Joseph S. O'Leary homepage: "Phèdre" at the Comédie Française

March 07, 2013

"Phèdre" at the Comédie Française

To assist at "Phèdre" at the Comédie Française, where Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt performed the title rôle, should be to participate in a supreme expression of French culture.

Well, tonight, French culture shot itself in the foot. Things went well at first thanks to Pierre Niney, who appears as Hippolyte at the start and who delivers his lines with beautiful diction, intelligence, feeling and a sure sense for the beauty of Racine's verse. But what was that irritating noise? It took me a long time to identify the source: a radio on the table, which played right through the performance.

The scene between Phèdre and Oenone was thrown away, as if the producer despaired of doing anything new with some of the best known lines in French verse. Phèdre played in a totally static pose most of the time, her voice sometimes so low that the radio drowned it out. In later scenes she shrieked like a fishwife, but with little help to her diction.

A minor character called Panope did a pseudo-comic stunt, reading her own lines with repetitions and also the replies of other characters. In act V she actually sang a song along with the radio, blissfully ignoring the progress of the tragic action. This is the sort of Regie-Theater gimmickry that has reduced the German theater to a cesspool of cultural vandalism.

Aricie, in modern dress that did nothing to lend her presence, delivered her lines in the scene with Hippolyte as if she had just memorized them the night before. The only moment when she came alive was in her challenge to Thésée in Act V.

At various times characters recited lines into a microphone, which in the muddled mind of the producer was no doubt supposed to underline the role of the audience.

The jumping about and sudden changes of tone had a certain surprise value and could be said to put some lines in a new light. When the lines were delivered with some respect for their sound and sense the drama was sufficiently gripping, as how could it not be.

There was a singularly inappropriate recorded string quartet musical accompaniment that seemed designed to produce an effect of "defamiliariazation" by being particularly intrusive during key speeches.

The producer, Michael Marmarinos, set the play in modern Greece because he finds ancient Greece "too abstract"; there was a nice video of the sea as background throughout; otherwise the stage had a graceless bed, table, and chairs, variously kicked about for no apparent reason.

Indeed the Comédie Française seem to have handed their actors and audience over to a typically uncultivated Regie-Theater messers, perhaps thinking that modern Greeks of any sort must have some sort of intuitive understanding of a play set in their country.

I do not know if booing is in the tradition of the Comédie Française as it is in that of La Scala and even Bayreuth (at least for recent disastrous productions), but I delivered two hefty boos. I was sitting in the center of the front row and did not applaud. Instead I glared as theatrically as possible at the accursed radio. A distinguished looking theater critic at my side murmured that everyone has their own take on a theatrical performance (his own applause being cursory) and no doubt he will find the requisite diplomatic tone. But I hope there will be critics to warn the Comédie Française against the rot of Regie Theater.

Posted at 08:27 AM in Literary Essays | Permalink

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Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

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March 07, 2013

"Phèdre" at the Comédie Française

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