Falstaff (2): forever waiting at the station

24 November

"Les joyeuses commères de Windsor" (aka "The Merry Wives of Windsor") is not one of Shakespeare's more original works, though the guy did have a knack for putting a show together. Seen primarily as a vehicle for resurrecting Falstaff (allegedly at the insistence of the Queen, to whom one did not say 'no') it is a bit disappointing: unlike in "Henry IV," where the pathos of Falstaff's downward trajectory, juxtaposed to the upsurgence of the prince, is the stuff of universal drama (see my post of 22/11), the outsized Falstaff is here fitted into a standard comic plot of fickle wives and jealous husbands, where his enormities are just another occasion for low humor. So I wondered what a company as original as the Théâtre du Voyageur would make of this material, and said as much to Chantal Melior before the show. "You'll have to see," she said, sphinx-like, and see I did.

One simple fact is that Chantal's two 'episodes' directly connect in a way that Shakespeare's do not: two hundred years of social history and a change of genre separate Shakespeare's feudal Falstaff from his early modern one. In the Voyageur's episode 2, though, the rather touching conclusion of episode 1 is replayed, verbatim, except that Falstaff, rebuked and abandoned, trudges to the far side of the stage ... and into a boxing ring! There he KO's one, two, three of his erstwhile critics and emerges a winner once more. Later the ring will become a stage where Falstaff's desperate housewife (now known as Mme. de Gaie?), will croon a love-song (in English), Motown style, while the rest of the cast sings back-ups. More choral numbers similarly yank the scene into the present day--but of course that's exactly what Shakespeare did by creating a contemporary bourgeois bedroom farce.

Other interpolations worked less well for me. The English wars of succession break out all over again, just long enough for Falstaff as recruiter to engage in a lot of wordplay (I no doubt missed a lot here), but then the armies seem to get laid off and everyone goes home. On the other hand the fact that the play actually erupts in the bar/waiting area before it officially starts, with Falstaff bellowing and cursing from the stairwell and the cast warming up at the piano, is a wonderful way to launch a sequel. This was particularly effective as half the audience was a group of middle-schoolers (who had seen the first half as I did the night before): not quite knowing what to expect, they were both amazed and a little worried as this enormous and rather unstable-looking fellow was suddenly amongst them, using language they knew one didn't use in polite settings ... but was this a polite setting? Had their teachers brought them by mistake to a bordello? In some ways the uncertainty of that moment set a perfect tone for what followed.

After the instabilities of these preliminary gestures the main plot of "Merry Wives," in which Falstaff's adulterous designs are deceptively encouraged, then foiled in a crescendo of humiliations, goes ahead like a mechanical toy, delightful in its details but finally all too predictable. Falstaff is left on all fours, wearing a ridiculous set of horns (antlers, actually), while the honest burghers of Windsor--that boringly upright bunch--make sport of him. That's as far as Shakespeare takes it: Falstaff realizes his folly, and the romantic subplot (altogether missing from this version) is left to work its charms. 

But in the Voyageur version a wonderful thing happens at just this moment, a gesture with which Chantal Melior has won my heart forever.  Falstaff picks himself up, antlers and all, and returns to the studied nonchalance he tried to assume in the face of Hal's devastating rebuke at the end of episode 1. Turning to his faithless friends he asks--in exactly the words he used last night-- "Who wants to have dinner?" and strolls off as if nothing has happened: no moral lesson, no triumph of bourgeois propriety, no change of heart. For all his faults and follies he is still Falstaff, heavyweight champion of the world, now, tomorrow, forever. Now that's an ending.    

with Falstaff on the railway platform (1)

22 November

Crowned and regal, Bolingbroke surveys his destiny, his wanton prince, and us from a high chair, which is rolled majestically across the vast stage when History beckons. Hotspur and his rebellious colleagues, on the other hand, wander through the same space like nomads in their mobile HQ tent. When the battle occurs, it happens as an athletic ballet, part West Side Story, part soccer match. These spacious effects come naturally to the Théâtre du Voyageur at Asnières, just north of Paris, a big stage housed right on the platform in a former railway station.

But what do we care about kings and battles? The production is "Le Ventre de Shakespeare," the Belly of Shakespeare, or "the Lives and Deaths of Falstaff in Two Episodes," and we spend most of the evening carousing with Sir John and Mistress Quickley and their patchy friends in a seedy piano bar that takes up most of center stage. Oh, and Prince Hal is there too, in it but not of it, his acerbic wit setting him apart, starting with his first lines, though it takes him the length of episode 1 to realize it.

At the Théâtre du Voyageur, as its website informs us, each production is "un apprentissage et un voyage," an exploration and a journey, which departs from the "psychological theater" to create "an experience lived simultaneously by actors and spectators." The local genius who inhabits these precincts is a dynamic woman named Chantal Melior, and it is she who has assembled the script, produced, and directed it. Chantal (everyone seeems to call her by her prénom) has nurtured her little repertory company over nearly two decades. It was she who saw the possibilities of the abandoned station and somehow persuaded the local and regional governments to renovate it. Though she disclaims much knowledge of English, she knows her Shakespeare, and she has stitched together these scenes from four of his plays with the cunning of a master, adding songs and choreography as needed. Her Falstaff, a hogshead of a man whose belly deserves its top billing, not only lives and breathes--as he does in Shakespeare's vignettes--but takes on the full amplitude of a major character, not tragic but sad in a modern way, a perpetual adolescent whose tricks and fancies never cease to amuse, but who gets left behind when Hal's express train leaves the station. 

Before that happens, though, we get the full enjoyment of this outsized character: hear his quick lies as he tries to repossess his squandered bravery, hear him load his beloved prince with calumnies he smoothly disavows when overheard, hear him declaim on the hypocrisies of "honor." A floozie named "Do-Do" sings a dancehall number in his honor, in which he seems to be compared to an orangutan (my French isn't always up to this sort of scene, but folks around me found it hilariously naughty). And best of all, with Quickley on his arm, Sir John himself sings her a little chanson d'amour as they two-step across the stage, a scene the Bard would have stolen in a minute.

Theater is meant to be transport, and Chantal's  brilliant insight in claiming this space is only a small part of how that effect is put to work. Apart from its luxury of stage space the company's style is low-budget: the cozy coffee bar/waiting area is furnished with mismatched chairs and makeshift tables and lit by a large dripping candelabra, a cross between an Allston group apartment and a set for La Bohème. But I feel immediately drawn in as the volunteer hostess absolutely refuses to take my euro the coffee is supposed to cost, and insists that I meet Chantal. "Is this your first time here? Welcome to the Théâtre du Voyageur" is said to me at least three times. This is clearly a voyage we're taking en groupe. 

At the final moment of episode 1, though, that voyage becomes vast and solitary. Sir John and his friends witness the triumph of their pal, now crowned as Henry V, from behind a crowd-control barrier of chicken wire. Falstaff is his bragadoccio self, assuring one and all that his personal connection to the new king will have them all rolling in titles and repaid debts. But the new king has moved on to another life. As he rebukes his old companion from the far side of the stage, telling him how unsuited his capers are to his white hair, we can all but hear the air leaking out. Abandoned by his prince and his disappointed followers, Falstaff, slumped and vacant, makes an achingly slow walk across that spacious but empty stage, a voyager to nowhere. 

What I saw last night was just episode 1, "la dolce vita." Falstaff's death is recounted in a rapid-fire epilogue just as the lights go out,  but Chantal's notes to episode 2 promise that he will be back on other terms, not a person but a "character" (personnage de théâtre) living a "farce tragique." Will that be so very different? I'll find out tonight and let you know.

 

mesure pour mesure in bobigny

16 November

"Measure for Measure" is an intellectually fascinating text but a hard play to bring to life on the stage. In fact, it's a hard play to justify in lots of ways, as I found out one time when I attempted to teach it to sophomores at Commonwealth School... but  that's another post. I went to see the play in French at MC 93 Bobigny last night, and the experience taught me some new things about the play--and a few about France as well.

One of the most successful aspects of this production was the set. Director Jean-Yves Ruf has the action begin (after a sort of prologue delivered by the duke from the audience) behind a gauzy transparent screen, through which we see what Vienna has become under the lax Duke's reign: prostitutes flaunt their wares under a garish light, as one of them squats to rinse her crotch and several clients exchange ribaldries while peeing (toward the audience) into a large rectangular pool/urinal that literally sets the stage for this drama of infraction and purgation. It is a world, as the duke admits, whose moral authority has gone flaccid in response to his negligence in enforcing the law. It is every Angelo's nightmare, every law-and-order conservative's case-in-point, every French droitiste's view of ... places like Bobigny. 

Allow me to digress a moment. In this morning's Monde I read an interesting op-ed piece, "Appeler un Noir un Noir,"  in which the writer examines le Monde's use of racial and other sensitive terminology, and notes how the Obama campaign among other forces has put pressure on that usage manual. One of the terms the author still considers defamatory is the chic adjective neuf-trois, 9-3, which identifies the départment Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris, but is understood to "stigmatise" the residents with undertones of criminality and foreignness. (American speakers, think of the adjective "ghetto") Bobigny is part of that world: MC 93 is Seine-Saint-Denis (93)'s public theater. 

Of course, one could hardly compare the French government's policies to the duke's. Under Interior Minister, now President, Sarkozy enforcement in places like Bobigny has been much more like ... Angelo's 'reforms.' Candidate Sarkozy famously suggested directing a watercannon at such places, and under his vigilance the racaille of Seine-Saint-Denis, as in Vienna, are rounded up, incarcerated, deported.  Once you understand that Angelo's real principles are hypocrisy, abuse, and personal gain,  voilà!--Ruf's lurid scenography takes on a hard edge. In yet another turn of the screw Sarkozy's cultural ministry has been trying to execute what local commentators call a "hostile takeover" of MC 93 by the ministry-managed Comédie Française (against the wishes of artistic director Patrick Sommier and Bobigny's Communist mayor), though that initiative seems to have been deferred. But the context is particularly pertinent for this play that is all about official power in conflict with human desires, as mirrored in the contrast of aristocratic and plebian standards of behavior. In its lavish and engaging presentation of the more populaire elements--not just the staging but virtuoso readings of a number of comic parts--this production comes down heavily on the side of le peuple and its humane republican values, and against the republic of les flics--of cops like Angelo and Sarkozy.

What is less successful is the effort to make coherent the angelic worldview, the absolutist standard of right behavior, whose burden in the play it is Isabelle's to impose on this bordel of a town. It is not the fault of the actress that she is constrained to play her entire role in a white nightgown more suggestive of Bon Marché than of Heaven. But she wouldn't have to intone her moral lessons so operatically, though really the fault is in how untrue these lines ring to moderns. Even her beloved, soon-to-be executed brother Claudio can't believe his ears when she patiently explains why her chastity is worth more than his young life. I'm in no position to judge André Markowicz's verse translation except to say it was 'difficult' for me in a Racinian sort of way, but I'm not sure Shakespeare's original makes Isabelle's case any more successfully.

This production's version of the Duke, on the other hand, is an improbable success, as well as the part of the play when I was most aware that it was in French. Let me say that my 10th graders were particularly unwilling to take this guy seriously, despite their teacher's increasingly plaintive insistence that they had to, that he was the obvious center of authority and truth in the play. But what a wacko he is, with his plots and disguises and non-stop machinations. And that's just how Jérôme Derre played him, waving his hands and rubbing them with glee, shouting at Isabelle and pulling her by the ear, just before he suddenly turns and gives her a 10-second smooch right on her virgin mouth. Is this sounding French?  At last it all makes sense: it's all about the desire of the Other of the other, which displaces the phallocratic law of the father into a chain of signifiers ... Just wait till I explain it to the sophomores.