ARTS
Theatre 1
French without tears
Bryan Robertson went to see a dazzling new play at Cheltenham Ladies College
Madame de Maintenant with one or two followers walked briskly into Thatch- er's, ran upstairs, paused and descended to walk across the crowded floor to confer with friends seated around a small table by a window. We were drinking tea in a popu- lar restaurant in Cheltenham, waiting, of all unlikely things, for a theatrical perfor- mance of a play about Racine to be staged later that evening. The calm-faced school- girl in a baseball cap, jacket and slacks, now busy with her friends, would play the part of the formidable Madame de Main- tenant, mistress of Louis XIV. Rather omi- nously, Racine was still busy on the lacrosse field.
Early this year, Cheltenham Ladies Col- lege commissioned John Spurling to write a play for the college to coincide with the Literary Festival. What he chose as a sub- ject is so 'amusing' — in the word that sur- vivors of the Twenties and Thirties still use to describe anything bright or original — that it seems worthy of record. Louis XIV's mistress, the highly intellectual Madame de Maintenant, created a rather grand acade- my for young ladies in a convent at Saint- Cyr, near Versailles. Pupils were restricted to the well-born daughters of court officials or courtiers and Louis himself held an occasional seminar in philosophy or reli- gion. At this time, Racine was still the greatest playwright in France, although retired from the stage and serving as Louis's historiographer. Madame de Main- tenant persuaded him to write a new play for the girls to perform and Racine fulfilled the commission by writing Esther, a drama about the beautiful Queen of Persia, a bib- lical personage, who courageously prevent- ed her husband's persecution of the exiled Jews by declaring herself to be Jewish.
Spurling's play takes the fulfilment of Racine's commission as a starting-point and deals with the 1689 rehearsals, super- vised by Racine, that are fought over by an over-zealous cleric, the cure of Versailles, who detects subversive Jansenist thinking in parts of the philosophically pious text, and a more permissively enthusiastic Moth- er Superior, Marie de Brinon. Madame de Maintenant herself — the play makes it clear that she was secretly married to the King — is more equivocal in her attitude to events since she is aware of the King's detestation of the exiled Jansenists whose revisionism early in the reign had threat- ened his absolute authority in the church. Her anxieties turn into a firm resolve to cancel any further performances of the play when she discovers a plan made by one of the girl performers to elope with a young marquis, her own nephew, and she realises that the enthusiasm of the young gallants 'Oh no — Lagerfeld louts!' of the Court for the play was more for the shapely young performers than the drama itself. It's 'the show must go on' all over again, and reason rather delightfully tri- umphs in the form of James II, in exile from England, who arrives with Queen Maria to seek refuge with his fellow Cath- olic 'cousin' Louis, wittily discountenances the spoilsports and insists on the play tak- ing place. Spurling ends with Racine strik- ing the stage three times with his stick and calling for beginners as the royal person- ages and clerics disperse and Esther begins. English broad common sense thus over- comes narrow French scruples, a heady moment for an audience bowed down by months of 'will we, won't we' flutterings over increased European involvement and hardly expecting such a comical theatrical twist to the notion of l'entente cordiale.
Spurling also discovered that Esther had quite beautiful music specially composed for the occasion by Jean-Baptist Moreau, a Court musician working in the brief period between Lully and Couperin. This inciden- tal music with its semi-operatic choruses and passionate sonorities on the harpsi- chord added a great deal to the charm of the occasion at Cheltenham. Spurling's Play is punctuated by brief scenes, as frag- ments of rehearsal, from Esther itself. Visu- ally, the characters match the quality of acine's prose — translated by Spurling into English to match the measured cadences of Racine's alexandrines — as well as the music in the richness of their costumes, contrasting with the institutional greys and whites of the girls in their every- day uniforms of the convent at Saint-Cyr. Spurling's own dialogue, 'outside' the frag- ments from Esther, is written very sharply With a lot of jokes unleashed within the confines of a necessary 17th-century for- mality. The play would be perfect for the small theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican base or the National's Cottesloe. Spurling is one of our very few Playwrights who write wittily and with real insight about ideas as well as behaviour. It seems too long since his early play, a fanta- sia. on the idea of political hero-worship triggered off by the Che Guevara story, was performed by an all-star cast at the Nation- al Theatre.
At Cheltenham, the troubled Madame de Maintenant was majestically played in a calmly self-questioning key by Laura Tow- fiend; Racine was interpreted with resigned, worldly-wise gravity by Madeleine North, and the two Kings, Louis and James, erupting into the last scenes with fermidable panache, were played by Victo- ria McAtamney and Phillippa Yates verg- ing on a suitable note of knockabout farce. The play was lucidly directed by Judi Bond with elegant and sumptuous costumes designed by Michelle Walton and Judy Longhorn. Spurling paid the College the compliment of writing a serious, highly entertaining play of ideas and his confi- dence was repaid handsomely by a produc- tion better acted and better-looking than many dismal affairs seen in London. Racine at the Girls' School should not end at Chel- tenham, but so far nobody is rising to my suggestion that the play should now be per- formed in France by the young cadets of what is now the Military Academy at Saint- Cyr, in drag, an event that would of course bring true lovers of the drama rushing from all over Europe.
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