To what degree can a piece of art – particularly a theatrical performance, given the degree to which it straddles the line between permanence and ephemerality – be considered independently of its own history?
I have debated this question before, mainly with Gwenaël Morin’s 2018 production of Re-Paradise at Nanterre, then more recently with Rebecca Chaillon’s Carte noire nommée désir when it came to the Odéon last winter after its run in Avignon. In the former case, as I elaborated in my dissertation, the question arose from the fact that Morin’s staging took a moment that was spontaneous in the Living Theatre’s original 1968 production – the dancing in the streets at the close of the performance – and inscribed it as “text”, thereby also maintaining a distinct audience/spectacle divide that was otherwise blurred into something more complicit (or collaborative) fifty years prior. Conversely, with Chaillon – one of the few pieces I have made a point of seeing twice –, one thing I asked myself during the second performance I saw at the Odéon was how many people were there because of the “scandal” that the play caused in Avignon*. The gesture that sparked a reaction in the moment, in other words, becomes reduced to a kind of “artefact”, a thing that elicited a certain response once and now we wait and see if the same response will reproduce itself again rather than allowing for the gesture to regain a kind of ephemerality, existing on its own within the context of that particular performance and granting space for new, organic, spontaneous responses to it.
Granted, with the subject of today’s post – Jean Genet’s Les Paravents staged at the Odéon by Arthur Nauzyciel – the almost 60 years between its original Paris premiere and now mean that anticipation of scandal or violent outbursts during the performance is more than just a little unrealistic. Yet, at the same time, the fact that the production is being staged at the Odéon means a revisiting of its history is all but inevitable. When the play – inspired by and written during Algeria’s war for independence, though Genet deliberately does not give any specific geographic designations in the text– first premiered in Paris in 1966 five years after its initial publication, the Evian Accords had only been signed four years prior and the memories of the conflict were still fresh. France was, in a sense, still traversing a kind of existential crisis period if we could call it that, what with the remaining fractures of WWII (including the denial – at the time – of just how many people were willing collaborators), as well as the disastrous attempts to keep a hold on Indochina as well as Algeria. Its geography was being redrawn as well as its constitution (the Fourth Republic collapsed following Algeria’s independence). Thus, when in his latest piece – staged, mind, in a State-funded theatre, a brand new concept at the time, given that the Ministry of Culture was only created in 1959 – Genet directly critiques not only colonialism in a broad sense, but also the army and Western Europe’s inflated sense of superiority**, certain groups (three guesses as to where they fell on the political spectrum) were very much not happy about it.***
The outbursts that broke out both in the house and outside the theatre towards the close of the play’s initial run (think: chairs, bottles, eggs, tomatoes, and firecrackers being thrown onstage, as well as, on May 4, 1966, a pre-show protest of about 500-600 members of the right/far-right – including the group Occident – outside the theatre) rather expectedly ended up becoming synonymous with the play itself, given their amplitude. Honestly, I would say it’s almost understandable to find it difficult to think of the play – and in particular any production of it – as independent of these events. But this difficulty arguably becomes more pronounced once the play returns, for the first time since 1966, to the original site of conflict.
Could this question of how to address the play’s past while allowing it to move on from it be part of the reason why it has taken so long for it to come back to the Odéon? Maybe. At the same time, I would also propose that the fact that it is an absolute monster of a piece (an unedited version would last 8 hours…and even I have my limits when it comes to “marathon” shows) and Genet’s theatre is not exactly known for being “easy” to perform/produce have made it a…let’s say…less than popular choice for directors/theatre troupes. It’s a shame, really, though, because the text is quite beautiful and its approach to notions of liberty (much like the rest of Genet’s oeuvre) merits engaging with, particularly as it can offer possibilities for thinking outside a cycle of removal-(re)installation of various systems of power that we seem to be stuck in, despite the fact that they have never truly lived up to their promise of liberation.
But enough of the preamble: what of Nauzyciel’s production?
I will freely admit I was skeptical at first. As usual, I tried not to “spoil” myself by looking too much at production photos or promotional videos, but one thing that was pretty much unavoidable was the realization that there were (almost) no screens in a play titled Les Paravents (The Screens in English). Generally, I’m not much of a “purist” when it comes to this sort of thing but given how insistent Genet himself was on the presence of screens on the stage in his own (extensive) notes on the play, their absence did give me pause – as did the giant white staircase that comprised the majority of the stage design.
Yet, if one of the reasons for Genet’s insistence on the presence of screens was that they be a constant reminder (particularly because of his insistence on their placement next to a “real” object) of the artifice and theatricality of what was happening on stage, perhaps the same effect could be produced with another visually theatrical device. Indeed, one of the first things that came to my mind when I saw the large white stairs were the movie musicals of the 1930s and 40s – think 42nd Street or just Busby Berkeley in general – whose most memorable numbers are pure spectacles of dazzling costumes and precise (and precisely synchronized) choreography. In this context, the stairs, and any other elements of the set design, are physically located on a studio soundstage, but on film, they could be anywhere, topographically ungrounded except for in an imagined somewhere – a space that cannot exist except within the fictional context of the film. They have thus become inherently theatrical. And, to return back to this particular case, to my own pleasant surprise – they mostly worked here.
Adding to this, given how much of Genet’s text (particularly towards the latter half) turns into a dialogue of sorts with the dead, one could almost go as far as to call this set piece a kind of “stairway to Heaven” to be incredibly clichéd about it. However, an ascending trajectory (a transcendence, if you will) is not a given. Indeed, there is much more emphasis on weighty, downward movement in the staging, particularly when it comes to the trio of the famille des orties. When, during the opening tableau, Saïd first enters at the top of the stairs and begins his descent, he moves, slowly, methodically, as though walking on a tightrope. This was likely a nod to Abdallah Bentaga, a young acrobat and one of Genet’s former lovers, to whom Les Paravents is partially dedicated. It is also a movement that is inherently theatrical, particularly as it further “fictionalizes” the space both in its suggestion of the existence of a tightrope, as well as the extent to which this suggestion affects the manner in which Saïd descends the stairs, moving this latter movement even further away from the “real”.
The degree to which artifice is emphasized also extended to the costumes – a clearly false, almost plastic-looking, wig on a female colonist; the obvious padding worn by Sir Harold and Mr. Blankensee under their clothing; Warda’s wig being a clear nod to the one worn by Madeleine Renaud who played the role in the original production – as well as the props – very obviously wooden guns painted baby blue or pink for the soldiers of the colonial army; Sir Harold’s absurdly large glove that is also his informant. Yet, as with Saïd’s entrance, it is in the characters’ movements, particularly the degree to which they are de-natured, that brings a both consistent and I would say even approaching uncomfortableawareness of the materiality (or the fleshiness) of the bodies on stage engaging in a process of crafting fiction that, at times, takes them to the point where the possibilities of imagination confront the limitations of the real. The “screen” of performance and physicality, if you will. For instance, Malika, one of the sex workers in Warda’s brothel, almost always adopts the pose of Degas’s La Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans whenever she has to traverse the stage, yet in doing so, she also extends her arms behind her to their full tautness. This references, of course, the rather unnatural – or fantasized – position of the original statue, as well as draws attention to the fact that the actress herself must also stretch and hold her body in this position in order to maintain the aesthetic. It is neither subtle nor natural, in other words. Similarly, the Lieutenant – who is made up to look like Charles De Gaulle in a costuming/makeup decision that would have been almost unthinkable in 1966, but which I think it is fair to say Genet would have found rather amusing – moves very delicately, his upper-body gestures undulating and extending all the way to the tips of his fingers. In contrast, his lower half – by the way the actor carried himself – seemed comparatively heavy, as if all its force was concentrated in his pelvis. Watching him move was, in fact, almost like watching a body in conflict with itself (though I do not mean this as a bad thing – given the character, I think it works), wanting to both transcend as well as give into and embrace its more base, abject, desires.
There is, to a degree, an erotic element in the above, though this is arguably pushed further in the character of La Mère (the Mother) – who, as an aside, was probably my favorite of the evening. Like the Lieutenant, she carried her weight in her pelvis, though unlike him, she left her arms hanging low, oftentimes resting them on her thighs or even itching/rubbing at her inner thighs, notably climbing very close to the area between her legs. This inevitably draws attention to that area, thus the erotic potential of the gesture. But, like with most iterations of the erotic, the gesture gets close to but never quite reaches “completion”. At the same time, given this particular character’s status and relationship to not just marginalization but also abjection – like most other characters, she speaks a language that is (often) highly poetic structurally, but whose imagery/general content are more base if not outright scatological – this attention to her pelvic area in her manner of moving also brings attention to the fact that this region of the body is one that simultaneously evokes desire as well as secretes fluids / emits odors that could potentially repel that desire. A liminal space of a kind, in other words, one that straddles the tense line between attraction and repulsion. And, if I am being honest, I would have liked to have seen this tension leaned into a bit more generally – particularly when it comes to the question of the abject / repulsion. Perhaps it was the stark white of the stairs that seemed a bit…too…clean. However, when you have the Lieutenant speaking in one tableau about how his men should aspire to stain their clothes with mud, blood, and cum, and in another you have Warda picking at her teeth with an absurdly long hairpin and then spit a barely perceptible glob, the question does arise as to whether or not there was some kind of holding back on the part of Nauzyciel and/or the actors.
Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that they should have gone the complete other direction and just had the performers throw globs of indeterminate substances at each other for the sake of being visibly “foul”. For instance, the scene that once sparked fury in 1966 in which the dying Lieutenant is given the chance by his troops to breathe the air of his homeland (France) one more time via the latter farting in his face is here staged with the Lieutenant splayed out in the arms of his men while they perform synchronized body rolls around him, pointedly pushing their buttocks out at the end to suggest pushing the “wind” out of them and toward his face. It was both aesthetically beautiful and delightfully silly (I mean, given the play’s reputation and history as described above, it was also more or less the moment those familiar with the piece were waiting for, so it almost had to pack a bit of a punch). But, even if the abject was not more explicit, say, by punctuating the body rolls with fart noises, I found that it was nevertheless physically embraced here to a degree I thought could have been more consistent.
And since this is proving to be quite long already (granted, this play is also a beast in its own right so, it’s fitting), a final word on the question of screens.
As mentioned previously, there were no screens here that corresponded to Genet’s original vision of them, but there were several reinterpretations of screens. I alluded to some earlier when I spoke of the question of theatricality in the performance styles and gestures of the actors, but other than that, there are also four instances of the presence of screens in Nauzyciel’s staging that merit attention. The first is the screen – or rather the frame of a screen – that is lowered onto one of the steps to frame the action happening in the steps above. Here, it is the public that will inevitably “fill in” the screen, the boxed frame evoking a television set or the rim of a movie screen, both objects associated with another kind of spectacle. The second instance (though chronologically, this is the final screen to appear) occurs during the second act, which opens with a large screen lowered at the very top of the steps, with only one long vertical slit sliced in it acting as a kind of passage from one side of the screen to the other (and yes, this slit did suggest a vagina, and yes, this was very likely intentional). This screen represented the passage into the world of the dead, with each character signaling their arrival – or even, rebirth – into this realm first with a kind of shadow play from behind the screen before stepping through the slit.
I have chosen to close on talking about these last two instances of screens together both for aesthetic reasons – specifically, these are both instances that feature screens onto which images are projected – as well as for some larger questions they left me thinking with regarding the relationship of Les Paravents to the events that were occurring at the time of its writing as well as continued critical association of the play with those events.
The first of these final instances involves the stairs themselves. Beginning towards the latter third of the first act and continuing in the second, black and white images and videos were projected onto them, though of course the structure of the steps meant that the images were also quite distorted. These images were, in fact, archival footage, taken from 1) a 1949 reportage on the landscapes of Algeria ; 2) a 1956 report concerning army reinforcements for Algeria (note: at the time the French government still considered what was happening in Algeria as a “special operation” – in case anyone else needed another example of the worst parts of history repeating themselves – rather than a fight for independence) ; and 3) footage from an August 1956 protest in Algeria. Together, they also represented the first instance of this staging directly tying the play back to Algeria, grounding (or at least semi-grounding) it where before it was geographically (and to a certain degree temporally) untethered. The characters on stage may not specify where they are, but the images superimposed over them via the projection at minimum symbolically tie them to a real, lived, historical moment. The dialogue with History continued in the intermission as well as the opening of the second act, when an actual screen is lowered and onto which colonial-era maps of Algeria are projected (during the intermission) followed by a filmed segment in which an older gentleman reads a series of letters written by a young French doctor stationed in Algeria in 1957/58 (at the opening of the second act). According to his director’s note, Nauzyciel states that his decision to bring the war more directly back into a piece that does not directly mention it is his own way of confronting a, what he terms, general amnesia (or at least the risk of one) surrounding Algeria’s war of Independence in France, given how little the subject is still discussed (at least from his perspective). The taboo of sorts that existed when Genet began writing his piece – when a blatantly obvious war could not be officially labeled as such – still hangs over the larger collective memory like a kind of sword of Damocles. Yet, even when considering the fact that, sixty years onward, this collective memory or lived experiences related to the war are slowly fading, I do wonder if this kind of confrontation with the historical / the real (even with the images being purposefully distorted in some cases) made the most sense for the context of this piece. I do not mean to suggest the images / videos were not impactful here – the content of some of the letters, particularly how laconic / blunt they were at times regarding not only how absolutely screwed the French army was, even as early as 1957, but also how aware they were regarding the use of torture against prisoners, was particularly effective, even if some of the looks the gentleman gave to the camera were a bit too on the nose. Rather, I wonder if this explicit grounding risks diluting some of the political power and potential of the text, especially when it comes to the larger questions it poses on the nature of power and cycles of dominance/submission which, while they are often later tied to historical moments, also exist independently of those moments.
To return to the question I posed at the top of this post, there is also a part of me that finds it amusing that, in the projection of archival as well as testimonial footage of the war (among other aesthetic choices), Nauzyciel’s staging almost ends up embracing the critique lobbied at Genet by the press in 1966: that the play was a direct critique of the war in Algeria, despite Genet’s instance at the time that it was only inspired by the war, not a direct representation of it. Yet, Genet, also did later (in a letter to director Roger Blin) rather cheekily say that the play both was and was not about Algeria, and I think it is this uncertainty that the inclusion of the archival material risks losing. There is, in fact, a good deal of political and critical power in the embracing of temporal/spatial ambiguity in theatrical representation. Yes, it does mean, in a sense, that the fiction on the stage is happening nowhere, but in this negation, there is also the possibility that it could be happening anywhere, thus granting the text a freedom to speak beyond just a particular historical moment.
For the sake of not making this thing any longer than it already is, I’ll just end things on this little nugget. Something to mentally chew on, if you will.
*For those unfamiliar: the play directly tackles questions of racism – and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, etc. – particularly on the black female body in France in a darkly satirical tone that, in my opinion, is unfortunately too rare on stages these days. Anyway, in a surprise to no one who has been paying the remotest amount of attention to the rise of right/far-right discourses in Europe and elsewhere, during and after the performances, some of the actresses were verbally and physically harassed by white patrons. One performer in fact opted to take a break from the show for her own well-being once touring resumed following the festival. Chaillon in fact adapted the text a bit to directly acknowledge the aftermath of Avignon in the Odéon performance.
**At the same time, given that this is Genet, his critiques are also much more nuanced than what may be suggested here (I just don’t have too much time to get into that). In brief: no one “side” really escapes this play unscathed. Even the famille des Orties (aka: Saïd, his mother, and Leïla) end more or less where they started: in the lowest most abject dregs, yet Saïd and Leïla are also the only ones who receive some kind of veneration in the end, largely because of this and their general refusal to be folded into any kind of system of social order.
***I was doing some more in-depth research on the 1966 premiere of Les Paravents prior to seeing the show for a side project, focusing especially on reactions/critiques in the press. One thing that stood out: the degree to which the discourse of right/far-right has not really changed regarding things it does not like. This is both hilarious and disturbing (I’ll let those of you decide where you fall on this).
Scènes sur Seine 