Artists love getting naked, emotionally and physically. This was clear in the more intimate scenes of Slope, director Stewart Laing’s last major outing, which looked at the tempestuous relationship between romantic poets Verlaine and Rimbaud. As he prepares for his Dundee Rep production of Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, however, you get the impression Laing prefers getting naked by proxy. Which may be why he repeatedly returns to extreme icons of European letters. As well as Verlaine, Rimbaud and now Cocteau, Laing has made works by or about figures such as Michel Foucault and Herve Cuibert.
“Maybe it’s because I’m quite self-contained,” Laing ponders over lunch at The Rep, “so I live my life vicariously through other people. There’s an extremity to how these people led their lives, where sexuality’s an issue. There’s an openness about their gayness, from Cocteau through to Jean Genet and Foucault. There’s a long line starting with Rimbaud of very openly dealing with gay themes in their work, and in their lives. Because it’s their lives as much as anything that I’m interested in, and how their lives come out through their work. It’s hard to separate the two, and they’re all very much self-mythologisers, and that’s very attractive. One of the myths about this play is that Cocteau said he wrote it in eight days when he was high on opium, and you’re not quite sure whether that’s just him framing his life the same way he framed his work.”
Written in 1948, Les Parents Terribles was written for Cocteau’s lover and muse, Jean Marais, who two years later would star in Cocteau’s reinvention of the Greek myth, Orphee. While its title may suggest a sequel to his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, this play focuses on a dysfunctional relationship between a mother and son.
“The central relationship in the play was very much the relationship Marais had with his mother,” Laing says of a play once described as resembling Noel Coward on opium. “It’s very intense and emotionally heightened, but it’s a comedy that’s written in epigrams, so there’s that similarity. But I think it’s a bit more emotionally honest than Coward. You always got the sense there that Coward was holding something in. Cocteau doesn’t do that. He’s letting something go, so it’s all out there.”
While preparing for the production, Laing watched films from the French nouvelle vague and Belle du Jour. He also watched The dreamers, Bertolucci’s reimagining of love across the barricades during the Paris uprising of 1968. This has filtered into Les Parents Terribles via a 1960s visual sensibility to counteract Cocteau’s more baroque leanings.
“If you set it in the 1940s it becomes a fashion play,” Laing says, “You have to get to the emotional heart of it, and not worry too much about period. The Dreamers is relevant, because this play is about young people rejecting the values of their parents. The difference here is that the kids are more bourgeois than the adults. It’s very Ab Fab in that way.”
With Laing’s name attached, you could be forgiven for presuming this production to be some bijou, studio bound or site-specific affair. Over the last fifteen years or so, as well as earning his bread and butter directing operas in Sweden, Laing has created a striking canon of avant-garde classics.
As both designer and director, Laing came up through the Citizens Theatre, where he worked on works as diverse as Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Mae West’s The Pleasure Man. With his first company, the tellingly named TV Productions, Laing directed Beckett’s Happy Days at Tramway and looked at French philosopher Michel Foucalt in Brainy. His next venture, the even more tellingly named Untitled Productions, saw Laing adapt JG Ballard short stories in locations that included a derelict swimming pool and a semi-detached house.
“I grew up at the Citizens,” says Laing. “When I was thirteen we were being taken there to see these great plays by De Sade, Balzac and Cocteau, and that was my equivalent of Penguin Modern Classics. That was my first experience of theatre, and that’s what I thought all theatre was like. I suppose I’ve just managed to hold onto that idea, that classics like that are w hat it’s all about. I miss having that support network I had at The Citz, so being at Dundee Rep feels a bit like that again.”
One project that didn’t work out was Laing’s long-craved for collaboration with The Wooster Group. Given the New York company’s approach to the classics is similarly audacious as his own, one might have presumed it to be a match made in post-modern heaven. But it wasn’t to be.
“It’s very idiosyncratic what The Wooster Group do,” Laing says without malice, “which is very much about what (artistic director) Liz LeCompte is interested in. Working with them was something I’d wanted to do as a designer for ten years, then when I got there I realised very quickly that it wasn’t for me.”
More successful was Slope, which saw Laing collaborate with writer/director Pamela Carter. This alliance looks set to continue via a version of a forthcoming version of a play by Marivaux play. While Laing mourns the lack of any real laboratory in Scotland for theatre-makers like himself to experiment in, he recognises too that getting Cocteau done in Dundee is an unmissable opportunity.
“I’ve got a bit of an obsession with the Volkesbhune in Berlin at the moment,” Laing confesses. “The stuff I go and see there is mind-blowing. You can watch a classical play there, and it’s wilder than anything you’ll see anywhere else. But it’s still a classic play being done in a conventional theatrical space. It’s extraordinary that can happen in Berlin but not Scotland.”
Laing’s fusion of the mainstream and the avant-garde also ties in with his ultimate ambition, which even he recognises is unlikely to ever happen.
“I want to do a version of Confessions Of A Justified Sinner,” he says, “but I want it to just exist as documentation, so the actual production will never happen.”
As justification for this, Laing cites Gordon Matta-Clark, the New York based artist who in the rundown districts of pre regeneration 1970s New York, reinvented derelict buildings as sculptures. Since Matta-Clark’s death in 1978, only an extensive photographic archive remains.
“The only thing that exists of that now is the documentation,” says Laing, “and now that’s kind of become the thing itself. Liz LeCompte is absolutely obsessed with documentation. Because once The Wooster Group ends, all that will be left will be this entire history of 25 years on this bank of video tapes of rehearsals. I find going through archives at the Lincoln Centre or wherever absolutely fascinating. The stuff we do is so ephemeral, so the documentation, and how that relates to the event, becomes essential.”
In the meantime, “I want to make work that I’m interested in watching. I want to make a version of this Cocteau play that will keep me entertained. On one level it’s a very conventional play, especially in the canon of Jean Cocteau. It ran as a commercial venture in France for two or three years, and it’s perfectly possible just to take it on that level. But whatever I do, I just don’t want to be bored.”
Les Parents Terribles, Dundee Rep, until June 21
www.dundeerep.co.uk
The Herald, June 10th 2008
ends
“Maybe it’s because I’m quite self-contained,” Laing ponders over lunch at The Rep, “so I live my life vicariously through other people. There’s an extremity to how these people led their lives, where sexuality’s an issue. There’s an openness about their gayness, from Cocteau through to Jean Genet and Foucault. There’s a long line starting with Rimbaud of very openly dealing with gay themes in their work, and in their lives. Because it’s their lives as much as anything that I’m interested in, and how their lives come out through their work. It’s hard to separate the two, and they’re all very much self-mythologisers, and that’s very attractive. One of the myths about this play is that Cocteau said he wrote it in eight days when he was high on opium, and you’re not quite sure whether that’s just him framing his life the same way he framed his work.”
Written in 1948, Les Parents Terribles was written for Cocteau’s lover and muse, Jean Marais, who two years later would star in Cocteau’s reinvention of the Greek myth, Orphee. While its title may suggest a sequel to his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, this play focuses on a dysfunctional relationship between a mother and son.
“The central relationship in the play was very much the relationship Marais had with his mother,” Laing says of a play once described as resembling Noel Coward on opium. “It’s very intense and emotionally heightened, but it’s a comedy that’s written in epigrams, so there’s that similarity. But I think it’s a bit more emotionally honest than Coward. You always got the sense there that Coward was holding something in. Cocteau doesn’t do that. He’s letting something go, so it’s all out there.”
While preparing for the production, Laing watched films from the French nouvelle vague and Belle du Jour. He also watched The dreamers, Bertolucci’s reimagining of love across the barricades during the Paris uprising of 1968. This has filtered into Les Parents Terribles via a 1960s visual sensibility to counteract Cocteau’s more baroque leanings.
“If you set it in the 1940s it becomes a fashion play,” Laing says, “You have to get to the emotional heart of it, and not worry too much about period. The Dreamers is relevant, because this play is about young people rejecting the values of their parents. The difference here is that the kids are more bourgeois than the adults. It’s very Ab Fab in that way.”
With Laing’s name attached, you could be forgiven for presuming this production to be some bijou, studio bound or site-specific affair. Over the last fifteen years or so, as well as earning his bread and butter directing operas in Sweden, Laing has created a striking canon of avant-garde classics.
As both designer and director, Laing came up through the Citizens Theatre, where he worked on works as diverse as Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Mae West’s The Pleasure Man. With his first company, the tellingly named TV Productions, Laing directed Beckett’s Happy Days at Tramway and looked at French philosopher Michel Foucalt in Brainy. His next venture, the even more tellingly named Untitled Productions, saw Laing adapt JG Ballard short stories in locations that included a derelict swimming pool and a semi-detached house.
“I grew up at the Citizens,” says Laing. “When I was thirteen we were being taken there to see these great plays by De Sade, Balzac and Cocteau, and that was my equivalent of Penguin Modern Classics. That was my first experience of theatre, and that’s what I thought all theatre was like. I suppose I’ve just managed to hold onto that idea, that classics like that are w hat it’s all about. I miss having that support network I had at The Citz, so being at Dundee Rep feels a bit like that again.”
One project that didn’t work out was Laing’s long-craved for collaboration with The Wooster Group. Given the New York company’s approach to the classics is similarly audacious as his own, one might have presumed it to be a match made in post-modern heaven. But it wasn’t to be.
“It’s very idiosyncratic what The Wooster Group do,” Laing says without malice, “which is very much about what (artistic director) Liz LeCompte is interested in. Working with them was something I’d wanted to do as a designer for ten years, then when I got there I realised very quickly that it wasn’t for me.”
More successful was Slope, which saw Laing collaborate with writer/director Pamela Carter. This alliance looks set to continue via a version of a forthcoming version of a play by Marivaux play. While Laing mourns the lack of any real laboratory in Scotland for theatre-makers like himself to experiment in, he recognises too that getting Cocteau done in Dundee is an unmissable opportunity.
“I’ve got a bit of an obsession with the Volkesbhune in Berlin at the moment,” Laing confesses. “The stuff I go and see there is mind-blowing. You can watch a classical play there, and it’s wilder than anything you’ll see anywhere else. But it’s still a classic play being done in a conventional theatrical space. It’s extraordinary that can happen in Berlin but not Scotland.”
Laing’s fusion of the mainstream and the avant-garde also ties in with his ultimate ambition, which even he recognises is unlikely to ever happen.
“I want to do a version of Confessions Of A Justified Sinner,” he says, “but I want it to just exist as documentation, so the actual production will never happen.”
As justification for this, Laing cites Gordon Matta-Clark, the New York based artist who in the rundown districts of pre regeneration 1970s New York, reinvented derelict buildings as sculptures. Since Matta-Clark’s death in 1978, only an extensive photographic archive remains.
“The only thing that exists of that now is the documentation,” says Laing, “and now that’s kind of become the thing itself. Liz LeCompte is absolutely obsessed with documentation. Because once The Wooster Group ends, all that will be left will be this entire history of 25 years on this bank of video tapes of rehearsals. I find going through archives at the Lincoln Centre or wherever absolutely fascinating. The stuff we do is so ephemeral, so the documentation, and how that relates to the event, becomes essential.”
In the meantime, “I want to make work that I’m interested in watching. I want to make a version of this Cocteau play that will keep me entertained. On one level it’s a very conventional play, especially in the canon of Jean Cocteau. It ran as a commercial venture in France for two or three years, and it’s perfectly possible just to take it on that level. But whatever I do, I just don’t want to be bored.”
Les Parents Terribles, Dundee Rep, until June 21
www.dundeerep.co.uk
The Herald, June 10th 2008
ends
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