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Andromaque
Apr. 8th, 2009 10:24 pmLast week I accompanied Gail to Cheek by Jowl's production of Andromaque. I've read - and taught - quite a bit of Racine, but I don't think I've ever seen any on stage. The nearest I've come was probably Rivette's L'Amour Fou, about half of whose running time (252 minutes, it says here) consists of rehearsals for a production of - ah, that was Andromaque, was it? It's thirty odd years since I saw it, and all I remember is that I was very bored, but here's a review which gives an interesting account of it. Then again, it's forty years since I studied Andromaque for A-level, and I was surprised how familiar the text felt last night. I'd say I must have taught it in the interim, but I don't seem to have a copy...
But I feel I know the play well (with one misremembering, which I'll come to). I remember vividly the first confrontation with the text, so unlike anything I'd read before (can it really have beeb the first of our set texts that we studied? That's how I remember it, but wouldn't any teacher, even the unique, the wonderful, the uncompromising Dr Smith, have eased us in more gently than that?) - staring at the verse and wondering why it didn't make sense (and the revelation, several weeks later, that all you had to do was reverse the order of the phrases in each sentence - this was long before Yoda speak). The construction, too, was strange: four main characters working out their desperate love each for the wrong person in a series of dialogues - conversations between two people - with each other or alone with a 'second self', a friend or servant in whom they could confide as if speaking to themselves in monologue. The play is all talk, of course - to have violent action taking place on stage would be regarded as unseemly by French classical drama - but the intensity of the passions beneath the talk is action enough. So I was curious to know how Cheek by Jowl would stage this.
( This is what they did: )
After this, it will seem perverse to say that nonetheless I enjoyed the play. But I did, partly because of the sheer hypnotic power of the verse, and partly because it made me think about the these choices. I also had some entertaining but unproductive thoughts about the role of the confident, how to interpret it and how to subvert it.
But I feel I know the play well (with one misremembering, which I'll come to). I remember vividly the first confrontation with the text, so unlike anything I'd read before (can it really have beeb the first of our set texts that we studied? That's how I remember it, but wouldn't any teacher, even the unique, the wonderful, the uncompromising Dr Smith, have eased us in more gently than that?) - staring at the verse and wondering why it didn't make sense (and the revelation, several weeks later, that all you had to do was reverse the order of the phrases in each sentence - this was long before Yoda speak). The construction, too, was strange: four main characters working out their desperate love each for the wrong person in a series of dialogues - conversations between two people - with each other or alone with a 'second self', a friend or servant in whom they could confide as if speaking to themselves in monologue. The play is all talk, of course - to have violent action taking place on stage would be regarded as unseemly by French classical drama - but the intensity of the passions beneath the talk is action enough. So I was curious to know how Cheek by Jowl would stage this.
( This is what they did: )
After this, it will seem perverse to say that nonetheless I enjoyed the play. But I did, partly because of the sheer hypnotic power of the verse, and partly because it made me think about the these choices. I also had some entertaining but unproductive thoughts about the role of the confident, how to interpret it and how to subvert it.
