Letter from Paris
All the city's a stage
Christine Brooke-Rose
Paris It has been a curiously mongrel season in the Paris theatre this year. There have been fewer French classics than usual, and those rarely presented 'straight', but updated in some way : Marivaux introduced with a quotation from Sade, Moliere's Le Misanthrope interspersed with other texts in an excellent production subtitled Regards sur la folie au siècle de Louis XIV, by Jean-Pierre Dougnac, and, in a small theatre, a Neron 33 ,d'apres Britannicus de Racine'. That word .d'apres', though, is a little suspicious since it often conceals a lack of ideas or a pseudoexperimentation. At the Café-Theatre, for example, there is Au Bec Fin: Hommes et Femmes, by Gabriel Arout, 'd'apres Tchekhov'. Whose play is it ?
There were curious coincidences: three Don Juans, one of them with marionettes, are still on: Anouilh's L'Orchestre has ladies at Le Fanal, but is in drag by a Brazilian company at the CampagnePremiere ; and there are two plays about and around (d'apres?) Freud's case of Dora, that by Cixous at the Petit Orsay just winning out. There were also some foreign Plays, a relatively unusual event in Paris: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sont mons (Stoppard), L'Eveil du Printemps (Wedekind), La nuit des tribades (Per Olov Enqvist), Affabuazione (Pasolini), The Fireraisers, Don Juan (Frisch) and, surprisingly, the Comedie Francaise's somewhat stately production of Brecht's Master Puntila. There were others. I tried hard to appreciate, for example, Terry Hands's production, for the Comedie Francaise, of Twelfth Night, translated as La nuit des rois by Jean-Louis Curtis. The French critics thought it very Slow, though Hands, when interviewed, said he had merely left nothing out. It is true that both plot and sub-plot are a bit thin, so that each seems merely to eke out the other and much depends on the poetry, the acting, the production. The poetry was mostly lost in the elegant but academic translation but some of the comedy came through well in lively and eilloquial French. The line, for instance, She sat like patience on a monument' came out as 'pareille a la resignation sur une tombe': crashing off its pedestal, at least for me. Pierre Dux, the director of the ComPagnie, insisted to me that it was not a translation but an 'adaptation', and the programme indeed calls it 'adaptation francaise de'. But this seems even more unsatisfactory; if the version is faithful but somehow fails, it seems not quite right to call it an adaPtation as opposed to a translation.
Hands's production was a little slow and
perhaps too sober, but it was a great pleasure to see Shakespeare again (I had missed the Royal Shakespeare Company's all too brief visit—barely a week—with Henry V in English, which I am told was terrific). As for the acting, it left something to be desired here and there: the Duke, for instance, being very unconvincing and Olivia (Genevieve Casile) hovering curiously between skittishness and Racinean declamation. All was saved, however, by the grave pathos of Dux as Malvolio and, above all, by the truly unisex charm and exquisite performance of Ludmila Mikael as Viola: for once I actually believed in Viola as boy enough to deceive the others, woman enough to move us. All the same, the experience made me keep away from Faust 'cl'apres' Christopher Marlowe, adaptation de Philippe Raulet, at the Petit Orsay. I love the play too much.
It seems, then, that the French had a go at being unFrench. They were unclassical this year although, of course, there was also Claudel's Partage du Midi (with Ludmila Mikael), and a Feydeau bedroom farce (Monsieur Chasse, still at l'Atelier in Montmartre) that takes a whole act out of three to get going and then reels with highly ex, peeled situations. And then there were also some new plays in the small 'off' theatres I ike the cafes-t hea t res. These are a permanent feature of the Paris scene, though less important than they were about ten years ago. They are usually in a deep and tiny cellar (like Fanal) or in a crumbling seventeenthcentury mansion about to be restored (Essaion and Café de la Gare, the latter moved from near the old Gare de Montparnasse), or in a tumbledown building about to be razed (Le Lucernaire and Au Vrai Chic Parisien, which has a show on now called En attendant/es bulldozers ) They have
various methods of charging: Le Fanal serves expensive drinks beforehand and the actors pass the hat round afterwards. Le Café de la Gare has an amusing lottery at the entrance (which delays the play by half an hour), then a horrible lemonade is free.
The standard varies enormously. For one thing the stages are so small, and the audience so close (from six seats in front of a cardboard booking-office for a play called Le Guichet at Chez Felix, the smallest I've seen, to about one hundred at Le Café de la Gare), that there is inevitably an amateur air about the whole thing. This in itself is excellent, provided the play and the acting are good. But as soon as one or both of these fail, the experience becomes curiously dismal and untheatrical. Even so, the caféstheatres are usually cheap and fun, and visitors to Paris should at least check up on them.
After all these odd mixtures, I tried to return to a more French tradition by seeing Hugo's Ruy Bias at the Tuileries 'Fete 76', but it turned out to be at 6.30 under a tent, a highly unpleasant experience in a heat-wave —though even more unpleasant for the actors. It seems that both the 'Fete 76' and the Festival du Marais have fought shy of open air productions, no doubt on account of past mishaps. But it seems particularly absurd this year, all the more so because police regulations inscrutably forbade all ventilation in the tent once the performance began. The actors, who were all young, battled on valiantly but I for one couldn't stand the length or, for that matter, the romantic tirades in such heat, despite the grace and the subtly mobile face of Gerard Philippe's daughter, Anne-Marie Philippe, as the Queen.
The Comedie Francaise has announced its programme for next year, when it will be returning to its old home at the Palais Royal. And we shall be back with the most popular French classics: Corneille's Le Cid (to be produced by Terry Hands), Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, Musset's Lorenzaccio (to be produced by Zeffirelli, for the Florentine flavour). Will the rest of the theatres follow suit or continue in the d'apres way ?
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