Andromaque
Apr. 8th, 2009 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustLast 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.
The stage setting is minimal, which makes sense: as with Shakespeare, there's always a clash between the period in which the play is set and the period when it was written. Do you opt for the awkwardness of modern actors in classical Greek costumes? Or the incongruity of the costumes of Racine's original actors, seventeenth century dress with some additional drapery to signify "classical"? No period setting would be quite right, so there's a logic in dispensing with period detail, in a bare stage and a row of schoolroom chairs, and let the words do all the work. As for the costumes, I see the logic in the 1940s costumes: almost but not quite modern, the men in uniform with slicked back hair, the women in dark frocks and retro hairstyles, post-war, but barely, just as the play is about the aftermath of the Trojan war. It makes sense, but I'm not sure it comes off: the big speeches and the little frocks, the women running across the stage, all unladylike bare legs, not timeless but multiply anachronistic. I never quite got used to it, was constantly distracted by it.
Not half as distracted as I was by all that running, though. No-one ever walked anywhere, everyone ran all the time: ran onto the stage, ran off the stage, and from time to time ran across the stage for no particular reason. I can think of no reason for this, except to counter the static nature of the play: we can't expect our audience to tolerate a play in which people spend all their time standing around talking, so we'll put it lots of running to liven things up.
Similarly, audiences will be bored by the sequence of scenes in which two people confide in each other about what's going on: so we'll have them shouting at each other from opposite sides of the stage - that'll be much more dramatic! Better still, it creates a space centre stage where the people they are talking about can appear, almost as if the action were being performed instead of just being described: when Pyrrhus and Andromaque are being discussed, they bring their chairs and sit centre stage, as visual aids. Occasionally, these 'absent' characters even voice the speeches attributed to them by the speakers. Even more bizarre, the child Astyanax appears on stage. Racine changes his source material, denying that he was killed when Troy fell, to use him as an unseen pawn whose execution the Greeks are demanding, a means for Pyrrhus to influence his mother, Andromaque. How old is he? It isn't clear, and it doesn't much matter. Except that this production has him on stage much other time, played by an adult impersonating the mannerisms of a child, and a child young enough to be boisterous and unruly, at that.
Finally, I find the character of Hermione irritating at the best of times. The play is about obsessive passion and self-delusion: these are powerful dramatic forces, and you may pity their victims, but you don't have to like them. Oreste is totally ineffective, unable either to perform his task as ambassador or to throw it aside and act on his love for Hermione. If you had asked me before last week, I would have told you that he does in the end kill Pryrrhus: but even this turns out not to be the case). Yet Hermione, savage and self-indulgent, annoys me more - and in this production, which emphasises her emotionalism to the point of hysteria, more still.
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.
The stage setting is minimal, which makes sense: as with Shakespeare, there's always a clash between the period in which the play is set and the period when it was written. Do you opt for the awkwardness of modern actors in classical Greek costumes? Or the incongruity of the costumes of Racine's original actors, seventeenth century dress with some additional drapery to signify "classical"? No period setting would be quite right, so there's a logic in dispensing with period detail, in a bare stage and a row of schoolroom chairs, and let the words do all the work. As for the costumes, I see the logic in the 1940s costumes: almost but not quite modern, the men in uniform with slicked back hair, the women in dark frocks and retro hairstyles, post-war, but barely, just as the play is about the aftermath of the Trojan war. It makes sense, but I'm not sure it comes off: the big speeches and the little frocks, the women running across the stage, all unladylike bare legs, not timeless but multiply anachronistic. I never quite got used to it, was constantly distracted by it.
Not half as distracted as I was by all that running, though. No-one ever walked anywhere, everyone ran all the time: ran onto the stage, ran off the stage, and from time to time ran across the stage for no particular reason. I can think of no reason for this, except to counter the static nature of the play: we can't expect our audience to tolerate a play in which people spend all their time standing around talking, so we'll put it lots of running to liven things up.
Similarly, audiences will be bored by the sequence of scenes in which two people confide in each other about what's going on: so we'll have them shouting at each other from opposite sides of the stage - that'll be much more dramatic! Better still, it creates a space centre stage where the people they are talking about can appear, almost as if the action were being performed instead of just being described: when Pyrrhus and Andromaque are being discussed, they bring their chairs and sit centre stage, as visual aids. Occasionally, these 'absent' characters even voice the speeches attributed to them by the speakers. Even more bizarre, the child Astyanax appears on stage. Racine changes his source material, denying that he was killed when Troy fell, to use him as an unseen pawn whose execution the Greeks are demanding, a means for Pyrrhus to influence his mother, Andromaque. How old is he? It isn't clear, and it doesn't much matter. Except that this production has him on stage much other time, played by an adult impersonating the mannerisms of a child, and a child young enough to be boisterous and unruly, at that.
Finally, I find the character of Hermione irritating at the best of times. The play is about obsessive passion and self-delusion: these are powerful dramatic forces, and you may pity their victims, but you don't have to like them. Oreste is totally ineffective, unable either to perform his task as ambassador or to throw it aside and act on his love for Hermione. If you had asked me before last week, I would have told you that he does in the end kill Pryrrhus: but even this turns out not to be the case). Yet Hermione, savage and self-indulgent, annoys me more - and in this production, which emphasises her emotionalism to the point of hysteria, more still.
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.
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Date: 2009-04-09 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 09:18 pm (UTC)