It seems odd – or off, rather – to be writing right now.
But it’s also the first time in quite a long while that I’ve had enough down time to actually get to writing out my thoughts on what I’ve seen so far this season, so I figure I may as well just take it.
I won’t lay out my feelings here (those who know me know exactly where I stand on this and that’s fine enough for me), but I will close with taking a second to point out the overwhelming hypocrisy that is characterizing a vast majority of media responses to current events – October 7 of course, but particularly now the siege and very likely ethnic cleansing in Gaza, as well as the (expected but no less vile) opportunistic co-opting of these tragedies by the right/far-right.
With that, the two pieces for this post:
Another reason I am making a point of writing now is also the fact that the shows I am going to feature were – for now – the only two that left some kind of impression on me. Granted, this does not mean that it was necessarily a good one (I found both somewhat unsuccessful, but for differing reasons), but as I was saying to someone recently, after going to the theatre as often as I make a point of doing, sometimes just feeling a…thing…even if it is not overwhelmingly positive is better than leaving feeling perfectly neutral about the last hour(+) spent watching a performance. Call it an inevitable result from going to see as many things as I do, but it does take quite a bit to truly move me.
Also, both pieces happen to be based on works of English writers…so…it kind of makes sense to write about them at once anyway.
Écrire sa vie (based on The Waves and other texts by Virginia Woolf), dir. Pauline Bayle, Théâtre Public de Montreuil, Oct. 7, 2023
I’m not entirely sure if anyone has ever asked themselves why Woolf’s work (other than possibly Orlando, but I think I have an idea as to why) has never been adapted for the stage, but should anyone in the near future find themselves pondering over this question, I would advise them to look to this piece. This is not to say that it was a total disaster – in fact there were one or two moments I found quite beautiful (the synchronized movement sequence among the six players being one of them). Rather, what it more speaks to is an inherent limit in some of Woolf’s work that, oddly enough, is tricky to translate to the stage if one is not particularly attentive to it.
I’ve talked before about the idea of the plurality of the body on stage (see: Bovary but also my dissertation + book), with particular emphasis on the fact that the body in performance on a stage is at once the body of the actor as well as that of the character(s) they are incarnating. This, one could argue, comes somewhat close to Woolf’s treatment (or destabilization/destruction) the literary subject, yet the problem with theatre is that, unlike in written fiction, one must contend with the fact that the aesthetics of stage performance still more or less insist upon a 1:1 association between the actor on stage and whatever singular character they are playing in a given instance. Flowing in and out between two or several subjectivities is thus rendered almost impossible when the physical body still acting as a primary signifier for an audience. Of course, exceptions exist (see again Bovary, particularly the sequence at the end when Emma confronts Flaubert), but based on what I saw here, I think those exceptions would have to be relegated to either a small moment that reveals the – let’s say – cracks in that 1:1 representational system, or something that is constantly engaged with.
Given that Écrire sa vie is mostly based on Woolf’s The Waves, I really think it’s the latter option that should have been taken.
The piece – which begins with a bifrontal staging but then moves to a fully frontal one about 2/3 of the way through – centers around six friends who are meeting for a beach picnic to celebrate the return of a seventh friend from the army. Though it is never specified what time period we are in, the costuming, as well as the particularities of the references to war made throughout, suggest we are in the late 1930s (never mind that at one point we are all asked to join in a singalong to a modified version of “Hey Jude”). Like in Woolf’s novel, the majority of the piece centers around the friends’ interpersonal relationships, how they see one another and consider themselves as individuals within the center of it all. Unlike Woolf, however, the fluidity in stream of conscious – the almost wave-like way in which one character seeps into the story/narrative of another – is missing until the latter half of the piece. At that point – which followed a kind of air raid that destroyed the celebration – all the actors come back and semi-switch costumes. I say semi because the new outfits they wore leaned more towards borrowing colors or patterns from another costume rather than an exact copy. They then began to play a version of a childhood make-believe game they had already played earlier in the show, only this time the names they call each other are those associated with the costumes they are wearing, rather than with who they played earlier. This leads to confusion, culminating in a final moment in which each character states who they “are” while trying to “properly” identify the others.
And while I see what Bayle was trying to do here in terms of developing a commentary over the way in which our relationships with those close to us help shape who we become as individual subjects – they are, in part, the multitudes we contain, as several characters in the piece suggest – I do wonder why she chose to have this happen so late in the piece, after the 1:1 relationality between actor/character had already been established and confirmed. In some sense, having this come so late makes it seem almost forced, rather than organic or fluid as a way to harken more closely to Woolf’s text. It’s a shame, really, that it feels so stale because even amidst the tragedy of impending war, there is still a larger celebration of the randomness of life that underscores this. But I think also that for it to really have worked, the piece would have needed to lean much more intently towards the ludic element of the children’s games the actors played, destabilizing fixed identity from the start. Doing this with six actors, however, especially taking into account the randomness with which Woolf’s explorations of subjectivity – particularly through her stream of consciousness writing – flow on the page, is understandably tricky, hence my suggestion earlier on why Orlando seems to be better suited for stage adaptation (its comparatively easier, for instance, when you just need to keep track of one character who shatters the illusion of the actor’s body on the stage rather than several).
Avant la terreur (based on Shakespeare’s Richard III and other texts), dir. Vincent Macaigne, MC93 Bobigny, Oct. 8, 2023
Ah, we meet again Vincent.
After a six-year absence from the theatre to focus more on his acting career in television and cinema – I finally watched La Flamme + Le Flambeau for the first time recently, and let me tell you, his guest appearances on both were…a trip – Macaigne and his special brand of spectacular excess and destruction are back. And to get this out of the way now, no he does not seem to have tamed any of the aesthetic down quite yet.
Now, I was going to write something much more detailed about this one (because like with Je suis un pays, I have…thoughts), but I was informed last night when I was sharing my impressions on the piece with someone who had seen it a few days after I had that since last Sunday, Macaigne has made some edits to the production. Chief among these is the reduction of the run time from 3.5 hours to 2.5 hours.
I mean, look, already the 3.5-hour runtime listed the afternoon I saw it was an improvement from the 4+ hours of his last piece, so I guess we can take this development as a sign things are moving in a…tighter…direction. At the same time, this is still a show funded largely by public money, and given how production-heavy Macaigne’s work is – as well as how strapped almost all public services are in France currently –, I do wonder if perhaps these edits could not have been made sooner. Perhaps during rehearsal? In any case, most of my notes are now useless, but there is one key moment that survived the cut that I would like to speak about, mostly because it deals with a moment in Richard III’s reign that is not detailed in Shakespeare’s play directly, but that historians are – I believe – pretty much in agreement that the last Yorkist king of England had a hand in: the Princes in the Tower.
Before getting into this, yes, Macaigne’s piece is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s play – and by extension of Richard III’s reign. As such, there are some elements that deviate further from the historical record than Shakespeare’s piece does. These include the swapping of Richard’s oldest sibling, King Edward IV, with a woman, Elizabeth (that she shares a name with Edward’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville, is likely a coincidence), a character named George (no, not George Duke of Clarence…he’s still here) who seems to be an amalgamation of Buckingham and – maybe – Tyrell, and key for our purposes, the reduction of the two aforementioned princes down to just one – Andrew.
Further deviating from Shakespeare and the historical record is the fact that though at the start of the performance the audience was commanded to close our eyes and imagine ourselves in the 1480s, there was no real adherence to historic-temporal coherence. In an early sequence – one that arguably has a sizeable bearing on the significance of the one I will get to in a moment – Richard projects videos taken from his supposed Instagram “For You” page on a series of television screens on stage. The images are all real, and if one were to watch the videos on their own, one might be momentarilyshocked at the instances of intense violence, but watching a never-ending sequence of horrific accidents makes it difficult to ignore not just how disturbing by nature these videos are, but also what our appetite for them says about us and, perhaps, our numbness to violence.
And this brings us to the prince in the Tower.
This is the longest sequence, I believe, excepting those where someone has a monologue. The sequence happens in two camera shots. The first is backstage, where Richard goes and grabs Andrew from the cage where the boy has hidden himself and begins to strangle him. The second happens immediately after and it is on stage and almost right in front of us. Richard drags Andrew back behind a box that is up slightly stage right; however, we have cameras that are to the side and above that show him strangle him and we see that fully frontally. This is shocking. However, the message I believe that McCain is trying to get across is rather clear, and will likely be clearer now, given the extensive cuts.
Just before the scene happened, Andrew had his own monologue. Essentially, unlike in other plays where the new generation comes out and chastises the old generation, Andrew also recognizes the fact that the older generation is one that was itself begot by violence and came up in violence. I am thinking, for instance, when George early in the play talks about how his parents would always repeat to him how life was better before he arrived. Thus, if one is coming from that violence, then what else can one expect except to continue to perpetuate violence? In any case what Andrew does is he essentially forgives or pardons the old generation. At the same time, he also makes it clear in his speech that the urgency with which the whole piece is underpinned by is not going away anywhere, that the terror that’s in the title of the piece is coming. We are about to run face first into it, and we have to act and do something and the only thing we might have working on our side is the fact that this kid is talking and showing us that there is a possible other way if only we listen to him if only Richard essentially humbles himself and gives up power willingly.
The problem, of course is that Richard does not want to do that, even though it is very obvious to him and everyone else that what he’s doing is going to lead to mass destruction. And it is as a result of this that we get Richard strangling Andrew on stage, the boy’s convulsions seen not directly, but by proxy via the overhead and onstage cameras. It’s a confrontation, in other words, not just with the violence that was also found in the images projected on the screens earlier, but also with our own gazes and thirsts for violence that keep those images popping up on our algorithms.
Thus, the implication in the killing is essentially unabashedly displaying what they generations in power now are doing or have been doing to the rest of us for the past 15 to 20 years. This gets even more interesting when considering the ages of the actor playing Richard because he is about the same age as McCain, who would be classified as Gen X because he was born in 78. This is often thought of sometimes as the more apathetic generation or the new lost generation but there is a sense of responsibility there anyway: ignorance of the violence that characterizes one’s upbringing only serves to kick the can down the road rather than break the cycle definitively. And so, we kill the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. We sacrifice the young so that the old do not need to ask questions about the stability and viability of their system. There is an urgency in Andrew’s speech, augmented further by the manner of his death. Laws of succession aside, there are strong implications for our present moment in seeing an adult strangle a child who was trying to warn him of his hubris. At the same time, Macaigne’s aesthetic is also a little bit tiring to me at this point because it’s been done over and over again. At the same time though I can see why he reverts to this because the urgency has never been heeded to. I will say this is, I do think this piece was more successful somewhat than his previous piece six years ago because it doesn’t fall into the trap of conservativism that I saw in the latter, but I’m not sure what to definitively think about it.
We’ll just have to wait and see, I suppose.
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