Aristophanes, the immigrant makes his appearance here treated both as hero and as a familiar theatrical type. Following his opera LEcharpe 43

rouge, staged in 1984 by Antoine Vitez, which, in a lyrical language reminiscent of Paul Claudel, dealt with a Communist revolutionary action in an imaginary country, these three more recent works provide another way that politics is appearing in the theatre: through comedy. As Ahmed remarks in Ahmed philosophe: I have never known events to take place when they were expected . . . So from now on, we will no longer expect anything. That is the way to win. But no longer expecting does not imply becoming silent and resigned. On the contrary. Laughter is one of the weapons of the powerless, it reverses for a time the mechanisms of humiliation and repression and marks the chronicle of an era of medocrity. If theatre does not reveal certain public truths that no other way of thinking can accomplish, then it is not worth an hour of trouble, Badiou has written in his Dix Thses sur le thtre. These are the stakes involved in confronting, without trouble, his Ahmed. At the same time, the Algerian actor Fellag has clearly pursued his carrier in the line of the dramatist-storyteller Dario Fo. These productions, which gather from far beyond regular theatre circles a population generally absent from the state-supported theatres, seek with brilliant talent to depict the living conditions of immigrants and Algiens in the cities and viillages. These two examples place the foreigner at the very heart of contempory dramaturgy, the immigrant, who scarcely existed in the theatre in recent decades, with the notable exception of those militant companies of immigrant actors in the 1970s. Civilian Citadels Ariane Mnouchkine decided to set her Tartuffe and her fundamentalist sect in Algeria. The transposition of Molires play into a contemporary context condemned fundamentalism and the duplicity of religious fundamentalists. The Thtre du Soleil has for many years played the role of an engaged witness of history. In 1994, Ariane Mnouchkine, her company and dramatist Hlne Cixous devoted an ambitious production, La Ville parjure ou le rveil des Erinyes, to the drama of contaminated blood. The play pursued in Greek history the very possibility of its own existence. In 1996, the Thtre du Soleil engaged itself on the side of those without papers. These people, tossed about at the whim of events, in their struggle twice found themselves taking refuge in the home of Mnouchkines company, the Cartoucherie de

Vincennes. Involved in the demonstrations beginning with the occupation of the Eglise SaintBernard, and initiating some of the most positive actions of the movement (such as the meeting with a mediation advisor), the company spared neither its time not its energy in supporting the struggle of the sans-papiers. A year later, the Thtre du Soleil developed a new collective creation, Et soudain des nuits dveil. The plot was based on the recent occupation of the theatre by Tibetan refugees, and the reactions that this hospitality inevitably stimulated. The connection was clear; the problem posed by the sans-papiers here confronted the actors at the Cartoucherie. Without any reference to mythology or to the theatrical patrimony, the dramatic text developed the form of its production out of a current situation, scarcely mediated, thus creating a formal proximity for this explicitly militant theatre. Nevertheless, Et soudain des nuits dveil was not so much a reflection on its own capacity for hospitality as a play of denunciation or of political exposure. Ariane and her troupe created at almost this same time a production, Le Dernier Caravansrail, dealing with migrants around the world, always stigmatized and persecuted. Once again, the direc-

tor and her company addressed the question of hospitality as the sum of ones duties, ones civic responsibilities. It is also in the name of citizenship that the Thtre Grard Philipe of Saint-Denis, headed by the director Stanislas Nordey, has become engaged in a number of struggles ( the sanspapiers, teachers strikes, and so on). This Centre Dramatique National, with a radical and prolific program, has attempted for some time to be in the forefront of struggles within the sclerotic theatrical scene as well as within society more broadly. The list of directors invited by Nordey is impressive, as is that of productions directly tied to political questions. However, Nordeys vision for the Thtre Grard Philipe is now a thing of the past. Battered by financial problems, it has today again become a theatre like most others. Its invitations are more conventional, its prices of admission are no longer unique, and its seats are numbered. The term citizenhas become quite suspect in recent years. In a severe statement, Franois Regnault has rightly reminded us what the choice of such an emblem implied . . . citizenship. French, of course, for otherwise what would you be speaking

Requiem for Srebrenica. Photo: Elisabeth Carecchio

44

not often enough with the few. This suggests a danger facing the theatre which is not slight. Its oft repeated proclamations of resistance do not conceal that this is a combat without an adversary, supported by the majority. The theatre today runs the risk of not positioning itself on a moral and ethical ground. Today it must be admitted that the class struggle has been largely replace by a conscience struggle,and the battle line is drawn between conscience and a good conscience. Accusing Requiems During the summer of 1995, Ariane Mnouchkine, Franois Tanguy, Olivier Py, and others undertook a hunger strike in order to denounce day after day the complicity of our government with Serbian barbarity. It was a matter then of stopping work in the symbolic realm and of showing concretely, with ones own body and with the risk inherent in such demonstrations, support for a population being murdered and an appeal to military power. A bit later, Olivier Py produced a play, Requiem pour Srebrenica, which was a montage of journalistic texts, speeches, and facts that alternated between a requiemand a political trial. Quoting Claude Rgy, the Catholic director, Olivier Py asked in Le Monde (12 January 1999) What is more sacred than the suffering of another? Can one make an image of it? And how can one make an image? Thus can be seen the powerful reappearance of the question of the victim in the theatrical process, of a murdered victim whose represention the theatre takes as its mission, utilizing his voice and his martyrdom to sensitize others to the Calvary suffered. This dramaturgy does not forget to stimulate apathetic consciences or to name the torturers. Nevertheless, such a theatre, based on the religious dimension of representation, tends to supplant the political question, that of the play of forces, the conflicts, and the historicization necessary to understand the event. Thus Py concluded in Libration(22 January 1999): It is theatre, it is politics, but it is not political theatre. Another production devoted entirely to the 45

Rwanda 94. Photo: Philippe Delacroix

of? And if it is French, do you wish to consider it purely contingent? . . . and the theatre, which knows nothing about being French and cares even less, finds nothing depressing in the abjection of national identity. This comment represents one of the dangers that the theatre must guard against, in a situation where comrade represents a community united by a social class and its struggles, the term citizen binds together exploiters and exploited in a civic posture that abolishes all difference. The engaged theatre today is often only the reflexion of a consensus which has papered over conflicting positions. George Sand, in 1845, wrote to the historian Michelet Like everyone else, I admire your talent. You are right, I find, ten thousand times, and yet I find that you are right with too many others and

matter of the victim, Rwanda 94, was created by Groupov, a politicallyinvolved Belgian company [See WES 11:3, 37-39]. It adapted a radically different strategy, that of producing a symbolic reparation (according to J. Delcuvellerie). The production, which extended to the length necessary to understand the political facts, opened with a direct testimony, on stage, of one of those who escaped the genocide. A woman (Y. Mukagasana) sat in a chair in the center of the stage. She gave a shattering account of the insane Rwandan hatred of 1994, of the murder of her husband, her children and her brothers, and of her survival. Her death had been planned like those of all the Tutsi and all the opponents of the Hutu. I am not an actress. I am someone who escaped from Rwanda. Her refusal of indentification disturbed the normal course of the performance. The horror evoked by her words was that of the victims, and of them alone. In a radical manner, Groupov thus laid out the boundary of responsibility, of words that could be spoken and of their conditions of enunciation. It is a question of not evading the issue, that is of not allowing the theatre to become the incarnation of a trauma, but, quite the contrary, to contort the theatre so that it it is no longer only a place, a mechanism (stage, auditorium) where certain speeches can be heard, but a place where all the disturbance can be felt that the direct speech of a victim can provoke. This inaugural speech opened several hours of performance which involved a wide variety of theatrical genres. Later the director, Jacques Delcuvellerie, seated behind a table, interrupted the work in theatrical stricto sensu, attempting to explain precisely the operations and the causes of the situation. Rwanda 94 is before all else a confrontation with those assassinated. They are present, symbolically, on the stage, a chorus of the dead, made up of Rwandis, who in a Litany of questions surround the political space, sharply interrogating the the responsibility, the complicity of certain people. In the theatre, the dead often forget the most 46

Armand Gatti. Photo: Jean Mohr/La Parole errante

concrete political questions (as they are occupied by other, more metaphysical concerns), but here the chorus of the dead is (among other things) a location for facts and accusation. The general weakness of such a form is of little importance, indeed paradoxically the weakest moments seem to be the most theatrical ones, with the sociable and sympathetic figure of the TV reporter, a kind of Saint Joan of the Stockyards,who moves through the scenes as a woman lost in the face of the immensity of the crime, who seems more and more to have descended into a nightmare. Rwanda 94 never ceases to suggest and to invent new esthetic means, new scenic translations of anger and of posing questions in the face of the unspeakable tragedy in Rwanda.

Although it surely underestimates the infra-structural dimensions of the situation, this is yet an attempt to express what is ineffable in the event without at the same time de-historicizing it. One could perhaps call it a requiem, but a lay requiem, viscerally profane. The Invincible Armand Gatti The anarchist poet Armand Gatti has always pursued his long march toward a classtheatre in the service of the more and more numerous conquered. Resistant, exiled, a journalist and then a dramatist, Gatti has created a biography that bears witness to an entire life devoted to struggle, one ferociously revolutionary. Censored by the French State in 1969 for his anti-French La Passion en violet, jaune et rouge, Gatti went into exile in Germany and continued all the same his adversarial enthusiasm. Returning to France, he continued his work with his tribe far from any allegiance to the system. He returned to earlier themes and concerns (such as the question of judicial killing), seeking their patterns and attempting to relate these to his dramatic writing. The political position that he took remained deeply one of combat. He gradually stopped working with professional actors (whom he called mercenaries) and pursued his theatrical experiments with those excluded from the system. His work has been often described as cultural activation,and as social support, in which Gatti has attempted to solidify that principle that has never ceased to guide his work: collective research for the perfect expression to witness to the violence of the world and the force of the unsubmitting conscience. This work has given birth to important texts which have developed the idea of resistance (more than than of revolution) by honoring the memory of rebellious figures (Ch Guevara, the militant antinazis of the Orchestre Rouge or the Rose Blanche, Indians and other indigenous people, and so on). His theatre affirms its solidarity with Commander Marcos and the Zapatista guerillas of Chiapas, as well as with condemned prisoners Mumia Abu Jamal or Leonard Peletier. Far from taking a teaching position, the theatrical space seeks to devote itself entirely to a moment of the struggle, when a radical convergence of those assembled in a theatre directs the full power of its conscience toward bringing back to life, for an evening, the victims of history, toward signifying to the world their rebellion, toward, finally, the act of bring a glimmer of utopia into the world. Recently, in his latest pub47

lished text, Didascalie se promenant seule dans un thtre vide, Gatti reaffirmed the irrepressible force of the word, the possibility that opens to the theatre as soon as it refuses to be a merchandise like any other. Gatti reports that on the walls of a prison in Tulles, where he was held prisoner during the war, a cry had been carved: Here we do not say, History. We say, the universe. The call that prisoners traced here for those who would come after them testifies powerfully to the connection with resisting words that acknowledge, at least for a time, that they have been overcome. The cry remains, and this evening it is ours, writes Gatti at the beginning of his text. The power of the dramatists writing is bound together with this heritage. Powerfully contemporary and nevertheless haunted by the defeat of those conquered by history, Gattis theatre operates in the manner of Paul Klees Angelus novus, as described by Walter Benjamin: a gaze fixed upon the disaster of History and yet rooted in a present in which one debates and fights. The theatre of Gatti and the beautiful suggestions of Groupov have established new perspectives for a theatre which rejects both political impassivity and the recycling of the inappropriate forms and assumption History offers, its hope and its disasters. It takes on contemporary conflicts, sometimes in total disarray, seizing whatever is unexpressed, unstressed, unrealized in the event. These theatres de not submit to the History of the conquerers and their grim chronology. When they borrow from History, it is to challenge it, to show its inanity and brutality. Perhaps among the most stimulating innovations of the contemporary political theatre is its utilization of material outisde that of the dominant culture as well as that of the fictional classic, stage. The questions raised by these creative arists in the heterogeneity of the forms that they utilize are innumerable. Today, when a not inconsideable part of the population has been radicalized, when militancy no longer suffers the same stigma that it did only a few years ago, when the field of battle is growing, the theatre involved with social concerns must confront its political responsibilities. The esthetic ideology (P. Ivernel) which was the source of all of its power in recent years is fading under the assaults of social reality and militant desires. To enroll the theatre in this struggle is no longer heretical. This of course detracts nothing from the legitimacy of the other theatre, its charms or its brilliance. Street demonstrations,

gatherings of anarchists bear witness to an inventiveness in spectacle stronger and more radical than many theatrical experiments. Already, ACT-UP, during the eighties, and a number of subsequent political demonstrations have utilized the scandalization of the spectators as a method of agitation, creating here and there clear new possibilities for militant forms somewhere between agit-prop and performance. Obviously these are far from returning to the forms of the seventies, which were tied to a singular vision of History and of politics, marked by an urgent Leninism (Rgis Debray), and yet this theatre runs the risk of missing the significant role that it should play if it does not remember the questions raised by its predecessors (about the means of production, the receivers of representation, and so on), taken for granted or forgotten today. But so far the theatre has taken no cognizance of this. As the militant philosopher Daniel

Bensad claimed in his recent loge de la rsistance lair du temps, No one can predict today what the revolutions of the twenty-first century will be. The revolutionists are in a situation comparable to that of the military. The military are always fighting the last war while the others are always fighting the last (or the next to last) revolution. Their time would be better spent paying more attention to what has been unexpressed or forgotten. In the same manner, people of the theatre are not, perhaps, the most likely to predict the new forms that engaged theatre of the future will take. Social movements will determine the forms and the terms of engagement. The political theatre, if it desires to invent new expressions of anger and of hope, will not follow old patterns, but will be organically tied to emerging and effective resistance. If times of upheavals lie in the near future, the charge to the theatre will be to change from a drama of resistance to one of offense. (Translated by Marvin Carlson)

48

Philippe Caubre: Molire Forever


Sophie Proust Born in Marseilles in 1950, Philippe In 1989, he performed in the films under Caubres idealism led him in 1968 to become a the direction of Yves Robert in La Gloire de ma politically engaged actor at the TEX (Thtre mre and Le Chteau de ma mre, based on Pagnol. dEssai dAix en Provence). His TEX street theatre In 1995, following a dramatic reading of poems by was seen by Ariane Mnouchkine, and in 1971, he Aragon at the Huma Festival in Paris, he created the joined the Thtre du Soleil with two of this friends, production Aragon, composed of two parts, Le Maxime Lombart et Jean-Claude Bourbault, and Communiste and Le Fou, on the island of Frioul, experienced difficult days performing in 1789, across from Marseilles. Before creating (in 2000) 1793, and Lge dor, before playing the title role in the first episodes of LHomme qui danse, he devotthe film Molire in 1977, directed by Ariane ed himself to a tour of Aragon through France, and Mnouchkine. He then staged Dom Juan at the to dramatic readings of texts by Andr Suars : Thtre du Soleil. Collective creation began to lose Marsiho and Vues sur lEurope as well as to the its momentum and this led to ruptures and fallings publication in 1999 of his Carnets dun jeune apart in the bosom of the Company, as in the case of homme (1976-1981). In July of 2000, at the Philippe Caubre. He went to Belgium to rehearse Avignon Festival, Philippe Caubre created the role of Lorenzo under the direction of the Czech Claudine et le thtre, which put together the two director Otomar Krejca, for a Lorenzaccio which first episodes of LHomme qui danse: Claudine ou was a failure in the Cour du Palais des Papes at lducation and Le Thtre selon Ferdinand. After Avignon in 1979, more than twenty years after the Le Roman dun Acteur, the public impatiently success of Grard Philipe in this same role. In 1981, awaited the artists return with new texts drawn out after seven years at the Thtre du Soleil and one of his own flesh. He described his childhood and season with the Atelier Thtre de Louvain-laadolescent years close to his mother, and from the Neuve in Belgium, he decided to improvise somebeginnings of his life in the theatre to the seismic thing based on his own life, and thus created La onanisms of May 1968. In September, 2001, at the danse du diable. This production tells about his Thtre du Chne Noir at Avignon, he created childhood, his relationship with his mother, his real Octobre and Avignon, which comprised the second and imaginary friends, and his first theatre studies section of LHomme qui danse, under the title 68 with his professor Micheline. From these same selon Ferdinand. In a trajectory undertaken echoing improvisations have come, twenty years later four that of Goethes young Werther de Goethe, Caubre of the six episodes of LHomme qui danse. is a hedonist who embraces his era. He calls up the Between 1983 and 1985, he was involved memory of his deepest passions, those for his mothwith a film project, Le Roi misre, developing for er and for the theatre, in a history so intimate that it that occasion a second series of improvisations becomes universal. The two productions were prewhich made up the scenario. He created a video sented in Paris in November and December of 2002 mock-up. Then, for lack of means, he was forced to at the Thtre du Rond-Point. They enjoyed an give up the project. At the same time, he formed his enormous success with both the public and the own production organization with Vronique press. Alongside these creations, the first episodes Coquet: La Comdie Nouvelle. This name signalled of Roman dun acteur appeared in the cinema. the revindication of a particular kind of theatre, that These had been filmed by Bernard Dartigues in of Jacques Copeau, which called for the use of a 1994 during rehearsals and performances of Roman bare stage for new work. Jean-Pierre Tailhade interdun acteur at the Thtre de lAthne in Paris. vened at this point, asking Caubre to stage his project of a film for the theatre and to play it. In April, Le Roman dun acteur 1986, when this film failed to be realized, Ariane ou Le Roman dun acteur gathers eleven thelge dor appeared at the Thtre Tristan Bernard atre pieces each lasting about three hours. This in Paris. From 1986 to 1992, ten new creations folwork, autobiographical in nature, is a burlesque epic lowed which, along with the eleventh in 1993, Les about the life of the actor Ferdinand Faure in the marches du palais, formed the episodes of the bosom of a company, with material about his love Roman dun acteur. affairs, his friends, his dreams as an actor, the the49

atre, Ariane Mnouchkine. It was presented in five cities in France before coming to the French capital. After its first showing at the Thtre Sorano in Toulouse in 1993, Le roman dun acteur was truly created at the Avignon Festival in the Clotre des Carmes before playing at the Hexagone in Meylan and La Mtaphore in Lille in 1994, at Nancy, and finally at the Thtre de lAthne in Paris. Then in April, 1986, Caubre created Ariane ou lge dor which tells the story of the work of creating the production Lge dor at the Cartoucherie. In October-December of 1986, a sequel appeared, Jours de Colre, with the subtitle Ariane II. This production went so far as to restage, although much altered, sequences from Lge dor, as that of a character anthologized in The death of Abdallah, an emigrant who falls from a crane in a factory. In the production created by the Thtre du Soleil in 1975, Ariane Mnouchkines aim was to create a commedia dellarte for our time, moving into her own time the traditional characters of Arlequin, Pantalon, Matamore. Other creations followed without yet giving birth to the idea of the Roman dun acteur. This was so even though a narrative unity appeared from the outset in his improvisations. Between September of 1988 and January of 1989, Philippe Caubre created the amourous trilogy which depicted the meeting of Ferdinand and Clmence at the Thtre du Soleil, their marriage in this same place, and the manifestations of jealousy on the part of Ferdinand which drove Clmence into the arms of another actor in the company, Jonathan, with whom she at last falls in love (Les Enfants du Soleil, La Fte de lAmour, Le Triomphe de la Jalousie). Two years later, he created Le chemin de la mort and Le vent du gouffre. In January of 1992, the Belgian trilogy appeared: Le champ de betteraves, Le voyage en Italie, and Le bout de la nuit. The first of these dealt with the opening rehearsals of The Three Sisters in Belgium after the failure of Lorenzaccio at Avignon and the arrival of Ariane and her company in this place. The second showed the embarrassment of Ferdinand, forced to ask for a large budget from Armand, the director of the Atelier Thatral of Louvain-la-Neuve, in order to stage Romeo and Juliet, and to bring together the members of the Cartoucherie for a festival honoring one of the actors, after his suicide. He then leaves for Italy to rejoin Clmence, on tour with Savary. Le Bout de la nuit is the concluding production. This episode reveals to Ferdinand his desire to write 50

about his life and about the theatre. When Philippe Caubre created Ariane ou lge dor and the productions that followed, he had no idea of creating such an epic. That is why the order of his creations differs from the chronological order, which has been restored today. Les marches du palais has been put back in chronological order in the story to make a transition that is central to LeRoman dun acteur. The first part traces the theatrical and love interest of Ferdinand at the Thtre du Soleil. The second part, introduced by the story of the breakup between the actor and Ariane Mnouchkine (with Les marches du palais) tells about his experiences with the Atelier Thtral of Louvain-la-Neuve, and particularly the flop of Lorenzaccio at Avignon, as well as the continuation of his love affair with Clmence, engaged by Jrme Savary at the Magic Circus. This entire creative process came into being only through projects each of which were unrealized in themselves. Thus, Le roman dun acteur in itself is a reaction to an unfinished project for a second draft of Lge dor. The foundations of this large undertaking are thus laid upon frustrations, upon incomplete efforts, on wishes and failures. La danse du diable was created because its author did not find funding for the staging of Romeo and Juliet, Ariane ou lge dor because Le Roi misre could not be produced, the nine following productions because he could not come finally to give birth to the eleventh, Les marches du palais. Le roman dun acteur was certainly born out of frustration of not having developed the second sketch for Lge dor, and of not having dared to create LHomme qui danse. Although autobiographical in character, the work of Philippe Caubre cannot be limited to this simple summary. Certainly this is involved in his productions, but involved more for than against: for a certain theatre which for him provided the key to a particular era : the work of the Thtre du Soleil under Ariane Mnouchkine. By taking this position, he then of course placed himself against the actual theatre as it existed. Every spectator recognizes himself in an artistic event. If for Caubre these productions were designed in the beginning to glorify his master, to free himself from her in order to give her a proper homage, one in which admiration, envy, and the desire to set things right were mixed, in telling the story of the story of the greatest theatrical pain in the ass of the twentieth century, as the character of Armand says in Le vent du gouffre,

Philippe Caubre rehearsing for Le roman dun acteur in 1994. Photo: Sophie Proust

the autobiographical dimension touches on the universal. The major themes of his writing, in addition to involving the theatre, evoke in fact the search for identity, developed in particular through reflections on love, friendship, and sexuality. Writing and Improvisation None of the functions of actor, author, and director take precedence over any other in the balanced productions of Philippe Caubre. His creative process simultaneously involves writing, acting, and directing. Thus he does not work in the same way as other contemporary actors, directors, or dramatists. The very term of writing in his theatrical work is equivocal. This effect is consciously chosen in order to make it clear that the writing really could have been created on the basis of a specific working process (improvisation), so that the actual theatrical production privileges in a particular way the status of the director, sometimes even to the detriment of the author. For Caubre, staging and dramatic writing are one and the same. He has demonstrated this over the course of years, but it was not established at the beginning of his project showing the stages in the life of a man and an actor by the means available to an actor. He inherited 51

from the collective creations of the 1970s the idea of the actor as creator, comparable in this to the author. Coming out of improvisations, this writing is corporeal. Philippe Caubre considers that improvisation is simply another way of writing, it is writing standing up. This is the way he expressed it in an interview that I had with him in Grenoble in 1993: I think that anyone who writes, whether he is a writer or not, improvises, even in the process of tearing up pages and starting over. When an author improvises, at least as I have done, improvising people, characters, life itself, he is writing. One can say this is the degree zero or the A of writing. Afterward, there is a second degree, which consists of heading toward a goal, knowing that one improvises while wanting to say something. That is when one becomes an author, because an actor can improvise for its own sake, without knowing why. In my own work, I improvised people knowing that I was heading toward something, even if I did not know very clearly what I was heading toward.

Then, there was the work of getting away from all that text, that enormous amount of raw material, that enormous muddle from which must be drawn scenes, purposes, performances. And that is still a third stage. But really there is a great difference between writing with a pen on paper while sitting at a table and playing people, or presenting life standing up, and when all is said and done, letting the body take control. And all this in front of somebody, for one is not alone, there is somebody there. The body is the beginning, since when I play somebody I copy, I imitate, and so it is the body which begins this, not the head. Then come gestures and the physical bearing, which leads to dialogue, texts, and situations. It is therefore just the reverse of everything we have been taught, thinking comes after and not before. The first thing that thinks is the body, with its on particular laws; then comes the texts, the dialogues, the situation, and perhaps even a concept of the ensemble comes. I certainly did not think at all in Le Roman dun acteur while I was improvising. Video has supported the process of writing and creation, through work with video-manuscripts. For Le roman dun acteur, there were more than one hundred and fifty hours of video films recording the improvisations as the very first work. They were referred back to in developing the written texts of these performances, with the help of Roger Goffinet, who transcribed the films. These records, which allowed the physical recuperation of the scenic indications, the gestures naturally called up by the body became in the end a real guide to direct the actor. These video-manuscripts provide an interesting documentation of the extent to which the origin of the directives upon which improvisation is based is infinitely mysterious, and thus impossible to determine, since it is inherent in the playing of the actor, originating in the performers body, and set into motion by an entire affective memory. Whatever literary mode the author may adapt, the working time remains a very personal and individual activity, whether the writing project takes on an autobiographical character or not. Caubre rarely rehearses alone. In his way of creating, the 52

close relationship that he has developed with his company results in a kind of smaller audience at rehearsals, so that the beginning improvisations are a kind of private performance, with the energy requisite for such a creation. For Caubre, laughter is the driving force of improvisation. He created his Roman dun acteur directly, since, as the programs for example point out, these performances were written, directed and performed by himself, after having been improvised under the eyes of Clmence Massart, Vronique Coquet and Pascal Caubre. This clearly points out the importance of an outside eye. For Le roman dun acteur, Vronique Coquet, the producer of the production, but also assistant, script-holder or prompter according to the programs distributed by each theatre, represented this external view. If this were a passive role, Caubre would have dropped it. Even though it does not involve direction of the actors, the artistic role of this observer must be taken into account. La danse du diable was published in 1988, the first part of Roman dun acteur in 1994. The latter is part of the actors next projects. The publication of the text implied a necessity of fixing it, and eventually the fear of setting it for its improviser. And yet, the actor does not improvise during performance. Everything which involves the phatic function (the means of holding the attention of the listener) is written out. In the distribution of roles in the published version of the text, a record, a telephone, the flip-flip-flip of the flight announcements in the airport are all characters. Although he performs alone, his text involves an important distributing of parts. The first episodes of Roman dun acteur have, moreover, been staged by several companies using more than one actor. The familiarity of the languages of his characters corresponds to everyday language, especially that of artists involved in creation, even though every director has his own way of speaking. The jargon in stricto sensu of a director of actors is essentially limited to a few hundred words and a technical vocabulary, but this same director also has at his disposal an infinite palette of literary and poetic language from which can be constructed a vernacular language suitable for the creation at hand. The familiarity apparent in the fiction is repeated in reality. It seems that a sense of performance tends to hide this. Still, the crudeness of a director should not be read rigidly as rudeness, it is simply part of the dynamic of the creative process. The language of work really should be

familiar, with repeated expressions utilized by each director. In Le Roman dun acteur, Philippe Caubre takes up, for example, a leitmotif of Ariane, the directing character, who, in critiquing the performance of her actors, says that they are not worth shit: [] For an hour and a half they are not worth shit! Not worth shit! Ive even tried watching through the cracks in the doors . . . I . . . (She throws the doors wide open.) WOUFFF! (To the performers who are still acting.) Youre not worth shit! (Les Enfants du Soleil). Thus the uncensored report on Ariane Mnouchkine by Josette Fral in her work Trajectoires du Soleil (1998), provides this interesting and doubtless truthful quotation : During the rehearsal process, the fear is present from nine oclock in the morning. The activity and the searching is continuous. I was there, I was exhaused, I was crying, and so on. There was always some sort of goading going on. When they are acting during performance, which is normal, I bloody well leave them alone, to a certain extent. Although a thoughtful and consensual training system might call for tact and emphasize politeness and good manners, artistic relationships are not unwilling from time to time to throw down the gauntlet, and a sharp word is from time to time used, just as Caubre depicts it. Aside from its poetic quality, his writing allows one to become implicit in a history of contemporary staging. For example, Otomar Krej?as reputation as a director is well known, with the unspoken assumption that his actors were satisfied with the materialization of his global concept of direction. And yet, his actors have been regarded as intelligent monkeys (Travail thtral, OctoberDecember 1970). In Le Roman dun acteur, Philippe Caubre tells humorously about this aspect of Krej?as rehearsals during the creation of Mussets Lorenzaccio at Avignon, when the actors had to execute precisely and without discussion the propositions of the director of the Za Branou theatre. Interpretation One of the singularities of Philippe Caubre is that he has developed his production on a base of improvisations (an inheritance from Mnouchkine) and above all has presented them alone on a bare stage, of the sort that was dear to Copeau, even while restoring to it a multiplicity of characters and settings. A door, for example, will be indicated by the sound of its closing. All the onomatopias thus become part of the text and stand in 53

for a great number of realistic and utilitarian properties. In this new sort of theatrical writing, there is a clear influence from the cinema. Passing from one role to another in the same sequence all the while maintaining a consistent rhythm, Caubre utilizes ellipses to achieve most of his transitions. Thus he economizes on traditional entrances and exits of characters, and allows us to discover them directly as they are carrying out some action. He uses the technique of cinematographic montage, and thus easily creates the illusion of a multiplicity of characters and of points of view. Starting from the same scenographic position as the one-man show, his writing is nevertheless theatrical. This gives agency to his recitation, and each dramatic situation is put together in such a way as to advance the plot or the action. As a costume he uses only the most banal and current urban dress : blue jeans, a belt, a white shirt, shoes that are white, brown, or black according to the performance, sometimes a coat, a scarf, or a little hat reported to be that of Ariane at the beginning of Roman dun acteur. Except for a few details, his sartorial panoply remains the same. The sobriety of this non-costume throws the actor into relief. He interprets all alone a hundred characters with a disarming precision and virtuosity. Each character is distinguished physically and vocally, even though this is often imperceptible. The movements of his hands and feet work continuously in harmony with the immobility of one part of his body and the mobility of another. In a system of foregrounding and backgrounding he is always adjusting his view of the characters to the appropriate level, which contributes to the credibility of the dialogue between them. The rapidity of his changes of position and their symmetry ultimately give illusion that several characters are present. An excellent physical and vocal mastery thus allows a subtle and nuanced interpretation in the composition of each character. With no properties other than a chair, Caubre serves as actor-designer making everything visible. He does not mime anything, he performs everything. He has the gift of making the invisible visible. In his work, therefore, the question of his relationship to the imaginary is a vast one. It suggests a comprehensive and explicit means for setting free the imaginary processes of the spectator and for holding it in suspense. He is alone and yet he shows us a multitude. What is it that allows the spectator to see all these characters, these different properties, these places, as if they were actually rep-

resented ? In a novel, the power of suggestion employed by the author or narrator is what allows the imagination to function. Philippe Caubre adopts somewhat the same process as does the novel by stimulating the creative capacity of the spectator. The sustained rhythm of the actor is originally established, at least in part, upon the expansion of this imagination. The delivery and the breathing of the characters are both a part of the construction of this magic. Caubre is careful to give full amplitude to what he is embodying, laying out in every case the heard, visual, and olfactory space in which each character moves. If it is difficult to prove that an actor can perform and direct himself without any exterior regard, the abundance of one-man shows seems to demonstrate the contrary. The quality of this type of performance however often suffers from the absence of critical appraisal. The renewal of solo performance can be interpreted in part as a rejection of the authoritarianism of directors. Jean-Pierre Miquel, a former administrator of the ComdieFranaise, advanced this hypothesis in 1996 in his book Le thtre des acteurs : ces tranges animaux, asserting that certains actors reject all direction, and even all help, ending at last with the one-man show . . . Michael Chekhov, however, both an actor and a major innovator, imagined the possibility of self-direction when he created the concept of the psychological gestures in his 1953 book To the Actor. There he suggested that movement, if it is executed with strength, has the power of stimulating our will, so that the nature of this movement awakes a desire in us, and its intention stimulates emotions in us. Later he says that through the intermediary of gesture we communicate with the deepest levels of [our] psychological being and stimulate them. Chekhovs concept of the psychological gesture is devoid of any intellectual element, and according to him allows one to access the very essence of a character from the perspective of performance. In this way, the psychological gesture removes an exterior critique and could serve as a justification for self-direction and thus for the independence of the actor from the director. The best way to avoid all external manipu-

lation therefore is to direct oneself, and to do ones own staging. This solution does not, however, mean giving up self-control. Philippe Caubre is his own most rigorous master, and exerts an absolute control over himself. In 1994, during a rehearsal of Roman dun acteur, while performing a frenetic exchange between two characters stage left, he suddenly froze and called out to the technical staff The followspot is bleeding onto the second drape stage right. Self-direction cancels the relationship between two distinct individuals. The actor who practices it either creates a state rather like the doubling of his personality or else he puts someone else in his place to judge his own performance. Caubre uses someone to walk though his positions (a crab), especially when they are choreographed, in order to get an over-all view of his physicalization of musical moments or to get a view of some special effects. Utilizing different comic registers, Philippe Caubre tells his story while at the same time criticizing a feeling of unease in the contemporary theatre. He remains an island of resistance defending the art of the actor in a world of directors. Giorgio Strehler said of his Arlequin, Ferruccio Soleri, that the older he became, the more youthful his character became on stage. It is the same with Philippe Caubre. Certainly the years go by, but his character of Ferdinand Faure, for example, has not gained a wrinkle. The followers of Saint Thomas would say that you have to see him to believe him. And indeed, everything written about him is one thing, but to see him perform is something else entirely. Philippe Caubre is one of those very rare actors in the world who change forever the spectator once he has seen them. While waiting for 2004 and the conclusion of LHomme qui danse, one can see the performance this year of a text by Alain Montcouquiol in homage to his brother bull-fighter Nimeo II: Recouvre-le de lumire. The performances will take place in French arenas during the bull-fighting season. Philippe Caubres website is www.philippe.caubre.fr (Translated by Marvin Carlson)

54

Stphane Braunschweig and the Theatre in Strasbourg


Marvin Carlson Except for the period during the summer when theatre attention shifts for a time to Avignon, Paris continues, as it has for centuries, to dominate the French theatre world. Andr Malrauxs ambitious plan to decentralize the French stage created major new theatre buildings around the country, but most of these are now more like the Italian model of scattered homes for traveling productions than like the German model of permanent, well-established, publicly supported theatre organizations in every region of the country. A few French cities, however, have managed, usually under the influence of a strong director, to gain some national prominence. Such was the case in Lille, in the years when Daniel Mesguich was there and before he returned to Paris to direct and teach at the Conservatoire. Today, the most prominent of the regional theatres is the Thtre National de Strasbourg, partly because it is the only one of Frances five official National theatres located outside of Paris (the other four are the Comdie-Franaise, the Odon, Chaillot, and the Colline), partly because of its special location in a rapidly changing Europe but finally (and not unrelated to the other two) through the efforts of its current director, Stphane Braunschweig. Like many important recent French directors, Braunschweig built a career in regional theatre before gaining a reputation, as any emerging French director inevitably must, in Paris. After graduating from the National Theatre School of Chaillot, then directed by Antoine Vitez, in 1988, Braunschweig presented productions in various suburban Paris theatres of Bchner, Horvth, Brecht, Sophocles, and, most notably, a highly stylized Cherry Orchard in 1992 [for reports on these early productions, see WES 4:2]. These led to an offer of the directorship of the National Dramatic Center in Orleans, where he worked from 1993 until 1998. A number of his productions there were invited to international festivals

Thtre National de Strasbourg. Photo: Elisabeth Carecchio

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and also toured to Paris, most notably his Winters Tale in 1993 [See WES 6:1] and his Peer Gynt in 1997 [See WES 9:2]. During these years Braunschweig gained a strong reputation as a director of opera, mostly through productions at the Paris Chtelet. His 1999 Magic Flute toured to Lausanne, Padua, Venice, Rouen, Lisbon, and the festivals of Avignon and Aix. In the spoken theatre, Braunschweigs most honored recent production was a Woyzeck created for the Residenz-Theater in Munich, with the popular actor Udo Samuel. This production won the Bavarian prize for the best theatrical work of the year. It was also presented in Strasbourg and it entered the ongoing repertoire of the Schauspiel Frankfurt in 2001. In July of 2000, Braunschweig became director of the National Theatre of Strasbourg, an outstanding appointment considering not only his distinction but also his strong background in both French and German theatre. Braunschweig has made much of the potential of the Strasbourg theatre in the new Europe, due to its central location on the German/French border (where the European Parliament is also located). It is also the only French theatre outside of Paris included in the fourteen member Union of European Theatres organized in 1990 by Giorgio Strehler to develop a Europeanwide system of co-production and cooperation [See WES 7:2]. Since he assumed leadership of this theatre, Braunschweig has directed five major productions, beginning with Prometheus Bound in 2001. [See the article in this issue by Barry Daniels.] Two of these were revived at the Thtre de la Colline in Paris, but Braunschweig is clearly seeking to replace the traditional Parisian orientation of the regional theatres, in Strasbourg at least, with something much closer to the Theatre of Europe envisioned by Strehler. In the current season four new productions are being created at the TNS, along with one revival from the past season. Significantly this, the only French work (Molires Don Juan), is a highly unconventional reworking by the leading Italian experimental director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti. The four new productions of the season are Kleists Famille Schroffenstein (in French with German supertitles), Ibsens Ghosts (in German with French supertitles), Andreyevs Thought, a multimedia production in French, and a new Japanese play, News from Level S, by Oriza Hirata. The other eight productions that make up the season provide further evidence of Braunschweigs international orientation. England is represented by the 56

Thtre de Complicit with Mnemonic and by a French version of Sarah Kanes Cleansed from Marseilles. Besides the Andreyev, Russia is represented by a touring production of War and Peace, staged by the Moscow company of Piotr Fomenko. There is a second Kleist production, based on his Penthesilea and other writings as well as a new German play, Bluebeard, by Dea Loher. Alain Franon, the current leader of the Colline in Paris, is bringing his production of Ibsens Little Eyolf from that theatre along with a new French play, Anthropozoo, by Gildas Milin. Finally, the major French offering will be a ten-hour staging of Claudels epic Le Soulier de Satin by the prominent young French director Olivier Py. Braunschweigs own productions this season are the two Kleists and Ibsens Ghosts, the two German plays presented in French with German supertitles and Ghosts in German with French supertitles. The Ghosts (billed, interestingly, as Les revenants, its French title) perhaps most clearly shows Braunschweigs international interests. It was co-created with the Frankfurt Schauspiel and utilizes actors from that company, most of whom also worked with Braunschweig on his muchpraised Woyzeck. The title role in that production was taken by Udo Samuel, who plays Manders in this Ghosts. I cannot remember ever seeing a production of Ghosts in which the leading actor played Manders, not Mrs. Alving, and I was quite surprised at the different feeling this gave to the play. I never realized before how much of the play Manders is in fact on stage nor the degree to which the play is a struggle between him and Mrs. Alving. Nor was this focus on Manders achieved by developing him into a strong, formidable adversary for Mrs. Alving to play against. Rather, Udo develops the pompous, somewhat foolish, and often comic elements of the character. Short and rotund, he appears distinctly closer to a traditional clown figure than to a pillar of society. In the past when I have seen actors bringing out the comic side of Manders, which is certainly in the character, I have normally been troubled by what Mrs. Alving found attractive in him, but Samuel was so warm, so engaging even in his foolishness that somehow we were drawn to him, and so could imagine a similar feeling from Mrs. Alving. Her urge to embrace him after he is so completely taken in by Engstrands story expresses this relationship perfectly. On the whole, however, in comparison with Samuels fussy Manders, Friederike Kammers

Mrs. Alving seemed to me rather cold and abstract. She seemed often to withdraw from scenes as if not wishing to open herself to further suffering. Having just seen Nathalie Cornets Hedda Gabler in Paris, who so often allowed the audience to see every shade of emotion pass over her out-turned face even during other characters scenes, I was struck by the almost opposite approach of Kammer, who often turned her face away from the audience, not only when others were speaking, but even during major speeches of her own, particularly in the final scene. Only in her mid-play relationships with Oswald (Daniel Christensen) did she seem to relax, even become a bit playful, as when she pretended to smoke his (and Alvings) pipe while defending his position to Manders. Christiensen played Oswald very quietly throughout, making his few outbursts in the final act particularly powerful. His quiet delivery and that of Mrs. Alving reached their climax in intensity near the end in the sequence where he reveals to her his illness. For almost the entire scene they remain unmoving, Kammer standing upstage with her back to the audience, watching the coming dawn in the faint light that surrounds the upstage doorway, and Christiansen standing motionless in a nearby corner of the room in semidarkness. The entire only interchange has a quiet, almost elegaic intensity. Ruth Marie Krger brought a sprightly liveliness to the character of Regina, but the other most interesting interpretation of the production was Uwe Bertrams Engstrand. I have often seen Engstrands that were slight men, almost gnomelike, but Bertram is a large bear of a man, almost a head taller than Samuel, and his limp is indicated

only by a slight stiffness and a click when his shoe hits the stage. He might seem dangerous indeed except for his almost uninterrupted Uriah-Heep-like smile and deferentiality. Manders is clearly no match for him either intellectually or physically, and when he goes to embrace Engstrand after hearing the story of his marriage to Johanna, laying his head on Engstrands ample chest, the image is both disturbing and highly comic. The interplay between Engstrand, Manders, and Mrs. Alving is always complex and fascinating, since Engstrand is constantly checking on the reaction of both to his fabrications, and invariably finds Mrs. Alving as cold and unimpressed as Manders is warm and appreciative. Only once does he clearly allow his awareness of his own rhetoric to appear, however, when he directly addresses Mrs. Alving with his announcement that he plans to call his sailors retreat Captain Alvings Home, which he follows with a burst of laughter. The setting (by Braunschweig) and lighting (by Marion Hewlett) were both minimal and highly effective. The main part of the stage had a freestanding door, always gently lit, on either side, with another door just behind it in the actual dark wall of the set. A third door, up right, gave access to the upstage area, the dining room, separated from downstage by a scrim so that this area was always faintly visible. In the dining area, up left, is the dining table with two chairs, table settings and two candles, which burn throughout the production until Oswald extinguishes them near the end and sits at the table, where he will be illuminated in profile by the rising sun. The stage arrangement leaves Oswald, sitting drinking and smoking at the table,

Ghosts. Photo: Elisabeth Carecchio

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Udo Samuel, Friederike Kammer , and Daniel Christensen in Ghosts. Photo: Elisabeth Carecchio

clearly though dimly visible, through most of the third act, and emphasized in a way I have never seen before Mrs. Alvings concern that he has remained there so long. The downstage area, in keeping with the minimalist feel of the production, has as furnishing only two chairs. Their positionwidely separated or close togetherfaithfully reflects the relationship of the characters in Ibsens many twocharacter scenes. When Regina brings in the champagne, all three sit on the floor, a somewhat surprising arrangement, but one which very well suits the new social relationships of the situation. Yet who would have expected to see Ibsen done, as I saw twice in France within a single week, in bare rooms with only a few chairs as furnishings and not a table in sight? I felt as if I had almost returned to the empty stages of French neoclassicism. Aside from the National Theatre, Strasbourg also offers another major theatrical venue, Le Maillon, which for a quarter of a century 58

has served as a major location for touring experimental dance and dance/theatre productions such as Needcompany, Wim Vandekybus, and Jan Fabre. In January Fabre, having appeared three times previously at Le Maillot, brought here his latest piece, Parrots and Guinea Pigs. This production is a meditation on the relationships between human beings and animals, and explores the possibilities both of their relationships and of their imitation of each other. Members of the company appear sometimes in grey professional suits, sometimes nude, and sometimes wearing large Sesame Street-style animal costumes and heads (a chicken, a frog, a dog, a guinea pig, a sheep, a rabbit) and, not infrequently, some combination of these, such as a nude body with an animal head. The elaborate animal costumes were the work of Denise Catsermans. When the audience enters, an elegant parrot sits on a perch center stage, muttering and preening. He will preside over the evenings activities,

along with his human counterpart, a woman dressed in an elaborate costume matching the coloring of the parrot. After an opening conversational sequence between the two parrots and a sequence where a young woman describes and addresses various audience members in Flemish while the human parrot translates (or mistranslates) her comments into French, the first actual dance sequence takes place, introducing a number of themes that will be repeated throughout the production. The female members of the company, all nude except for inverted white bags over their heads, perform an awkward dance, each hopping, strutting, or jumping in movement that is very suggestive of animal locomotion. Accompanying them is the song Talk with the animals (in English, as are all of the songs used), repeated several times during the evening, while a video projected on the stage sidewalls and rear of animal bodies in a slaughterhouse, also several times repeated. Soon after this the first animal figures appear, a huge frog and sheep, who cannot stop fighting each other, despite the desperate efforts of a woman to separate them, repeatedly shouting, to no effect, I love you. In this production, women in general seem to be attempting, rarely with any success, to civilize and control the various animals, including men. This is particularly clear in the next major dance sequence, where the men dance nude with large animal heads and, even after the heads are removed by the women, continue to act like animals, simulating the movements of copulation and shaking their genitals at the audience despite the continued slaps, admonitions, and attempts to cover them by the women. Again Talk with the animals accompanies this activity. Another repeating figure next appears, a man moving like a robot and inadvertently knocking about a young woman who continually pleads with him Do you want to be my friend? A number of languages are used in the production, but English, as in these repeated sentences and the songs, is the most common. A large baby chicken dances to the words and music of Lets all sing like the birdies sing, but resists the extended efforts of two dancers to get him to fly, by lifting him first on two chairs,

Jan Fabres Parrots and Guinea Pigs. Photo: Jean-Paul Lozouet

then onto a table. Still, Fly! now joins Do you want to be my friend? and I love you as a verbal leit-motif of the production. In a scene most closely evoking an animal laboratory, the empty costumes are placed on tables around the stage and abused, physically and sexually, by the human dancers, male and female. This produces a number of bodily fluidssperm, blood, urine, and feceswhich are assiduously collected in bottles during this scene and others and then hung on one of dozen of hooks suspended above the plays acting area. In a later reversal of this scene four nude humans are placed on these tables to be prodded, tormented, and even branded by controlling animals who nevertheless eventually cradle and cuddle their suffering human pets. Near the end of the production the focus returns to the parrot lady who tells the assembled 59

animals a parable bedtime story, The Parrot and the Merchant about a parrot who wished to become a human being. Human figures reject this attempted confluence with repeated and urgent chants of I am not an animal, but the parrot lady picked out by light far up stage center, gnomically replies: They are nourished, like me. They expire, like me. Her repeated Like me (comme moi) is taken up as a chant by the entire company, as they dance frantically but in an uncoordinated manner in their heavy animal costumes. The dance and chant goes on and on. From time to time one or more dancers will fall to the stage, apparently exhausted, but then get up

again and continue dancing. Minutes pass. The couple next to me in the audience finally had enough of this and left. Still the frantic movement continued. At last the dancers all collapsed on the stage, slowly crawled out of their heavy costumes, stripped off the underwear they were wearing beneath and either wrung it out over their faces or licked the sweat from their limbs. The last of the productions bodily fluids were thus collected and the final connection made between the animal and the human in the sweating bodies of the exhausted dancers.

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The Theatre at Nice


Sophie Proust Nice: thirty kilometers from the Italian border. Frances fifth-largest city, basking in almost continual sunshine, this jewel of the Cte dAzur daily encounters the Mediterranian Sea and socializes with an infinite number of palm trees along the promenade des Anglais. It lacks only angels in the Baie des Anges. Thus the primary spectacle of Nice is probably that of nature. The city has been governed since 1995 by Jacques Peyrat, the Mayor and Senator, under the standards of the Rassemblement Pour la Rpublique (RPR), Jacques Chiracs party. It offers a rich artistic and cultural diversity, including the famous Carnival de Nice. One should not however forget that in the last French presidential elections, on 5 May 2002, during a run-off between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, the latter gathered 27.9 % of the votes in the Provence-AlpesCte dAzur region. Happily, the great ochre-colored arcaded mansions like those on the place Garibaldi, the castle hill, or the cours Saleya and the shadow of many artists over the city, particularly that of Henri Matisse, blur out any appearance of possible political violence. No one seems interested in boasting about his particular political colors, but they are nevertheless there. Between the Thtre National de Marseille, the Thtre National Populaire de Villeurbanne and the Piccolo Teatro de Milan, all three only a few hours distant, the theatre at Nice is quite eclectic. Despite the political revendication of local culture, the Nioise theatrical tradition makes itself discreetly felt. The genre of pastoral drama, for example, theatre pieces in French, Provenal or Occitan, showing the birth of Christ while taking account of contemporary problems, are apparently defended only by certain scholars and artists, whose opinion finds little resonance among the authorities. This form of popular theatre with a social dimension thus remains marginal, as it was described at an international colloquium devoted to this question at the Centre Universitaire Mditerranen de Nice in December of 2002. On the other hand, some fifteen theatres enthusiastically present plays and attract a passionate public, among them the Thtre de la

Thtre National de Nice. Photo Courtesy: Ville de Nice

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Cit, the Thtre de Nice, the Thtre de la Semeuse, the Thtre Municipal Francis Gag (260 seats), and the Thtre Lino Ventura (700 seats). For creations more oriented toward caf-theatre there are the Bar Thtre des Oiseaux and the Thtre du Chat Perch, as well as smaller venues, including one of the tiniest in the city, the Thtre de la Traverse. This theatre, accomodating only some forty patrons, is found in the same location as the only theatre bookstore in Nice, which also publishes plays from la Traverse. Many theatres are frequented by the student population since they are located near the most important theatrical institution of the region, the Centre dramatique national de Nice, created in 1969 by Gabriel Monnet. Near the old town, across from the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, is the present home of this theatre, an octagonal block of clear grey marble, built in 1989. Jacques Weber is its current director. Rebaptized the Thtre National de Nice by its new director in January, 2002, the TNN rises on an esplanade enlivened by a number of prestigious contemporary works of art, among them a statue by Niki de Saint-Phalle and a mobile by Calder. All this adjoins the new municipal library of the city, inaugurated in June, 2002. There is also a caf on the square in front of the TNN, where on certain Sundays, onlookers remain motionless, fascinated by people dancingby the long, magnificent legs supporting the upright busts of the tango performers, with their striking features. The theatre possesses two auditoriums and a rehearsal room. The large Italian-style main theatre can seat nine hundred, while the other can accommodate three hundred. The first is named after Pierre Brasseur, the other after Michel Simon. The theatre faces in any case a considerable challenge. It must confront a number of prejudices, among these that it belongs to a certain intellectual elite, while still respecting its mission and offering productions that can be widely appealing. Without giving in to compromise, the new director, Daniel Benoin, seems on the way toward meeting this challenge. His object is to develop a dramatic center that will stimulate creativity on the local, national and international levels, notably by establishing a permanent company of actors and by developing new perspectives. An author, actor, and director, born in 1947, he was trained in business and obtained a doctorate in Sciences from the Gestion des Entreprises in 1972, also the date when he created his first theatrical production. The prod62

uct of university theatre training, he became the director of the Comdie de Saint-tienne in 1978 after having served for three years as its co-director. In 1982 he founded the School of the Comdie de Saint-tienne. Among the sixty-odd plays that he directed, one can see that he favored the work of certain authors, such as Pierre Bourgeade at the beginning of his career, Franz Kafka, Bchner (whose Woyzeck he revived several times, both in its dramatic and operatic forms), and also Goethe, Brecht, Thomas Bernhard, Botho Strauss and Urs Widmer, from the German-language tradition. Shakespeare and Molire were also represented among his thirty years of productions; King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet from the former and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, LEcole des femmes and LAvare from the latter. Among other French and Francophone authors, he also presented works by Victor Hugo, Henri Becque, Romain Weingarten, Ren Kalisky, Eugne Ionesco, Eugne Labiche, Pierre Louki and also Marie Laberge. He also created some works of his own, such as Sigmaringen in 1990. Working both in France and abroad, he directed some twenty operas. An actor both on stage and in the films, he sometimes acted in his own productions, and often designed the lighting as well. President of the Convention Thtrale Europenne, founder and director of the Forum du Thtre Europen, President of the Centre Europen de la Jeune Mise en scne and Vice-President of the lACID (Agence pour la cration et linnovation dans la dcentralisation dramatique), Daniel Benoin has many responsibilities; these also provide him with concrete European perspectives for guiding the futureof the TNN. His first season at Nice opened with two productions he directed of non-theatre works which deeply engaged him, Festen and Misery. Festen, the Danish film of Vinterberg, responded to a series of rules of cinematografic conduct proposed by Dogme 95, and, with Lars Von Trier as the leader, it was awarded the Special Prize by the Jury at Cannes in 1998. This involved a theatrical adaptation by Bohr Hansen (translated into French by Daniel Benoin in collaboration with Sejer Andersen) of the scenario of Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov. The director was also responsible for the staging and lighting. This production was created 1 October 2002, at Nice and presented through 3 November, and will be revived at the Thtre du Rond Point in Paris from April to 17 May 2003. The story portrays a family reunion, celebrating with a party the

fathers sixtieth birthday. His two sons are present, the table, the spectacle necessarily had a different as well as one of his daughters, although the other resonance in Nice. This image of a white, blond committed suicide in the year just past. The family woman, embracing a man of color she loved awakparty seems to progress according to a certain rouened political echoes. What seems normal elsetine until the father asks his older son to say a few where is considered here an act of resistance against words in memory of the loss of his younger sister. racial prejudice. When a National Centre The son then reveals that his father sexually abused Dramatique, subsidized by a government associated him and the sister who is now dead. The enormity with the politics mentioned above presents such an of this revelation makes it incredible in the eyes of image, this is taken as a significant act of political the others and the fathers reputation is preserved engagement. until this same son, supported by his brother and sisThe cast was composed of eighteen actors, ter, attacks the father. among them a major French actor particularly wellFor this adaptation, Daniel Benoin totally known in films, Jean-Pierre Cassel. This was the altered the large auditorium in his theatre. Half of first offering by the permanent company of the the seats in the orchestra were removed, so that the TNN, including Jacques Bellay, Paul Charriras, space usually occupied by the audience became a Paulo Correia, Sophie Duez, Frdric de Goldfiem playing area. The spectators were invited to sit on and Ccile Mathieu. Such a group of actors permathe stage on two sets of bleachers facing each other, nently associated with a theatre is quite recent in between which was set up, on the same level as the France. It was advocated with the Minister of auditorium, an immense table elaborately set for some forty people. The rest of the theatre was illuminated but totally unadorned, and each balcony represented the different rooms of those invited to the family celebration. Not only were the spectators asked to sit on the stage, usually reserved for the actors, but certain of them were even invited into the playing area, as if they were guests at the party. Apparently making up part of the assembly, they remained observers who were a priori indifferent to the speech of the son. In addition to exposing the social scourge of incest, this production also revealed racism in certain characters, especially when the daughters companion arrives at the height of the celebration. He suffers several moments of drunken insults from certain guests of the event. Black and Englishspeaking, it was inevitable that he be a musician, and so on. When, at the end of the evening, this couple embraces amourously while standing on Daniel Benoin, director of the Thtre National de Nice. Photo : Alain Brard 63

Culture, most notably by Stphane Braunschweig, Alain Franon and Georges Lavaudant in 2001, and finally realized, among others, by Stanislas Nordey at the Thtre Grard Philipe at Saint-Denis. The presence of a permanent company has helped to modify the image of theatre in the city, affirming a new, more artistic identity and creating bonds between the theatre and the citys population following the course of a company. To take only the activity of one of them as an example, the attentive spectator would realize that he had already seen the thirty-year-old Paulo Correia, trained, like most of the others, at the cole du Centre Dramatique National de Saint-tienne, as the interpreter during three months of three creations as different as Festen, Enda Walshs Disco Pigs, directed by Frdric de Goldfiem, and Molires LAvare, directed by Daniel Benoin. Correia also directed, with Ccile Mathieu, a little piece planned to encourage theatrical activities in the schools, Paul Austers Laurel et Hardy vont au paradis. The seasons second play was Simon Moores Misery, after the novel of the same name by Stephen King. It was both staged and acted by Daniel Benoin, along with Myriam Boyer, in a setting designed by Jean-Pierre Laporte and lighting by Daniel Benoin on the small stage of the TNN. Here also the theme chosen was hardly innocent, since it was involved with artistic freedom. Following an automobile accident, a successful author finds himself in the home of one of his admirers, who is also a nurse. She takes care of him but then imprisons him and promises to release him only if he reworks his most recent novel and bring back to life the person who died in it. The gagged author naturally suggests a metaphor of artistic censorship and the difficulties of an art that will not submit to its public. In order to survive, the creator here however, must give in to the literary desires of his reader. This creative choice shows clearly that discussions of art have not always taken into account for whom it is intended and how that may encourage a compliance with that audience. If it responds only to the needs of a particular public, the work of art may become fixed in a particular, often commercial theatrical form. Creation should be the determined by the artist, not by reception. Writing is a process that is paradoxically solitary, collective, and autarkical. If theatrical form responds to precise artistic criteria so that the production with serve the expectations of a public, theatrical creation will become a site of the manufacture of a product designed for the con64

sumption of a pre-determined clientele. It will comply with the anticipation of its public reception. But is that public a uniform mass, a single thinking body seated somewhere or other ? There is not a unique theatre type, not a single public, and therefore dramatic art should not be limited to any single mode of practice. Therefore, one can think of two ways of working: either the artists move toward the public or the public moves toward the artists. These involve two quite different esthetics and orientations from the actors. In fact, a production can change when viewed afresh during theatrical performance. This problematic operates in a totally different way for the great cinematic productions. The enormous commerical impact that a successful film may have involves the systematic taking into account of the consumer-spectator at every stage of its creation. Multiple viewings to test emotional impact and other investigations take place in order to modify the product and to adapt it as closely as possible to its consumer. Thus, certain DVD films even offer the viewer the option of chosing the end of the story. Among the eight new productions of the TNN for the forty shows offered during the 2002/2003 season, two were directed by Daniel Benoin, two others by Jacques Bellay, one by Frdric de Goldfiem (both permanent members of the company), while two others opened the doors to two young Nioise companies: the Compagnie du Grain de sable, with a text by Eugne Durif directed by Jacques Laurent, and the Compagnie Demain la veille, with an adaptation of an unpublished play by Isral Horovitz, directed by Gilles Fvrier. The eighth creation is part of an original project of Daniel Benoin, to invite each year a foreign director to create a production with French actors. Thus Krysztof Warlikowski from Poland, a former assistant of Peter Brook, agreed to come to create at the TNN Shakespeares Midsummer Nights Dream. Among the directors invited for this same season are found artists as divers as Andre Moguchy, in connection with the Festival des Arts et du Cinma Russes, Jean-Claude Penchenat, co-creator of the Thtre du Soleil, Claude Stratz, former assistant of Patrice Chreau, invited by the Comdie-Franaise to stage Molires Le malade imaginaire, Maurice Bnichou, an actor associated with Peter Brook, directing Fabrice Luchini in Jules Romaines Knock, as well as Jean-Michel Ribes, Philippe Adrien, Alfredo Arias, Yves Beaunesne, Jacques Nichet and the young Hungarian director rpd Schilling. Thus every spectator will find something to please

While some audience members would prefer to see a classic text, especially it is bears the seal of approval of the Comdie-Franaise, other rush to see Luchini, while some, curious to discover theatre that is out of the ordinary, will risk going to see the production by rpd Schilling: Hazm hazm (Country, my dear country). In an hour and forty minutes, a political and poetic tempest portrays the sufferings of the Hungarian people, renamed the Grungarian people. Inspired by Bchner, the text is the work of the author Istvn Tasndi and of rpd Schilling. Born in 1974, this 28-year-old artist brought with him the Compagnie Krtakr (The Chalk Circle, in homage to Brecht), which he founded in 1994 after five years of study at the Advanced School of Dramatic in Budapest. The artistes present, singing, playing, dancing, and weeping, with brio, the turbulent history of Hungary from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 until 2002. With an infectuous enthusiasm they denounce the ideologies and the ill effects of a consumer society on their country. The setting shows a circus ring made up of wooden chest-benches, from which the actors pull their props. In the center of the circular stage a moveable platform allows a pool to be discovered. The satire is accompanied by an orchestra which updates traditional Hungarian and Gypsy music. The arrival of a new despot is hailed, and when he brings a microwave oven to liberate his people the joy is universal. But soon everyone notices that there is nothing to put in the oven. The problems thus remain the same from one ideology to another. No tyranny fills the belly of a hungry people. International aid is held up to ridicule when a representative of the European Union is taken for Zeus by the nave populace. He speaks to them in a foreign language. The Grongrois do not disarm and proudly present a woman who translates into Russian everything the spokesman wants to say to the new arrival. But he does not understand; he speaks only English. Then an individual who seems to speak that language steps forward from the group of Grongois. When he begins speaking, however, one recognizes that he is repeating the lyrics from a song by the Rolling Stones. When, later, aware of his mistake, the UE representative comes back to speak to them in Grongrois, the gap still remains. He speaks to them about parking problems while the peoples real problem still remains having enough to eat. This play was given several months earlier in suburban Paris at the Maison de la Culture de 65

him.

Bobigny, who co-sponsored the production. The former director of Bobigny, Ariel Goldenberg, who is presently director of the Thtre National de Chaillot, was not at all mistaken in inviting this prodigious offering to France, nor was his successor, Patrick Sommier, who understood this perfectly and invited them in his turn. The production did not however receive the public attention that it merited in Nice. Certainly a Hungarian production, supertitled in French, presented by unknown young artists was certain to put off some people. And yet the enthusiasm of these two evenings was such that many spectators had the illusion that they understood Hungarian. The director of the theatre is to be congratulated upon taking the risk, for if potential spectators had realized what this production had to offer, the theatre would have been full. When Fabrice Luchini came to present Knock, it was thought that this was a strictly commercial enterprise and that the artists were well aware of this. Nevertheless the production was quite interesting in many ways. On the other hand, Luchini offered a special performance of Larrive New York, based on Louis-Ferdinand Clines Le voyage au bout de la nuit, which he had presented for the opening of the centre dramatique in 1989. Larrive New York lasted one hour and sixteen minutes, but the production in fact lasted another forty minutes during which, as paratext, a second part, or an appendix, the actor had to stretch out and remain on stage for a final senquence, quoting Cline and Nietzsche, we no longer knew which, perhaps to avoid attacks on his philanthropic attitude: People avenge themselves for the services done. But let us go back to the first part. The stage is bare, with a chair somewhat to one side and a bench somewhat to the other. Both of these setting elements are dark green, as one finds in many parks. The decision to keep the setting simple accords with the approach of Luchini, whose simple and praiseworthy ambition is to place himself at the service of a text and an author. The undertaking is therefore appreciable, yet humble. Fabrice Luchini, who last year presented two productions about Louis Jouvet, has thus pronounced himself his disciple. During this hour and sixteen minutes, aside from a few pauses, one hears a text, one hears a work, one hears Cline. It must be recognized that this is rather rare. What is moving is that the most serious moments are the most beautiful, those in which one suddenly feels a total identification between Luchini and Cline. Through certain phrases, certain thoughts,

the troubling fear and anguish of an actor overtake the story of Bardamu and Molly. When Luchini utters a sentence such as: This is perhaps what one is seeking throughout life, nothing but this, that is, the greatest possible sorrow, to become oneself before dying, the writing which transports him touches the spectator equally profoundly. Luchini hits his consonants hard, particularly the occlusives, with a heavy stress upon the muted occlusive p, and accents with long vowels that do not exist in French the words whose sense he seeks thus to prolong. His right hand marks the rhythm of the text in the air, drawing imaginary hills as if tracing the course of the writing and better indicating its wanderings to his reader-spectator. Thus he succeeded in becoming a kind of open book, in which one hears the whole course of Clines American autobiography. He appears to emphasize the beauty of Clines style by sometimes repeating several phrases (essentially, I think, to reinforce the memory of the text in process). He would have been at the peak of his enterprise if, after the well-deserved applause, he had the courage to enter that nowhere of the actor who leaves the stage. His respect for the Style would then have been preserved. But no. Delighted by the nine hundred people before him, the actor is unable to leave the stage and as a suddenly miserable being (in the Pascalian sense of the work) he destroys the whole enterprise just offered. He wants to be his own author, but he no longer has a text. He cannot entirely emprovise either, for this extension is still part of the production. Without any judgement and simply as a kind of report he plays to the gallery, seeking to win their applause. He thus becomes pitiful in the literal sense of the term. It is quite extraordinary. He will not refer to the course of the production that he has just done, he says jokingly, since it would not be right to give two performances for the price of one. All the same he refers to a passage from his other work on Cline and laughs in a casual manner: I am going to do that for you. He begins, but does not finish and anticipates criticisms that might be made of his production by indulging in a kind of autocriticism.

What a pity that he did not have the humility to be content with Cline. He evokes a madame who has come to the theatre with her husband rather put off by the style of this genre, to whom he has promised a little additional supplement. He cites another madame in such and such a town who asked him why he repeated the same phrase twice. Only for the Style . . . In the course of a sentence he critiques Jeannine Castaldi, a great French actress much appreciated by professionals and little known to the general public. Beyond her, he tweaks the Avignon Festival in a very general way, Antoine Vitez, the Conservatory, and so on. The public laughs, but do they really know why? Luchini can do whatever he likes (which is practically what he is doing at this moment) and people will laugh. He asks them to sing a Mammy blues and suddenly the auditorium resounds as if with a single voice in the refrain of Nicolettas popular song. Even though he has not been faithful at all to his primary text, he asks those present What do you want as the last text? La Fontaine, answers the audience. He then begins a fable, and, losing his inspiration, stumbles over the text, admits this and goes off in another direction without ever finishing the fable. And so on. It is if not lamentable, at least sad. In order to deal with vanity, the actor should be able also to know how to escape from it. All is vanity indeed. Louis Jouvet himself said so in his Le comdien dsincarn, and continued: The actor knows this and lives it. He can only momentarily, however active, glorious, and superficial he may be, not be assailed by the emptiness of this vanity. He cannot avoid feeling it, knowing it, perceiving it, and whatever gestures he may make there comes upon him suddently an internal silence, lassitude and discouragement. This theatrical eclecticism is to be seen, well suited to Nice with its theatre of nature where the promenade des Anglais ultimately brings together all social classes before the sea. There one recalls the words of Euripides Iphigenia: The sea carries away everything that is evil in man. (Translated by Marvin Carlson)

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A Review of the 2002 London Theatre Season


Robert Skloot Theatre is one of Londons true glories, unpleasant being many years delayed, makes the and a visitor to the city is required to spend time case for the economic independence of enjoying its vast and various offerings. In fact, the womenbut with a twist; after the revelation of greatest handicap to seeing London theatre is its Mrs. Warrens profession, the real interest shifts cost; tickets, like the city as a whole, are often largely to its effect on her daughter Vivie. exceptionally pricey, though concessions exist for Mrs. Warren is discussed more interestingseniors and students, and half-price tickets can be ly as a story of Vivies education, not at the unifound. versity (she has won first-class honors in mathematThe productions of the fall 2002 season ics), but in life. Shaw provides her with a series of included a number of non-English plays, as eviconfrontations (with unacceptable suitors, and espedenced in the obligatory Chekhov (a highly praised cially with her mother) that test both her susceptiUncle Vanya in Briel Friels version), and other bility to marriage and her ethical mettle. One sticky Europeans (Buchners Woyzeck, Schnitzlers La problem that the playwright had difficulty in settling Ronde adapted to the Irish troubles as Ten concerns the issue of incest in the courtship between Rounds), as well as some forays into non-Western Vivie and her half-brother Frank, which is left sussubjects with explicitly Western forms (Andrew pended and unresolved. (In this early play, Shaw Lloyd Webbers splashy musical Bombay Dreams makes clear that there is no man available who can and a South African musical called Umoja: The provide the perfect match for this excellent woman, Spirit of Togetherness). Curiously, there was hardly a continuing concern from Arms and the Man any American drama on view if musicals and The (1894) through Back to Methuselah (1922).) The Vagina Monologues are excluded, though in past play concludes with the second of two confrontaseasons Americans have been very well represented tions between Mrs. Warren and her daughter, and (Mamet, Miller, etc.). What follows here is one visVivies education is achieved with her rejection of itors overview of mostly English theatre, and without any mention of Shakespeare whose presence is ubiquitous and eternal. I. Revivals Concluding long and successful runs were three revivals of plays from the first and second thirds of the twentieth century. All of them saved a surprising directing choice for the last seconds of performance. The first, Bernard Shaws Mrs. Warrens Profession (written 1894; performed 1902) is revived occasionally because of the nature of the playwrights criticism of social hypocrisy as it relates to womens issues. The profession referred to in the title is prostitution, and Mrs. Warrens social status and sybaritic personal lifestyle are supported by it. The play, which was refused a license to be performed in its own day resulting in the production of this play

Brenda Blethyn and Laurence Fox in Mrs. Warrens Profession. Photo: Tristram Kenton

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her mother, not because her profession (which has supported Vivie too) is immoral, but because it is maintained long after it shouldnt be, thereby enhancing both the subjugation of women, the reaffirmation of patriarchal/capitalist economics and the hypocrisy of the ruling class. Sir Peter Halls disappointing production, in which his daughter Rebecca gives a fine performance as Vivie, presents ably the easy ninety percent of the text, completely avoiding the truly interesting dimensions of character that would provide a revival in 2002 with more than momentary interest. The incestuous interest of selfish, lascivious Frank, the dissolute history of his reverend father (and likely Vivies too), the desperate, corrupt pragmatism of Croft (Vivies sixty-year old suitor), the wilful avoidance of ethical problems by the aesthete Praed, even Mrs. Warrens eliding of her nearabandonment of her daughter, are the dark and dangerous edges of character that are missing from this production. In their place is a crisp but empty reading of a text whose social concerns are of minimal interest to todays audiences absent any deeper exploration of the characters psychology. This Mrs. Warren refuses to stoop, and cannot conquer. The first and last images confirm the failure of the production. Beginning the production and continuing with every scene change, an excerpt from Shaws Authors Apology about censorship is projected on a scrim, thereby fixing the production in the past. The directors program note addresses only this historical theme. And by ending the play with a far too protracted emotional outburst by Vivie, alone on stage, as she rejects forever her mother and Frank and signals her graduation from the school of hard knocks, Hall misses other worthy, perhaps necessary interpretative opportunities. Clearly, this final moment was too little, too late. The second revival was by Somerset Maugham, whose reputation rests almost entirely on three or four comedies from the nineteen-twenties and thirties, though his thematic and tonal range is far more expansive and interesting than these old standards would suggest. (Our Betters from 1917, for example, is a much more intriguing and complex play of character, and much more bitter, than The Circle, although it is the latter that gets revived.) On view was The Constant Wife, a play that provides the protagonist of its title (named Constance) the opportunity, and at great rhetorical length, to advocate (and activate) a feminists preference for marital equality based on financial inde68

pendence. (The play was written in 1927.) Following an elaborate, year-long scheme to earn a livelihood unconnected to her surgeon husband Johns, Constance announces she will be embarking on a six-week tour of Italy with a former suitor, that they will be travelling as a married couple, and that she will pay for her excursion with earnings from her new business. Hers is a particularly satisfying decision because the previous action of the play had dealt almost entirely with Johns infidelities, in particular his affair with his wifes best friend. The fun of The Constant Wife derives largely from our knowledge that Constance (in a very strong performance by Jenny Seagrove) has known all along about Johns extra-marital activities but has chosen to keep silent until she is ready to assert independence on her own terms. Nonetheless, the only real surprise of this capable production was provided in the final image: Johns exasperated acceptance of his wifes autonomy followed in the last seconds by his collapsing into a chair distraught, alone, and apparently weeping. (The echo of Ibsens Nora departing her dolls house for a new life is unmistakeable.) Maugham does not specify this action in his stage directions (She lightly kisses her hand to him and slips out, slamming the door behind her.) and though Johns gesture is possible and theatrical, it doesnt ring especially true to the production that preceded it. Still, it was a popular moment for the audience, implying greater depth to John and the play than met the satisfied eye (the period set and costumes were pleasing), and it provided a moment of emotion to a text whose themes and characters are more than a little mechanical. In 2002, Michael Frayns Benefactors, originally produced in 1984, received its first West End revival in an exceedingly strong production directed by Jeremy Sams. Frayn, like Maugham, possesses an astonishing range; this drama is both serious and dark, entirely opposite his luminous farce Noises Off that appeared in London at roughly the same time a generation ago. In Benefactors, two couples, one successful and generous, one hapless and insecure, become locked in an increasingly bitter battle with each other over social friendships, political revolution and personal ethics. The title refers to David and Janes beneficent attitude toward their neighbors Colin and Sheila, as well as to their devotion to providing the poor and downtrodden with better housing and social services. These practical concerns of life are the

The Constant Wife. Photo: Tristram Kenton

stuff that dreams are made of and by which dreams are destroyed. Davids architectural plan to rebuild a neighborhood inventively and humanely withers over the years, along with his liberalism; Sheilas struggle to find happiness in an oppressive marriage wins many minor victories over considerable time. Which is to say that the future Frayn provides for his richly developed characters is open and, therefore, freshly and engrossingly investigated. The play is elegantly crafted, and the discussions of social policy and political initiatives gone awry are grounded in moving explorations of individuals and the way all come to grief despite their best intentions. The title of the play is charged with irony. The most provocative part of Benefactors is Davids difficulty in recognizing and then dealing with Colins evil nature. Full of rage and crippled by insecurity, Colins destructiveness lays waste to Sheilas self-confidence and Davids idealism. Later, Sheila (with Davids help) rises to the occasion while David responds mostly with puzzlement and concern. A force of malignant intelligence, Colin tests the assumptions of all his benefactors, and by plays end it is the women, in different ways, 69

who are able to extract themselves from his destructive grip. The final (and unnecessary) directorial flourish has the set (a single large room) come apart horizontally at a place ten feet above the stage floor to reveal a vista of rooftops that refer to Davids original architectural scheme long-since consigned (along with Colins anarchism) to the dustbin of history. (Contemporary events brought an unexpected, distracting intrusion to the second act of Benefactors when several references to Davids project spoke of bringing down those two towers. Seeing this excellent production near the first anniversary of September 11 provided those lines with a disturbing, unintended force.) II. New Plays Four new plays, all well-reviewed, provide a sense of the range of theatrical offerings in London this season. The first, Nicholas Wrights Vincent in Brixton, dramatizes the forgotten three years, beginning in 1873, when Van Gogh lived and worked in Londons Brixton neighborhood. The play is a meticulous and mostly cheerless rendering

of a artists early life foreshadowing his eventual descent into madness and self-destruction. Richard Eyre has directed the text with complete dedication to old-fashioned realism. Vincent (Jochum Ten Taaf) arrives to rent a room from Ursula Loyer (Claire Higgins) while lunch is being cooked in her kitchen; the chopping and cooking of vegetables comprises much of the stage business of act one (smells included). Van Gogh, employed by an art dealer at the time, falls in love instantly with the proprietors daughter, but settles instead for the mother whom he seduces, liberates, and later abandons. The final scene of the drama, played in semi-darkness on a stage filled with dirty dishes, drying laundry and wet clothing (it is storming outside), provides the first and only image in the play of Van Gogh as a practicing artist. The naturalist playwrights of the late nineteenth-century, as one critic of the time declared, wrote about passing through the long and nauseating kitchens of life to find the hard truth of existence. Although Vincent in Brixton is long, it is more depressing than nauseating as Wright parcels out his story of one famous artists slow trajectory from a confused, sexually repressed bourgeois to a

half-insane degenerate and religious fanatic. The performances are uniformly excellent, and the atmosphere exquisitely delineated (and occasionally pungent). The oppressiveness of Ursulas life and home reveal a palpable sense of despair alleviated only by a comic scene of linguistic misunderstanding occasioned by the brief appearance of Vincents morally conservative (and equally repressed) sister, Ana. But I wondered if the production wasnt drawing too much attention to its own old-fashioned, self-contained virtues. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that the importance of Van Gogh really doesnt begin until his departure from Brixton, the play is leading up to something that it cannot reveal. Filling in the historical blanks of Vincents miserable English sojourn allows for wide latitude on the playwrights part, but the play itself has little of the resonance of, say, Chekhovs lost and repressed characters who carry with and within them the demise imperial Russia. To be fair to Wright, he has written interesting characters whom he is reluctant to judge (except for Ana), but ones that dont mean any more than themselves or have substance except within the space of a lower-class London kitchen. In this long

Paul Nichols and Jochum ten Haaf in Vincent in Brixton. Photo Courtesy: National Theater

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production, the pauses are protracted not only because the emotions of the characters are buried so deep, but because the discovery and release of them is the productions ultimate purpose. The result is a production that is always rigidly controlled in its minutest detail, and for that feels cramped, airless and earthbound. If Vincent in Brixton recalls the early European realists, Martin McDonaghs The Lieutenant of Inishmore looks back to the tasteless farces that Joe Orton wrote in the 1970s. But his play begins where Orton left off, taking Ortons nasty politics (making fun of rape in What the Butler Saw) and violent humor (the on-the-loose eyeball of Loot) to an original and grotesque level his outrageous predecessor couldnt imagine, though of which he would have surely approved. In Lieutenant, the Beverly Hillbillies play war in the Ulster slaughterhouse. Set in rural Northern Ireland against the backdrop of the continuing troubles, the play begins with the accidental death of a cat and ends with a stage flooded in an intentional red tide of happy homicide. The cat called Wee Thomas belongs to Mad Padraic, a psychopathic killer-torturer (the second scene involves a victim hanging upside-down from a block and tackle being threatened with having his nipples cut off), in whose bloody excesses McDonagh manages to find something both appalling and hilarious. In part, the humor derives from watching a group of goofy misfits with brains no larger than cats, enabling us to enjoy the moments when grey matter is splashed over the walls with frequency and abandon. Two of the three survivors spend the second act dismembering the corpses of the killed, sawing apart limbs and tossing viscera, all the while discussing their unhappiness with their job situation. Earlier, atrocity was displaced by an argument over word choice. (Pinter does this, bloodlessly, in The Dumbwaiter.) By separating behavior from consequence and event from reality, McDonagh produces a theatrical cartoon that evokes laughter from an audience where the cheaper seats in the rear stalls are probably more desirable than the more pricey ones in front. Nonetheless, there is a real wound that McDonagh is picking at under the mayhem: the half-century of brutality that has claimed thousands of victims in Northern Ireland through car bombings, political assassinations and police brutality. The extraordinary achievement of Lieutenant is to 71

drive home the terror of a situation at the same time it encourages us, successfully, to laugh at it. It asks us to see that the real assassins and torturers are little more than madmen (and women) who produce suffering and chaos in pursuit of sentimentalised political dreams that are nightmares for everyone who gets caught up in them. The final joke is on us, of course, because although the assassins are as much a danger to themselves as they are to others, no one is safe any longer, not in Belfast, nor in Moscow, nor in Bali. The cast is impeccable. Originally mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, the production transferred to London in February 2002, on the strength of ecstatic reviews and is now ensconced solidly in the West End. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is bloody good theatre. Sophie Fauchers adaptation of the writings of Frida Kahlo was presented at the Lyric Hammersmith in a limited run of the Ex Machina Company from Montreal, by the acclaimed Canadian director Robert Lepage. The English language version was done by Neil Bartlett, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, whose new translations of classical French plays have made an important contribution to the English-speaking theatre. With Faucher playing the lead (assisted by two other actors), Kahlos turbulent career is brought to stage life in a series of extraordinary images managed by a technical crew twice the size of the cast. (They take a deserved curtain call at the end of the hour-and-a-half long production.) Surprising, haunting and occasionally moving, Lepage has found the perfect story for his extraordinary visual imagination. What subject could be better than the work of a painter in love with color and freedom, whose life was a terrible mixture of personal betrayal (her lover Diego Riveras sickness was to sleep with any women he fanciedincluding Fridas sister) and physical pain? I took my tears and I turned them into paintings, Kahlo says. Not until her death in 1954, at La Casa Azul (her house in Coyocan near Mexico City), did she receive the acclaim she deserved. Her irrepressible will to paint through her suffering and wrath, overcame finally the restrictions of a male dominated and regulated society. (Catholicism, strangely, is never criticized in the text.) At one remarkable moment, Kahlo is hoisted from her hospital bed and becomes a piata for others to strike at and break, a fitting symbol of the abuse and assault she endured and one which is located within a pre-

cise cultural and historical context. Other of Lepages images are equally powerful and, fittingly, colorful: Kahlo in a floating bathtub filling with blood, Rivera shattering his 1933 New York Rockefeller Center mural, a doubledecker bed that is transformed in a number astonishing and dynamic ways. But for all their beauty and power, the images force upon the play a rhythmical flatness that may be as unavoidable as it is problematic. Thus, La Casa Azul moves ahead chronologically from image to image, but the pace of the narrative seems determined by preparations to reveal the next visual moment. For example, an extended, silent scene when Diego, drunk and in despair, plays Russian Roulette, serves to prepare for Fridas appearance in the hospital bed, but retards the forward movement of the play. Which is to say that La Casa Azul is captive to the curtains and scrims that are necessary for it to create its amazing visual style. In its favor, Lepage enlivened several bridge scenes with music of Mexico, and Bartletts translation is earthy (a long monolog of Kahlos called Shorn Locks) and full of fun (a scene where Kahlo and Rivera conclude their marriage contract). But the words are insufficiently powerful by themselves, and they are subordinated to the visual component that makes the productions ninety-minute length often feel sluggish. Still, Fauchers strong performance as Frida is able to give the lie to one of Kahlos last (and sentimental) lines: Ive spent my whole life dying. La Casa Azul could lay claim to being one of the most inventive and original productions of the London season. Performed by two actors on a raked fourmeter square stage with only two chairs, small table and an ashtray, Caryl Churchills newest play received much attention and discussion, in large part because of her theme: cloning. Lasting only an hour, A Number (meaning some, referring to the unknown number of clones of one of the characters) brings new meaning to the theatre term doubling. Characters often outnumber the actors who play them in a production, making it necessary for an actor to play several roles. But A Number adds the twist of an actor in multiple roles playing the same character. (The play is for two actors. One plays Salter, the other his sons.) It makes for a fascinating, and thought provoking production. Over the course of an hour, Salter confronts several of his sons, who are the same son. Churchills wonderful idea is to locate the encounter 72

not among medical professionals or academics who might be expected to debate the merits and horrors of cloning, but in a discussion of the subject by the clones or their progenitors. Thus, we are party to a dramatization of how the cloned themselves feel about what has been done to them. The problem for the audience, however, is that we cannot be sure what they have done to each other. Salter, it seems, has managed to have his deceased child cloned a number of times, but under circumstances that are impossible to objectively verify. In dialog with at least three of his sons, different answers are provided to the reasons for and circumstances of the medical procedures that were carried out. There is, among the three, an original son and two others, who look alike but are, it is noted in the program, different. The surprise of the production, directed by Stephen Daldry, is to have the actor playing the sons leave the stage and then return without any alteration, so that it is not always clear which son has reentered. Thus the dialog folds in upon itself, repetitive but refreshed as conversation between the two characters speaking, as well as the characters themselves, are both the same and different. At times, the encounters are suffused by a dread and violence that early Pinter elicited in his comedies of menace, and the fascination accumulates as the past becomes slippery and the pronouns become unstuck from their referents. The production seems to go astray in the several places where Salter, unaccountably, begins to break down physically. At one point shaking convulsively, at another stammering, at yet another falling to the floor facing upstage, the characters behavior is unmotivated and unexplained, giving the effect that the director is playing some kind of game with the audience, perhaps as a way to emphasize the unreliability of the facts of the story. This behavior results in doubting all the reality of the play, making it harder to believe in the reality of the world it is creating. (It does produce occasional comedy, however.) Although Salter could reasonably explain his reasons for cloning his sons differently to each, reducing the essential veracity of the character is, I believe, a mistake. Michael Gambon (father) and Daniel Craig (sons) provide strong performances in a play that is complicated but not difficult. With A Number, Churchill contributes an important and artful text to a critical social debate. It is a text full of surprises, not the least of which are the last two lines when

Daniel Craig and Michael Gambon in A Number. Photo: Ivan Kyncl

Michael (son number three) responds to Salters And youre happy you say are you? You like your life? with a reply that is both upbeat and contrite: I do yes, sorry. As in her previous work, Churchill has opened up a political, medical and domestic conversation to other voices that deserve a hearing. We havent heard these voices before, and though they may come to sound like others, hers is the original. III. Two Trilogies Alan Ayckbourn and Tom Stoppard are among Englands most popular and prolific playwrights, and both are represented in London by a trilogy of plays that confirm their continuing importance as interpreters of cultures and experimenters in form. The huge pleasures of the six plays in performance derive directly from knowing that they were being staged perfectly and in ways that seem impossible to be replicated later. Under the title Damsels in Distress, Ayckbourn has written and directed three plays joined together by a single set, a riverside apartment in Londons Docklands. They are also joined together by a brilliant cast of seven actors. In his brief Preface to the published scripts, he describes his desire to work again with a repertory company 73

of the kind he had in the nineteen-seventies and eighties at his theatre in Scarborough where Damsels premiered in 2001 before moving to London. The plays are linked also by other stylistic hallmarks, in particular Ayckbourns compassion and understanding for his women characters; there are few writers of such generosity and concern in the theatre today. (He has written more than sixty plays.) Here, however, the plays touch lightly upon the oppressive, degrading and lonely condition of women that is more emphatically seen in, say, Just Between Ourselves and Woman in Mind. Flatspin is the most frivolous of the trilogy. It describes the comic results that follow from providing a false name in a sudden moment of confusion or opportunity. Rosie Seymore, an actor, becomes Joanna Rupelford to disguise the fact that shes not the actual tenant of the riverside apartment so that she can begin a relationship with the man next door. In doing so, Rosie comes to realize that she has become an accomplice to a complicated scheme involving the laundering a great deal of illgotten money by an inept and contentious criminal enterprise. Flatspin contains a number of amusing plot twists, but it is a rather weightless if amusing effort that precedes two efforts of greater substance.

Gameplan explores also the implications of another womans voluntary change of identity. Here, the woman is the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Sorrell Saxon who attempts stabilize her chaotic life (her mother Lynette has lost both husband and job) by beginning an after-school career as an internetadvertising prostitute named Mandy. The considerable humor the play generates involves Sorrell, together with her adoring disciple Kelly, preparing to turn her first trick in the riverside apartment. And after the retired dry cleaner Leo arrives for his assignation, and later dies of a heart attack on the living room floor, the girls frantic attempt to dispose of the body provides more (unneeded) evidence for Ayckbourns status as one of our greatest farce writers. After a nasty encounter with police (one a weird Bible-quoting fundamentalist) and a smarmy tabloid journalist, the play concludes with Sorrell and Lynette in a moment of high expectation that the future may be a bit brighter for the ex-hooker and her single mom. Roleplay is the most serious and the most comic play of the trilogy. It begins with preparations for Justin and Julie-Anns dinner party in the riverside apartment at which they plan to announce their engagement to their parents who will be meeting for the first time. The plans, of course, go awry in a major way for reasons as diverse as a misplaced spoon, a ferocious rainstorm, and a surprise visit from an ex-dancer named Paige Petite who is being held captive upstairs by an ex-boxer named Micky Rale. As the title implies, the supper depends on concealing the truth about a number of identities that are revealed at the conclusion, most notably in a sprint to freedom by Paige and Justin who run off together into the drenching night. Although their happy future is neither assured nor even reasonable, both see life more clearly than they had before. And at that moment, Ayckbourn provides Paige with the trilogys most pointed speech: Most men I know, if you look in their eyes, all you see is this hate. Incredible. They really hate us women, most of them. Ive never known why that is. But Im always seeing it. I mean, real, real hatred, you know. Its like we threaten them. And the more they love us, the more they need us and the more they need usthe more they hate us because they need us. Bloody men. Crazy bastards. In his Preface, Ayckbourn summarizes his pleasure at the conditions that gave rise to his three connected plays: they will always remain an entity, 74

born out of a company. Written for a small group of actors with talent, stamina, a sense of teamwork and a taste for adventure. Although none of the plays is as good as Ayckbourns best, Damsels is deeply satisfying because its company of actors, directed in a way to liberate and congeal multiple performance talents is the envy of theatre people everywhere. Only one example of his companys achievement is the work of Alison Pargeter who, as Rosie, Kelly and Paige, contributes to the London season not one but three performances of astonishing range, impressive skill and surpassing loveliness. The upper lobby of the National Theatre displays an exhibit recounting the successes and controversies over its forty-plus year history. In 2002, filling (and overfilling) the stage of the Olivier Theatre, Stoppards The Voyage to Utopia was its latest triumph. Working together with the Nationals Artistic Director Trevor Nunn, Stoppards three plays are nothing less than a pageant of the political history of Europe during the middle thirty years of the nineteenth century. The overall effect is almost always captivating and frequently thrilling; there is no way to overestimate the extraordinary achievement of these productions. Importantly, the trilogy begins and ends with a focus on family, first of the Bakunins, later of the Herzens. Something about a fathers love for his children anchors this historical panorama, and provides to the trilogy its hold on the audiences affection while revolution swirls through it. Together and in opposition, the personal and the political worlds of the plays advance and retreat, describing what appear to be small victories of human goodness and larger disasters of human cruelty and betrayal. Especially in part one (Voyage) when chronology moves ahead and backward through the years 1833-1844, Stoppard lays out the reasons for political change and the forces that work against it. The first play concludes on the Premukhino estate of the aged and blind Alexander Bakunin. He tells his daughter Tatiana how she grew up in Paradise, all of you children, in harmony that was the wonder of all who came here. She cries. He asks if the sun has set, and she replies yes, twice. Inevitably, Utopia recalls Chekhovs melancholy people of privilege who attempt to make sense of Russias political and social turmoil. And the trilogy also reminds us of earlier Stoppard plays which sounded similar alarms about the ambiguous results of revolutions (whether in history or mathematics), as when the pleasures of aes-

Iain Mitchell and Will Keen in The Coast of Utopia: Voyage. Photo: Ivan Kyncl

thetics and comradeship are sacrificed to the vanity of intellectuals and the unfeeling savagery of ideologues. But Stoppards disillusion is spread universally across the political spectrum, and he shows no liking for fanatics on the right or the left. He answers the two questions of parts one and two of the trilogy: whats wrong with this picture? and where is the map?, by returning, at the conclusion of Utopia, to the identical image of Voyage: a garden idyll where an old father and young daughter (here Herzen and Liza) kiss and embrace while the garden fills with voices of comradeship and, of course, an approaching thunderstorm. It is 1868. To the figure of Alexander Herzen falls the task of articulating the playwrights theme, heard ten years ago in another nineteenth-century location in a play with a similar title to this trilogy. Says Septimus Hodge in Arcadia: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. Here, Herzen reiterates Stoppards belief in the incremental advancement of human beings through ceaseless effort moderated by compassion for frailty, recon75

ciliation to disappointment, and the refusal to give ones arm to the slaughter of the innocent in the name of any ideology with an insatiable appetite for human sacrifice. Talking in a dream where the oppositional figures of Turgenev and Marx advance their philosophical projects, Herzen declares that, history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance . . . . We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings . . . Thus, utopia exists as a distant place toward which we can always voyage, and there will be shipwreck(s) (the title of part two) along the way. But with courage and wit we will salvage (part three) the best that can be gotten from our journey through life. Hope is hard work, but it always accompanies us as we endure alternating cycles of displacement and rootedness. (Most of the characters in part three are in exile.) And lastly, on the voyage of life, love redeems as well as revolutionary rhetoric. The emotional center of the play occurs in the second half of part two, when Herzen (Stephen Dillane) and his wife Natalie (Eve Best) reach the first of two crises in their domestic life.

The scene, full of sexual attraction and emotional humiliation, is among the most moving in all of Stoppards long career, and the two actors are superb. One of the wonderful ways in which Stoppard tells his complicated historical narrative is through the use of books, journals, and lettersone might assume that the European postal service in the nineteenth century was one of the better features of society that should have survived the revolutions of the time. He believes in the power of language to produce higher thought and better lives, and he administers the necessary rhetorical medicine in nine hours of exemplary, literate text. Yet, the production moves along at a remarkable pace. Long passages of philosophy are dispensed with lucidity and conviction; quick and clever dialog mixes with heavier disquisitions on the themes of continuance and change. (Utopia dramatizes both the philoso-

phy of European history and the history of European philosophy.) The Nationals company of forty actors and its army of scene changers never rest in bringing this vast panorama to life. Nunns direction is always purposeful and full of wonder, as scenes shift throughout Europe through the use of lights, projections, a turntable stage and, not the least, the deployment of the actors themselves to convey the sweep of events that include a maritime disaster and storming the battlements. Voyage succeeds as the joint effort of two extraordinary artists working at the peak of their creative power, assisted by talented actors and scenic artists who take up the scripts challenges with their own wit and courage. The Coast of Utopia is a theatrical landmark that (with the possible exception of Tony Kushners Angels in America) has no equal in English-speaking drama of our generation.

Will Keen and Douglas Henshall in The Coast of Utopia: Voyage. Photo: Ivan Kyncl

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Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, National Theatre, London, Autumn 2002
Noel Witts In the front of the published text of trilogy was in rehearsal. Stoppards new trilogy about the exiled political and Stoppard starts in Russia, in the philosophical forerunners of the Russian revolution, Chekhovian estate of the Bakunins, Premukhino, he writes of his indebtedness to his director, Trevor north of Moscow, in the summer of 1833. The famNunn, for encouraging me toward some additions ily dines, drinks, laughs, while the souls, or serfs, and subtractions, while inside the program, there is of the estate watch the proceedings with a powerless a quotation from Peter Chaadaev, a mostly forgotten gaze. The plays then move, from 1833 to 1865, to philosopher, to the effect that Russia is one of those the Zoo Gardens in Moscow (bandstand, skating nations which does not seem to form an integral part rink), the office of The Telescope over a Russian of humanity, but which exists only to provide some laundry, a river boat, a street near the Neva in St great lesson to the world. Therein lies the dilemma Petersburg, a ballroom, another Moscow estate, a of Stoppards three plays: Voyage, Shipwreck, and spa in Germany, the Place de la Concorde, Paris, Salvage, which form a nine-hour epic, or can be Herzens apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, a played individually. After nine hours in the prison in Germany, Mediterranean Nice, a crossNational Theatre one emerges tired but elated at the Channel steamer, Herzens houses in Richmond and sweep of events and speeches; after one and a half Hampstead, the Isle of Wight, and finally to Geneva, one merely feels frustrated that its too long and where Herzen declaims one of Stoppards finest wordy. The sweep is necessary because here, after speeches, History has no culmination! There is a long enough time, we have a British dramatist takalways as much in front as behind. There is no ing on board the grand European themes that have libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every always been at the back of British politics, showing moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We shout the flight from Russia and settlement in England, into the mist for this one or other to be opened for France, and Switzerland of such figures as Bakunin, us, but through every gate there are a thousand more Herzen, Marx, Turgenev, and a host of writers and . . . the end we work for must be closer, the labourthinkers of whom most members of the audience ers wage, the pleasure in the work done, the sumhad barely heard. It seems that Russia, and the lesmer lightning of personal happiness . . . sons it teaches, is tapping a need in the UK at presIn the words of one of the more perceptive ent, with Martin Amis, Stoppard, and the historian British critics, we are watching the life of the mind Orlando Figes, publishing work on Russia and its combined with the fabric of everyday life. All this lessons last autumn. Could it be that in a world of is achieved in a series of computerized film and what appear to be blatant Western certainties, slide images by Bill Dudley which sweeps over the Russian mistakes need a contemporary European semi-circular cyclorama at the back of the stage and airing? One of the mixed emotions on emerging form a restless backdrop for the set pieces of each from the theatre was to realize with some pride that scene, where doors open and close, immense tables, England has for so long been a refuge for intellectuchandeliers, settees and chairs form the context for al asylum seekers and that this trilogy celebrates this the crucial and passionate discussions on freedom, as well as the ideas for which these Russians fought authority, the individual, and Russia, which form the and debated. Stoppard, has, with these plays, core of these plays. Its clear that all this has been reclaimed for the UK a theatre of international politboiling at the back of Stoppards mind for years; the ical ideas that has long been missing. The nearest research is immensely impressive, the passion to parallel I could come up with was some of the work communicate what he has found is almost tangible; of Howard Brenton. So for a theatre long mired in the need to let the audience into the lives as well as something called entertainment, gritty domestic the thoughts of these men and women, and the realrealism, or post-modernist experiment, The Coast of ization that it is one of the forgotten possibilities of Utopia recalls an earlier era of theatre as a place of contemporary theatre to be epic. We meet forgotten international context, where society debates with figures like Nikolai Stankevich, Vissarion Belinsky, itself, a phrase coined by another great European Nicholas Polevoy, Peter Chaadeev, as well as the exile, Martin Esslin, who died in London while the Herzens, Bakunin, and a host of nationalist politi77

cians and writers from Europe who all turn up in one scene. All this is marshaled with his usual skill by Trevor Nunn, even incorporating what looks like an outtake from Les Miserables at one point, in his attempt to make this material theatrical. Many of the London critics felt that he had not succeeded, that the texts and speeches were too long, the characters incomprehensible, Stoppard had been too ambitious and longwinded, etc. But these carpings are those of men and women used to the crisp onehour-and-a-half, unless its Chekhov or Shakespeare; who have mostly forgotten a theatre of ideas where time is necessary and where it may be hard work sometimes to listen. In a sense they may have a point. There is a view that Stoppard is so much a slave to his craft and his theatrical milieu, that a set of texts which really demanded the directorial vision of a Brecht or a multi-media Piscator had been handed to a director of musicals who believes his responsibility is to the great language theatre of the past (some contradiction here perhaps?). Nunns massive cast coped valiantly with all the comings and goings, but often the great speeches floated past us on a sea of naturalism masquerading as intellectual debate. Is there a way in which great sweep of thinking can be conveyed as excitingly as great sweep of location? Do these scenes really need a grander theatrical vision than that of the playwright? These were the thoughts that were left with me after the experience. After all when Richard Wagner wanted to debate power, love, and corruption, he needed five evenings of music theatre. Perhaps Stoppard, in reclaiming the theatre as a place of historical debate, really needs a radical directorial mind that can cope with the intellectual sweep of the writing, instead of encouraging subtractions. Now that the trilogy has left the National in London and is out in the world, lets see

what a European director can do with this material which answers at this time our urgent need for debate about major issues when so much appears to be decided for us. Stoppards work is a reminder that the human race in the modern world has thrived on debate, discussion, and free publication, and that countries that encourage this thrive intellectually, while those that forbid it decay, atrophy, or remain frozen. Around the corner, in the Cottesloe Theatre, the smallest of the Nationals spaces, is still playing Christopher Hamptons new play, The Talking Cure, also historical and based, one assumes, on considerable research, set in 1904, forty years after the end of the Stoppard. It charts the early breakdown of the professional relationship between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, with Jungs affair with one of his patients as a running backdrop, the kind of historical coincidence that Stoppard might have tackled in his earlier years. More history, much talk, but here the similarity ends. Hampton has found an interesting corner of psychoanalytical conflict, but there is no attempt to contextualize this for the audience, who are of course expected to know the characters and their professions historical significance. The dialogues between Freud and Jung only lead one to wonder how the relationship with Sabina is progressing, while the story of their love turns into a domestic affair with no historical or other ramifications that would lead us to re-think the impact of psychiatry or any wider issue. The story has been reduced to an English affair, with Freud referring to his patients as finicky . . . stubborn, and extremely stingy with money and one of the patients talking about something doing my head in. As ever, there are sound performances from Ralph Fiennes and Jodhi May, but one leaves thinking, why waste the time?

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Station House Opera, Mares Nest; and Forkbeard Fantasy, Frankenstein


Greg Giesekam Over the past fifteen years many experimental companies in Britain, such as Forced Entertainment, Desperate Optimists and Blast Theory, have played around with the use of video in their performances, in ways that would seem familiar to spectators of work by the Wooster Group, John Jesurun, or Robert LePage. Such work might be seen as primarily theatrical, with the video occasionally extending the scope of the performance, introducing extra-performance material, characters or narratives, or, when used as live relay, re-framing performance events which are also seen on-stage. Recently, however, there has been an resurgence of work which in a more thorough-going way explores a full-scale merging of film or video with live performance, to create hybrid productions which are not simply multi-media, but more properly might be described as inter-media: works in which the performers move freely and continuously in and out of live and projected performance (usually life-size), seemingly drawing no clear demarcation lines between the two worlds and challenging the spectators attempts to hold onto such boundaries. Notable examples have included shows by the Chameleons group, which won a new media award at the New York Expo in 1999, and whose latest production The Doors of Serenity toured in Summer 2002, and Station House Operas Roadmetal Sweetbread (1999-2002) and Mares Nest (2001-2). The latter, in particular, made ingenious use of the interaction between two male and two female performers and their life-sized video projected images to explore the aspirations, fantasies and fears which characterised a spiralling series of ritualised encounters between them, encounters which extended from the banal to the erotic, from the gentle to the very violent. Staged in the round, with spectators free to move about the space, the production had non-stop video tracks projected on either side of a large central screen (which provided a backdrop to a narrow stage on either side of it). Performers went to and fro on either side of this, often through a door which was mirrored in the video projection, leading to them seeming to enter the screen action on one side, while they simultaneously emerged on the other side to take part in live action (where, again, their behaviour was seen against a backdrop of filmed actionsometimes involving the present performer, sometimes not). The projected material was extremely diverse: at times, it showed close-ups of parts of a performers body or face, sometimes it was apparently (but not actually) live relay of action taking place onstage or in the environs of the auditorium (as it showed performers seemingly engaging in offstage action); at other times it showed inverse echoing shotsas performers A and B might be performing a series of actions live, so the video might show performers B and C performing the same actions; it could be used to show a very different series of actions to the live action, as when some banal live interaction of affection might be set against video of the same performers engaged in some sado-masochistic or fetishistic routine; at other times the video was the vehicle for Three

Roadmetal Sweetbread. Photo Courtesy: Station House Opera

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Roadmetal Sweetbread. Photo Courtesy: Station House Opera

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Stooges-like physical clownery; a further sequence showed a group of naked figures with elaborate feathered masks engaging some sort of Baroque Bacchanal, into which the live performers would intrude. Such multiplication of the action and the representation of the characters forestalled early spectatorial attempts to decide what were their real characters or relationships, or even to distinguish between what might seem to be fantasy as opposed to likely real behaviour (it was tempting at first to read the screen action as a sort of sub-text to the live, revealing the sub-conscious of the performers, but such a simple logic was soon overturned). Instead, it encouraged the sense that at any one time characters and relationships might be operating simultaneously in multiple and contrasting ways, without any possibility of disentangling the motives and emotions which underlie them. (For a fuller account of this production, see Jeremy Peyton Jones in Live Art Magazine, at http://www.liveartmagazine.com.) Notwithstanding my inclusion of such work as an example of what one might see as a more fully hybrid form of inter-media, it is arguable that the video material used was mostly highly theatrical in nature and style; it was closely bound in with the stage world of the performance, in terms of action, location and cast (with the exception of the masque). A very different approach to the use of projected film and video, which is more self-reflexive about the merging of the live and the mediated, is found in the work of Forkbeard Fantasy, who have in fact been pioneers of such inter-media work in Britain. Founded by the brothers Chris and Tim Britton in 1974, Forkbeard Fantasy has for many years muddied the borders between avant-garde performance, outdoor and site-specific performance, experimental film, sculptural installations, and eccentric comedy of a particularly English kind. One of their earliest experiments in creating a show which fully merged performance and film was Who Shot The Cameraman?, first shown (under their other name as the Brittonioni Brothers) at the National Review of Live Art in 1988 [discussed as well by Tim White, in Contemporary Theatre Review, 1994, 2.2, 107-114, and on my website on which I document the work of the NRLA, http://appserver.pads.arts.gla.ac.uk/PadsStatic/nrla/] In that show they coined the expression crossing the celluloid divide for a moment when an on-stage performer moved, with great diffidence 81

initially, into a projected filmwith the transition marked by his live bodys being visible on stage while his head came into shot on the screen against which he was leaning. Subsequently, performers moved and conversed freely between stage and screenproducing a certain comic frisson along with a disturbing sense of the uncanny when doing so. In style and content, that show played around with early forms of cinema and magic lantern shows, and it is a love of films of the silent era and early talkies which has informed much of their later experimentationnotably in The Fall of the House of Usherettes (1995) and their latest piece Frankenstein (2001-2). This last was a co-production with two major repertory theatres (the Lyric, Hammersmith and the Bristol Old Vic) which eventually toured a number of mainstream venues, including the Grand Theatre, Blackpool, where I saw it in November 2002. Like Improbable Theatre, which in the past few years has had a major international success with its grotesque adaptation of Victorian childrens tales, Shockheaded Peter, Forkbeard Fantasy have managed to have considerable crossover success, while still remaining true to their roots in experimental theatre: 300,000 people visited a 2001 exhibition at Londons Theatre Museum of sets, objects, puppets, and films from their career, but early in 2003 they will be appearing again at the National Review of Live Artone of Britains longest standing performance art festivals. Frankenstein cunningly combines a sort of Monty Pythonesque appeal to the younger audience with a clever deconstructive approach to the myth of Frankenstein as it has mutated through hundreds of theatrical and cinematic adaptations. It also, beneath its comic surface, lays the ground for a wry meditation on what we might see as the Frankensteinian nature of film itself as a form. The dual levels of appeal echo the way the production combines critical and technical sophistication in its conception, structure and set, with a surface lowtech look and feel, and an approach to acting which draws on popular theatre. The production is no simple telling of the Frankenstein story. Set in the present day, its clever use of a revolve set and a range of projection devices and surfaces allow it to move fluidly to and fro between past, present and future, between real and imaginary. As its central character, a supposed expert on the story, dreams grandiosely of making a ten-part television series about it, he literally falls

into an Alice in Wonderland world where he witnesses the conception of the story at the Villa Diodati in 1816, is mistaken for Victor Frankenstein by the Creature (who then forces him to make him a mate), and finally makes a movie, with the assistance of the Creature and of the hunchback servant Igor, who, he protests, was a character only introduced into the story in Bela Lugosis film. The opening scenes set the tone for the piece as a whole, and thus, deserve some close description. Accompanied by pastiche horror film music, the productions title is projected onto the front cloth in the style of an old black and white movie. As the cloth rises the opening scene is bathed in low cinematic lighting, with a spot picking out a quivering, hairy forearm, which seems to be growing out of the arm of a wooden chair. A shadowy figure appears and takes the chair off, while lights reveal the upper level of the two-tier wooden scaffolding set: an expressionistically distorted room, inhabited by the dishevelled-looking Tim Britton, wearing the crumpled cream jacket and trousers of many an anti-heroic Englishman abroad in films. While a storm rages, he speaks on the phone to Professor Sailcloth, assuring him that he will soon be returning to London with a mysteri-

ous object which he has stolen. His tone combines seedy servility with attempts at pompous self-assertion. Cinematic music swells and light-pierced smoke swirls as he approaches a trunk and takes out a small objectthe Spark of Life. As he hurriedly replaces it, the tall, comically sinister figure of Chris Britton, with red hair curled up into two high horns on either side of his head, appears in a puff of smoke through the floor. He is subsequently revealed as Count Obladee, the house is near Ingoldstadt (which does of course appear in the Shelley story), and Chris Britton is David G. Scrivener, the worlds leading expert on Frankenstein. In menacing fashion, the Count tells Scrivener the local mob is rioting because of the theft of the Spark of Life, and presses him to stay for dinner. He departs, leaving Scrivener to ponder the injustice of his subservience to Professor Sailcloth. He pulls down a blind across the front of his room: initially, we see his silhouetted figure striding up and down, but then he approaches the screen directly, at which point a large eye appears projected onto the blind/ screen. This expands into a picture of a shadowy figure flitting through his room and then closes down to a close-up of his terrified face. The camera then pulls back to show a life-size Scrivener pacing in the room, imagining a future documentary he might make, Frankenstein, the man, the monster, the myth . . . a ten-part series . . . even a film. At which point, the film shows us a hand emerging from the bed and summoning Scrivener. Approaching the bed, Scrivener is swallowed up by it. As the film shows his head struggling to stay above the beds enveloping force, we see the live actors legs dangling down through the (real) floor of the room into the space below and then dropping into it. As we adjust our perception, the Count appears in the upper (filmed) room and begins searching it, and the live Scrivener in the downstairs Frankenstein. Photo Courtesy Forkbeard Fantasy 82

room pulls down another blind/ screen. While the film on the lower screen shows Scrivener again pacing up and down, behind it the live performer delivers an imagined lecture on the Frankenstein myth. Meanwhile, the Count is swallowed by the bed (on the upper film), to be followed by Scriveners being swallowed by the bed on the lower film: this leads to a wonderful visual trick, whereby Scriveners legs are seen falling through the top of the upper ceiling, while his upper torso is still visible in the bed on the lower film. He then appears in the upper room and carries on imagining his film on Frankenstein. This sequence typifies the wit and the complexity of the visual play found in the production as a whole. But it also points to some underlying issues and effects that emerge from such play between the live and the filmed. One is the way in which the rolling up and down of the blinds and the movement to and fro between live performer and screened performer brings home to us the material nature of film and its projection. When most mainstream cinema encourages us to lose ourselves in the filmed narrative and to forget about the materiality of the film itself and the screen onto which film is projected, the placing of the screens one on top of the other, the way in which images are duplicated with variation, and the doubling of the live room and its objects and inhabitants by filmed room and inhabitants, all bring home the materiality of film and its projection. In addition, the fragmentation of the body across the two screens and the way in which Scriveners imagining a film begins to conjure up a film, echo, of course, the Frankenstein myth itself. This is brought out more graphically in a sequence soon afterwards, when Scrivener describes the monsters which have been depicted in theatre, film and comic books: rapid sequences of various mis-matching torsos and lower bodies (mixing human performers, animation, drawing, painting, sculpted models etc) roll across the two screens / blinds. The presentational echo of the original Frankensteinian project brings home to us the way in which all film might in fact be seen as Frankensteinaindependent as it is on gathering and cutting up images of humans and stitching them together in the editing suite to produce the characters we see in action on the screen. As the production develops, the uses of film and the inter-action between live performers and it becomes increasingly ingenious. When Scrivener is invited to dinner by the Count, he enters 83

into a filmed dinner party of various monstrous figures from film history, where he encounters Mary Shelley (played by Chris Britton). As he pontificates about her writing the story, Mary sits in front of a mirror and talks to her reflectionwhich turns out to be projected onto a plasma screen and begins to take on a life of its own. Mary then goes down to a mixed media burlesque of the Villa Diodati gathering: where Tim Britton himself becomes Percy Shelleys head attached to a foppish half-size puppet figure of him, and Byron is seen as a circular projection of his headliteralizing the notion of the portrait shot and also evoking images of John the Baptists head on a plate. Byron and Shelley are shown as a grotesque double-act pumped up on drugs, booze, and Romantic machismo, patronising Mary, who can get no one to hear her story of Frankenstein. This leads into a wonderful coup de thtre to close the first half. Mary goes upstairs to write the novel. As cinematic music swells, the lights fade, leaves begin to fall, to be replaced first by pages of paper blowing about, then, as the front cloth has dropped, by filmed pages blown about in the wind. These pages gradually fall into the shape of a manwhich rises from a prostrate position to produce a silhouetted monster image, surrounded by circle of light, as at the end of silent movies. While horror music builds to a climax, the silhouetted figure becomes bigger and biggermeanwhile someone is pushing at the front cloth from behind, creating the effect of the monster trying to claw his way out of the screen and reach us in the audience. (Such play with the boundary between screen and the live audience recalls, of course, the techniques of early cinema trick films, where often the impact derived from having someone or something hurtling towards the audience, threatening to break out of the screen.) The second half involves much comedy as Scrivener initially attempts to escape the Creature and Igor, who both take on a quite pathetic air. He then accepts the mantle of Victor Frankenstein and attempts to create a mate for the Creature: live reading of the novel is threaded through performance and film pastiches of the ways in which laboratories and scientists are presented to us in media today. The early cinema feel of the first half gives way at times to mock documentary on scientific experiments, and to the whole set being bathed with swirling images of bacteria under a microscope (these are the new monsters), a gesture towards the serious thematic of Shelleys novel, while the

on-stage performance involves weird and wonderful objects being cobbled together, in a manner reflecting a strong strain of British comedy based on mad boffins experimenting in their garden sheds. This climaxes in a mock premiere of Scriveners film at which the mate is to be unveiled. Of course, when, in true Frankensteinian manner, he attempts to throw the switch to bring the figure to life, an explosion occurs, killing the mate and Igor. Comic bathos abounds in the final sequence, as Scrivener laments the death of Igor, who had by now become his chum. He is consoled by the Creature, Igor didnt really exist . . . Nor did I. I am just a literary monster-piece. Im finished. The Creature exits by climbing into the trunk from the opening scene.

When Scrivener fails in his attempt to revive Igor with the Spark of Life, and the Count too disappears into the trunk, he attempts to exit through the trunk himself, to remain with his new-found chumsbut finds he cant. Unlike the creatures of fiction, with whom he has crossed and re-crossed the boundaries between live performance and the screen, he cannot finally go back into the box of tricks from which he had originally released them. For all that the production has entertained a cyborgian merging of the filmed and the live, Scrivener, having found his monsters are not really monstrous, is shown having to return to the live world and face it on his own along with the audience in the theatre.

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The Twenty-Fifth Annual Festival Internacional de Teatro Clsico in Almagro, Spain


Celia Braxton nineteenth and twentieth century theatre spaces. In July of 2002 marked the twenty-fifth addition to the corral, the town boasts an original anniversary of the Festival Internacional de Teatro seventeenth century Plaza Mayor, several ancient Clsico, held yearly in Almagro, Spain. Almagro convents and churches, and the Museo Nacional del sits in the middle of Don Quixotes plain of La Teatro, which is currently awaiting relocation in a Mancha, the breadbasket of Spain, and contains the reconstructed convent. Almagro is about a twoonly corral theatre left from the Spanish Golden hour drive from Madrid, and is also reachable by Age. The corral in Almagro was built in 1628, and train. Ciudad Real, the business center of the continued as a theatre until the prohibition of corral province of that name, is less than half an hour theatres in the eighteenth century. It was then conaway. The town is therefore quite full on Festival verted to a fruit market, and later to an inn. In 1950, weekends. However, the Festival remains quite the stage area was rediscovered, almost intact, dursmall in comparison to those in major cities. Only ing some construction work. After considerable one production plays at any one venue on any given restoration, the corral was reopened as a theatre in group of days. It is perfectly possible to see every 1952. show playing during a period of a week. The Festival at Almagro has grown since The first production I chose to see was the its inception in 1978 from a week of plays presentCompaa Nacional de Teatro Clsicos production ed by semi-professional groups to todays month of of Peribaez y el comendador de Ocaa (Peribaez professional productions in the corral de comedias, and the Commander of Ocaa), by Lope de Vega. seventeenth century patios, and more conventional

Peribaez y el comendador de Ocaa. Photo Courtesy: Compaa Nacional de Teatro Clsico

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Peribaez is one of Lopes well-known peasant honor dramas (the others are Fuenteoveuna and El mejor alcalde, el rey), in which peasants fight for their honor against a member of the nobility. In Peribaez, the Commander attempts to rape Peribaezs wife, Casilda, and is foiled by Peribaez. He then places Peribaez at the head of a peasant army, knights him as a joke, sends him to battle, and enters the house for another attempt. Peribaez, forewarned, returns in the nick of time, and in the ensuing fight, kills the Commander. As he has killed a nobleman, Peribaez must then appeal to the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabela, for justice. While his knighting provides the legal means by which Ferdinand and Isabela can pardon him, the play suggests that peasants, like noblemen, have a serious claim to honor and dignity, a revolutionary idea in seventeenth century Spain. The Teatro Nacional production was at the Hopital de San Juan, a permanent open-air theatre that abuts the convent of that name, and was built for the Festival in 1994. On entering the theatre forecourt, pre-show, we found the entire cast on a temporary stage set up against the back wall of the auditorium proper, singing and dancing with the audience standing in a semicircle. Some cast members, the women in long skirts, corsets, and bare feet, the men in suits of the 1910s, were in this de facto orchestral space, dancing with members of the audience to guitar and accordion accompaniment. The singing and dancing continued until the entire house was seated in the auditorium, when the cast entered through the audience throwing flowers and continuing to sing. The play opens with the wedding of Peribaez and Casilda, and we had been invited to the party. The marriage celebration takes place, with a country dance, very free and legswinging, and a messenger enters, carrying a red matadors cape, announcing the arrival of the bull for the final festivities. He leaves the cape hanging in mid air and it magically stays in mid-air by itself, then falls over. Later, when Peribaez and Casilda kiss for the first time alone, rose petals fall from the sky. Jon Berrondos scenic design is in constant dialog with the play. The stage is a profile stage, with a set consisting of five sets of wings and borders, rounded into an arch. The overall impression on stage is sky blue. The wings and borders contract in one scene to form a series of Gothic arches in a church, expand to open up the entire stage area, and contract off center to form a palace room. The 86

in-one curtain is painted to represent the grasses of the plain. But perhaps the most scenically effective image of all, at least in Almagro, situated as it is in the middle of an agricultural region, comes in Act Two, when an entire wheat field is placed on stage. As Peribaez winds his way down stage through the wheat, with a cloud forming, lifting and continually changing in the background, a rustle and murmur of recognition and appreciation ripples through the audience. Peribaez knows the Commander has placed him at the head of a company of men in order to get him out of the way. He knows he must leave the farmland that he loves and with the land, leave his wife at the mercy of his overlord. Jacobo Dicentas performance as Peribaez is heartbreaking. If Peribaez suggests that peasants have the same right to honor as the nobility, Lopes El perro del hortelano (The Gardners Dog, or The Dog in the Manger) suggests that there may be no difference between nobility and those who serve them other than what people agree to see. In this play, the Countess Diana, known for her emotional coldness, becomes jealous when her maid Marcela asks to be married to her secretary, Teodoro. Diana leads Teodoro to believe she will accept him as a suitor in spite of his low birth, and because of her nobility he is more than willing to comply; but each time he attempts it, she pushes him away. Yet she will not allow Marcela to marry him. Finally, through the offices of his grazioso Tristan, who arranges a wealthy and noble father for Teodoro in a manner similar to Shakespeares Tranio for Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, Diana is able to publicly accept Teodoro as her social equal and marry him. Teodoro then confesses to Diana that his father is not in fact the wealthy Count Ludovico (who is unaware of his own deception), and that he really is of low birth. Her answer? It doesnt matter to her, as long as no one else knows. El perro del hortelano is one of Lopes most popular comedies, and there were two productions playing in Almagro the week I was there. One, by La Traverse, a young French company, sets the play more or less in the 1930s, and follows the script fairly faithfully, with some cuts in the third act that decrease cast size without materially affecting the story. Director Herv Petit, who adapted the script into French and plays two small roles, including Count Ludovico, directs his actors for sentimental realism, which provides some lovely moments for Diana, Teodoro, and Marcela; and David Arribe,

who plays Tristan, would appear to have a strong future as a comic. Petit is less successful in his own role as Ludovico, due in part to a terrible white wig donned to differentiate him from his earlier role, making it seem as though Ludovico were playing a part in an amateur production. This under-funded production, reminiscent of dozens of Off-Off Broadway or Fringe productions, played on a small temporary stage in the patio of the Palacio de Fcares, once the home of the towns premier banking family. The Teatro Municipal housed the production by Vania y Focus, where director Magi Mira directed an extremely modern adaptation by Emilio Hernndez. For Mira, the play is the story of a little countess of today, who lives in a palace of today, with servants of today, and listens to Latin music. With all the hereditary privileges without working a stroke. An idle class which defends its survival while it enjoys living off others. (Sexo, RH y sopa boba, by Magi Mira, Program of the XXV Festival Internacional de Teatro Clsico). The actors spoke much too rapidly for me to actually understand what they were saying, but my impression, backed up by information in Miras program notes, is that Hernndezs adaptation is highly colloquial. It is certainly highly musical. Diana (Clara Sanchis) sings intermittently during her first scene. When Marcela (Vicenta Ndongo) tells Diana of the wonderful ways in which Teodoro speaks his love to her, she sings the text in a modern Pop style. Teodoro (Antonio Garrido) sings to Diana at one point, and Garrido seemed to be doing an impression of a particular singer, because he repeated the music, his physical motions and facial expressions three times, until he got a laugh. Dianas socially suitable but otherwise unsuitable suitors, Ricardo and Federico (Balbino Lacosta and Israel Frias), first appear framed as a portrait of two military officers, then as dance-like toy soldiers. Marcela sings after Teodoro dumps her the second time, before launching into her plan for vengeance, and later does another song and dance with lots of high kicks to the audience. Most of these musical bits are extremely short, no more than four bars, but there are a large number of them, most at moments of high emotion. Sexo is certainly front and center in this production. The set consists almost entirely of a huge red bed center stage which haltingly travels up- and downstage at the touch of a clicker in order to give the actors about four feet of downstage playing space. Diana opens the show by writhing on the 87

bed in various centerfold-inspired poses, dressed in a red, purple, and lavender negligee, the red of which clashes with the bed. She remains on the bed, standing or sitting, throughout the first act, and most of the play. When Marcela sits on the bed to talk with her, Diana reaches her hand under Marcelas mid-thigh length skirt as she asks about Teodoro. During Dianas first attempt to seduce Teodoro, she does a striptease with her back to the audience. Marcela snaps him out of his strip-induced trance, and they make out to make up, Ndongos back turned purposefully to the audience so Garrido can raise her skirt to reveal a perfect pair of derriere cheeks outlined by a thong. The second time they make up, unfortunately, the audience is treated to Garridos much less than perfect derriere, also outlined by a thong, and spotlit downstage right. When Ricardo finally understands that Diana will not have him, the shotgun that he carries breaks. By this time, the show is getting regular laughs, not only at the sexual comedy, but also at textual jokes. With all these hijinks, however, Mira is not able to answer the question she poses in the programwill Diana leave the nobility of privilege and find the nobility of the heart?because no character in this production has any nobility of heart, not even Marcela who, doomed by Lope to end up with the elderly butler, here jumps happily onto the bed with him. Los empeos de una casa (The Trials of One House), one of the few extant plays by women during the Spanish Golden Age, is the first play written by a woman in America. It was written on commission by Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz in 1683, a nun born, raised and educated in Mexico, to celebrate the installation of the new archbishop of Mexico. Sor Juana was the female wonder of her day, known for her beauty, intelligence and wit. Although she never visited Spain, she based her play on the comedias de enredo of Caldern, whom she refers to in the play. As usual with these plays, the plot is somewhat complicated. Don Juan is in love with Doa Ana, who is now in love with Don Carlos. Don Juan has bribed Anas servant Celia to hide him in Anas rooms, so he can do the Tarquin,rape her so she will have to marry him. Meanwhile, Doa Leonor and Don Carlos have attempted to elope from her fathers house. Don Pedro, Doa Anas brother, foils the elopement, arranging for a false arrest with the police bringing Leonor to his house as a safe haven, then letting Don Carlos go by accident. This will allow him

to woo Leonor without appearing to have kidnapped her, he hopes. However, Leonors cousin sees her leaving her house with Don Carlos, starts a duel, and is seriously wounded before Pedros men arrive. The play opens at night, just as Doa Leonor arrives at Doa Anas house. In a lengthy monolog considered autobiographical by most critics, Leonor explains how difficult it is to be an intelligent woman, how much she longed to study, and how few opportunities there are for women. Finally, she admits her love for Don Carlos. Thus, Ana learns her rival in love is in her own house. Don Carlos arrives seeking refuge, not knowing whose house it is, and Leonor hides in Anas room. Ana, taking this opportunity to try and win Carlos, hides him in another room. In Anas room, Don Juan comes out of the closet looking for Ana as Leonor enters. In the dark, he mistakes Leonor for Ana. Ana enters with Carlos, Celia brings in a candle, and each person sees their lover with someone else as Pedro bangs on the front door of his house. The next day, Don Carlos uses Castao, his grazioso, as a sounding board to figure out why Leonor is in the house. Rather uncharacteristically for a Golden Age romantic lead, he does not jump to conclusions about Leonor. He knows he is hidden, so maybe she is in hiding too. Leonors father, Don Rodrigo, arrives with Don Juan, who had earlier left, thinking Don Pedro has kidnapped Doa Leonor; therefore Don Pedro must marry her. They meet Don Carlos, who realizes Don Pedro may get his girl, while Don Juan, convinced Don Carlos is there to woo Ana, is enraged against him. Don Pedro, meanwhile, magnanimously agrees to marry Doa Leonor. As the third act opens, it is night again. Doa Leonor enlists Celias help to escape from the house, but Celia warns Don Pedro of her escape. Meanwhile, Don Carlos orders Castao to take a letter to Don Rodrigo that explains why he, rather than Pedro, must marry Leonor, but Castao is afraid to go because of the results of the duel. As a safety precaution, he dresses in Leonors clothes, which he was carrying in the aborted elopement. Pedro stops Castao, thinking he has caught Leonor escaping. Castao first insults Pedro, then agrees to marry him unless you dont want it, in which case he extracts a promise from Don Pedro that he will not hurt him/her. Don Juan starts a duel with Don Carlos over Ana. Pedro rushes in to defend his sisters honor. Ana enters, mistakes Don Juan for Don Carlos, and hides him to protect him from Don Pedro. Leonor, trying to escape, enters covered by 88

her veil and Carlos leaves with her, thinking he is protecting Ana. Castao, unable to find the front door in the dark, is locked in a room by Pedro, who still thinks he is Leonor. Don Carlos, still thinking he has Ana, takes Leonor to her fathers house in order to protect her from the fighting. Don Rodrigo does not recognize his daughter, covered by a veil. Thus, each couple is where and with whom they should be, but none of them know it. The dnouement takes place back at Don Pedros house, where Leonor, veiled, vows to marry Don Carlos, Doa Ana ends up with Don Juan, and Pedro brings his Leonor out of hiding, vowing to marry her. The real Leonor unveils herself, and Pedro is reminded of his vow not to inflict bodily harm on the person he thought was Leonor. The plot reads like a fast-paced comedy, but the play does not work that way, in part because of the many lengthy, often pensive, asides that stop the action. In the production by the Compaia de Teatro La Strada, director Ignacio Garca plays against the comedy, emphasizing the serious undercurrents of Sor Juanas textthat women, having no options other than marriage or the convent, are imprisoned within a societal system enforced by men like Don Juan, Don Pedro, and Don Rodrigo, who do not understand how their treatment of women negatively affect female behavior. On the proscenium stage of the jewel-like nineteenth century Teatro Municipal, the curtain rises to the accompaniment of a tranquil Schubert piano sonata, revealing a bare, dark stage, with a female figure prone on the floor. The elopement of Doa Leonor is staged in mime, backlit, and the duel that wounds her cousin is played out in shadow. As they leave, Doa Ana (Cecilia Solaguren) and Celia (Goizalde Nez) enter in the dark, with one lit candle, while on a screen in back, the faces of women are projected on a blue screen. As Ana talks to Celia about her brothers plot against the elopement, she stands with her back to the audience. Eventually, slowly, both actresses turn profile, back to back. Much of the movement in this production is as carefully and as slowly choreographed. The four lovers meet in the dark room, not tentatively, as if in the dark, but as in a slow dance. In the transition from Act One to Act Two, the lovers slowly move across the stage to the accompaniment of a piano concerto in front of a large, astronomically accurate projection of the full moon, each person reaching out for, yet missing, their other. Later in the play, as Carlos leads Leonor (whom he thinks is

Ana) out of Don Pedros house, the choreography and basic lighting of the opening elopement scene is repeated. The production ends with all five characters entering backlit against the sky, slowly lying down on the floor, the men in back, the women in front, reminiscent of the beginning. The production embraces a number of presentation styles. Leonor and Ana speak to each other about Carlos while facing the audience, each in their own spot of light, in an Expressionist manner. Lengthy asides or soliloquys are performed, not as direct address, but as often seen in productions of Chekhov, with the actor imagining the character about whom she is talking. Thus, when Castao, late in the play, speaks directly to the audience as he dresses, it is both shocking and refreshing. In this role, Luis Felpeto makes the most of the transgressively cross-dressing male, providing the only laugh in this rather somber, though thoughtprovoking, production. The most satisfying production during my

stay, however, was La Compaia Jos EstruchResads production of El amor al uso (Love in Fashion), by Antonio de Sols y Rivadeneyra at the corral de comedias. De Sols is one of the Golden Age minor playwrights. None of his works have been translated into English, as far as I have been able to determine, and there is comparatively little critical writing about his work, even in Spanish. According to the Festival program, El amor al uso is considered his best play. Director Ana Zamora states it is also one of the first theatrical examples of a new philosophy of love, which today seems to us to be extraordinarily modern, which reacts against the aristocratic demands of that steadfast love, exclusive and knightly, found so frequently in the ladies and gentlemen of the Golden Age comedia. This was all the information I had on the play, and for this reason, I saw it twice. As Zamora states, the play is a comedia de enredo, in which Don Gaspar and Doa Clara, refuse to admit they care for each other, as it is not

El amor al uso. Photo Courtesy: La Compaia Jos Estruch-Resad

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stylish to be in love. (No es al uso s es amor, says Don Gaspar in a pensive moment.) Don Gaspar is playing around with Doa Isabel and Doa Claras maid Juana, while Doa Clara flirts with Don Garca and Doa Isabels brother, Don Diego, who is at the same time jealous of his sisters honor. Otuo, Don Gaspars grazioso, thinks he has an understanding with Juana. The play begins with the receipt by Don Gaspar and Don Diego of identical letters from Doa Clara, each sent to the wrong party, and proceeds from there. Zamoras direction is fast paced and actorcentered. The actors address their parts with high energy, assaulting each other with their words, directly addressing the audience and fairly demanding a reaction. Mirabel Vitar is extraordinary as Doa Clara, using her words almost as physical weapons in her battle against Don Gaspar (Chema Ruiz). Her expression as she scathingly describes Doa Isabel as la santa de nuestro barrio is unforgettable. The rest of the cast matches her energy, using the corral stage as their playground. For in this production, the corral stage is the set. Further, and perhaps in acknowledgment of the lighting of the Golden Age, when plays were performed in the afternoon, Zamora uses extremely simple lighting, bathing the stage in a warm light, while occasionally picking out individual playing areas. The main visual effect is left to the costumes, therefore. Here her concept of the play as surprisingly modern yet definitely seventeenth century gains substance. All characters, male and female, wear their hair in todays casual styles. The men wear jeansblack,

blue or brownwith a tee shirt of the same color. Over this is a jacket cut in modified Renaissance stylea short embroidered peplum with slightly padded or puffed upper sleeves (except for Otuo who, as a servant, has neither sleeves nor shirt). Doa Isabel, played by Eva Torres as a nave yet strong-willed sweet sixteen, and her servant Ins (ngela Espaa), wear long sleeved bodices, with long full patchwork skirts of brown, beige, gold and green, supported by a petticoat, reminiscent in silhouette of Diors New Look. The medley of times and styles is completed by Doa Isabels brown denim jacket and Inss vest. Doa Clara and Juana (Gemma Morillo) are even more idiosyncratic. Colorful bouffant skirts are hitched up balloon-style to reveal long black flared pants, and flat court shoes with colored buckles, allowing for free physical movement. At one point, Don Diego hides first under Doa Claras, then under Juanas skirt. He then stands with Juana on his shoulders and they both climb into a second-level aposento at the side of the stage. This fusion of seventeenth and twenty-first centuries is topped off by Zamorras use of music by the Beatles. Although the play opens with a string quartet, perhaps by Mozart, the scene-change and inter-act music includes Here Comes the Sun, Girl, Eight Days a Week, A Hard Days Night, and the curtain call is taken to Revolution. This production, sharply envisioned, dynamically directed, completely at home on its seventeenth-century stage, still electrifies me.

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A Masked Ball, Die Fledermaus, Threepenny Opera: Calixto Bieitos 2002.


Maria M. Delgado 2002 has proved a busy year for Calixto Bieito, the Catalan director recently dubbed the Quentin Tarantino of opera (Luke Leitch, Evening Standard, 21 February 2002), with four major operatic productions probing the resonances between past operatic works and our own contemporary society through whose values and ideologies they are now read. Bieitos bold reimaginings of both theatrical and operatic classics, like those of Peter Sellars before him, have often been derided as trivialized updatings by a press keen to present him as the bad boy of opera (Cathryn Scott, The Big Issue, 9-15 September 2002). Such readings, however, fail to recognize a deconstructionist aesthetic that continually probes the artifacts relevance to a contemporary audience, drawing our attention to the tensions inherent in the colliding temporal systems at work when a Verdi, Strauss or Weill opera is revived in our time. Bieitos stagings of A Masked Ball, Die Fledermaus and The Threepenny Opera in 2002 may have polarized the critics, but in dispensing with the often unstated vocabularies of authenticity they have exposed the various anachronisms that position performance as the site of fierce contradictions and at times, irreconcilable polarities. Bieitos staging of Verdis A Masked Ball opened at English National Opera on 21 February. Classified as adolescent lavatorial toilet humour (Robert Hardiman, Daily Mail, 22 February 2002; Angelis Christafis, Guardian, 9 March 2002), it relocated Verdis study of the events leading to the assassination of Gustavus III of Sweden in 1792 to twentieth-century Spain in the period immediately following Francos death, while the country negotiated the delicate transition from dictatorship to democracy. An aggressive media campaign conducted during the weeks leading up to the opening pounced on any aspects of the production that could be judged as contentious, with alleged reports of the chorus in a state of rebellion (Nigel Reynolds, Daily Telegraph, 20 February 2002), the lead tenor pulling out in disgust at the lewdness of the role (David Wilkes, Daily Mail, 21 February 2002), and threatening warnings of sponsors reconsidering their support of opera (Danielle Demetriou, Evening Standard, 20 February 2002). Notices posted on ENOs website warned those who preferred more traditional entertainment that the production featured some violent and adult 91 scenes. The dress rehearsal was presented behind closed doors, further fueling irresponsible press rumors of the productions unsuitability for London opera-goers. On the day of the opening Payne appeared on BBC Radio 4s Today program justifying the programming of Bieitos staging, which had been seen in earlier incarnations at Barcelonas Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house in December 2000 and Copenhagens Royal Danish Opera in May 2001. A further article by Payne was published in the Guardian the following day, elucidating on his engagement of Bieito as one of Europes leading new wave directors, betraying his Spanish origins with his passionately engaged and physical work (Payne, Guardian, 22 February 2002). Indeed the frenzied preview articles led the Daily Mails conservative opera critic David Gillard to defiantly conclude before the opening that, this sounds horrendous . . . I have a real sense of foreboding. The feeling is that once again a producer is throwing his own twisted vision on to a masterpiece and, in all probability, wrecking it (in Wilkes, Daily Mail, 21 February 2002). Bieitos decision to refract Verdis tale through the prisms of a contemporary King, a hypothetical Juan Carlos figure, negotiating the boundaries between institutional duty and personal pleasure, clearly sought to reassess the operas relevance for our age. Rejected by the censors when first written in 1857, and subject to enforced mutations by censorships exigencies in the period leading up to its premiere in 1859, Verdis study of betrayal and murder offers a challenge of location to any director who wishes to tamper with the composers late eighteenth-century Swedish court setting. Whether this version or the later American transposition to colonial seventeenth-century Boston is chosen, the hallmark of either is that of a volatile society engaged in an uneasy process of transition and it was this theme that Bieito chose to emphasize. Whilst using the structure of the earlier Swedish version, Bieito located the work in the unstable, volatile, insecure climate of political change where a generation of ambitious politicians plays high-risk political games with devastating consequences. It was an exposure of what goes on behind political closed doors that governed Bieitos biting production. The overture was played against the backdrop of a vast public mens urinal, underground

The controversial opening image of A Masked Ball. Photo Courtesy: English National Opera

toilets where a row of conspirators against the king sit reading the paper, masking their faces from public view as they discuss the guest list for the forthcoming masked ball. As a gun was hidden in a cistern, in a moment clearly appropriated from Francis Ford Coppolas 1972 film The Godfather, we were placed in a society of intrigue and sleaze where nothing and nobody can be trusted. Whereas the Barcelona staging had the toilets swinging up to reveal a vast semicircle of metallic pseudo-industrial towers, at ENO the absence of some aspects of the striking original design, made for a more focused stage landscape, which highlighted the plight of the three main protagonists: the king Gustavus III, his love Amelia and her husband, Anckarstroem, the kings chief minister and closest friend here presented as a military attach. Flores rendered a stage environment where everything was stripped right back to the bare walls of the theatre, where minimal changes announced the stages metamorphosis from royal court to Madame Arvidsons brothel. Ulrika Arvidsons fortunetelling den was here realized as an iniquitous Fellini-esque nightclub filled with whores, sailors, and transvestites, where the kingwittily disguised 92

as pops king Elvishad his wallet deftly stolen by a pickpocket who goes on to meet a nasty end in Act Three. The ambience of the first act was touched by what Bieito terms the surrealism of my country (in Martin Hoyle, Time Out, 20-27 February 2002): the tradition of black humor negotiated by Buuel which Bieito has always regarded as much a facet of his Hispanic heritage as the culture of flamenco and bullfighting through which Spain is traditionally reflected and refracted (Bieito, in Allison, The Times, 19 February 2002). Indeed Bieitos dissection of Verdis opera located imaginative analogies for the situations presented in Antonio Sommas libretto. The second act, which is set outside the city, showed a dangerously exposed landscape and it was here that the one of the most controversial moments, the homosexual gang rape and subsequent murder of the young thief of Gustavuss wallet by a group of soldiers, was enacted under the cover of subdued moonlight where the audience shared Amelias unease at coming across the semi-naked corpse which replace the gallows of the place of execution specified in Sommas libretto. While this directorial addition was met by a chorus of public derision at the

Barcelona opening, here the scene passed without vociferous protest. The event may have been judged specious and gratuitous by certain critics (Roderic Dunnett, Independent, 22 February 2002; Michael Kennedy, Sunday Telegraph, 24 February 2002), but it served to ground the staging in an atmosphere of male camaraderie where institutional machismo masks a multitude of abuses and where the dangerous breakdown of law and order that always looms at times of political unbalance and upheaval, threatened a descent into social chaos. The raw aggression of the stage images found an exquisite counterpoint in the elegant composure of Verdis melodies. As with all of Bieitos work, the production showed a society looking in on itself. The rows of red raked seating suspended above the performers in the first two scenes served as a metaphorical device, like the giant mirror used by Bieito in his 1997 staging of Life is a Dream, to further reflect the themes of the piece back at the audience. The arc lights that shone down onto the stage as the seating rises and drops further reinforced the theatrical associations of the piece. This was a stage set for conspiracies hatched in arenas masked in theatrical detritus: from the glorious choreographed formalism of the open-

ing image of politicians caught by the audience with their trousers around their ankles, to the decadent disguises of the courts clandestine visit to Madame Arvidsons brothel and the lavish, opulent grandeur of the final acts masked ball, Bieito situated the piece within an aesthetic of grotesque anarchy in presenting a society facing a choice between a new order and destruction. Indeed the antics presented at Madame Arvidsons brothel, dismissed by the Daily Telegraphs Rupert Christiansen as transvestites, dwarves, gratuitous sexual couplings and visits to the lavatory . . . more suited to a camp movie by Almodvar (22 February 2002), functioned, incidentally not unlike Almodvars own intricately patterned filmic ventures, as a monstrous parody of religious and political rituals. Bieitos career, like Almodvars, is marked by a focus on pictorial excess conceived through color coding, cinematic intertextuality and overtly theatrical ambience. The third acts opening scene, for example, the eventual conspiracy pact between Anckarstroem, Ribbing and Horn, plotted in Anckarstroems pristine chrome private bathroom, created both a pattern of association with the opening scene, and a sense of the interlinked relations between political ambition and personal

A Masked Ball. Photo Courtesy: English National Opera

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revenge. This was the arena in which Anckarstroem, believing his wife to have entered into an affair with Gustavus, made his fateful choice to murder his comrade and king. The lavatory, that home of human waste and debris, became the key location for dirty clandestine acts of betrayal; the most private of spaces rendered into a venue where dastardly plots with far-reaching institutional consequences are hatched. Throughout this was a cold steely environment where Bieito refused, even in moments like the love duet between Amelia and King Gustavus in Act Two, to allow any warmth of affection or tenderness to permeate the hard, sparse milieu. Bieito dispensed with the lavish royal courts or colonial mansion that had dominated previous stagings of Verdis opera in favor of a bleak milieu where tame romanticism was replaced by a dark aesthetic of almost surreal comedy. The chorus costumes both at Arvidsons brothel and at the masked ball itself, the operas final scene, were larger than life. In both scenes regalia served to mask a multitude of sins. The effect was like being trapped in a giant hall of mirrors where nothing is reassuring and we are forced to confront a disturbing vision of society at its most debased and depraved across class boundaries. As with his similarly contentious productions of Barbaric Comedies at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival [See WES 12:3, 61-70] and Don Giovanni for ENO (2001) [See WES 13:3, 53-8], Bieitos portrait of societies failing to adhere to the behavioral rules established to control and regulate human excess was both uncomfortably contemporary and brutally savage. The staging benefited from the changes wrought on its journey from Barcelona, via Copenhagen. Indeed the committed young English cast drove the action with veritable gusto. John Daszaks hedonistic bisexual king negotiated sensitivity with bravado, his ambivalent sexuality deliciously hinted at with a kiss shared with David Kempsters Anckarstroem. Kempsters frustrations and torn loyalties rendered his characterization of the kings right-hand man a vivid study of rabid self-destructive envy vented out in his physical abuse of Amelia. Claire Ruttera sexually active Donna Anna in Bieitos ENO staging of Don Giovanniprovided a tormented mistress battling with her illicit love and placing blind faith in the superstitious herbal cures suggested by Rebecca de Pont Daviess Madame Arvidson, who presided over her decadent neo-gothic brothel with cool dra94

matic panache. Mary Plazass athletic Oscar reenvisaged the kings page (often used to hint at Gustavuss alleged homosexuality) as a flirtatious secretary brutally assaulted by the conspirators, and the antics of Panajotis Iconomous cross-dressing Horn and Graeme Danbys sinister Ribbing firmly positioned the production within a performance register of dynamic physicality. Together with the carefully choreographed chorus scenes and Andrew Littons rousing pacing of the music, the effect was that of a rapid, frenetically paced mise-en-scne which highlighted a hedonistic society, charging ominously towards its own destruction. This is not the first time that the subject matter and themes of A Masked Ball have made for controversial interpretation. David Aldens 1989 staging of the piece to David Fielding designs was one of the most provocative productions of the ENO Powerhouse regime under the artistic auspices of David Pountney, Mark Elder, and Peter Jonas. Nevertheless the radical associations of such past productions have been conveniently obliterated by critics like Christiansen, who was to denounce the production as embodying all that is wrong with the cult of the opera producer. It makes the opera mean what he (or she) egocentrically wants it to mean, rather than entering into an honest dialogue with the composers and the librettists intentions (Daily Telegraph, 22 February 2002). Bieito has never purported to know what the intentions of the composer and librettist might have been, recognizing the problematics of seeking to define these intentions in a climate that differs considerably from that in which the work was initially produced. Rather in acknowledging the slippery nature of textual and musical meaning as well as Verdis stipulation (conveniently ignored by critics like Christiansen) that the work should be set as close to the present day as possible, Bieito provided a reading of the opera that overlapped the rickety, precarious, traumatic worlds of Gustavus III and post-Franco Spain to provide a resonant stage landscape where the tragedy of the kings downfall was realized within an ambience where the squalid actions of Gustavus and his court are juxtaposed against the romanticism of Verdis lush score. While there are precise references to recent Spainthe wheelchair bound Minister of Justice, the nineteen-seventies cut of Merc Palomas costumes, the evocation of LieutenantColonel Tejeros 1981 attempted coup dtat in the Spanish parliament suggested through Horn and Ribbings plottingit was through theatrical

metaphor that Bieito framed this production, showing a previously repressed society spiraling out of control as it explores its darker recesses of intrigue, suspicion and conspiracy. And certainly a significant component of the British press corps was able to recognize that after all the media hysteria about the excesses of . . . A Masked Ball, the reality of the opening performance . . . was rather more serious and far less sensationalist than some more excitable souls had led us to believe (Andrew Clements, Guardian, 22 February 2002; see also Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 25 February 2002; Edward Seckerson, Independent, 23 February 2002). Bieitos production of Die Fledermaus, opening at Cardiffs New Theatre on 14 September was also subject to advance negative critical scrutiny, despite Bieitos assurances that he wasnt using shock tactics in his reading of Strausss take on turn-of-the-century Vienna (in Karen Price, Western Mail, 31 August 2002), merely attempting to dispense with the assortment of clichs that surrounded past productions. The fact that Bieito had asked Shopping and Fucking dramatist Mark Ravenhill to provide a new English language translation for the spoken dialogue further reinforced misgivings about the pairing of Strausss popular work with the Catalan enfant terrible. Nevertheless, Bieito made clear his objective of theatrically probing the tensions present between the lush, opulent romanticism of Strausss memorable score and a plot that gravitates around adultery, deception and revenge. Dispensing with the framework of a contemporary Spanish setting that had grounded Don Giovanni and A Masked Ball, Bieito chose to relocate the opera from 1870, where the librettists place it, to the early years of the twentieth century in an society on the cusp of the rude awakening that was the first world war. Bieitos regular scenographer Alfons Flores provided a single design environment of imposing mottled black marble and red velvet, based on Brussels Stoclet palace designed by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffman, which functioned as the living quarters of the Eisenstein couple in the first act, the grand salon of Prince Orlovsky in the pieces second act and the prison of the final act. Part mausoleum, part grand hotel lobby, its airless, windowless dcor of black lacquered high walls provided a stark metaphor for the deadened transitory liaisons that mark the piece. Act One began against a backdrop of hungover guests emerging languorously from a drunken stupor, with the luxuriant stage bathed in a dark, 95

dingy light which immediately announced the tensions between decadent hedonism and a faade of social propriety which marks Bieitos reading of the piece. Indeed one of Bieitos key reference points for the production was Buuels Exterminating Angel (1962), an expos of the absurdities of bourgeois conventions of respectability and social grandeur. But whereas Buuels characters are prevented from leaving the room by some undefined force, here Strausss characters do not wish to escape for theyre trapped within the closed universe of a giddying state of interminable partying that becomes their particular mental prison (Bieito, in Lourdes Morgades. El Pas, 8 September 2002). Here, no character proved exempt from this decadent culture. Paul Nilons Gabriel von Eisenstein was presented as trapped in a marriage of convenience, deceived by his wife Rosalinde (played by Geraldine McGreevy as a middle-aged vamp, all cleavage, gown and pearls), romantically involved with a rotund lusty tenor, Alfred (a great comic turn from Wynne Evans), well equipped in the demands of hiding his ample frame when husbands return home unexpectedly. Rosalindes maid Adele (Natalie Christie) lied to her mistress about tending to a sick aunt in order to borrow one of the formers dresses and escape to Count Orlovskys party. Eisenstein, conned by his trusted friend Dr. Falke as revenge for the former allowing him to fall asleep in public dressed in a bats costume, wants to be the Marquis he passes himself off as at the party. And while Eisenstein may have taken Adele onto his knee in a gesture that pointed to theirs as something more than a formal master servant relationship, the gestural language of his relationship with the smooth-talking Falke suggested a homoerotic pull that questioned the supposed heterosexuality of the protagonists. The intricate physical games that marked out the characters interactions in Act One including a drunken striptease, cushion fights, urinating around a palm tree, and the tenors avid pursuit of his mistress with his trousers downall suggested a climate of infantilization which was carried forward in the frenzied hysteria that marked Orlovskys Act Two party. Sara Fulgonis lithe count was a detached androgynous entity, who watched over the antics of her socially ambitious guests with the dull anger of boredom. Richard Whitehouse rendered a dark, menacing MC, Falke, presiding over his bitter revenge with poised gusto. The mini stage placed upstage, largely unused in Act One, here created an arena for the lurid

metatheatrics that categorized Bieito and Stuart Hoppss exuberant choreography. There was something of the dissolute spectacle of Baz Luhrmanns Moulin Rouge in the tailoring of Merc Palomas intricately drawn chorus costumes and Hoppss dance routines. The grotesque bright-colored tutus of the chorus were vividly juxtaposed with the rigid formality of the protagonists evening dress. The popular myth of Vienna, as Bieito reminds us in his program notes, may be synonymous with charming cafes, waltzes and delicious pastries but peer a little closer and the superficial brilliance of the grand imperialist veneer rubs away to reveal a dangerous provincialism. Indeed both Freud and Schnitzler, Viennese contemporaries of Strauss, were also evoked in the staging: the former through the wild, Bacchae-like chaos of the party and the discontent it masks, and the latter through the hypocrisy that veils the voracious sexuality and egotism of the characters. The perpetual party fuelled by endless champagne charged towards its own inevitable selfdestruction as Act Two led straight into Act Three, a mental prison rather than the physical jail specified by the librettists. In The Exterminating Angel, the trapped dinner party guests gradually reduce the elegant bourgeois salon to a squalid wasteland of debris and discarded food. By Act Three, the salon had similarly disintegrated into a messy sea of wasted corpses through which Falke, promoted to much greater prominence as he assumed the Frosch jailer role, waded distastefully, trying Eisenstein through a fake kangaroo court farce. The denouement was accelerated with real masochistic bite and nastiness as all the social climbers, lying in their own metaphorical waste, were exposed for brutal hypocrites trapped in a devastating tableau of social decay. The mood of jolly frivolity that often underpins productions of the piece was here replaced by an acerbic look at a society obsessed with maintaining an outdated representation of its own ritualistic codes. Ravenhills dialogue succeeded in capturing the tedious self-centered vulgarity of the characters views, making analogies with contemporary corruptions through references to politician Jeffrey Archers prison parties and corporate share scandals. For a number of critics however, Ravenhills coarse lyrics jarred with David Poutney and Leonard Hancocks more stylized lyrics (Rupert Christiansen, Daily Telegraph, 17 September 2002; Andrew Clements, Guardian, 16 96

September 2002; Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 22 September 2002). And Ravenhills decision to stress vulgarity at the expense of wit met with practically universal panning (for example, Anthony Holden, Observer, 22 September 2002; Stephen Walsh, Independent, 23 September 2002; Jon Holliday, The Stage, 3 October 2002). While the Sunday Timess Stephen Pettitt judged Ravenhill and Bieitos textual reworkings disquieting (22 September 2002), and the Financial Timess Andrew Clark, despite misgivings about the playing of the humor in simply bawdy, physical terms, found the staging compelling (17 September 2002), for a significant component of the British critics, including Pettitt and Holden, Bieitos pitch of sustained hysteria was simply tedious. It was, however, precisely through this sustained hysteria that Bieito was able to re-view Strausss rather staid operetta, providing an entertainment about emptiness where the characters were dancing about, but as if on the Titanic (Bieito, in Allison, The Times, 19 February 2002), with voyeurs peeping out behind every curtain and champagne mindlessly guzzled via chamber pots. As the phallic stage imagery made clear, it is the unholy union of vain, competitive patriarchy and all-consuming capitalism that generates such devastating self-destruction. The unflattering mirror offered to our own societys exasperating obsessions with vicarious pleasures and voyeuristic self-contemplation was visible in the ambiguous cut of Palomas costumes and Ravenhills caustic dialogue, which evidently proved rather distasteful to a conservative critical establishment keener to maintain a respectable distance from Strausss social satire. Brecht and Weill, like Somma and Verdi before them, rewrote known stories and through the process of narrative retelling offered searing commentaries on the socio-political landscape of their time. Brecht and Weills 1928 reworking of John Gays 1928 The Beggars Opera overtly flaunts its own anachronisms, juggling a setting that suggests Edwardian London with elements of urban North American gangster culture, and the vibrant Berlin in which both were then based. The Threepenny Opera was conceived as a pastiche that incorporates references from cabaret, operetta, opera and jazz into a new bitingly acerbic musical language. Bieito has judged the work a product of a Brecht still trying to find a way of understanding theatre and the world, paraphrasing Picassos dictum that an unfinished piece of art is a dead piece of art in articulat-

ing his own view of the piece as an unfinished masterpiece juggling elements from all corners of society. The fact that Bieito toyed with renaming his version of the piece, La pera de todo a cien (The Everything for 100 Opera), gives an indication of the directorial approach he chose to take. For the radical reworking undertaken with translator Pablo Leya veritable continuation of Brechts own liberal reworking of Gays pieceresituated the piece from a mythical London to a hyper-real, contemporary fairground booth, named, not insignificantly Alabama, with a tombola-cum-bingo-cum-karaokecum-brothel stall filled with an array of contemporary electrical goods and soft toys whose lights wink provocatively at the both audience and the beggars, whores and thieves who populate the piece. A self contained, multiple layered box-of-tricks that opened out to lay out its alluring wares, this resonant environment matched Baudrillards Disneyland as a metaphor for the all-pervasive simulation that is the predicament of our times. It is here that these characters gathered in search of the stroke of luck that will allow them to rise out of the marginalized spaces represented by this deviant, carnivalesque location into more respectable moneyed society. And it offered a brilliant metaphor for a tarnished capitalism, which, while it has seen better days, continues to cast its

alluring spell over all the characters. Positioned among the washing machines, microwaves, toy monkeys and ducks, sat the members of the Teatre Lliures chamber orchestra, disguised as Minnie Mouse, Cinderella, Batman, the Pink Panther, Barbie, Homer Simpson, Elvis Presleya self-referential nod perhaps to the disguise of Gustavus in A Masked Balla gorilla, and in the case of its musical director and pianist Llus Vidal, Harry Potter: clearly an amusing reference by Bieito to the world of popular TV, comic and cinematic culture which so animates his stagings. This band was not hidden in a corner of the stage but rather placed on display among the other commodities available for purchase. Along the top of the stall a narrow overhead screen flashed titles, observations, financial statistics, wry comments, lines of dialogue and questions to the audience. Brechts stage directions suggest that sermonizing style in which the songs are to be delivered. Bieitos reading of them, as with so much in the production, went beyond this function, although they entirely kept up with Brechts aspirations to expose the sinister workings of capitalist society. Indeed Bieitos fairground booth was a seedy ambience where gaunt, haggard expressions testified to a culture permeated by the toll of hard drugs. The production opened with the

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appearance of a blind beggar who first stepped onto the stage hushing the audience as he plugged in his electric guitar to begin a brash, abrasive rendition of The Ballad of Mac the Knife before Macheaths gang appeared on stage and brutally injured him with a drill. Carles Canut provided a dapper Peachum, pristine in a cream suit and a romantic Cuban lilt, an migr made good and determined to protect his privileged position at all costs. His wife, a rather muted, schoolmarmish performance from Carme Sansa, resembled the caricature of bourgeois housewivesall backcombed hair and color coordinated twin-setsso beloved of Catalan performance group La Cubana. The other characters were more sharply drawn. Boris Ruizs Macheathhere renamed Mackiewas a predatory, tawdry womanizer. A soiled, slimy figure with greased back hair and crocodile shoes, he strutted and swaggered across the stage with aggressive disdain for those who dared stand in his way. There was much of the aging second-hand car salesman about this characterization. Exploding in fits of roaring aggression when disobeyed or challenged, Ruiza memorable Lenox in Bieitos recent Macbethmoved away from his habitual comic register, to render a compelling, gravel-voiced petty crook and gangster, losing his looks and trying to hit the big time by marrying the blonde bombshell daughter of the local mafioso. While El Pass Marcos Ordez (El Pas Babelia, 6 July 2002) judged his performance overly redolent of Joe Pesci in first half, really coming into its own only in the second half, Ruizs characterization seemed conspicuously and self-consciously modeled on the US gangsters he and his men aspire to emulate. The gang, however, was depicted as a motley assortment of trigger-happy hoodlums, indiscriminately flashing their phallic pistols around with an alarming indifference to the damage that they may inflict. Theirs is the culture of compulsive consumerism and murderous machismo where everything exists to be bought and sold if the price is right. As Macheaths lackeys they often shaped the performance space, bringing on the propswedding arches, bridal table, a giant cake from which jumps a strip-o-gramfor the marriage ceremony with Polly. These unreconstituted males were always looking for an opportunity to drop their trousers, charging around the stage like a herd of drunken dogs. The aggressive society presented by Bieito was pervaded by a climate of corruption where the complicity of the establishment was ever evident. 98

Tiger Brownhere played by Bieitos Macbeth Mingo Rfols as a retro cop trapped in the iconography of nineteen-seventies US police dramas appeared a languid, lazy detective. With hair combed over his ample bald patch and mirrored sunglasses, he suggested a man with much to hide. Santi Ponss Reverend Kimball was a similarly shady figure. Willing to conduct a wedding ceremony with a strip-o-gram in the corner, and snogging Chantal Aimes Miss Smith whenever the opportunity presents itself, he formedwith Macheath and Tiger Brownpart of a deadly trio, an old boys club determined to maintain a status quo that protects their crooked interests. It is money that rules here, and Roser Cams engaging Polly, clad in baby doll white dresses and cascading blonde ringlets while ostensibly the object over which Peachum and Macheath clashed, similarly recognized the mercantile climate in which all are embroiled. Her wedding gifts from Macheath are a girls best friends: diamonds and a fur coat. But this was no meek and mild Polly, and as Macheath placed her in charge of his business interests while he languished in prison, we watched her swap the white mini dresses for black clean-cut trouser suits, emerging as an aggressive temptress who threatened Walter without a second thought, coolly determined to keep control of the empire over which she now presided. Love is just another commodity here. As Mrs. Peachum sang of male sexual obsession, All you need is love flashed ironically on the screen. The hard-drinking Mrs. Peachum presented an image of a woman driven to alcohol by the trials and turmoils of marriage. Polly flourished sans Macheath. The round of bingo, the karaoke event, and game showwith prizes including landmines and an orthopedic legin the background as Macheath visited Jennys brothel in Act Two, served to further remove any romanticism from Brechts scenario. Sex, as Macheath made clear in his dealings with Jenny, is a commodity to be bought and sold. And the array of prostitutes on showin a range of sizes and agessuggested all tastes could be catered for providing the price is right. The multiple spheres of action that Bieito created both within and around the fairground, may, at times, have proved distracting but they played a crucial part in rooting the staging within a world teetering towards the anarchy that consistently threatened to ruin the impending royal nuptials. Joining the Romeas repertoire company

members, who have performed Threepenny Opera alongside Macbeth throughout the latter part of 2002, came veteran Argentine performer Cecilia Rosetto who conceived a robust Jenny trapped within the iconography of flash nineteen-seventies disco culture. Hers was a feline figure, who, according to El Pass Ordez, cavorted across the stage like Tina Turner. Her silver lam trousers, low-cut tops and Joan Collins wig, may have implied that the flesh is still willing but the ravages of age contained in her gritty, world weary tones suggested her glory years were long gone. There was something of the torch song singer about her Jenny, merging the gusto of Shirley Bassey with the melancholy of Marlene Dietrich. Towering over Ruizs Macheatha height difference exploited by Bieito in his choreography of their Act Two love duet to amusing effects as the big man Macheath stood on tiptoes to kiss herhers was a performance grounded in the performance language of musical theatre. And while both this and her Argentine accent served to accentuate her outsider status, for Avuis Francesco this dissonance gave the impression that she was performing in a different show to the rest of cast (27 June 2002). While Bieito may have been castigated for not imposing a coherent performance register onto the production, the piece itself does not aspire to this kind of homogeneity. The dramaturgical decision to rebrand Miss Smith into an emcee provided a unifying strand to Bieitos staging. Chantal Aimes feisty mistress of ceremony, described by El Pass Ordez as part-beauty queen, part-TV presenter (6 July 2002), controlled the proceedings with a range of guises to suit the mood of the occasion. Hers was the slate on which all characters wrote their wishes, her responsesabrasive, sarcastic, steely, surprising, acquiescent, defiantserved as Bieitos most brutal commentary on the avaricious consumptiondriven society depicted in the piece. In Act Two this included a clinical description of fellatio while fanning herself in a spotlight beside Jennys whorehousea telling a critique of the commercialism of sexand the detached observation of Lucys assault of Macheath while nonchalantly consuming popcorn. In Act Three she exuberantly narrated the gruesome horrors of the electric chair, the first prize in a lottery won by Macheath, as if pawning a piece of jewelry. The latter, sitting amidst a pile of electrical goods and soft toys that were to prove his scaffold, was simply another object on display before an audience that would be asked to vote on 99

whether he ought to be executed. This critique of the death penalty proved as damning as that offered by Sellars in his searing reading of Handels Theodora for Glyndebourne in 1996. Pablo Leys rough idiomatic translation, juggling what Bieito views as the politics and poetry which drives the work, peppers the dialogue with a range of contemporary references: the exploitation of immigrants, economic scandals, European federalism, and the forthcoming wedding of a prince (Spains Crown Prince Felipe?) who has just built a house for himself. The alterations undertaken by Bieito, Ley, Josep Galindo, and Xavier Zuber never attempted to efface the pieces wayward dramaturgy. Rather the creakiness remained, the sense of fragmentation accentuated by the structural decisions made by the team. Indeed part of the appeal of the piece has always been its inherent malleability and here Bieito demonstrated the willingness to cut and paste, which has marked his recent contentious work with Shakespeare. As such the shifting of the Song of Insufficiency of Human Endeavor from Act Three, Scene Seven to the first half finale in Act Two provided a pre-interval moment of contemplation on the politics of the piece. The Pirate Jenny Song, moved from Act Three to Act Two, shifted the focus to Jennys revenge for Macheaths treatment of her. The inclusion of The Alabama Song from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny sung by Jenny on her first Act Two appearance, served as both leitmotif for her and for the work itself, a link to the fairground booth which shares the same title, and the prison to which Macheath is taken which is also bears this name. The playfulness of Brechts deus ex machina ending, where Brown enters with news of a reprieve for Macheath from the Queen, was here replaced by two alternative endings which followed each other. The first saw Macheath electrocuted, the second provided a pardon where he was given the funds to form the Mac Bank as he shook off his wires prepared for his electrocution, screeching Dios existe! (God exists!) Any production that opens the annual Grec summer Festival in Barcelona is always going to be subject to close press scrutiny. La opera de cuatro cuartos was no exception, polarizing the critics across all elements of the mise-en-scne. El Pass Javier Prez Senz castigated Bieito for his choice of actors, judged unable to provide an adequate singing register for the piece (27 June 2002) with only singer Cecilia Rosetto regarded as rising to the challenge posed by Weills music. The choice to

largely cast actors rather than singers, however, rendering the harsh songs in anything but dulcet tones, while evidently following Brechts dictum that the roles be taken by singing actors rather than acting singers, also rendered some resonant casting decisions. Carles Canut (Peachum), Boris Ruiz (Macheath), Carm Sansa (Mrs. Peachum), and Mingo Rfols (Brown) all appeared in Mario Gass now legendary 1984 Catalan-language staging of the piece at the Romea theatre, now under Bieitos artistic directorship. Bieitos staging is only the second Castilian-language outing for the piece: the first presented in 1965 by Jos Mara Loperena at the Poliorama theatre two years after the Catalan-language premiere by Frederic Roda at the Palau de la Musica. While the pieces fervent anti-capitalist message may have ensured a rather checkered production history during the censorious years of the Franco regime, its sprawling dramaturgy has proved a veritable challenge to contemporary directors working in what appear to be politically less compromised times. For El Pass Prez Senz Bieito failed to find an appropriate tone for the piece, pitching it at too intense a political level so that the reiteration of excessively, capitalist critique became exasperatingly tiring. While El Periodico de Catalunyas Gonzalo Prez de Olaguer recognized the moments of scenic brilliance conjured by Bieito, he also sensed that the repetition and sometimes clumsy stitching together of the piece weakened its impact (27 June 2002). ABCs Juan Carlos Olivares, La Vanguardias Joan-Anton Benach and El Mundo de Catalunyas Iolanda G. Madariaga shared his doubts (27 June 2002). It is perhaps Ordez who provided the most astute review of the production, praising both the ferocious nihilism of Leys translation and the charged interpretative register of the assembled cast while recognizing that the conceptual brilliance of the staging was not always matched by close directorial attention to all scenes. Whereas the piece was coolly greeted in the cavernous outdoor Grec theatre where it opened on 25 June and at Madrids Teatro de la Zarzuela, where it played as part of the Autumn Festival in late October, with critics documenting the audience exodus that followed the interval (Pep Martorell, El Punt de Maresme, 28 June 2002; Javier Villan, El Mundo, 26 October 2002), the performances at the Lliures Faba Puigserver auditorium which closed its Spanish tour between 6 and 10 November were warmly greeted by a younger than average audience 100

whose remained vociferously engaged and attentive to the end. Bieitos nurturing of a younger audience with his programming at the Romea theatre over the past two years may well have paid off. The repertory company cultivated at the Romea, performing in both Catalanas in Bieitos searing conception of Macbeth, a reworking of his controversial 2001 Salzburg staging of the piece which has opened new parameters for the staging of Shakespeare in Spainand Castilian-Spanishas in The Threepenny Operahas provided a bilingual ensemble responsible for the citys most dynamic textual theatre. The forthcoming visit of the Romeas production of Macbeth to London s Barbican Center as well as possible plans to revive The Threepenny Opera for Pariss EMCEE Bobigny suggests that audiences outside Barcelona will finally have a chance to see the work that he has produced with his company as he prepares his Englishlanguage Shakespeare debut, Hamlet, for the 2003 Edinburgh International Festival. And while some may take offense at what they regard his desecration of classic texts, his decentering postmodern aesthetic has served to ask pertinent questions about what these pieces might say to contemporary audiences. A recognition of the importance of his stagings is evident in the press attention that now greets his openings both in Spain and the UK. His production of Don Giovanni, opening at the Liceu on 30 November, generated a clamorous debate with polarized reviews generating counter reviews and emotive letters (see, for e.g. Alier and Benachs reviews in La Vanguardia on 2 December 2002, and the letters that were subsequently published on 5, 6, and 8 December 2002). His conspicuous directorial choices of works which appear to concern themselves with societies hurtling uncontrollably towards self-destructionas his visions of Don Giovanni and Macbeth also graphically demonstrateindicate a political engagement with the global concerns of our timeeconomic and political migration and displacement, ethnic conflict, and the pervasive tentacles of a global commercial ethos that has permeated all forms of communication. Eschewing the easy sentimentality of cultural conservatism, the visual signs of his productions have effectively rewritten these operatic pieces for a new generation attuned to the highspeed rhythms of twenty-first century media, providing seminal connections to our cultural era and as such, offering pertinent reflections on the ideological currents and concerns of the age.

Alles nur Spass: Colognes Carnival Stunksitzung


Erik Abbott In the Rhineland region of Germany, in and around Cologne, Dsseldorf, and Bonn, Carnival has been celebrated at least since Medieval Times. And before that, it is said, the Romans kicked up a pretty good time during their annual Saturnalia festival. (The region around Mainz is also well known for its Carnival celebrations.) The Romans, though, did not have the Stunksitzung. A recent winter visit to the area allowed me the opportunity to view this immensely popular production and cultural event. With 2003 marking its twentieth year, the Stunksitzung has brought theatrical hilarity and unrestrained (sometimes bare-knuckled) parody to Cologne since 1984, including in 1991, when many public Carnival festivities were cancelled because of the first Gulf War. (The prospect of a second did not miss the Stunkers scalpel.) The Stunksitzung is the largest, most visible, and most popular production (this year, as in the case in most years, all forty-six performances sold out in less than an hour) of the so-called alternative Sitzungenproductions that take satiric aim not only at current political and social happenings (as any traditional Sitzung will also do, though perhaps to a gentler degree), but also at the Rhineland version of Carnival itself and, especially, at its unique contribution to pre-Lenten revels, the Sitzung. It would perhaps be too easy to dismiss the traditional Sitzungen (which literally means sittings) as being little more than community variety shows, and, on the surface, this comparison would not be inaccurate. It is not entirely clear to this writer precisely when the Sitzungen tradition began, although it is most closely associated with the modern celebration of Carnival, which, at least as an official civic celebration dates to the early nineteenth century. (There was a reform enacted in 1823, around which the official Carnival events were organized.) The Sitzungen are interesting to theatre scholars because they represent an indigenous local folk theatrical forman adjunct to and integral part of the admittedly performative revels that occur in the streets, bars, and Vereinen of the

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cities and villages of the region. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Festkomitees, who present Sitzungen every year. (One of the oldest and largest is the Prunksitzung, whose name the Stunksitzung mocks.) Traditional Sitzungen last six hours, with acts of comedymostly satirical swipes at local figures and eventsand music and Bttenreden essentially comic lectures (often rather long, perhaps at least by American theatre-going or stand-up comedy standards). These lectures (many of which have been published in collections) originally were given from a podium fashioned to look like a beer barrel or wine cask, and now traditionally include political and social commentary. (Cabaret, in the Rhineland often refers to similar, long, comic solo performances that are expected to have a rather highly developed degree of this topical commentary.) Hildegard Brog, in her book, Was auch passiert: Dr Zoch ktt! Die Geschichte des rheinische Karnevals (Whatever Happens: The Parade is Coming! The History of Rhineland Carnival), states that Sitzungen were at one time important for the organization of the parades that take place during Carnival. In contemporary times, however, they have survived as performances in their own right. In recent decades, alternative events, including alternative Sitzungen have emerged as important and popular components of Carnival. There is, for example, a Rosasitzung (Pinka gay and lesbian Sitzung), and a Mdchensitzung (literally, girls Sitzungonly women are allowed to attenda popular challenge to the historical patriarchal flavor of much of Carnival). The Stunksitzung, which began life in the small Studio Bhnea black box theatre on the campus of (though not specifically associated with) the University of Colognehas become a seminal and essential Carnival event for thousands in the area. I first became acquainted with itand with Cologne Carnivalduring an extended visit to the city in 2001. In consideration of this years production, I could not help but wonder that, if Bahktinian theory holds and Carnival represents a necessary upending of societal norms, and the traditional Sitzungen are a part of that, what then is to be made of the alternative Sitzungens further upendingof this traditional initial upending? What results when the upside-down is flipped again? What can we make of this subversion of the subversive? What is left when the twisted and mocked is itself twisted and mocked? 102

In the case of the 2003 production of the Stunksitzung, what remains standing is a targeted jabbingsometimes sucker-punchingand often hysterically funny look at Rhineland concerns ranging from flooding in the lowlands to war in the Middle East. Biggi Wanninger, who has worked with the production every year since 1993, once again filled the role of Presidenta simple variety show would call her the emceeas she has done since 1999. For the 5 January 2003 Premiere, she made her entranceas is done every yearthrough the packed house of Colognes E-Werk, a former power plant-turned nightclub/concert hall, with the nights special guest Festkomitee, eleven strong and Carnival-costume-bedecked. (There are, she soon notedand as any good Jeck, or Carnival celebrant, would knowonly supposed to be ten, but at a good party, whats one extra, more or less?) The Stunksitzung band, perennial favorite Kbes Underground, provided the musical backdrop and Lead Singer Ecki Pieper (who was back after a hiatus in 2002) met Wanninger onstage for an opening number. (Kbes, in the local Klsch dialect, is the name given to brewery house waiters who serve up tall thin glass after tall thin glass of the regional beer, also called Klsch. The Kbes are somewhat legendary for their curt service and abrupt manner.) The crowds roar of approval rose to a pitch at Wanningers entrance and did not stop untilmore than three-and-a-half hours laterthey were informed that no more show would be offered. Although the traditions being mocked and the extremely local and/or topical references could be as impenetrable for the uninitiated as spoken (versus consumable) Klsch (in which some songs and at least one sketch are always performed), still much of the humor was eventually understandable. Wanninger dispensed with any formal Bttenreden, although her short commentaries between sketches and musical numbers certainly had a similar, if sharper and funnier, edge. (I confess I had some help in comprehending the proceedings; I was invited to watch a number of rehearsals during the week prior to the Premier and repeated viewings along with translation assistance, explanations of references, etc. from cast members, director George Isherwoodhimself an expatriate Americanand one of the co-directors, Hans Kieseier, were enormously useful in sorting things out). In addition to Isherwood, who also worked with the 2002 production, and Kieseier, who directed the show from 1998-2001, the directing team was rounded out by

Thomas Kller, Joschi Vogel, and Angelika Pohlert. Some pieces had universal enough targets that little beyond rudimentary German was necessary to get the overall idea, if not the minutia. A case in point was the Priestersex sketch, a scathing indictment of Catholic Church sex scandals. In this piece, a guilt-ridden Priest (Ozan Akhan) visits his Monsignor (Bruno Schmitz), needing to talk about his carnal indiscretions. Before he can detail his sins, the Monsignor jumps to his own conclusions and begins a hilariously graphic monologue describing and acting out what he believes must be the fathers misdeeds, using a candle as a phallic visual aid and ending up astride a table, copulating in an orgasmic frenzy, as he gleefully imagines the fathers liaisons with his housekeeper. When the Priest finally admits that he has not had an affair with his employee, but rather with an altar boy, the Monsignor waves it off as no problem at all, as long as they keep it secret. (The Church has been a frequent, if not annual target, and it should perhaps be noted that, on more than one occasion, the Stunksitzung has incurred local diocesan wrath.) Another sketch that certainly transcended cultural and even linguistic barriers was The

Silence of Men, in which the entire male acting ensemble plus several Kbes Underground members sat in a semi-circle at a support group, wherein they were supposed to discuss their feelings, in regards to relationship issues. Utter silence followedand followed. Finally, after two or three minutes with nothing more forthcoming from the assembled gents than fidgeting and throat clearing, a cell phones ring shattered the quiet. The offender (Jnemann) answered, embarrassed, and exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, I cannot talk right now. After a few more moments, the facilitator (Schmitz) finally suggested that they take a break and perhaps talk about sports or whateverat which point, of course, the guys burst out with a cacophony of chatter. It was a one-joke sketch, but the joke was funny and the audiencewell, the female half of the audience, anyway, loved it. Give the attention German-American relationship strain has received, it was not surprising that George W. Bush was also drawn into the troupes satiric crosshairs. At one point, Wanninger, in fine German Wortspiel form, referred to him as George Doppeldoof Bush (George doubly-stupid Bush), and the ensemble dedicated an entire sketch to the American President in the Bush Ponies.

The Dreigestirn Sketch. Photo Copyright: A. & W. Bartscher/ dea-NewsInfo.net

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The Ponies themselves were four red, white, and blue-clad cowgirls (Anne Rixmann, Doro Egelhof, Martina Klinke, and Martina Bajohr), whirling lassos, who extolled (in their best Texan-accented Germanin and of itself funny) the President of the world, as sturdy cowboys (Akhan again, with Tom Simon, Bruno Schmitz, and Christian Rzepka) astride hobby horses, swayed in the background to the western music of a now-cowboy-hat-and-bolotie-festooned Kbes Underground. The Ponies decried the unfairness of German politicians comparing President Bush to Hitler, because, after all, Hitler wrote a book. Finally, the man himself (as played by Didi Jnemann), in a properly Presidential suit and cowboy boots, entered, his translator (Doris Dietzold) by his side. Bush spoke in Englishcomplete with stereotypically mangled syntax (Saddam is the most fucking dictator in the Middle East)while the translator relayed his comments. But from the moment he said Remember the Marshall Plan and the care packets? she softened his words into a deliberately mistranslated German that was presumably more palatable-to-the-pacifistic-public (Germany and the US have a long history of friendship), discussing at one point the distribution of tangerines rather than the sexually graphic humiliation Bush declares five thousand US Marines will visit upon the Iraqi dictator. (This joke was also the best pun of the evening, the German word for tangerine being Mandarine.) Later, after Bushs boast that my father and I will personally drown his [Saddam Husseins] goldfish, the by now completely aghast translator could only come up with a weak bloop. Another high point was the Leni Riefenstahl sketch, with the one-hundred-and-oneyear-old film director (Bajohr) being interviewed by a television talk show host (Rzepka). Though Hitler was not directly mentioned, his favorite filmmakers visual and thematic fascinations with, among other things, marching feet and classical notions of masculinity, were delightfully spoofed in a short film (from Niklas Bhm) featuring three oiled, g-string clad Rotenfunkentraditional Carnival redcoat soldiersoriginally a mocking of the Napoleonic soldiers during the French occupation (portrayed by Simon and Kbes Underground members Volker Klinke and Georg Kunz)enveloped in wisps of smoke and backlit by raging infernos, and accompanied by Wagnerian music, drinking Klsch, posing, and dancing the Stippe Fttchea traditional Carnival dance during which the Rotenfunken, 104

among other things, rub their buttocks together. As the best Carnival satire will, the film managed several levels of social and historical reference. The actors carried propsKlsch serving trays, etc. associated with the Kbes (the waiters), fusing images of everyday Cologners (the waiters), traditional Carnival figures (Rotenfunken), and German historyor stereotypes of historyeffectively creating simultaneous linkages between the quotidian, the festive, the homoerotic, and the martial. This clever fusion bitingly dug at the stereotype of Germanor at least Rhinelandnationalism, with Carnivals subversive wink assuring the audience that the troupe knew exactly what they were mocking and how and why. Even without this deeper context, however, the film was funny on its face, and anyone with even a surface knowledge of Riefenstahls reputation and work (or Carnival in Cologne) would have laughed as uproariously as the opening-night audience did. This year also marked a leap forward in terms of the complexity in the technical aspects of the show, both because of the videos (a promotional video of Kbes Underground singing one of their signature covers, Just a Gigolo, was also shown) and because of the Cologne Under Water sketch. It was also, perhaps unintentionally, one of the most topical moments in the show, as the Rhine was flooding much of the low-lying land in and around the citya somewhat unusual occurrence for January. In this sketch, Heike (originally Dietzold, although the Stunksitzung website reports that band Saxophonist and Floutist Tanja Svejnoha has since taken over the role) and her grandmother (Egelhof) are out in a rowboat on the Rhine, when they spot two spires poking just above the water. Imagery of two spires in Cologne is always a reference to the Cathedral, Colognes most famous landmark since the thirteenth century, and such visual allusions are ubiquitous in the area. (One local joke makes the claim that McDonalds took its trademark from der Dom.) In the sketch, the grandmother recalls the legend of Colonia Atlantis Agrippinensis, the mythical underwater city. A vast mirror, hinged along the upstage stage floor, was employed to create genuinely beautiful stage pictures. The stage floor itself was covered in aquatic-print linoleum. As the grandmother told her story to Heikethe two precariously suspended in a rowboat far above the underwater actionthe downstage edge of the mirror was raised to a forty-five degree angle and the actors performed on their backs on small skate-

The Elvira Sketch. Photo Copyright: A. & W. Bartscher/ dea-NewsInfo.net

board-like carts with castors that allowed for waterballet-like movement. The audience viewed the sceneshumorous representations of Carnival celebrations, etc.in the mirror, creating a visual effect that was stunning. (The wonderfully inventive sets, props, and costumes were designed by Helga Schmelz. Jojo Tillman designed the lights.) Every year, in a nod to the traditional, the Stunksitzung makes use of traditional Carnival music and symbols and this year was no exception. Local scandals came under fire in a musical sketch (the Bullenmedley) in which members of the Cologne Police (Simon, Rixmann, Martina Klinke, and Kbes Underground member Winni Rau) sang traditional Carnival songs with new Klsch-dialect lyrics boasting of their accomplishments with their nightsticks. (In 2002, a man in custody died after being beaten by the Police.) A Star Wars sketch mocked a Cologne trash incinerator scandal and disgraced German Free Democratic Party Leader Jrgen W. Mllemann (Jnemann) made a brief appearance in a failed attempt to take Wanninger 105

captive. Wanninger herself, who often does a trademark angel number, did a Goldfinger tribute to popular local cabarettist and comedienne Trude Herr (who died several years ago) with Rzepka in a Halle Berry gold-lame bikini serving as her Bond girl. In a gravelly voice that I was told closely approximated Herrs, Wanninger declared that, as a secret weapon, should she get hold of Bin Laden, he would be bin fertig, (finished), and tossed out a couple of obligatory digs at Dsseldorfthe state of North Rhein-Westfalias capital city, with whom Cologne shares an eternal animosity and competitionmostly based in fun. Bajohr also deliciously mocked Cologne civil service in a solo piece as the operator at a city hotline, who demonstrated as little interest as possible in offering any actual assistance to callersanswering each call with How must I help you? Even Britains Prince Charlestrying to reach Cologne Mayor Fritz Schrammawas not able to get what he needed. Declining social services were targeted in The Hospital of the Future, in which health care

was depicted as completely self-service, supermarket-style, with shopping carts and home surgery kits. A mother in labor (Martina Klinke) and her husband (Schmitz) were able to get actual human help, although the orderly (Akhan) assigned to assist them let slip that he may have been confused about their newborn sons umbilical cord and snipped the wrong protuberance. Globalism came under fire in a sketch called Globalix, a gentle spoof of the popular cartoon characters Asterix and Obelix (Jnemann and Simon). This sketch was largely in dialect and therefore a little difficult for me to sort out exactly, but I did recognize that Klsch (the beer) was ultimately represented as triumphant. The best theatrical joke of the evening was the first sketch, in which the ensemble parodied Peter Handkes Offending the Audience. In the staccato rhythms of the original, the company informed the audience that this was not a traditional Carnival Sitzungjust in case anyone might have been misled. They would, howeverand this was neither a suggestion nor a requestlaugh. There would be no Dreigestirnthe traditional Carnival trio of Prince, Farmer, and Virgin (the last always portrayed by a man in drag)although, later, in fact, there was one, distorted, of course, into a sort of Dreigestirn for foreigners, with Auslnders portraying the roles (Pieper, Rau, and fellow Kbes Underground member Carlos Neisel, respectively)an acknowledgement that local customs can be dizzily confusing to non-Rhinelanders and an implicit and not-so-subtle criticism of the stereotypical xenophobia and aloofness of Germans. (At least, I think thats what they were getting at.) If there was a low point, it may have been the Elvira sketch, in which Elviss abandoned

daughter, Elvira (Egelhof), grows up in a convent, but leaves to become a rock-and-roller like her father. In this version, Elvis (Simon) was originally from Cologne and he later admits that he faked his death because he couldnt get Klsch in the US. The sketch served as the musical finale, and, although amusing, lacked the depth of cleverness and searing wit of much of the rest of the evenings offerings. It did present a good opportunity for the evenings festivities to end on a musical note, as such a show needs, but it would perhaps been better placed at another point in the program. (I thought the Dreigestirn segment would perhaps have been a stronger finish.) Despite the cultural baptism one must undergo to understand the Stunksitzung (and, perhaps, indeed, Carnival itself, at least the Rhinelands version, which is sadly less well known than the Rio and Venice incarnations), the rewards of having made the attempt to overcome the perceived obstacles were immense. The Stunksitzung is an enormously entertaining and interesting take on a unique theatrical form that is itself fascinating. As to what Bakhtin might have made of it, I cannot say with authority. Given the popularity of the mainstream Carnival in Cologne, it would seem that it serves its necessary function with enough strength to withstand a subversion of its traditions to the point thatat least in the case of the Stunksitzungthis subversion of the subversive has become its own firmly establishedand imminently worthwhile project. The Stunksitzung website is www.stunksitzung.de Kbes Undergrounds website is www.koebesunderground.de

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Contributors
ERIK ABBOTT is a student in the Ph.D. in Theatre Program at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Editorial Assistant for Western European Stages. CELIA BRAXTON is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her paper, Walking the Plank: Virtual Reality in the Corral del Prncipe and The Balconies of Madrid was presented at the second annual SCAENA Conference of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Performance. Her Report on the Status of Women Directors and Playwrights in the New York City Theater, prepared for the Theatre Program, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), was fundamental to NYSCAs 2002 Report on the Status of Women. Celia teaches in the Department of Theatre at Brooklyn College. MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history and dramatic literature. He is the 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the 1999 recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award. His book, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, which came out from University of Michigan Press in 2001, received the Callaway Prize. BARRY DANIELS is a retired professor of Theatre History. He has written extensively on the French Romantic Theatre and his book Vers une scographie moderne: Dcors de la Comdie-Franaise, 1799-1848, will be published in 2003 by the Bibliothque nationale de France. JEAN DeCOCK is a Professor of French Literature with a PhD from UCLA, where he wrote his thesis on Michel de Ghelderode. After teaching at UCLA, UCBerkeley and UNLV, he is now retired between Paris and New York. He was Editor for the French Review on African Literature and Film for many years. MARIA M. DELGADO is Reader in Drama and Theatre Arts at Queen Mary, University of London and co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review. Her most recent publications include the two co-edited volumes, The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the Citys Stages and Theatre in Crisis: Performance Manifestos for a New Century (both Manchester University Press, 2002) and the forthcoming Other Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (Manchester University Press, 2003). GREG GIESEKAM is a Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Community Theatre in Strathclyde and Luvvies and Rude Mechanicals? and he has also published on Sophocles, Pinter, Osborne, and Peter Arnott, and companies such as the Wooster Group, Clanjamfrie, and the Citizens Theatre, and created an annotated web-based Catalogue of the Archive of the National Review of Live Art, providing descriptive accounts of over 200 live art events between 1988 and 1996. MANUEL GARCA MARTNEZ received his doctorate from the Universit de Paris VII and is on the faculty at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He has translated Tadeusz Kowzans Littrature et Spectacle into Spanish and derved as stagiare for Lavellis Le Public and Mesguichs Marie Tudor. BRUCE KIRLE is Associate Professor of Theatre at Roosevelt University, where he teaches graduate theatre history and directs the B.F.A. and M.F.A. Musical Theatre Programs. OLIVER NEVEUX teaches in the Department of Theatre Studies at the Universit de Paris XNanterre, and is writing a doctoral thesis on engaged aesthetics and theatre in France during the 1960s and 1970s. SOPHIE PROUST received her doctorate from Universit de Paris VIII on the direction of actors. She has contributed to a variety of theatrical journals. She has also served as an assistant director to Denis Marleau, Matthias Langhoff, and Yves Beaunesne on productions at the Avignon Festival, in Montreal, and in Italy.

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ROBERT SKLOOT is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and a Professor in the Theatre Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches courses in theatre literature and serves as a staff director for the University Theatre. He edited The Theatre of The Holocaust and wrote The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of The Holocaust. NOEL WITTS is a Senior Research Fellow at the London Institute. He is co-editor of The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, and is at work on a book about the arts and communism. For a subscription to Western European Stages, please send your name and address, along with a $15.00 payment, to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Circulations Manager Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 3110 New York, NY 10016 For more information, please see our website at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc

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