Paris Letter

Dramatics

Christine Brooke-Rose

Paris There are some hundred theatres in Paris, not counting about -twenty-five in the present suhurbs but including variety and

cafes-thecitres, the latter often a source of rising talents. These theatres are scattered,

Compared to London's Westendency, and

this is originally because of Napoleon III who wanted every faubourg (then suburbs) to have a church, a mairie and a theatre.

Despite this profusion, and perhaps because of it (long runs are rare), the theatre has tended to lag, and is one of the few domains in which England, over the last decade or so, has had the reputation of being more lively and exciting than in France—and this even among the French. . In recent years, however, there have been distinct signs of renewal, with young Producers and young companies all over the place, the best known being perhaps Patrice Chereau and Claude Regy. The latter's production of Peter Handke's

strange and poetic La chevauchee stir le lac de Constance at l'Espace Cardin two years

ago, with Delphine Seyrig and Jeanne Moreau, mystified some and excited many, and confirmed Regy's rising reputation into a true arrival. More recently, at the

Petit Orsay, he produced C'est beau, by Nathalie Sarraute (partly based on her 12ovel Vous les entendez?), an aptly

beautiful' play in which, to summarise absurdly, an intellectual couple dare not say 'c'est beau' in front of their children. It filled the theatre for over two months and stopped only because one of the actors had to make a film.

, Both L'Espace Cardin and the Theatre d Orsay are new theatres, the latter more so and built by Jean-Louis Barrault inside the huge but elegant disused Gare d'Orsay °n the left bank, to which the famous hotel Drouot has recently transferred its vast auction rooms. The metro runs below the old station, rumbling below the text, as

at the Royal Court. There are two theatres, °Ite large, one small, and an unpretentious restaurant done up in old theatre sets Where one can get a meal before or after. The big theatre is still running Harold et Maude (third year), but also Marguerite buras' Une iournee entiere dans les arbres as. well as Jean-Claude Carriere's adaptation of Restif de la Bretonne's Nulls de fails, produced in a neo-Brechtian manner °Y Jean-Louis Barrault, who also acts Restif (older and wiser than in the charming earlier work, Monsieur Nicolas). The stage Is vast, with an additional apron-stage, entrance-extensions through the audience and four side-loggias that open up for contico-erotic scenes. Yet despite these attempts at variation, including a brief sitting interval during which the actors distribute glasses of wine to the lucky few in the aisle seats, the result is curiously static and, in a fashionably demagogic way, visibly influenced by the much livelier productions of 1789 and 1793 at the Theatre du Soleil in the Cartoucherie de Vincennes a few years ago: collectively produced happenings, the chief interest of which was less history than the fact that stage and audience mixed, the audience sitting on the floor in an enormous ex-munitions hangar, around scattered wooden platforms, the actors moving about from one platform to another, often locally dispersing the sitters.

A new play at the Theatre d'Orsay, by Helene Cixous, promises more: entitled Portrait de Dora, it is a reconstruction of Freud's case-history of 'Dora', with Freud's own unconscious transfer projected into the scene. A radio version of this was broadcast on France Culture's Atelier de Creation Radiophonique a few years ago, but here we have something like a collectively created spectacle (in the French sense), with filmed sequences by Marguerite Duras and with the extraordinary American dancer Carolyn Carsonas Dora, the whole produced by a newcomer, Simone Ben Mussa. Helene Cixous is well known, not only as a highly original novelist (or rather, producer of passionate and poetic texts), but also for her feminist studies; her basic premise is that hysteria is a language, from witchcraft onwards, a language of nature and the only one available to women in a man-made world.

I have picked a few current plays, a few that are over, and one that has just arrived, by way of example. But on the whole it can be said, and often is, that too few new plays emerge from under the weighty machinery of the more traditional theatre. Yet even here there are signs of renewal or, as Sacha Guitry used to reply when asked Quoi de nett! ?: Moliere.

Perhaps the best instance of this is the demarivauding of Marivaux which has been happening steadily over the last few years. Already in 1969 I saw L'isle aux giants at the Festival du Marais (open air, in a beautiful old courtyard), in which the giants of the utopian island, merely perched on ladders, were dressed in bright yellow Maoist tunics to point the message. Without going so far, a disturbing irony can certainly be extracted from the underlying social comment in Marivaux's master/ valet and mistress/soubrette situations, disturbing precisely because tout rentre dans l'orclre. The Comedie Francaise for instance, temporarily lodged at the delightful Marigny while their quarters are renovated, is currently running La Commere and Le jet, de l'amour et du hasard, both produced by the newly hired Jean-Paul Roussillon.

The manuscript of La Commere was discovered eleven years ago in the archives by Mlle Chevalley, and produced shortly after. This new production, though a little slow, vibrates with the daringness, for the time, of a situation in which a rich old maid of forty-five falls in love with an adventurer of twenty, who turns out to be a mere peasant; of course, the commere of the title, through her obsessively careless talk, makes the marriage impossible, but Yvonne Gaudeau draws a genuine pathos from the part of the old maid.

In Le lea, the young mistress changes roles with her soubrette in order to observe her pretender Dorante (who has had the same idea with his valet), and, of course, good blood attracting good blood, falls in love with Dorante as valet and vice versa, as do the valet and soubrette in the roles of master and mistress. Roussillon has here extracted, but discreetly, all the protest possible from the repartees about honnetes gens, the appalling snobbery of the masters, the rage of the valet and the disappointment of the soubrette who each thought they were making their fortunes. Nor is this social irony achieved at the expense of the charm and wit; in fact I felt that the production was not daring enough, remaining in the fairly static tradition of 'tableaux', unfortunately in a hideous realistic set more reminiscent of a dark wooden Victorian interior than an eighteenth-century salon.

Roussillon's discretion may have been a reaction against another production of Marivaux, La double inconstance, by Jacques Rosner with the Jeune Theatre de Paris at the Bouffes du Nord. This theatre was a disused ruin, taken over by Peter Brook who left it exactly as it was, with its balconies in ornamental stucco ungilded and its walls unpainted. There is a vast bare stage and plain wooden backless benches have been built around a circular apron-stage, here padded in foam: the JTP train their actors to express themselves with the whole of their bodies and they bounce around athletically like ballet dancers.

Here there was perhaps a little too much 'business', including a trap-door banging noisily every time the captured peasant girl or peasant was brought out or shoved back in, and a curious extract from Sade by way of preface through a loudspeaker, to suggest that all this misalliance of prince with peasant girl and lady-in-waiting with peasant takes place, after all, in a distant castle as inaccessible and antisocial as Sillig Castle, but at least it does take place, most stylistically and wittily.

Nevertheless, the dead hand of classic production still lies heavy on the French theatre, even its fresh models: another eighteenth-century text, Diderot's Le nevelt de Rameau (admittedly not a play) was stifled at birth by a young producer it would be kinder not to mention, and memories of Fresnay performing this sparkling, airy dialogue (memories, for me, merely on a record), were the final blow. But then, Fresnay merely moving from chair to table used to be an event.