There’s
a line at the end of La Maladie de la Mort, the late period novella by Marguerite
Duras that translates to English as The Malady of Death. ‘The Malady of Death’
it states, ‘could be staged in the theatre.’ There then follows several pages
of musings regarding any staging of her story that are as meticulously detailed
as anything Samuel Beckett might have written regarding movement, stage
pictures and possible use of film, only to end with a typically elliptical and
deliciously contrary ‘All this by way of general suggestion.’
More
than thirty years after the French-born novelist, playwright and film-maker penned
her first person study of intimate exchanges, director Katie Mitchell and writer
Alice Birch have risen to the challenge with a provocative and daring staging
of Duras’ book.
Created
for the Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord and co-produced with numerous
European partners, including Edinburgh International Festival, Mitchell’s
production now arrives in Edinburgh as part of EIF’s season of work presented
by the Paris-based centre where Peter Brook has been based since 1974.
While
retaining the essence of Duras’ story about a man and the woman he hires to
spend several weeks with him in a hotel in the vain hope of discovering love, Mitchell
and Birch are also looking to subvert the traditions of the male gaze to reinvent
it in a way which has accidentally chimed with the rise of the #MeToo age.
“It’s a piece with a secret,”
says Mitchell of both the play and the book it is freely adapted from. “The
syntax of the prose writing is so beautiful, but here is a man whose attempts
to love are always frustrated. Why did he have this malady, and why was this
woman able to sort it?
“Looking
at it now in terms of gender politics, quite a few things need addressing. Third
way feminism had come in during the 1980s, and that put paid to a lot of
particulars when Alice and I started to look at it. Why would a woman go to a
room with a man and do everything that man wanted her to do?”
To
try and contextualise this, Birch and Mitchell have made the woman a sex worker
in a hi-tech production which puts two actors onstage as they are filmed, with
live black and white footage of the couple’s intimacies running alongside a voice-over
by international actress Irene Jacob. This raises issues of voyeurism, the
numbing effects of online pornography and the patriarchal notion of the male
gaze again.
“Looking
at Duras’ own relationship to feminism, I realised it was ambivalent,” says
Mitchell.
The
last time a work by Duras appeared at EIF was in 1998, when Flemish wunderkind
Ivo van Hove brought his staging of India Song to Edinburgh. Originally
commissioned by the National Theatre in 1972, it remained unproduced, and was
filmed in 1975. Van Hove took the play and turned it into a sensuous experience
without a word spoken onstage. Since then, sightings of Duras’ work has been
rare. Only this year did her work appear on the same stage as La Maladie de la
Mort, when the Lyceum produced an adaptation of what is probably Duras’ most
famous novel, The Lover, notoriously filmed through a very male looking glass in
1992.
Duras
was in her sixties when she wrote La Maladie de la Mort, and had a long back
catalogue that moved between prose, drama and film, consistently reinventing
works for each medium as she went. In this respect, the sparseness of her prose
works lends itself to be made flesh onstage with ease. As for challenging the
patriarchy, “We’ve got a lot to do,” says Mitchell, “and I’m always optimistic.”
Mitchell
quotes playwright Caryl Churchill.
“I
remember her saying to me that feminism is a movement that’s only been around
for a hundred years, and that maybe we need to be patient.”
La
Maladie de la Mort, Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 16-18, 8pm, August 18-19, 3pm.
The Herald, August 14th 2018
ends
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