Adaptations, Versions and Perversions in Modern British Drama [1 ed.] 9781443868693, 9781443847001

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Adaptations, Versions and Perversions in Modern British Drama

Adaptations, Versions and Perversions in Modern British Drama

Edited by

Ignacio Ramos Gay

Adaptations, Versions and Perversions in Modern British Drama, Edited by Ignacio Ramos Gay This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Ignacio Ramos Gay and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4700-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4700-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Rehabilitating Adaptation Ignacio Ramos Gay Part I: Cultural Dialogues in the British Theatre: From the Victorians to the Present Time Chapter One ............................................................................................... 12 “The fairest one with golden locks”: Parodying Helen on the Modern Stage Laura Monrós Gaspar Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 26 “On est toujours le fils de quelqu’un”: (Trans)Nationality and the Aesthetics of Literary Originality in Oscar Wilde Ignacio Ramos Gay Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 The Theater of Arts and Sciences: Staging Medecine and Pathology from England to France Caroline Bertonèche Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57 “A swirling, brilliant, cloudy mass of blues”: David Hare’s Adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde Ana Fernández-Caparrós Turina Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 71 Relational Spaces: From the State of the Nation to Globalization in Contemporary British Theatre Mireia Aragay

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Table of Contents

Part II: Translating and Adapting for Foreign Audiences Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 88 Beckett’s Theatre: Translating and Adapting One’s Own Work Marianne Drugeon Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 105 Laclos, Hampton: English Esprit vs French Wit Lydia Vázquez Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 120 Translations in the Basque Country: Agur, Eire… Agur Maria Gaviña Costero Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 134 Three Ways of Looking at a Nightingale: The Tale of Philomela By Ted Hughes, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Joanna Laurens Miguel Teruel Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 154 “Is it happy cats or is it an Ireland free we’re after?”: Animal Rights, Terrorism and American Audiences’ Response to Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore Claudia Alonso Recarte Contributors ............................................................................................. 173

INTRODUCTION: REHABILITATING ADAPTATION IGNACIO RAMOS GAY

The word ‘adaptation’ comes to us from the Latin ‘adaptare’ meaning ‘adjust’ –a combination of the prefix ‘ad-’ (to) and ‘aptus’ (fitted)–. Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Usage (1867) defines it as ‘the act of making suitable’ as well as ‘the state of being suitable’ (5). Dr Johnson’s definition identifies it with the process of “proportioning” (7). The word implies thereby a teleological rearrangement as much as a prior appropriation, or what Linda Hutcheon termed, when approaching the substance of the mechanism of parody, a “repetition with difference” (1985: 32). This book aims at exploring what plays were deemed ‘suitable’ to be reworked for foreign or local stages; what transformations – linguistic, semiotic, theatrical– were undertaken so as to accommodate international audiences; how national literary traditions are forged, altered, and diluted by means of transnational adapting techniques; and, finally, to what extent the categorical boundaries between original plays and adaptations may be blurred on the account of such adjusting textual strategies, or what historian Adrian Johns terms “how could the need to create new knowledge be reconciled with the need to appropriate old?” (179). In his Devil’s Dictionary (1911), American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce cynically defined the word ‘dramatist’ as “one who adapts plays from the French” (59). Bierce’s definition inevitably takes after the late nineteenth-century zeitgeist, deeming theatre adaptation of foreign plays as an indeed economically profitable activity for the author, yet one that debased the dramatic art. Bierce’s Victorian contemporaries glossed the theatre performed in London as a succession of low, despicable genres such as vaudevilles, farces, melodramas, opérettes, burlettas or extravaganzas whose influence upon native product had led to a theatrical decline. English actors complained in 1853 throughout a series of anonymous articles published in the Bentley’s Monthly Review about the national theatrical poverty, crying out for “a new drama” that could

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Introduction

prevent them from “fainting”, and proclaimed “a thousand noes” to a theatre peppered by “farces barely translated from the French” (3). On a similar note, drama critic Edward Fitzball, commenting in 1859 upon the so-called degeneration of drama, described the theatre as a “childish affair” due to its being “almost all composed of translations” (I: 1). A few years later, dramatist and adaptor Dion Boucicault pointed at the “deluge of French plays that set in with 1842” and that took place right at the end of the patent theatre’s monopoly as the main factor that “swamped the English drama of that period” (242). Such literary colonisation was more epically described in 1887 by Edward Morton in an article whose suggestive title possessed evident warfare connotations, and conspicuously reminded the reader of bygone days: “The French Invasion”. In line with previous criticism, Morton deplored that “at half-a-dozen theatres English translations, versions, or perversions of French plays are now being performed, to say nothing of the French comedians in possession of the Adelphi and Lyric” (The Theatre, 1 July, 1887). Blaming their fellowcountrymen for not being able to create ‘original’ plays ‘in the manner’ of Parisian dramatists, adapting and translating pieces from alien sources was considered a mere subterfuge to avoid original creation capable of determining a national literary tradition. As critic William Archer stated in 1899, “they [the French] have five or six men who can do tolerable dramatic work […] for every one of ours; and their good men are not tempted to waste their time and talent on adaptations from the English” (37). Unlike its current use as evolution –a result of the present-day absorption and assimilation of nineteenth-century Darwinist theories– adaptation at the time chimed more closely with the notion of blockage and creative obstruction. This hyperactively industrial adapting activity characterised English theatre since the liberalisation of the theatres brought about by the passing of the Theatre Act in 1843. In her essay on adaptation theory (2006), Linda Hutcheon states that “the Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything –and in just about every possible direction; the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs and dances, tableaux vivants were constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again” (xi)–. On this note, it comes off as no surprise that Allardyce Nicoll was able to compile eighty-seven different terms used to describe the wide variety of subgenres performed on the Victorian stage, as a result in many cases of adapting operations from alien and foreign works (V: 230). Similarly, Julie Sanders reproduces Adrian Poole’s extensive list of terms accounting for the Victorian’s fascination with the rewriting of previous or contemporary artistic forms: “borrowing, stealing,

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appropriating, inheriting, assimilating […] being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed […] homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, allusion, and intertextuality” (Poole, 2. qtd. by Sanders, 3). However, far from complying with the “constant critical denigration of the general phenomenon of adaptation” that receives and regards the resulting product as “minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the ‘original’” (Hutcheon, 2006: xii), Hutcheon, in an attempt of de-hierarchizing the authoritative forms of creation, envisions adaptation as an instance of quintessential creativity; one by which “multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically” (2006: xiii). This volume builds on Hutcheon’s understanding of original creation as a horizontal –rather than vertical– process by bringing together a number of articles that scrutinise the linguistic, social, political and theatrical complexities inherent in the intercultural transference of plays, as well as the manoeuvres of semiotic recombination. The essays collected are partly a selection of the papers presented at a conference held at the University of Valencia, in Spain, in December 2011, titled “Adaptations, Versions and Perversions: French Theatre and English Playwrights”, and co-organised by the English and French departments. Although originally focused upon nineteenth- and twentieth- century theatrical rewritings of French plays, the conference soon expanded to include further theatrical trafficking so as to illuminate the flexibility of transnational practices and the nomadic essence of theatre adaptation. In a way that could be equated to the rapid circulation of images and peoples nowadays, the play itself becomes a “gateway to cultural dialogue” (Shaked, 1989) holding multiple passports and tempering political frontiers. At a time when national identities and sovereignties are constantly reassessed due to the perennial “flux in cultural reproduction and identity formation” (Ong, 10), the approaches presented by the different contributors investigate the modern British theatre as an instance of diachronic and synchronic transnational adaptations based upon a myriad of influences originating in, and projected upon, other national dramatic traditions. These traditions, rooted in relatively distant geographies and epochs, are traced so as to illustrate the split between the state-imposed identity and personal, subjective identity caused by cultural negotiations of the self in an age of globalism. International frontiers are thus pointed at in order to claim the need to be transcended in the process of cultural re-appropriation associated with theatre performance for international audiences. As Ong contends, the prefix “trans” denotes both “moving through space” as well as the “changing nature of something: it alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational and the transgressive aspects of

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contemporary behaviour and imagination” (4). Transnational adapting is to be construed as a diacritic of linguistic displacement, a textual diaspora detaching and reattaching dramatic fragments as a sort of protean self that paradoxically remains as the only possibility to approach an unmovable essence. The following ten essays interact with each other by means of encompassing theoretical and practical issues that cast light on the transnational and trans-epochal transfers of plays. The notions of adaptation, version and perversion are inevitably studied in compliance with a flexible understanding of national credentials. These are not mere translations conveying accurate linguistic and gestural equivalents from one culture and language to another. Instead, they are examined as extensive, original rewritings that seduce audiences into national mobility. In this sense, I contend that British plays performed on foreign stages, or absorbing alien heritages, portray contemporary theatre as a source of cultural nomadism and the agent of a new mode of subjectification. Despite its modern derogative use, in many ways, the adaptations dealt with in the next chapters could be deemed transnational copies of original plays, and they very proudly should be considered so. As Marcus Boon points out (2010), the word ‘copia’ is connected via its Latin root to the word ‘copula’ (a tie, a band, a fetter) but also to the verb ‘to copulate’ (83). By relating ‘copying’ with ‘copulation’, rewriting with generation, Boon reinstates what Robert Weimann termed the “reproductive dimension of appropriation” (14), that is, the engendering capacity of adaptation to create new life. More than a barrier to the constant flow of structures across cultures, the copy is the catalyser of creation, a celebration of renewal and a confirmation of the liquid texture of literature. In opposition with Victorian forerunning criticism, contributors to the volume show how textual annexation stands for a flowing, literary ‘rescription’: a writing back to past and present, foreign and local authors, forcing readers “to reconsider literary categories and loyalties” (Kellman, x). The book is divided in two parts. Part One focuses upon the (trans)cultural dialogues established between British playwrights and foreign authors from the Victorian period until the twenty-first century. This diachronic dimension shows how texts encompass and respond to other texts through time and how the audiences’ response varies accordingly. In this part, not only specific, porous texts, but also themes and leitmotifs are explored. A chronological progression has been followed so as to discern the interplay between time and space when adapting for the stage, the steady erosion of geographical boundaries made

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by time, as well as the elasticity of chronological order as a result of transnational literary transit. This is why the book opens with an article framing the widest chronological division between the text adapted and the play performed. Laura Monrós’s study of the Victorians parodying classic mythology for the stage unveils burlesque rewritings of the myth of Helen as a subterfuge mirroring mid-nineteenth-century gender struggles. The controversial reception of plays like Robert Brough’s The Siege of Troy (1859) or F. C. Burnand’s Helen, or Taken from the Greek (1866) bridges the gulf between more than twenty centuries of social history and unearths the theatrical mechanisms employed by Victorian playwrights to update the classics and accommodate modern issues within a popular form. The following essay maps out Oscar Wilde’s transnational and translingual literary imagination. Ignacio Ramos-Gay argues that Wilde’s life and writings can be interpreted in the light of a French cultural identity that transcends the classic Victorian binary of Irishness vs Englishness. In applying aesthetic formulae to the creation of his ‘French self’ and modelling himself, both physically and linguistically, upon his admired French classics, Wilde ignited a new mode of constructing identity that went hand in hand with his process of playwriting. Literary identity was consequently the result of a flexible cultural negotiation more related to art than to geography, which was arbitrarily used by Wilde as an instrument to convey his swinging sympathies towards France, Ireland or England. Finally, the author shows how Wilde used blatant transnational adaptations in his own works as a revolutionary practice to debunk the institutionalisation of intellectual property and as a tool of insurrection to British dominance. Beyond the cultural transfer of plays, the third paper in the volume faces the challenging topic of the literary transposition of similar themes and leitmotivs in two different countries from the late nineteenth-century to the 1950s. Caroline Bertonèche’s article tracks down and compares a number of theatrical representations of medical dysfunctions and scientific perversions permeating English and French contemporary drama. Taking as a starting point of such viral transmission Lord Byron’s effeminate dandyism, the author scrutinises the poet’s self-fashioning as an alternative and defying masculinity that was considered to be of one piece with the so-called homosexual malady fleshed out by Oscar Wilde. Her study then proceeds to explore two authors pivotal to the analysis of female pathology on the stage in the nineteenth century. The novels by Alexandre Dumas fils’s, La Dame aux Camélias (1848), and Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867) were successfully adapted for the stage, as the visual

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medium intensified the theatricality inherent in the malfunctioning psyche and could be easily rallied with Charcot’s display of hysterical muses at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Bertonèche concludes her journey into the spectacle of psychic anomaly with Beckett’s dissection of linguistic neurosis. In his plays, aphasias and the plaguing loss of the ability to speak and understand language unveil a myriad of injuries of the brain so that, as Bertonèche contends, in line with Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubuesque’ saga, Beckett’s ‘anti-human’ characters disarticulate the language as they dismember and mutilate their own selves. Ana Fernández-Caparrós analyses an English adaptation of an Austrian classic. By examining the notoriously polemical reception in England of The Blue Room –David Hare’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde– as well as the reasons underpinning its success, FernándezCaparrós contends that the source text was exponentially updated by Sam Mendes’s fêted mise en scène. Although limited to two actors fleshing out the whole original cast, Mendes’s version of Schnitzler’s text preserved the play’s provocative carnality through an intensified sexual innuendo that staged well-known actresses such as Nicole Kidman performing naked. More than simply a scoptophilic stimulus for the audience, Mendes’s voyeuristic adaptation enabled the audience to feel the perverse sexual arousal that the early twentieth-century public experienced in Berlin and Vienna when Schnitzler’s play unleashed a tsunami of critical reactions. If the opening article to Part One focused upon adaptations of Greek mythological plays in nineteenth-century England so as to annihilate any chronological division when rewriting plays for the stage, the paper that closes this section explores contemporary English theatre as a global and globalised genre transcending traditional national demarcations in the late twentieth century. Mireia Aragay thoroughly traces the alteration of the way space is experienced, and its subsequent progressive theatrical and psychological dissolution, in Harold Pinter’s Party Time, Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies. Following suit French political philosopher Étienne Balibar’s theories on the “topography of cruelty” (2001), Aragay yields an insight into how the ‘state-of-the-nation’ play (Rebellato, 2007) steadily gives way to a competing non-naturalistic representation of spatial interconnectedness. Just as much as Monrós’s paper showed how the Classics represent the first stage of globalised, ‘achronological’ literary appropriation, Aragay’s revealing approach to contemporary drama looks ahead to twenty-first-century drama as a transnational, de-territorialised stage mostly defined by new instable alignments, global processes and mobility across space.

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Part Two of the book focuses closely on the process of translating and adapting plays for foreign audiences. Chapters are again arranged chronologically: from Beckett’s translingual self-translations in the 1950s to recent versions in Basque and Catalan of Brian Friel’s play Translations; and from Ted Hughes’s, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s and Joanna Laurens’s revisions of Ovid’s tale of Philomela, to the American reception of British playwright Martin McDonagh. The five articles encompass the notion of itinerant transnationality and the possible fidelities towards, and reinventions of, the source work. Marianne Drugeon begins with an essay on how Beckett’s ‘ambilingualism’ –his ability to express himself in two different verbal systems and to translate his own works into French– transgresses any construction of a national identity associated with the use of a single, exclusive language. In line with a number of litterateurs –Wilde, Santayana, Nabokov, Cioran– who rejected the institutional constraints of ‘monolingualism’ expressed in their primary language by producing major work in a different one, Drugeon explores the lyrical strategies employed by the dramatist when translating his plays for a French audience, and most importantly, when performed in front of a Francophone public. The author deciphers the connection between two semiotic codes –the literary text and its theatrical representation– and observes in Beckett a system of ‘double adaptation/translation’ by which the text performed by the actors reaches a yonder degree of translingualism that obliterates the lexical meaning of words in favour of the audience’s audio-sensitive experience. The stage adaptation carried out by Christopher Hampton, and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1985, of Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century novel Les liaisons dangereuses articulates the second chapter of this section. Lydia Vázquez scrutinises the dramatic mechanisms of intergeneric adaptation from the novel to the play. The author specifically focuses on the myriad of ways French esprit in Laclos’s text is replaced in Hampton’s version by instances of English wit, and how these two notions coexist and interfere with alternative forms of conversational bantering such as persiflage and raillerie. Rallying nationality and humour codification, the author concludes by stating that Laclos’s juxtaposition of morbid and farcical elements instilling a disturbing effect on the French reader is dulcified by means of English wordplay, leaving British audiences completely unaware of the novel’s darkest tones. Whereas Vázquez’s article revolves around the interaction between cross-linguistic and cross-generic theatre adaptation, María Gaviña’s chapter sheds light on the connection between linguistic reshaping and

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cultural arrangement by comparing the Basque and Catalan versions of Brian Friel’s play Translations. First performed in Derry in 1980, and dealing with the cultural and linguistic clash derived from colonisation in nineteenth-century Ireland, the play acts as a reflecting and refracting mirror of the Basque and Catalan mindset in the late eighties. Translated first into Catalan in 1984 yet never published, and then four years later into Basque under the title Agur, Eire… Agur, its immediate success in Northern Spain brought to the fore a myriad of parallelisms between both countries at a time of massive political instability. As Gaviña states, both in Ireland and in Spain, linguistic variation epitomised an ‘otherising’ representation of the coloniser and the colonised population, as well as the silencing and the entombment of a specific culture. Transcultural adaptation is also pivotal in the following essay. Miguel Teruel analyses three contemporary stage plays depicting three new versions of the myth of Philomela by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Ted Hughes, and Joanna Laurens. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, The Love of the Nightingale, was presented in 1988 by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place in Stratford. Her rendition of the tale of Philomela enhances the dramatic potential of the story in significant ways: Philomela’s tapestry becomes a play-within-the-play, and her Itys voices a new, positive message for our future. Ted Hughes published his Tales from Ovid in 1997, a verse translation of twenty-four of the stories in the Metamorphoses. A selection of these poems (daring English versions of the Latin originals, faithful and modern at the same time) was transposed to an acting version produced by Tim Supple and Simon Reade for the RSC at The Swan Theatre in Stratford in 1999. Joanna Lauren’s debut play, The Three Birds, opened at the Gate Theatre in London in 2000, and was favourably received by audiences and critics. Laurens rewrites the myth with powerful poetical language, and threads the story with nonOvidian detail and terrifying actuality. All three update the protean possibilities of the stories around the myth in two main directions: as translations of the motifs and characters of the tales into the present, and as new forms –‘mutatas formas’– in a process of textual metamorphosis which is essentially dramatic in its literary nature. In the last chapter, Claudia Alonso approaches Martin McDonagh’s critically-acclaimed play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore (premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Other Place in 2001) from the double standpoint of international audience response and animal ethics. Specifically, Alonso recapitulates on the criticism surrounding the play to consider the implications of animal violence and cruelty within post 9/11 America. Irish terrorism acquires a new significance within this context,

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but then so does the connection between animal rights extremists and terrorism, particularly due to America’s preoccupation with national security, as manifested in the Patriot Act. It is the adaptation of McDonagh’s play for American audiences, Alonso argues, which invokes new issues pertaining both to current conceptions of terrorism and of animal activism, enabling a piercing critique against not only the characters in the play, but also against the audience itself. According to Darwinism, adaptation is a synonym of survival. The theory of evolution has it that adaptability to a new milieu is required for species to remain in being, and ‘the survival of the fittest’ within a process of natural selection provides for and guarantees the endurance of the species. The essays collected in this volume bring to light ten instances of how the thematic, linguistic, social, cultural and political phenotypes of a number of plays have mutated and adapted within a new environmental – and transnational– setting. In many a case, this new climate has undeniably transformed –if not distorted– the primary shape of the source play. Yet in no case has this operation of genetic recombination and migration of literary variants not granted the passing from one generation to the next of the textual species, thereby flaunting their freedom from their spatial and chronological constraints. Adaptation stands therefore as the single organising principle of the creative practice and the artistic mind.

Works Cited Anon. 1853: A New Drama or we faint! Decline of the Drama! Review of the Actors! Reprinted from ‘Bentley’s Monthly Review’. London: John Bentley and Company. Archer, William 1899: Study and Stage. A Year Book of Criticism. London: Grant Richards. Balibar, Étienne 2001: ‘Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence’. Constellations 8.1: 15-29. Boon, Marcus 2010: In Praise of Copying. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Donald, James, ed. 1867: Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers. Fitzball, Edward 1859: Thirty-Five Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life. 2 vols. London: T. C. Newby Publisher. Hutcheon, Linda 1985: A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of TwentiethCentury Art Forms. Illinois: Illinois UP. —. 2006: A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge.

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Johns, Adrian 2011: Piracy. The Intellectual Property Wars from Guttenberg to Gates. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. Johnson, Samuel, Henry John Todd and John Walker 1836: Johnson’s Dictionary, Improved by Todd, Abridged for the Use of Schools; with the Addition of Walker’s Pronunciation; an Abstract of his Principles of English Pronunciation, with Questions; a Vocabulary of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Names; and an Appendix of Americanisms. Boston: Charles J. Hendee. Kellman, Steven G. 2003: Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on their Craft. Lincoln: U of Nebrask P. Nicoll, Allardyce 1955-1959: A History of English Drama 1660-1900. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ong, Aihwa 1999: Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, N. C. : Duke UP. Poole, Adrian 2004: Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: Thomson Learning / Arden Shakespeare. Rebellato, Dan 2007: ‘From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwriting’. Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst, eds. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama. Oxford: Blackwell. 245-62. Sanders, Julie 2006: Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge. Shaked, Gershon 1989: ‘The Play: Gateway to Cultural Dialogue’. The Play out of Context. Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture. H. Scolnicov and P. Holland eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 7-24. Schultz, David and S. J. Joshi, eds. 2000 (1911): Ambrose Bierce. The Unabridged Devil Dictionary. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P. Weimann, Robert 1983: ‘Appropriation and Modern History in Renaissance Prose Narrative’. New Literary History 14: 459-495.

PART I CULTURAL DIALOGUES IN THE BRITISH THEATRE: FROM THE VICTORIANS TO THE PRESENT DAY

CHAPTER ONE “THE FAIREST ONE WITH GOLDEN LOCKS”: PARODYING HELEN ON THE MODERN STAGE* LAURA MONRÓS GASPAR

Women and Victorian Classical Burlesque Lotman contends that a semiotic triangle between real human behaviour, theatre and the visual arts should be considered in an analysis of the aesthetic objects in nineteenth-century Russian theatre (54). As I have argued elsewhere (Monrós-Gaspar, 2011), the same principles should underlie an in-depth analysis of Victorian classical burlesque. Nineteenth-century burlesque was a source and mirror of the cultural images which shaped Victorian Britain and countless examples of recurring props, costumes and settings accounted for the fertile imagery which moulded contemporary representations of women. The refiguration of Greek tragedy in classical burlesque introduced a group of heroines who questioned authoritarian values under the guise of humour. Medea, Alcestis and Antigone, for example, were refigured as round characters with complex dramatic histories that surpassed the frivolous loveplay of the burlesque nymphs and the pomposity of battle-scenes. The topicality of Victorian popular theatre offered these petrified voices the ground on which to debate contemporary gender issues. As an example, Edward Lemman Blanchard’s Antigone Travestie (1845) epitomizes the double standards that mould, measure and value the role of women in Victorian arts and culture. The lack of significant English models during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the impeccable performance of Antigone by Charlotte Vandenhoff and later Helen Faucit were crucial for the success of Mendelssohn’s Antigone in Victorian England. Hall and Macintosh’s analysis of the repercussions both of the Covent Garden and the Dublin performances of the tragedy in 1845 identifies how Sophocles’ Antigone suffused the intellectual, aesthetic and theatrical production of the .

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subsequent decades (316). Responses to Mendelssohn’s Antigone ranged from Thomas De Quincey (1863) to John Gibson (1866) and George Eliot (1856). The questions raised by the tragedy pertained to the idealized statuesque beauty, the conflict between man-made laws and divine universals as well as Antigone’s impersonation of Victorian virtue. Margaret Sandbach’s poem ‘Antigone’ published in 1850, for example, exemplified the nineteenth-century construction of the heroine’s uprightness which was also evoked by De Quincey (204-5).1 Nineteenthcentury American refigurations of the myth also gave prominence to the sacrificial Antigone and perpetuated the role of the “dutiful sister who defied the state to attend to her family and religious conscience” (Winterer, 81-4). The pre-eminence of the virtuous Antigone, however, did not completely upstage the political potential of the myth, as George Eliot contended in her essay “The Antigone and Its Moral” published in The Leader in 1856. Eliot’s reading of the tragedy was in tune with her personal defiance of the institution of marriage as she underscored the struggles between the individual and society embodied in Antigone. Forty years later, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ short story The Sacrifice of Antigone (1891) deployed realism to denounce how inadequate education and moral obligations to family determined the development of women (Winterer, 81-4). The coexistence of the sacrificial with the rebellious Antigone in relation to the woman question is also stressed by Julia Ward Howe’s lecture at The Congress of Women held in Chicago in 1893 and published in 1895 (Eagle, 102-3). Prior to Phelps’ reinvention of the Faucit-like Antigone who was seen in America and England from the 1840s, and to Howe’s restoration of the subversive voice of the heroine, E.L. Blanchard staged Antigone Travestie in 1845. Unlike Francis Talfourd’s Alcestis; the original Strong-minded Woman (1850) and Robert Reece’s Agamemnon and Cassandra; or, the Prophet and Loss of Troy (1868), Blanchard’s Antigone depended on the staging of a Greek tragedy, whose spirit was recaptured by the playwright and transposed to the aesthetics of Victorian popular entertainment (Hall & Macintosh, 33241). Antigone Travestie preserved the laudatory virtues of the heroine and stressed the entombment of her truth. Blanchard’s Antigone embodied both the sacrificial and dutiful sister who chimed in with the Victorian family values and the strong-minded woman involved in ‘male’-made politics. The syncretism with the tragic plot and images surrounding the petrifaction of women’s discourse abounded. Creon’s condemnation of Antigone, for example, syncretized with the systematic reification and concealment of women in caves in Victorian popular entertainment.

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Furthermore, the heroine’s perseverance in relating her truth paralleled the nineteenth-century political New Woman who scrutinized the legitimacy of ethical and political institutions. The struggle between the ‘natural’ order of things and law was at the centre of the intellectual coteries of the 1840s. Charles Dickens’ portrait of social inequalities in A Christmas Carol (1843), for example, was followed in time by Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) while Europe witnessed how a young Friedrich Engels was shaking the old order to pieces with Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, published in Leipzig in 1845. The clash between free-thinking and reliance on authority was an acute dilemma in Victorian England (Houghton, 99-109): James Martineau, for example, maintained in 1840 that there was “a simultaneous increase, in the very same class of minds, of theological doubt and of devotional affection” (qtd. in Houghton, 108). The dialogue between Hermon and Antigone on the relation between kings and subjects draws attention to issues of the sources of power and authority and reflects the socio-ideological crisis of the contemporary individual. Therefore, Blanchard’s Antigone can be said to reflect the entombed voice of the political New Woman. Even though it might be argued that George Wild’s cross-dressed interpretation might dissipate any possible gender criticism, it should be noted that Robert Brough’s subversive Medea in Medea; or, the Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband (1856) and Robert Reece’s Cassandra in Agamemnon and Cassandra; or, the Prophet and Loss of Troy were also impersonated by male actors. Transvestism was one of the staples of Victorian burlesque and on some occasions the characters less in tune with the Victorian ideals of femininity were precisely the ones performed by mature, well-known actresses and men. An added point to this issue is the function of humour as catalyst for debating social issues. Complex heroines such as Blanchard’s Antigone coexisted on the Victorian popular stage with flat burlesque characters such as those in Charles Selby’s The Judgement of Paris or the Pas de Pippins (1846), and the anonymous Cupid and Psyche (1848). Notwithstanding the general perfunctory tone of burlesque, the topicality of the themes displayed questioned social issues that inevitably dealt with the woman question. A common topic was the reification of women through sculptured bodies and voices. As Marshall (1998) contends, the Galatea aesthetic was based on a sculptural representation of women moulded by a voyeuristic male gaze that silenced female bodies and voices. Examples of the Victorian statuesque aesthetic abound in the press of the time. In 1865, for example, the Dublin exhibition was echoed in the press primarily focusing on the

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display and impact of the sculptures shown to the public. The ILN devoted several of its pages to the unpacking of the sculptures and the description of some of the most prominent marble groups such as Harriet Hosmer’s Sleeping Faun Satyr.2 Furthermore, following a common Victorian practice, the same newspaper reproduced sketches of the sculptures exhibited at leading art galleries and museums of the time. In the same year, the ILN echoed the exhibition of antiquities held at Kensington Museum in an article which, under the epigraph ‘The Art Loan Collection in the South’, included illustrations of the most sophisticated pieces.3 The daily life of the Victorians also abounded in references to the statuesque ideal of beauty, in particular, to women entombed in marbled bodies. With the development of the printed press, advertising became an important channel for creating attitudes towards women and beauty. Five actresses were depicted as sculptures in an advertisement of the 1887 Pear’s Soap campaign (Loeb, 95-6). The actresses were Miss Fortescue, Adelina Patti, Mary Anderson, Marie Roze and Mrs. Langtry. Curiously two of them –Langtry and Fortescue– had performed Galatea in two different productions of Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea (Loeb, 96; Marshall, 11-12; 56-7). As a form of mass communication, newspapers perpetuated a statuesque aesthetic which even reached Queen Victoria, who was portrayed for example in Punch as the petrified figure of Shakespeare’s Hermione. The caption of the caricature appealed to the reawakening of the Queen after her reclusive widowhood by Britannia, another sculptural embodiment of femininity.4 Echoes of the beauty of marble sculpture in art can be traced well into the late years of the Victorian era, when portraits of languid waxed women by Alma-Tadema were described by Tennie Claflin in 1871 as perpetuating the “marble contour” of the sculptures from previous decades (Dijkstra, 123). Furthermore, as we shall see, most important for this chapter are the exhibitions of tableaux vivants that reproduced the style of Greek art with regard to postures and costumes. Burlesque mirrored the lives of the Victorians, so whilst John Gibson’s infatuation with his sculpture The Tinted Venus developed (Smith, 200), female statues moulded by the gaze of male voyeurs invaded the nineteenth-century popular stage. Pygmalionism, as defined by Havelock Ellis (188), was a generalized malady in European drama. The French stage, which nurtured its Anglophone neighbour, was rife with Galateas madly worshipped by pathological Pygmalions. In 1847, Cesare Pugni’s ballet Pygmalion (choreographed by Arthur de Saint-Léon, which was a pseudonym for Charles-Victor-Arthur Michel) was first staged at the Théâtre de l’Opéra de Paris. In November the same year, Félix Anvers parodied the piece in

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La femme de marbre and four years later, in March 1851, Levassor staged a satire of Pugni’s ballet in the ballet-pantomime La fille de marbre at the Palais Royal. The Paris Vaudeville witnessed in 1853 the first performance of Théodore Barrière and Lambert Thiboust’s Les filles de marbre, which was subsequently parodied in Marceline’s vaudeville Les filles…de marbre (1853) and in Les filles d’argile (1855) by Hyacinthe Dubaq and Édouard Jaloux (Travers, 85; 17). In 1854, Barrière and Thiboust’s play was first put on in London. Numerous adaptations of Les filles de marbre were staged in London between 1854 and 1883. The topic was widely reworked by all genres: ballet, extravaganza, burlesque, and magic drama.5 The general plot reproduced Ovid’s original story with variations founded on the petrifaction of the heroines and their responsive voices after reawakening to life (Frenzel, 152-4). The symbiosis between women and sculptures reveals the semiotic construct that explains the cultural codes that perpetuated the social and individual subjection of women in Victorian England. Idealizing beauty and concealing wisdom were two regularized tools that enabled the gendered slavery of women denounced by Mill to continue. Patriarchal gazes, hands and institutions moulded ventriloquized bodies that remained concealed –and controlled– inside statues, caves and grotesque representations of women. On the other hand, classical burlesque heroines offered their voices to the social debates on the woman question encouraged by the mid-nineteenth-century strong-minded women who anticipated the New Woman of the fin de siècle (Macintosh, 2000).

Helen on the Victorian Popular Stage A frequent referent in Victorian burlesque was Lemprière’s Dictionary, which was the standard work of this kind in mid-nineteenth-century England (Clarke, 172).6 F. C. Burnand’s Paris or Vive Lemprière. A New Classical Extravaganza licensed to be performed at the Royal Strand Theatre in 1866, for example, and Henry James Byron’s Weak Woman, a comedy first performed in 1875 at the Strand, use Lemprière as an authoritative text. Burlesque audiences covered the entire social spectrum, but only on very few rare occasions was it necessary to relate the classical plot. The spectators’ acquaintance with the mythological figures evidences the increasing access of the middle and lower classes to antiquity, which was gained either with education, or with new cultural commodities, or with the numerous entertainments with Greco-Roman themes available at the time.7 In the 1822 American edition of Lemprière, Helen is “the most beautiful woman of her age” (181). The dictionary records how she was

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carried away and ravished by Theseus and that such a violence increased her fame among the young princes of Greece who aspired to her hand in marriage. Lemprière also accounts for the long list of her suitors, her marriage to Menelaus, her departure to Troy and her fate in the hands of the furies. Helen was a model of beauty in Victorian England and so it was recorded, for example, in the paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Helen, 1863), Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (Helen of Troy, 1867), and Evelyn De Morgan (Helen of Troy, 1898).8 Between 1833 and 1867 as many as six burlesques on the siege of Troy were first staged in London and in the provinces. The episode of the judgement of Paris as triggering the Trojan War was also evoked in Victorian classical burlesques. With regard to Helen, many a burlesque which alluded to her beauty and her affair in Troy was written until the last decades of the century. In 1866, for example, Francis C. Burnand put on Helen; or Taken from the Greek at the Adelphi and Paris; or Vive Lemprière at the Royal Strand Theatre, and as late as 1884 Robert Reece’s Our Helen was staged at the Gaiety. Moreover, as we shall see, the success of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Belle Hélène at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris in 1864 fostered a number 9 of English versions that contributed to the vogue for the genre in England. In such burlesques, Helen was a bastion of beauty and epitomized the paradigm of idle, shallow, vain young girls who put the institution of marriage at risk (Neff, 86-243).10 The daughters of Leda were recurrent characters in the English burlesque of the nineteenth century due to the social debates which sparked from the discussions on the Divorce and Marriage bills of the 1850s. The two women epitomized the stereotypes of vengeful, adulterous wives and young, fair concubines who filled the society news of the age.11 Whereas the display of stunning stage effects in the performances of the siege of Ilium manifested the allure sophisticated mechanical inventions held for Victorians, the refigurations of Helen and Clytemnestra reflected topical debates on divorce and the emancipation of women. The issue of the position of women within the institution of marriage accompanied more profound questions on gender regarding the nature of women and their economic position in society. As I shall contend, John Robert O’Neil’s The Siege of Troy (1854) and Robert Brough’s homonym play in 1859 portray the traditional, frivolous and fickle Helen depicted in popular refigurations of the age.12 F. C. Burnand’s Helen, or Taken from the Greek (1866), however, introduces topical debates which link Helen with other contemporary burlesque heroines at the forefront of the woman question.

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John Robert O’Neil, known as Hugo Vamp, staged The Siege of Troy; or the Misjudgement of Paris at Astley’s Amphitheatre on Monday August 28th 1854. O’Neil’s taste for shows with elaborate stagecraft is revealed in The Siege of Troy, or, the Misjudgement of Paris, where tableaux with opening mountains and sea serpents appear. The Siege of Troy, or, the Misjudgement of Paris was announced in the title page of the 1854 manuscript at the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection as a “Grand Classical Equestrian Burlesque in Two Acts” continuing with the tradition initiated by Charles Selby. The Siege of Troy follows the pattern of the comic theatre of the age: topical allusions, spectacular stage effects, women in Greek attire, etc. Reference to famous Shakespearean scenes from Hamlet also abound: the cockcrow, the sentinels, the fencing scene ‘à la Hamlet & Laertes’ were all familiar to an audience which had already been exposed to a large number of travesties of the tragedy (Young, 2002; Moody, 2000; Schoch, 2002; Wells 1978). The Siege of Troy is a burlesque about men watching women, flirting with them, and speaking about war. Women’s sexual and physical attributes, then, prevail over other matters. The socio-cultural context in which the play was first put on favoured the caricature of intellectual women and the eulogy of ‘female statues’ that complied with the demands of the voyeuristic male audiences. Accordingly, while the beauty of Juno’s, Venus’ and Minerva’s nudity is applauded by both Paris and the audience, Cassandra’s ‘knowledge’ is pitied and deprecated. With regard to Helen, she perpetuates the stereotypes of beauty and shallowness associated with modern refigurations of the myth. Lingering on Victorian double standards Helen plays the good wife at the same time as she is the capricious lover of Paris. The Chorus sings: For she’s the ladiest Belle oh For any reflecting swell oh And when address’d by a fellow Through coyness she wont deny (O’Neil, f.22b)

Following in the line of O’Neil, Robert Barnabas Brough put on The Siege of Troy in 1859. William (1826-1870) and Robert Barnabas Brough (1828-1860) were born in London, sons of Barnabas Brough, a brewer and wine merchant, and the poet Frances Whiteside. They were both educated at a private school in Newport; Robert started his working career in Manchester as a clerk and William as a printer’s apprentice in Brecon.13 Robert’s literary career included translations, prose and a complete dedication to journalism, where he displayed his talent for satire even more than on stage. Robert Brough’s The Siege of Troy, which draws on

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Homer’s Iliad and William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, had its opening night at the Lyceum in 1859 with Mrs Keeley in the role of Hector (Blanchard, 1891: 212). The news and illustrations on the siege of Delhi in 1858 published at ILN ensured the immediate success of the play which bore witness to the Victorian taste for historically inspired settings.14 Brough’s Helen is described in the dramatis personae of the play as “the original casus belli, and a very fair excuse too” (2). The action is set in Troy, after her elopement with Paris and with the Greeks threatening the city. Helen is a minor character who serves to reinforce Paris’ effeminacy. The contrast between Helen and Paris parallels the burlesque couples in Francis Talfourd’s Alcestis; or the original strong-minded woman (1850) and Robert Reece’s Agamemnon and Cassandra; or the Prophet and Loss of Troy (1868), where Admetus and Aegisthus are the coward and downtrodden counterparts of the strong-minded Alcestis and Clytemnestra. Yet the sound determination of Talfourd’s Alcestis and Reece’s Clytemnestra is still beyond the reach of Brough’s Helen, and she is scorned by the decent Trojan women concealed at the Temple of Vesta for the downfall of Troy. In contrast with John Robert O’Neil and Robert Brough, F. C. Burnand puts on an independent and wise Helen who intertwines traditional refigurations of the myth with contemporary debates on the situation of women. F.C. Burnand wrote as many as four classical burlesques connected to the motif of Troy: first The Siege of Troy at the Lyceum in 1858 (Adams, 67); then, Dido which opened at the St. James’s Theatre in 1860; Paris, or Vive Lemprière at the Strand in 1866; and, finally Helen, or Taken from the Greek in 1866. As noted above, Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Belle Hélène at the Thèâtre des Varietés in Paris in 1864 was the object of countless parodies in England. Hollingshead’s chronicles, for example record numerous productions at the Gaiety both in French and English between 1868 and 1871 (Hollingshead, 202; 243). The sensation caused by these stagings is well documented in the press of the time and by the sales of famous scores from the plays.15 Based on Offenbach’s operetta, Helen; or, Taken from the Greek was first staged in 1866 in London’s Adelphi theatre (Nicoll, 289). Teresa Furtado, “one of the beauties of the sixties” (Scott, 231), played the role of Helena surpassing in fame Hortense Scheider, Helen in the French original which was put on the same year in London.16 Genette contends that Offenbach’s hypotext is more imprecise than Scarronian travesty because it deals with the rape of Helen, not treated by Homer and only transmitted in highly hypertextual later versions. Genette

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continues his argument by the statement that La Belle Hélène is but a modernization by means of anachronisms (66-7), like Burnand’s Helen. Burnand adopts Offenbach’s love triangle between Paris, Helen and Menelaus and domesticates the plot to the taste of the British audiences. Such domestication also affects the setting. The focus on the Temple of Jupiter, for example, allows for the introduction of sculptures and actresses in poses plastiques which helenize the play and attract the male audience. Numerous examples from the arts and the press of the time manifest how the nineteenth-century Helen was, as a bastion of beauty, a paradigm for the vain and idle young women who threatened the institution of marriage within the Victorian social mores (Maguire, 2009; Reid, 1993). Burnand’s Helen is “the fairest one with the golden locks,”17 yet she also participates in the vindication of the female sages of her time.18 Helen is the only main female character in the play. Nonetheless, she is more complex than her male counterparts, who are a mere parody of the epic hero. Burnand downplays their heroism which becomes the whims of the idle high-class young man in London. Furthermore, Helen provides the moral standpoint of the play manifesting the Victorian double standards. She represents both the angel in the house, who plays with coquettishness and virtue, and the seducer femme fatale, who scorns the rules of marriage. Burnand’s burlesque lacks a clear political stance. Nonetheless, the intellectual superiority of Helen and her questioning of the bonds of marriage link her discourse with the classical burlesque heroines who denounced the entrapment of the numerous Caroline Norton in unwanted and unsuccessful arranged marriages. The three burlesque refigurations of the myth of Helen discussed in this chapter raise questions on the issue of humour as catalyst for debating social issues. Although it is true that burlesque contributed little to the intellectual development of theatre, the analysis of the works en masse allows us to unravel the interplay between the social codes and cultural commodities in Victorian burlesque. Hugo Vamp’s and Robert Brough’s homonym plays The Siege of Troy reflect the reification of women in Victorian aesthetics. Burnand’s Helen; or Taken from the Greek is chronicler of the two worlds opened for women in nineteenth-century England. On the one hand, Menelaus perpetuates pervading patriarchal ideologies. On the other, Paris and Helen give voice to the free will and licentiousness proclaimed by the end of the century and materialized, for example, in the drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. The evolution of the depiction of Helen on the Victorian stage manifests the mixed responses to the gradual integration of women into the cultural structures of modern societies. The myth of Helen, as an embodiment of women’s beauty,

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participates in the gender struggles that permeate an age rife with sociocultural changes. The convergence of literary and iconic refigurations of the myth underscores the relevance of nineteenth-century burlesque as a mirror of the contemporary mindset.

Works Cited 1848: Cupid and Psyche. British Library Add. MS 43011, 18. Adams, William Davenport 1891: A Book of Burlesque. Sketches of English Stage, Travesty and Parody. London: Whitefriars Library. Barrière Théodore and Thiboust, Lambert 1853: Les Filles de Marbre. British Library Add. MS 52946 R Blanchard, Edward Lemman 1845: Antigone Travesty. British Library Add. MS 42982, F 166-73. —. 1891: The Life and Reminiscences of E. L. Blanchard. 2 vols. London: Hutchinson & Co. Bornay, Erika 1994: La cabellera femenina: un diálogo entre poesía y pintura. Madrid: Cátedra Brough, Robert B. 1858: The Siege of Troy: A Burlesque in One Act. Winchester: Hugh Barclay. Burnand, Francis C. 1868: Helen, or Taken from the Greek. London: Thomas Hailes Lacy. Clarke, Martin Lowther 1945: Greek Studies in England 1700-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. De Quincey, Thomas 1863: The Art of Conversation and Other Papers. Edinburgh: A & C Black. Dereli, Cynthia 2004: ‘Brough, Robert Barnabas (1828–1860)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (accessed 14 January, 2013). Dijkstra, Bram 1986: Idols of Perversity. Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Eagle, Mary K. O. (1895). The Congress of Women Held in the Women’s Building. World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago). The Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs. (Accessed 15 January, 2013). Eliot, George 1856: ‘The Antigone and Its Moral’. The Leader 29 March. Ellis, Havelock 2001 (1906): Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Selection in Man. Honolulu: UP of the Pacific. Frenzel, Elizabeth 1994: Diccionario de argumentos de la literatura universal. Madrid: Gredos.

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Genette, Gérard 1977: Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Hall, Edith & Macintosh, F. 2005: Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hollingshead, John 1898: Gaiety Chronicles. London: Westminster. Houghton, Walter 1957: The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Humphreys, Anne 1999: ‘Breaking Apart: The Early Victorian Divorce Novel’. Nicola Diane Thompson ed. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 42-59. Kendrew, James 1826: Penny Books. York: J. Kendrew. Kenney, Charles Lamb 1866: La Belle Hélène. British Library Add. MS 53068 J Lemprière, John 1822: A Classical Dictionary Containing A Copious Account of All the Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors. Philadelphia: James Crissy. Loeb, Lori Ann 1994: Consuming Angels. Advertising and Victorian Women. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP. Lotman, Iuri M. 1993: ‘Painting and the Language of Theatre: Notes on the Problem of Iconic Rhetoric’. Alla Efimova and Lev Manovich, eds. Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture. London & Chicago: U of Chicago P. 45-55. Macintosh, Fiona 2000: ‘Medea Transposed: Burlesque and Gender on the Mid-Victorian Stage'. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin, eds. Medea in Performance 1500-2000. Oxford: Legenda. 74-99. Mackinlay, Malcolm Sterling 1927: Origin and Development of Light Opera. London: Hutchinson and Co. Maguire, Laurie E. 2009: Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Marshall, Gail 1998: Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Monrós-Gaspar, Laura 2011: Cassandra the Fortune-teller: Prophets, Gipsies and Victorian Burlesque. Bari: Levante Editori. Moody, Jane 2000: Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Neff, Wanda F. 2008: Victorian Working Women: An Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries and Professions, 18321850. London: Frank Cass. Nicoll, Allardyce 1952-9: A History of English Drama 1600-1900. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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O’ Neil, John Robert 1854: The Siege of Troy; or, the Miss-Judgement of Paris. BL 52,949 C. Reid, Jane Davidson 1993: The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts: 1300-1990s. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP. Sandbach, Margaret 1850: Aurora and Other Poems. London: William Pickering. Selby, Charles 1846: The Judgement of Paris or the Pas de Pippins. British Library Add. MS. 42995 (31) Schoch, Richard W. 2002: Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Scott, Clement 1899: The Drama of Yesterday and Today. New York: Macmillan. Smith, Alison 1996: The Victorian Nude Sexuality, Morality and Art. Manchester: Manchester UP. Travers, Seymour 1941: Catalogue of Nineteenth Century French Theatrical Parodies. A Compilation of the Parodies between 1789 and 1914 of Which Any Record Was Found. New York: King’s Crown Press. Wells, Stanley 1978: Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques. Delaware: Michael Grazier. Winterer, Caroline 2001: ‘Victorian Antigone: Classicism and Women’s Education in America, 1840-1900’. American Quarterly 53.1: 70-93. Young, Alan R. 2002: Hamlet and the Visual Arts: 1709-1900. London: U of Delaware P.

Newspapers and Periodicals Cited Penny Magazine Punch The Illustrated London News The Graphic The North British Review The Times

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Notes ________________________________ *

The research carried out for this article was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through the research project FF12012-32071. 1 Sandbach’s poem (1850) was based on Antigone discovered over the dead body of her brother by John Gibson (1866), which perpetuated the images of melodramatic heroines of the eighteenth century. 2 See ILN 46, no.1315 (13 May 1865), 448; ILN 47, no.1329-1330 (19 August 1865), 165. 3 The pieces were Gilt salt cellar, lent by the Queen, Bronze group of Apollo and Daphne and Bronze Vase, lent by the Queen. See ILN 46, no.1312-1313 (29 April 1865), 399. 4 Punch (23 September 1865). For the depiction of Britannia as Great Britain see also Britannia and the Admiralty, Punch (14 December 1849), R. B. Peake’s Europe, Asia, Africa and America or Harlequin Mercury (Harlequin Traveller or the World inside out) British Library Add MS 42919, 730-737b and the anonymous A Masque, British Library Add MS 42954. 5 E.g: The Marble Heart by Charles Selby (1850); The Elves or the Statue Bride by Charles Selby (1856) (BL Add Ms 52962 Y); The Marble Bride or the Nymphs of the Forest (1857) by C. H. Hazlewood (BL Add MS 52964 V); The Marble Maiden by Suter (1866) (BL Add MS 53054 G); The Animated Statue. A Modern Play in Five Acts (1868) (BL Add MS 5370 F); Pygmalion or the Statue Fair by W. Brough (1867) (BL Add. Ms 53058 M). For the impact of the refiguration of the Galatea myth on the British stage see for example Times (24 May 1854) and ILN 8, no.201 (7 March 1846), 163. 6 The 35th English edition of Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary appeared in 1824. The dictionary was compiled while Lemprière was still an undergraduate at Oxford (1788) and Lord Byron accused Keats of “versifying Tooke’s Pantheon and Lempriere’s Dictionary” (Clarke, 172). 7 See Penny Magazine, 25 May 1839, for an account of Aeschylus’ tragedies; see Kendrew (1826: 13, 19) for the Penny fables “The Waggoner and Hercules” and “Mercury and the Tortoise”. 8 See also The Graphic (20 January 1877) for an illustration of Mrs. Schliemann as Helen. See also The Graphic (8 May 1880) for the expectations for the performance of Christine Nilsson as Helen of Troy. 9 Eg: Kenney (1866). See Hollingshead (201-202, 209, 243) for performances of La Belle Hélène at the Gaiety both in French and in English. See Mackinlay (215225) for an analysis of the development of French operetta in England. 10 Note the success of Masks and Faces by Charles Reade and Tom Taylor, which was first produced at the Haymarket Theatre in 1852. Reade and Taylor based their comedy on the misunderstandings caused by Mr. Ernest Vane’s infatuation with Peg Woffington and the unexpected visit from his wife. 11 See for example The North British Review 27, no.53 (Aug-Nov.), 162-194, for the engagement of the press with the debates. See Punch, 5 September 1857, for a

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parody of the discussions. See Humphreys (42-59) for a full account of the representation of women and divorce in the Victorian novel. 12 See for example The Graphic (22 May 1880) for chapter XXVII of Amelia B. Edward’s novel Lord Brackenbury, where Lady Symes is portrayed as follows: “That is Lady Symes –a delightful old woman– witty, wicked, and devout. She was a great beauty in her day. Sir Thomas Lawrence painted her as Helen of Troy and it is whispered that the Prince Regent played Paris to her Helen; but, of course, that’s scandal”. 13 ODNB Cynthia Dereli, ‘Brough, Robert Barnabas (1828–1860)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 , accessed 14 Ene 2013. 14 ILN 2 January 1858. 15 Eg.: ILN 29 April 1865 and ILN 29 Dec 1866. 16 See ‘La Belle Hélène in London’ (Every Saturday: Journal of Choice Reading 29 Aug. 1868; Punch 25 Jul. 1868). 17 See Bornay (1994) for an in-depth analysis for the representation of blond hair in the arts. 18 Florence Nightingale, for example, attacks the institution of marriage in her essay Cassandra (1852).

CHAPTER TWO “ON EST TOUJOURS LE FILS DE QUELQU’UN”: (TRANS)NATIONALITY AND THE AESTHETICS OF LITERARY ORIGINALITY IN OSCAR WILDE IGNACIO RAMOS GAY

Rewriting and Originality Throughout the two parts of The Critic as Artist (1891), Oscar Wilde pointed at one of the most controversial statements in his aesthetic essays concerning his understanding of the author’s writing process, when asserting that “the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it” (147). Indeed, Wilde’s words refer to history in a broad sense, as any chronological record of events, but also as any past fact that needs to be reinterpreted by the subject in order to gain a real meaning. For Wilde, history is a development of prior events the physical expression of which is the written word, a word that needs to be integrated within a wider complex phenomenon of scriptural rewriting. By ‘rewriting’, Wilde understands that the artistic activity is caught in a sort of infinite treadmill that produces a multi-layered structure which is the object of art. If the artist ceased to rewrite history, to reinvent history through his writing, the cycle would calcify, and the forms of artistic creation would stagnate. History is therefore to be conceived as a labyrinth of voices, a semiotic maze that needs to be updated by the artist’s constant, flowing cultural process of linguistic re-signification. Wilde’s understanding of artistic criticism entails numerous implications concerning the transnational and trans-epochal compositional method of his oeuvre. History is assimilated to a sign-system, an organic creative process in which past and present, together with a myriad of national literary traditions, are brought together by the hand of the artist. Although Wilde’s zeitgeist considered anticipation in time a synonym of artistic originality, he swam against the tide when regarding borrowing,

“On est toujours le fils de quelqu’un”

imitation, plagiarism and appropriation creation. In this sense, in The Critic as Ernest’s question “is criticism really a literary annexation as a process reaching boundaries and time:

27

as essential agents of original Artist, Gilbert’s sound reply to creative art?” illuminates upon beyond, if not blurring, national

Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer to Aeschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added. (154)

Despite Gilbert’s somewhat vague description of the artistic activity, it is interesting to note that for Wilde the process of rewriting is teleological and progressive –rather than merely cyclical and repetitive– inasmuch as textual re-elaboration goes hand in hand with purification and improvement. The work of art is not only a dialogue with the past and the other, but primarily a creation orientated to the future precisely by means of the constant renewal of its forms. What the playwright terms “treatment” is the intimate reflection of the artist’s individuality: To an artist so creative as the critic what does subject-matter signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist or the painter. Like them he can find motives everywhere. Treatment is the test. There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge. (153)

Both by rejecting originality as a romantic notion referring to the work of art that has never been conceived before in time, and by refusing the possibility of creation ex nihilo, Wilde was repudiating a whole cultural tradition based upon the authority of the unborrowed creation as well as forerunning intertextuality as a fruitful source for composition, one through which the artist was able to convey his own self through rearranging and reshaping alien voices. Contrary to the quasi-divine conception of creativity established by the Romantics, privileging imagination as a selfcentred and self-sufficient faculty not indebted to prior materials, Wilde was legitimising a distinct way of composition that enthroned ‘secondhandness’ as a refining quality. The artist’s craftsmanship to select, incorporate, and coalesce prior materials into a new artistic unit is the only way to achieve creativity and the best expression of the artistic self. In a conversation with French actor Coquelin about his play The Duchess of

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Padua (1891), Wilde categorically asserted his refusal to a certain kind of creativity that did not owe gratitude and recognition to another work. He contended that his drame was “du style seulement”, for “Hugo et Shakespeare ont partagé tous les sujets : il est impossible d’être original, même dans le pêché : ainsi il n’y a pas d’émotions, seulement des adjectifs extraordinaires” (qtd. by Ellmann, 213-214).1 Wilde would elaborate on the freedom of the artist to incorporate whatever sources he may find when proclaiming “the originality […] which we ask from the artist, is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything” (qtd. by Small, xxiii). Wilde equates the artist to the artisan, for whom the literary servility deplored by the romantics is a means to elevate his work by endowing it with the grandeur of his peers. For the poet, literary allusion, pastiche and interference were qualities to be cultivated so as to bring the work of art to refinement.

Adapting from the French Such anxiety of annexation has led numerous scholars to carry out detective work in order to track down the alien sources in Wilde’s oeuvre. Contemporary editions of his works have systematically traced the presence of French, German, Classic and Biblical sources, suggesting their use as a means to stimulate creativity and as a token of Wilde’s understanding of literature as a supra-national and trans-epochal art. For instance, as far as his plays are concerned, Kerry Powell’s 1990 classic exploration of Oscar Wilde’s theatre meticulously relates his society comedies with Wilde’s coetaneous melodramas and farces both in England and in France. The names of Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, Sydney Grundy, Haddon Chambers and Brandon Thomas are recurrently referred to side by side to their French counterparts, namely Eugène Scribe, Victorien Sardou, Émile Augier, Alexandre Dumas fils, Eugène Brieux, Édouard Plouvier or Eugène Labiche. Powell’s final conclusion on the philosophy of composition of The Importance of Being Earnest states that Wilde could not have written the play “without a thorough, practical knowledge of what was being done in the lowly theatrical genre of farce in the 1890s” for, without the models provided by his “obscure forerunners” he would have had “little or nothing to say” (124-125). Powell’s statement can be applied to the rest of Wilde’s plays, if not to his complete oeuvre. For instance, Anya Clayworth’s 2004 edition of Wilde’s journalism draws a list of quotations in French from Balzac that the playwright memorised and resourcefully included in his text. The

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voices of Goethe, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Gautier, as well as full quotations from the Bible, have been identified by Rupert H. Davis (1962, 1964, 1985) in Wilde’s correspondence, notably in De Profundis, a letter written during Wilde’s incarceration in Reading and in which passages from French novels or from the Holy Scripture were adapted or rewritten verbatim thanks to his legendary memory. Similarly, his poems also reveal the strength of the impression caused by modern symbolist poets like Baudelaire and Mallarmé, as well as the influence of Keats, Swinburne, Rossetti, Milton and the classics, and the same could apply to his only novel –an heir of Huysmans’ À rebours (1884)– and to his essays, taking after Pater’s and Baudelaire’s writings on aesthetics. Finally, as for his plays, Wilde’s contemporary, British journalist Holbrook Jackson, best metaphorically defined what a century later literary criticism would term ‘intertextuality’: “he mixed pure wine […] and created a new complex beverage, not perhaps for quaffing, but rather a liqueur, with piquant and original flavour which still acknowledged the flavours of its constituents” (104). As a result of this dynamic interference of national and foreign, past and present sources, modern criticism has defined Wilde’s writing strategies as a collage. In Florina Tufescu’s words, “Wilde’s poetry is not essentially different from the rest of his work: it reveals the same irony, ‘instability of meaning’ and bold intertextual techniques” (64). The chorus of blatant echoes of modern and classic littérateurs present in Wilde’s works were also recognised by his contemporaries, and the theoretical leniency modern scholars have attributed to his mode of composition was not reciprocated in his time. Since the publication of his first poems, Wilde’s writing strategies have swung between the claim for originality and the stigma of plagiarism. The dialogic nature of his poems was considered by an anonymous critic as “the trash of man of a certain amount of mimetic ability, and trash the trashiness of which the author is much too cultivated not to recognise quite clearly” (The Spectator, 13 August 1881; Beckson, 47). Similarly, if his society comedies relied on the box-office successes of French boulevard plays of the late nineteenth century, his only symbolist drama, Salomé (1891), shared the influence of Gautier, Maeterlinck, Anatole France and Marcel Schwob, all of which paled in comparison to the ascendance of Flaubert. As the critic for The Pall Mall Gazette put it: But the voices that breathe the breath of life into Salomé are dominated by one voice, the voice of Flaubert. If Flaubert had not written Salambô, if Flaubert had not written Hérodias, Salomé might boast an originality to which she cannot claim. She is the daughter of too many fathers. She is a victim of heredity. Her bones want strength, her flesh wants vitality, her

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Further critical objections also applied to his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), deemed as “poor Huysmans” as well as a deplorable new version of Poe’s The Oval Portrait. As a consequence, most contemporary critics would then agree with James Gibbons Huneker, who stated that “after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer them to the Wilde imitations” (Puck, 28 November 1914; Beckson, 344). A duplicator and re-arranger of previous words of others, Wilde’s work was therefore synonymous to illegitimate creation. Anonymous accusations of this sort on the press abounded, and in some cases were personalised in the name of public figures. The verbal dispute between American painter James Abbot McNeill Whistler and Wilde himself about the former’s public denunciation of the playwright as an “all-pervading plagiarist” was notorious. It entailed a myriad of letters published in the leading newspaper Truth that led to Wilde’s famous consideration of the relationship between the artist and his forerunners as one in which “the disciple has the courage of the opinions of his master” (Beckson, 65). Wilde’s statement set him within a process of literary productions advocating recycling and reformulation of his predecessors, one that understood literary resemblance as a positive and legitimised mode of composition. Paradoxically, however, Wilde’s reactions to such charges differed in tone, and in some instances his claims for originality fitted within a swinging conception of romantic creation that contradicted his aesthetic writings and that was to be denied by the poet himself in other occasions. For instance, when late nineteenth-century leading theatre critics such as Clement Scott accused him of the imitative use of stage-props and scenic devices in An Ideal Husband (1895) in comparison with Victorien Sardou’s Dora (1877), Wilde claimed his absolute originality by resorting to an essential romantic axiom: anticipation in time. In Wilde’s words, Sardou is not understood in England because he is only known through a rather ordinary travesty of his play Dora, which was brought out here under the title of Diplomacy. I have been considerably amused by so many of the critics suggesting that the incident of the diamond bracelet in Act III of my new play was suggested by Sardou. It does not occur in any of Sardou’s plays and it was not my play until ten days before production. Nobody else’s work gives me any suggestion. (The Sketch, 9 January 1895; Mikhail, 230)

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The work of art that comes first, that is to say, the work that is conceived first in time, which is previous to the next, is endowed with the right of primary originality as it rejects derivation and influence. Priority in time displays what Richard Altick understands as “the Victorian obsession with the new” (10): the unprecedented as a keystone for originality and consequently for artistic excellence. Yet, as stated above, in most other instances Wilde refused such an obsolete understanding of creativity by celebrating unoriginality and, more surprisingly, the illegitimately indebted work. Max Beerbohm recollects a private episode where Wilde conspicuously challenged the privatisation of ideas and acknowledged his own unauthorised borrowings from other authors: Speaking of plagiarism the other day, Oscar said: ‘Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine without signing my name at the end of it. Que voulez-vous? All the best Hundred Books bear my signature in this manner.’ (Ellmann, 355)

Similarly, leading actor Squire Bancroft recalls another blatant confession of Wilde’s unlawful appropriation of Eugène Scribe’s plots and situations when discussing the performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892): He was talking with us about one of his comedies, just produced, when my wife remarked that the leading situation rather reminded her of the great scene in a play by Scribe, to which Wilde unblushingly replied: ‘Taken bodily from it, dear lady. Why not? Nobody reads nowadays.’ (112)

That Wilde voceferously tended to appropriate the works he read and admired is well-known nowadays, yet the interpretation given by modern scholarship differs from that of his contemporaries. As stated above, while Wilde’s reviewers were eager to accuse the poet of plagiarism, dullness and unlawful appropriation, recent criticism considers him a pioneer of the aesthetics of transtextual allusion. His claim “on est toujours le fils de quelqu’un” [one is always somebody’s son], appeared in his article “The Poet’s Corner” for the Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1886, and in his editorial column for The Woman’s World in January 1888, where he added an explanatory clause to his own understanding of originality as a succession of forms in time: “dans l’art comme dans la nature, on est toujours le fils de quelqu’un.” Both maxims, apart from being an illustration of Wilde’s “self-plagiaristic tactics” stated by Josephine Guy (1998), best mirror his distortion of the original phrase pronounced by the stammering Lieutenant Don Guzman Brid’oison in Beaumarchais’s 1784

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play Le mariage de Figaro, “on-on est toujours l’enfant de quelqu’un” (Beaumarchais, 137; my emphasis). Wilde’s inaccuracy may just be a slight lapse when remembering the actual words uttered by the stuttering judge –something particularly unlikely bearing in mind his astounding memory and his literal recollections of dialogues and even entire excerpts transposed in his letters during his imprisonment–. It could also be argued that Wilde’s incursion in, and posterior transformation of, Beaumarchais’s phrase is but a subtle replacement of a noun (‘fils’ instead of ‘enfant’) that does not appreciably expand its lexical meaning. Yet the most significant aspect of his claim is his intention to appropriate the phrase by retelling it with a trivial modification. Such a futile variation provides a new authorship to the maxim that makes it oscillate between reproduction and mutation, and stands for a reflection of Wilde’s own philosophy of composition enunciated in his essay The Critic as Artist, and summarised in his –also in French– Freudian claim when his play Salomé was associated with Flaubert’s conte, “Hérodias” by Will Rothenstein: “Remember, dans la littérature il faut toujours tuer son père” [in literature one must always kill his/her father] (Ellmann, 354-355). In this sense, Robert Macfarlane notes an “unresolved tension” in Wilde between “the writer-as-arranger and the powerful and egostistical affection for the idea of writer-as-originator” (16). This tension was framed within a socio-cultural context that, although tended to mitigate it, followed Romantic thought and antagonised creation and invention. Creation, Macfarlane argues, was to be understood as the origination out of nothing, as opposed to invention, which etymologically derived from the Latin verb invenire, ‘to come across’, ‘to find’, ‘to discover’. Therefore, while on the one hand the making ex nihilo is emphasised by the first term, invention highlights the discovery of material already present. Furthermore, the association between creation and crescere (‘to arise’, ‘to grow’) marked an additional distinctive touch from invention, which lacked the connotations bound to the idea of growth. Wilde’s aesthetic theories would put an end to the classic distinction between creation and invention by repudiating the divine interpretation of creativity inspired by the Romantics, which established authorial imagination as the only valid source for the making of art. Wilde reconciled craftsmanship with originality in the same way he reunited individualism and collectivism. Thus his essays on literary composition, as much as his dramatic work, can be defined as a strategy advocating the elimination of private property; what Holland terms a “communism of language and ideas on which to draw, justifying it in the name of style” (208), and Saint-Amour describes as “a kind of intellectual collectivism

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that stands in stark opposition to the logic of copyright, with its incentive of individual monopoly” (61). In a like manner, Wilde’s claims of unoriginality can be interpreted as a sort of anarchic repudiation of the ownership of words that goes in line with his utopian socialism. In the wake of Saint-Amour’s thesis, Robert Macfarlane (2007) argues that Wilde’s freedom of annexation runs against a notion of authorship safeguarding the privatisation of words and excoriates theories of literary repetition such as imitation, allusion, quotation or parody.

Irishness and Literary Appropriation Recent scholarship has interpreted Wilde’s ambiguous2 lack of respect toward copyright laws as a result of his iconoclast attitude and as an attack against private property rooted in his Irish origins and in the plurality of voices that characterises the Irish oral tradition. His philosophy of composition has been associated with his nationality, thus combining textual politics with cultural identity. As Paul Saint-Amour contends, Wilde was raised in an Irish milieu, in an environment in which literary production was subject to the conditions of oral discourse, rather than to those of the written word. In the critic’s opinion, the conditions that framed an oral culture included “plurality” (understood as the multiplicity of variations upon a standard, primeval story), “mutability” (its capacity to be adapted and reshaped so as to accommodate a target audience) and “a kind of communal ownership in which information could circulate and proliferate unfettered by private literary property forms” (62-63). According to the critic, Wilde’s deliberate acts of literary appropriation turn him into “a self-conscious practitioner of a resuscitated ‘orality’ ” (64), the best expression of which was the lecture on Chatterton given at Birbeck College in 1886, in which Wilde’s notes were literally a collage of two leading Chatterton biographies conducted by Daniel Wilson (Chatterton: A Biographical Study, 1869) and David Masson (Chatterton: A Story of the Year, 1770). The most illuminating passages of these had been cut and pasted together, and intermingled with Wilde’s splattered comments and reflections. The resulting text, which was never published nor considered to be a de facto plagiarism by his contemporaries, reconciled Wilde with the master forger he was lecturing on. The text stands for an assault against the canon of Western printed culture, a terrorist tactic intending to implode society from within, in line with the subterranean subversion of the British imperialist domination observed in his ultra-English style by Jerusha McCormack (1998).3

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Saint-Amour’s thesis follows suit Deirdre Toomey’s standpoint when associating textual annexation strategies with a specific national identity. As for orality taking precedence over textuality, Deirdre Toomey (1994) quotes W. B. Yeats’s accounts on Wilde and focuses on the poet mainly as a talker, emphasising speech and conversation over his writings. For the critic, Wilde would be a representative of the indigenous Celtic culture, a modern traditional peasant story-teller known as seanchaí, excelling in the oral narration of folk tales. Orality challenges the classical notions of textual ownership and property, for the oral tale is essentially a plural form, the result of a collective, transnational and diachronic effort linking past, present and future. This is why, Toomey argues, the charges of plagiarism and counterfeiting are incongruous within oral cultures, for the spoken word outdoes the written and transcends individuality to embrace the collective body. In Toomey’s words, “these cardinal sins of literacy are cardinal virtues of orality [...] the persistent charge against Wilde as a plagiary would seem oxymoronic in an oral culture” (411). Wilde’s written recursivity would be a sign of his essential (trans)national identity, his attempt to reunite orality and textuality and to surmount the limitations of printed culture for the audience’s sake. As Toomey puts it in regards with Wilde’s oral tales, “originality in an oral culture consists not in inventing an absolutely new story but in stitching together the familiar in a manner suitable to a particular audience, or by introducing new elements into an old story” (411). The tendency to discern a national identity in Wilde’s oeuvre has been repeatedly contended by postcolonial scholars since the mid 1990s. Despite the scarce allusions to Ireland in his plays, poems and prose, the works of Davis Coakley (1994), Richard Pine (1995), Declan Kiberd (1995), Jerusha McCormack (1998) and Neil Sammells (1994, 2000) have incorporated Wilde’s Irishness in order to set his literary production as the result of a split bi-cultural inheritance. According to postcolonial scholarship, Wilde’s Irish milieu constitutes a socio-historical background of paramount importance to construe the meaning of his ultra-English style and his constant rejection of English pharisaism. Rather than merely the product of accident, Wilde’s birthplace looms large not only upon his method of composition but also on his work. Numerous studies vindicate that Wilde’s Irish nationalism was the logical consequence of his mother’s political penchant and delight in Celtic mythology. A declared Irish activist whose revolutionary writing aimed at “the rescue of the fatherland” (Pulido, 319), Lady Wilde ‘Speranza’ is said to have exerted a profound influence on her son both as a lover of French letters and witty conversation (she introduced him to the Young Ireland poets, but also to

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Dumas père and Lamartine, whom she had translated into English) and as a committed nationalist writer. Furthermore, such influence expands to Wilde’s formative years in Dublin and in the West of Ireland, where the poet, Davis Coakley argues, “became familiar with the stories and superstitions of the area, and these would influence both his life and writing in the later years” (58). Wilde’s Irish ancestry is also underlined by Thomas Wright when declaring that the folk tales and Ossianic legends “formed the landscape of Wilde’s adult imagination”, and he resorted to it chiefly when framed by a decontextualized, foreign atmosphere, where he fondly delighted in “ ‘the beauty and glamour of the old Celtic legends’, and retold Irish folk tales at dinner parties in Paris and London” (25). Wright argues that, during these performances “Wilde imitated, in an alien urban context, the seanchaí he had encountered as a boy in the West of Ireland” (25). Nonetheless, the importance of Wilde’s Irishness transcends the archaeological activity of tracing relatively explicit references to his birthplace in his literary production, and requires a definition of what being Irish –if Wilde actually considered himself so– within an English dominant cultural scene meant in the nineteenth century, and of the consequences and correlations that such national identity had with his philosophy of composition. By claiming Wilde’s Irishness, modern critics have noticed a duality in his life and work that is the result of his flexible understanding of nationality, one which suited him depending on the occasion. Wilde’s boutade, “I am not English, I’m Irish, which is quite another thing”, is interpreted by Sammells as “Wilde’s own doubleness” (1994: 362), a peculiar conception of the self that considers nationality as a provoking function of difference and negation. Such negation does not reject the concept of nation as a whole, but rather its limiting and constrictive implications that render nationality as a hermetic cultural construction antagonistic to permeation by alien factors. For Wilde, national identity was a porous abstraction subject to the constant penetration of foreign influences, one that could not be fixed and determined exclusively by birthplace, but negotiated and moulded, depending on the subjective construction of the self. Standing in upright opposition to geographic determinism and the dictatorship of origin, Wilde claimed that the individual’s will, rather than accident in birth, is the source of subjectivism and therefore of Art. In this sense, in a letter to Edmond de Goncourt, the playwright claimed himself to be “Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare” (Hart-Davis, 1962: 304).4 Although the previous statement may be interpreted as a definite conviction in the

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implications of nationality, the playwright conceptualises nationhood as a versatile abstraction that can be shaped according to one’s passions. Wilde’s shifting nationality is but a further demonstration of how much style, ‘treatment’, is the test. This is particularly explicit in the case of Irish identity. A nation traditionally dominated by British imperialism, Irish culture was expropriated throughout the century of its defining features, turning into a void of significations that required a constant re-evaluation of its origins. As Richard Pine argues, the Irishman’s construction of social reality was purely illusory and “unreal”, for he could not “subscribe to its rule and its canon” (3). Ireland’s original non-definition may have been shaped as a categorical ‘anti-Englishness’ but also as a myriad of infinite national potentialities that were to be achieved through the artist’s rewriting of his own history. Indeed, both standpoints are complementary, for the adoption of a number of cultural identities may originate in a natural predisposition against a peculiar nation. Yet the interest resides in the possibility of vindicating an arbitrary national partnership different to one’s own. In other words, by randomly claiming his being Irish, English or French, Wilde was manipulating his own self as well as advancing a modern notion of citizenship that disintegrates the strict univocal cultural link between subject and geographical space. In this way nationality was for Wilde a mere history that had to be rewritten –submitted to style– as his constant threats to become naturalised as a Frenchman when Salomé was banned prove.5

Cosmopolitan Polyphonies and Textual Annexations Wilde’s writings are but the literary response to his protean, mouldable self. Rife as they are with annexations from authors belonging to a number of cultural traditions, Wilde’s works constitute the projection of a cultural cosmopolitanism that rejects a single geographic and literary ascendance. His lenient understanding of appropriation mirrors a multiple self, one that is inhabited by innumerable lives as a result of his readings. This explains Wilde’s recurrent use of masks and imagination –that faculty that Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, believed to let us live “countless lives” (178)– both in real life and in his works, as a means of carving-out his identity. As Wilde himself would have it when he moved to Paris, “a new wardrobe is needed for a new country” (Ellmann, 209). Disguise was not only a way of imitating but rather of fleshing out and incorporating a new self. According to Sloane, for Wilde, the use of masks was a device through which he was able “to inhabit different selves and realities at will, and so

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discredit the tendency to see the world in terms of a unitary reality and truth” (84). In this sense, echoing Joyce’s assertion in Finnegans Wake (1939), Wilde’s capacity to accommodate ‘two thinks at a time’ should be interpreted as the author’s attempt to cultivate a multiple life (rather than the simple ‘double life’ associated with his sexual orientation or his Victorian Irishness) and to simultaneously experience variety within unity. The result of this continuous amalgamation of alien selves is a postmodern exploded identity, mirroring a genetically multiple, transnational and exploded textual unit. His work is therefore a dialogue with the past and the foreign, as well as a means of embodying the authors he appropriated. The polyphony that haunts his poems, his plays and prose, is the reflection of the numerous identities that inhabited him through his readings of the Greek, Roman, German, English, and French classics. Wilde’s cosmopolitan annexations are a means to resuscitate their voices. As Robert Macfarlane puts it quoting T. S. Eliot’s phrase, when Wilde enunciated his stories “he allowed himself to be ventriloquized ‘by the men he admired in his youth’ ”, as if “ ‘dead voices speak through the living voice’ ” (193). For Wilde, reading and quoting the classics was a way of inhabiting both their lives and their characters’ lives, as is shown in The Decay of Lying when he asserted that the death of Lucien de Rubempré was “one of the greatest tragedies of my life” (82), or when Sheridan Morley recalls him “modelling himself on Balzac […] dressed in a white dressing-gown fashioned after the monkish cowl that Balzac used to wear at his writing table” (49). Wilde himself would acknowledge his preference to enter the world of books as a means to live multiple different lives when stating that “as early as I can remember, I used to identify myself with every distinguished character I read about […] The life of books had begun to interest me more than real life” (qtd. by Wright, 52). This understanding of the literary activity as a sort of paranormal medium allowing the author to connect with past and foreign, real and imaginary lives, allows him to reconcile one of the most controversial aspects of his aesthetic: the antagonism between the individual and the collective. The core notion of style invalidates plagiarism, for it reunites individuality and plurality in a single, indivisible unit, which is the work of art, which stands as the reflection of the poet’s soul. By means of stylistically embodying his masters, Wilde recognised their presence within himself, in a sort of perennial seesaw that corroborated Art’s unity. In an interview on the first performance of An Ideal Husband in France, Wilde acknowledged the influence of Pater, Flaubert and Keats in his work, although he nuanced that “before I came across them I had already

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gone more than half-way to meet them. Style must be in one’s soul before one can recognise it in the others” (Mikhail, 249). Wilde’s statement summarises the nineteenth century as it unfolded, evolving from a unanimous condemnation of appropriation as “slavish subservience” to a vindication of “trans-national and trans-epochal communion between writers” (Macfarlane, 209). As Edward Wright states in his 1894 criticism against plagiarism hunters: Plagiarism is best seen in the relations between poets each with exceeding

gifts, between Virgil and Homer, Shakespeare and Marlowe, Wordsworth and Milton, and many others. Of all acts of love towards the dead that man can perform, this is the sweetest and most noble, and none but the true poet can so honour the friend of his soul. It is a sign of communion, a sign of the spiritual bond uniting the singers in different tongues, of distant times, into the highest of earthly fellowships. (Qtd. by Macfarlane, 209)

Textual appropriation is regarded as a symptom of multiple collaboration, the importance of which lies less on the relinquished author than on the borrowing process itself as a ‘solidarity bond’. This is why Wilde’s assertion “on est toujours le fils de quelqu’un” (a maxim proffered in French more as a homage to his most admired French classics, than as a capricious, linguistic display) elucidates not only the notion of appropriation as paternity, but rather the indefinition of such filiation. Wilde’s claim is not intended to justify his borrowings from a specific literary master – namely Shakespeare, Flaubert or Hugo– but to contend that the artistic activity is necessarily determined by self-recognition in other souls. This leads to a textual kinship, a mutual exchange of motifs and themes the essence of which is transnational, trans-epochal, and supra-authorial. The non-definition of fatherhood stated in the maxim, and conveyed by the indeterminate adjective “quelqu’un” tends to reinforce the line of descent rather than the descendant or the ancestor. The poet is not the son of a single, precise father, but someone who is engendered by multiple originators, someone whose breed is polymorphous, and whose birth automatically dilutes their primeval existence. A ‘stray son’, Wilde seems to argue, must thereby produce a ‘stray work’, for ownership, nationality and authority are neutralised by artistic engendering. The emphasis must lie in the ancestry, in the derivation process that generates a supra-national and supra-individual lineage. This entails a Borges-like constant rewriting of history that Wilde terms in The Critic as Artist as “a creation within a creation” (154). In conclusion, Wilde’s emphasis on annexation as an inherent process of original creation involves a protean work mirroring a capricious, erratic

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self that debunks a whole cultural edifice based on textual copyright and discredits the conceptualisation of ‘nation’ as an entity associated to a particular literary production. This is the meaning of Thomas Wright’s statement when he argues that “Wilde’s motley taste in literature is of a piece with his temperament”, and that his miscellaneous library “was truly his portrait” (141). Wilde’s swinging, multi-polar national credentials relate to his cosmopolitan reading and writing and advocate for a marriage of cultures: a negotiable, elastic cultural identity outdoing the factual materialism of birth so as to rewrite history. The artist’s style, that is to say, his faculty and craftsmanship to administer and remould pre-existing materials, constitutes the key element to access his subjectivism, the best exponent of his individuality as one inserted in a lineage of creators that has to be recognised by the reader. “He copied from other poets”, professor Lewis Piaget Shanks notes, “hoping, as all plagiarists hope, that in the course of time others might copy him” (Beckson, 317). The poet himself declared his desire to be part of a saga defining supreme beauty, as he confessed to Max Beerbohm upon the reception in May 1897 of Beerbohm’s parody of The Picture of Dorian Gray, titled The Happy Hypocrite: The implied and accepted recognition of Dorian Gray in the story cheers me. I had always been disappointed that my story had suggested no other work of art in others. For whenever a beautiful flower grows in a meadow or lawn, some other flower, so like it that is differently beautiful, is sure to grow up beside it, all flowers and all works of art having a curious sympathy for each other. (Hart-Davis, 1962: 576)

Wilde’s unhidden and blatant plagiarisms testify to his conceptualisation of art as a dialogue with past and future generations and nations, requiring the active role of the reader to discern the innumerable axes that constitute the literary experience. Literature is therefore construed as self and mutual recognition, a unity that is appropriated as a whole by every single artist. Like Molière, who long before him stated his immortal maxim “je prends mon bien où je le trouve” (Wouters and De Ville de Goyet, 61) [I take my property wherever I find it,] Wilde not only conceived style as a core artistic faculty belonging to all true artists (that is what Molière meant by using the possessive adjective) but also as a natural right of the artist that entailed a self-founded universal nationality.

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Works Cited Altick, Richard 1991: The Presence of the Present. Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Bancroft, Lady Marie Effie and Sir Squire Bancroft 1925: Empty chairs. London: John Murray. Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de 1985 (1784): Le mariage de Figaro. Paris: Bordas. Beckson, Karl 1970: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Clayworth, Anya, ed. 2004: Oscar Wilde. Selected Journalism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Coakley, Davis 1994: Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish. Dublin: Town House & Country House. Ellman, Richard 1987: Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin. Guy, Josephine M. 1998: ‘Self-Plagiarism, creativity and craftmanship in Oscar Wilde’. English Literature in Transition (1880-1920) 41.1: 6-23. Hart-Davis, R. ed. 1962: Letters of Oscar Wilde. London: Hart-Davis. —. 1964: Oscar Wilde. De Profundis. New York: Avon. —. 1985: More Letters of Oscar Wilde. London: Murray. Holland, Merlin 1994: ‘Plagiarist or Pioneer?’. C. George Sandulescu, ed. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Colin Smythe: Gerrards Cross. 193-213. Jackson, Charles Holbrook 1913: The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. London: G. Richards. Kellman, Steven G. 2003: Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Kiberd, Declan 1995: Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape. Macfarlane, Robert 2007: Original Copy. Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP. Maxwell, W. B. 1938: Time Gathered: Autobiography. New York: D. Appleton-Century. McCormack, Jerusha, ed. 1998: Wilde the Irishman. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Mikhail, E. H., ed. 1979: Oscar Wilde. Interviews and Recollections. London & Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. Morley, Sheridan 1976: Oscar Wilde. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pine, Richard 1995: The Thief of Reason. Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd.

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Powell, Kerry 1990: Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890’s. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Pulido, Maria Pilar 1994: ‘Lady Wilde “Speranza”: A Woman of Great Importance’. C. George Sandulescu, ed. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. 319-327. Saint-Amour, Paul K. 2000: ‘Oscar Wilde: Orality, Literary Property and Crimes of Writing”. Nineteenth-Century Literature 55.1: 59–91. Sammells, Neil 1994: ‘Rediscovering the Irish Wilde’. C. George Sandulescu, ed. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. 362-370. —. 2000: Wilde Style. The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Sloan, John 2003: Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford UP. Small, Ian 2000: Introduction. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford UP. Toomey, Deirdre 1994: ‘The Story Teller at Fault’. C. George Sandulescu, ed. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. 405420. Tufescu, Florina 2008: Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism. The Triumph of Art over Ego. Dublin, Portland: Irish Academic Press. Wilde, Oscar 2007: ‘The Critic as Artist’. J. Guy, ed. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Historical Criticism: Intentions, The Soul of Man. Vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wouters, Hippolyte & Christine de Ville de Goyet 1990: Molière ou l’auteur imaginaire. Bruxelles, Paris: Éditions Complexe. Wright, Thomas 2008: Oscar’s Books. London: Chatto & Windus.

Notes ________________________________ 1 [My drama? It’s all about style. Between them, Hugo and Shakespeare have used up all the subjects: it is impossible to be original, even in sin: so there are no emotions, just extraordinary adjectives]. Translated by Ellmann (214). 2 Wilde’s ambiguous standpoint as regards literary copyright is illustrated by his contradictory attitude towards the re-utilisation of his oeuvre by his friends. While on the one hand he accepted literary theft as a natural consequence of orality –as shown by Wilde’s response to a myriad of writers who recorded his stories and published them under their own names: “stealing my story was the act of a gentleman, but not telling me you had stolen it was to ignore the claims of friendship” (qtd. by Maxwell, 97)–, on the other, he patently profited from copyright laws when he sold options on the scenario of Mr. and Mrs. Daventry not only to Frank Harris, but also to five more unknown parties (Saint-Amour, 61).

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McCormack argues that Wilde’s Englishness represented an undercover attempt to implode the entire English cultural edifice. As the critic states, by duplicating “many of the attributes of the coloniser”, Wilde “pointed to a subterranean, radical tradition of English culture, which might form a useful alliance with Irish nationalism, and thus remain true to its own deepest imperatives” (18). 4 [French by sympathy, I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare]. Translated by Kellmann (xiii). 5 When Wilde’s play Salomé was banned, the playwright threatened to settle in France, reject his British citizenship and obtain new national credentials. Such a decision proved not only that art and nationalism were intimately connected to each other, but also that the possibility to oscillate between different national identities was the result of his being Irish, a nation the cultural identity of which was in unremitting evolution: “If the Censor refuses Salomé, I shall leave England to settle in France where I shall take our letters of naturalization. I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in artistic judgment. I am not English. I am Irish, which is quite another thing” (Ellmann, 351-352).

CHAPTER THREE THE THEATER OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: STAGING MEDICINE AND PATHOLOGY FROM ENGLAND TO FRANCE CAROLINE BERTONÈCHE

[Le Père Ubu] n’a aucune tare ni au foie, ni au cœur, ni aux reins, pas même dans les urines ! Il est épuisé, simplement et sa chaudière ne va pas éclater mais s’éteindre. Il va s’arrêter tout doucement, comme un moteur fourbu. (Letter from Alfred Jarry to Rachilde, 28 May 1906; qtd. By 1 Saillet, 16)

There is nothing physically wrong with Ubu, says Jarry, equating the death of his character and the exhaustion of the mechanics of drama with the framework and structure of his bodily functions (liver, heart, kidney and urines). The process is all very “slow” and “simple” (Jarry’s choice of words is symptomatic): no explosion or ceremony at the final act of the play but darkness and silence, the light switched off on the evil scene of the crime(s), the curtain down at the end of this one piece of theatrical existence. The absurdity of life as a stage and its many players or sinners teaches us something, says the playwright: the nonsensical (non-sens/nonscience) essence and representations of a clockwork science whose drama resides in the possibility of its derailing, dysfunctional versions and perversions. In England, this heritage starts with Shakespeare’s potions, foolish remedies and quack medicine,2 in France, with Molière’s Malade imaginaire (1673) or Médecin malgré lui (1666): the comedies of science, its fake diseases and uncertified physicians, homo medicus sed non doctus. To reinterpret the truth within the world of the theatre also means there are valuable reasons to de-rationalize the nerves and pulses of its scientific substance. There lies the mystery, the uncanny (“unheimlich”) nature of a successful mise en scène: to feed on familiar concepts in order to

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stigmatize strange new affections and afflictions of the mind (Freud, 341). If science stops working, if knowledge regresses, then the imagination has to adapt or take over. Such is the basic principle of a pathologically deviant performance: to mimic the cycles, fits, and crises of the human body’s progressions or procreations. To please the audience on a universal level, the illnesses (plural) of a soul and character have to be disguised, the body’s costume and ill/well/will-being, writes Barthes, has to be exemplary: Or le théâtre exige ouvertement de ses acteurs une certaine exemplarité corporelle; quelque morale qu’on lui prête, le théâtre est en un sens une fête du corps humain et il faut que le costume et le fond respectent ce corps, en expriment toute la qualité humaine. Plus la liaison entre le costume et son entour est organique, mieux le costume est justifié. (Barthes, 2002: 145)3

Here the mask of drama extends to its comedic vices and virtues, to the whims of an atrabilious wit (a black bile on a yellow smile) and its brain matter (a cerebral conception of the theatre’s own idiocy); what Pirandello calls, quoting Cervantes, the aesthetics of “humourism” (l’humeur/humour noire): Venons-en maintenant à un exemple plus complexe où cette activité particulière de la réflexion ne se laisse pas deviner du premier coup: le Don Quichotte de Cervantès dont nous avons déjà parlé. Nous nous proposons de mesurer sa valeur esthétique. Qu’allons-nous faire? Après une première lecture et l’impression que nous en avons retirée, nous tiendrons compte ici encore de l’état d’âme que l’auteur a souhaité susciter. Quel état d’âme? Nous aimerions bien rire de tout ce qu’il y a de comique dans la représentation de ce pauvre aliéné qui sur lui-même et sur les autres, sur toute chose, applique le masque de la folie. (Pirandello, 120)4

This reflection stands at the crossroads of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury French and British theatre around the questions of art and science, illness and comedy, deadly syndromes and lighter shades of humour. It is based on four different cases: first, the “theatrical Byron” (Arnold, 469) or how effeminate dandyism has come to alter the rules of masculine performance, an earlier form of the Wilde phenomenon and the so-called homosexual malady on the page and behind the curtain, a new conception of illness which would later include female pathology on stage, like the (sick) muses invented by Dumas and Zola, La Dame aux Camélias (1848), Thérèse Raquin (1867), brought to life by Charcot’s hysterics of learning, and modernized, in the end, by Beckett’s dissections at the nerve of human psychosis.

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Effeminacy as a Romantic Weakness: The Curse of Byron’s Sardanapalus Effeminacy of character arises from a prevalence of the sensibility over the will: or it consists in a want of fortitude to bear pain or to undergo fatigue, however urgent the occasion. We meet with instances of people who cannot lift up a little finger to save themselves from ruin, nor give up the smallest indulgence for the sake of any other person. (Hazlitt, ‘On Effeminacy of Character’, 241)

Lord Byron, the eccentric aristocrat –the hot-tempered, bulimic genius, an odd creature driven by his appetites as depicted by Gabriel Matzneff in his Diététique de Byron (1988)– is the poet incarnate of physical affectation and impulse. This anxious writer unable to project himself into a near future has given to Romantic drama the full length of its ambiguous representations. In Sardanapalus (1821), he stages the coronation of a feminine hero, “effeminately dressed” with “unmanly” (350) codes of conduct: the refusal to fight, his cynicism and sense of renunciation, his taste for suicide, debauchery, colour and accessories. Such are the issues at stake in Byron’s plays and we hold Sardanapalus as a most revealing example, the inspiration of which extends to Eugène Delacroix’s embodiment (dénuement/dénouement) of the hero’s organic death in 1827. Theatricality in the words of a poet then a painter provides us with an odd diagnosis whereby art and movement are en-gendered by medical myths of female apathy: SALEMENES: […] The weakness and the wickedness of luxury,— The negligence—the apathy—the evils Of sensual sloth. (Byron, 351)

The evil science here portrayed along the lines of a deviant anatomy of the genre revolves around the “manliness of the literary performances” (Wolfson, 202). The lack thereof of dramatic vigour shall be seen as the constitutive Byronic pathology in the writer’s adaptation of his personality for the stage: On a public level, Byron’s Sardanapalus summons the whole issue of masculinity in Regency dandyism and his own association with it; on a private level, the compound of flagrant effeminacy and heterosexual virility projects an oblique, and ultimately heroic, figure for the issue of gender of deepest concern to Byron, his bisexuality […] Dandyism manages gender-testing with a self-conscious theatricality, paraded with the aristocratic license Hazlitt grants Byron’s behavior. (Wolfson, 205)

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We have here our first conflagrations of symptoms: gender obliquity/ubiquity, sexual parade and ambivalence, virile dysfunction or self-consciousness. The perversion that seems to afflict the playwright, in a positive yet dissipated manner, is Dandyism: an early form of Wilde’s later eccentrics of style and the nice word covering all the other ugly ones. The strength in Byron is not to shy away (like Keats or Oscar Wilde) from his inherent defects and deformities: his club foot, eating disorders, bilious temper, sexual perversions… He was indeed a poet very much in love with the aesthetic sense of his pathologies. Awaiting for the publication of Sardanapalus, Byron described Dandyism as another form of scholarly promotion, the product of both bodily and intellectual growth: “I like the Dandies”, he writes in his journal, “I had a tinge of Dandyism in my minority –& probably retained enough of it– to conciliate the great ones – at four & twenty– I had gamed –& drank– & taken my degree in most dissipations” (Marchand, IX, 22).

The Theatrics of Homophilia: On the ‘Medico-Legal’ Case of Dorian Gray He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. (Wilde, 137)

Thus spoke Dorian, Wilde’s evil brother in fiction and drama staged by John Osborne in the mid-1970’s, on the schizophrenic divisions of man’s sexuality: the spectral, the morbid, the sensational all wrapped up into one unnamed sodomite revitalizing the ancient flesh and form of traditional British portraiture. Wilde uncovers the new frame for his picture, one which seems to suffer all along from the illness of the model patient; he who is tormented in the end by the painted (or “tainted”) resurgence of “the monstrous maladies of the dead” (Wilde, 137). If the real pathology is hidden, the art, even haunted by its sins and shadows, does not lie. Gray sounds, from the very beginning, like a poor colour for a portrait, one vowel shift (‘e’ for ‘a’) and we have grey matter in a grey area or maybe the ‘r’ is simply superfluous, in which case, it would become the Picture of Dorian Gay! Wilde, heir to Byron, is writing an art for man’s sake, or worshipping another man for art’s sake. In such a Doric context or subtext of masculine architecture –from the feet to the head, the column stands as the backbone of phallic Hellenism–, the stage opens the first

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door to an underground counterculture and the germinations of its infectious immorality, away from the Socratic ethos of a youth bathed in testosterone, growth and emulation. The antique theatre of male elitism has now become a place of danger, criminality and perverted lust. The science of homoeroticism, a structural deviance, is implanted deep within the cells of unhealthy brains and bodies. Like a disease growing out of its place of origin, the contamination is bound to reach grotesque levels of influence: from stasis to metastasis. Somewhere in between genetic and artistic malfunctions, the Victorian mind has created a desexualized victim tied together by the instruments of the law and medicine. Wilde’s book was criticized, of course, then banished for its sexual overtones and its distortions of conventions and propriety: a novel containing this “one element” (again unspoken) “[…] which will taint every young mind that comes in contact with it”, writes The Daily Chronicle, on 30 June 1890 (Beckson, 73). Quite the scandal! The pathology is as such self-contaminating. From the art to the critique, the hostile readers borrow, like they did for Keats, the medico-scientific background of a writer (Wilde’s father was Surgeon Oculist to Queen Victoria) to inject poison in their penmanship: the venom of a larger literary tradition. Naturally, Basil admits to a certain madness of his own, the fruit of a forbidden inclination. The sickness, mental or physiological, is born out of a social taboo: “Wait till you hear what I have to say, Dorian, from the moment I met you”, says Basil, “your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you” (Wilde, 110). The romance therefore takes on a psychoanalytical charge by which the sexual deviance5 or impulse of the painter-character is transformed into new paradigms of queerness, repression and denial. Wilde, the Earnest writer, has fostered more than one child in the theatre as well as in modern medicine with this crossgendered, cross-sexual conception of (false) appearances and role-play. From England to France still, but with a detour through Germany, exactly a hundred years later, it seems interesting to quote here Heiner Müller’s Quartett (1981) as a possible echo, the adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary work, Les liaisons dangereuses (1782). The initial stage-direction could not be more explicit, famous for its unique style of rewriting the original version sublimated by its own brand of apocalypse and irony. The play is set in a pre-revolution, post-war waiting room in the form of a salon where all the characters take off their masks (Valmont, Volanges, Merteuil). In such a context, they are able to test the limits of their identity around the mechanisms of dissociation, split

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personalities, lies and mirror-effects, what Jean Rousset elegantly defines as “narcissistic specularity” (441): VALMONT. I could get used to being a woman, Marquise. MERTEUIL. I wish I could. (Müller, 142)

The Sick Muses on Stage: Dumas, Zola and Charcot Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu’as-tu donc ce matin ? Tes yeux creux sont peuplés de visions nocturnes, Et je vois tour à tour réfléchis sur ton teint La folie et l’horreur, froides et taciturnes (v. 1-4) (Baudelaire, ‘La Muse malade’, 65-66)6

This third case of a science reinvented by drama takes a closer look at women, heroines, mistresses in fiction, in real life or in the acting world and their specifically feminine pathologies. The web of germs and tapestries of psychoses they weave in front of our very eyes fascinate in that they fill the audience with awe and terror, pity and fear –the basic principles, since Aristotle, of any form of Classical tragedy–. The “hyphological” (Barthes, 1973: 79) extent and richness of these women’s follies or how their inner infections find a direct echo in the phobias of their reluctant admirers make them so perfectly fit for the stage. To prove our point, we have chosen three significant illustrations: La Dame aux camélias, Thérèse Raquin and Dr. Charcot’s actresses playing the part of the improvised patient, afflicted with different forms of hysteria. La Dame aux Camélias was adapted for the stage by Dumas himself in 1852, based on the true (love) story between him and Marie Duplessis, a pseudonym or stage name. Dumas transports his muse and originally perfect model into his theatre of consumption, staging the coughs, the blood, the sallow complexion and the Romantic agony with a certain delight. Viral contamination is both intellectually and visually riveting in that it transforms the stage into a hospital chamber or a doctor’s office with its many dark corners, its instruments of care and torture. Illness, like medicine, then extends its metaphors to the world of art and its fragile statuary. Tuberculosis becomes no other than a perverse Muse whose vision works as an always deceptive construct: every act of theatrical benevolence unveiling, in one unique outburst, its impulse for heartache and death. Phtisis is therefore sculpted as the ideal physiological setting for a woman’s fading beauty. Tragic yet sublime, it brings its symbolism of physical decay and morbidity to the stage, drawing from the aesthetics of a dying patient’s tubercular journey and the topography of its

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unbearable pangs made popular by such authors as John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield or, later on, André Gide… Zola’s third naturalistic and eponymously female novel adapted for the stage by the author himself in 1873 attracts our attention in similar ways. This experimental work depicts characters that are inherently miserable, nervous, traumatized, criminal and bloody-tempered. The entire plot, where literary folly has now become profoundly clinical, revolves on their dysfunctional, if not psychopathic, behaviours: self-hatred, consuming guilt or jealousy. The ultimate climax being their descent into madness by the end of the play/novel: Zola’s nineteenth-century version and socially rooted projection of a Shakespearean tragedy. On stage, Thérèse Raquin could very well be the evil daughter of Ophelia or the fallen disciple of Lady Macbeth. Finally, we would like to end with the charismatic figure of Professor Charcot and what is now known as his “Hysteria’s Theater” (Hustvedt, 89). Charcot’s basic principle stated that hysteria was not only a specifically feminine disease (if we exclude the case of Flaubert) but was also a most “spectacular”, “highly theatrical” pathology (Hustvedt, 89). The doctor used real and fake patients acting the part to prove his theory (Sarah Bernhardt, Jane Avril) and his hospital, La Salpêtrière, was to become the medical stage for the re-enactment of these women’s seizures, whether they were actual episodes or just figments of their imagination: “In an interview she [Sarah Bernhardt] gave to La Chronique Médicale, she discussed how she spent time locked inside of one of the Salpêtrière’s cells in order to prepare for the role” (Hustvedt, 93).

Scenes of Human Neurosis: Beckett’s ‘Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry’ Et à quoi pensera dès lors un auteur dramatique? Au théâtre, naturellement. […] Car ce sujet de déboires et d’enthousiasmes, d’afflictions et de révélations, le dramaturge l’a dans la peau, à l’intérieur, au plus obscur de ses options fondamentales, là où naît la passion, où se sécrètent les humeurs. (Pirandello, 6)

Modern drama with its cryptic faces, twisted words, tears of bitterness and signs of aggressions reveals man’s secret as an ever flowing secretion of humours. It is as such a betrayal of the body’s inner workings and drawings, laid out on an anatomical plate, allowing the author of medical dramas to look into extractions, fluids and ligaments of the brain as “multiple phials of poison” (Pirandello, 6). Each scene appears as a sort of scientifically based genesis in action, a pantomime of minimalist proportions

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reproducing the origins of mankind as so many anthropomorphisms, whereby the role of the theatre would be to reveal a human being’s own capacities of creation in light of its automatic, if not systematic, propensity for self-destruction. In Beckett, returning to the origins of the Logos allows the characters to question the ramifications of common understanding and basic human expression. From the animal definitions of their past identities –“WINNIE: What is hog, Willie, please! WILLIE: Castrated male swine. Reared for slaughter” (Beckett, 1961/2006: 159)– to the darkness of their primitive behaviour –Winnie and Willie’s terrestrial and dismembered bodies are half flesh and bone, half food for worms– Beckett’s pathology on stage climaxes with the stuttering of words as an autistic deregulation of language. In the end, the rhetoric of a science trapped within the walls of this morbid bestiary suddenly fails for “reasons unknown”, a litany of the unknown reminding us constantly that Beckett’s protagonists are obviously sick but they just do not know why (Pourquoiquoiquoiquoi?): Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing. (Beckett, 1953/2006, 42)

The distress of the disarticulate (or over-articulate) patient, kept enslaved as Pozzo’s personal Dog/God (a self-explicit palindrome), here un-lucky to perform without proper attention speaks in vain and burns in hell: “plunged in torment plunged in fire”, “labours unfinished”, “labours lost”, “the skull to shrink and waste” (Beckett, 1953/2006: 42). Like Yorick’s semiotics in Hamlet, the discrepancy between words and meaning grows like a gigantic tumor which seems to haunt the living while slowly disconnecting all their neurological wires. In the words of the Shakespearean fool turned coroner for the purpose of the play and handing out his pathology report to a hungry crowd, forensic medicine clearly contributes in reconstructing the body of the plot despite the threat of mental inertia. In Beckett, only echoes of such disorders survive, here expressed by Lucky’s own choice of style to describe his condition: a paronomasia binding together the curse of apathy and depression with peaks of aphasia in a rehearsed but mute state of turmoil. Either the emotion or the speech is defective, somewhere in between the urge to

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dissect every line and the desire to let the mind digress without ever allowing it to stop. Beckett likes to think in cycles that never end: “You… remain” (1957/2006: 134), says the tableau of prolonged motionlessness at the closing of Endgame’s single act. The divine addresses the damned after one healthy ideal has been scarred, buried alive and eaten away by its pangs: “all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea” (1953/2006: 42-43). The symptoms therefore seem to occur only after they are uttered or pronounced. The performative nature of Beckett’s absurd drama acts as semi-ablations of an art forever capable of regenerating itself despite its bruises and within the frame of its paralysis. It stands out by the medical power it generates not to heal its actors but to deconstruct the genre. The eschatology of Beckett’s theatre is always meant to reproduce the ending over and over again. His prophecy comes out of an all-inclusive sense of assimilation. The writer, character and spectator, the three blind sons of Œdipus, share one single sense of doom, a degenerative disease which condemns them to one day be lost in tragedy and solitude: HAMM: In my house (Pause. With prophetic relish) One day you’ll be blind, like me. You’ll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me. (Pause.) One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat down, but since I have I’ll sit on a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up and you won’t get anything to eat. (Pause.) You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open them again there’ll be no wall any more. (Pause.) Infinite emptiness will be around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (Pause.) Yes, one day you’ll know what it is, you’ll be like me, except that you won’t have anyone with you, because you won’t have had pity on anyone and because there won’t be anyone left to have pity on. (Pause.) (Beckett, 1957/2006: 110)

Beckett and Jarry have that penchant for linguistic deconstruction in common, so let us end where we started, with those word games which work so well on stage, those Freudian slips and neologisms of dramatic proportions: missing links, battles of wit, verbal attacks, passwords, letters too few, letters too many used in modern theatre as so many symptoms of re-creation. Jarry’s ethernal science, for example, is implanted in our brains as a dyslexic reverence to the eternity of art mixing, in one word compression, ether with the ethereal, hospital smells with the body’s

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anesthesia, medical substance with perennial sounds of immortality. Willie’s “formication” (Beckett, 1961/2006: 150) in Happy Days works in a similar fashion: an asexual form, both fantasized and forbidden, of fornication. The same applies to Ubu’s own invention and favourite curseword: “MERDRE!” Such a token of redundant iconoclasm in vulgarity gives to the original insult an added sense of coarseness and a rougher tone to it. Again, like in Dorian Gray, the adventitious ‘r’ acts as both a stimulant and a destructive parasite: “Alors voilà. Je tâcherai de lui marcher sur les pieds, il regimbera, alors je lui dirai: MERDRE, et à ce signal vous vous jeterez sur lui” (Jarry, 1978: 48).7 In line with Beckett’s folly, the imaginary world of the theatre works, for Jarry, as a huge laboratory for experimentation in which he likes to juggle with the many branches of art and science. This is how Dr Faustroll was born in 1898, in Circassia where he died that same year, at the age of 63 years old. A famous pataphysician, son and heir to Dr. Faustus, his words and gestures apply to drama in an obscure even aporetic kind of way: we do not really know what he does or what he says. In 1948, Jarry creates the College of Pataphysics and describes the science practiced there with a reasonable amount of elaborate words –words which are understandable separately but put together defy the norms of basic (in)comprehension–. “La pataphysique est la science des solutions imaginaires, qui accorde symboliquement aux linéaments les propriétés des objets décrits par leur virtualité” (Jarry, 1980: 32).8 Yet Jarry’s objective is not completely absurd. He hopes to create another added value (‘un surajout’) to existential theatre and its many aberrations. A superior level of drama is built around another (epi)phenomenon which allows the mind to go one step beyond the metaphysical stage and reach new pataphysical lobes of consciousness. The term, theatrical in essence, has to be apostrophized to avoid an easy pun, writes Jarry: Un épiphénomène est ce qui se surajoute à un phénomène. La pataphysique […] est la science de ce qui se surajoute à la métaphysique, soit en ellemême, soit hors d’elle-même, s’étendant aussi loin au-delà de celle-ci que celle-ci au-delà de la physique. (Jarry, 1980: 31)9

Let us conclude our overview of pathologies dissected within the walls of the theatre with a tragi-comic example, the result, once again, of Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics of drama and (si-/super-/soli-/inter)loquial variations. His goal is both to create and educate. For that reason, his higher didactic purpose cannot be totally devoid of a certain amount of seriousness in terms of medical insight and physical pain. The overall scene is burlesque but of a scholarly nature denouncing the mechanics of a science perfectly

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able to ridicule the stage of its own inventions –in this case, the “castigateur orthomathique” [“orthomathic castigator”] (Jarry, 2006: 49), a machine used and recommended against perverts who beat women–. Where derision meets drama, imagination and social awareness, we have here the work of both a humorist and a poet acting the parts of, first, a playwright, then, an anatomist; a schizophrenic dialogue between the arts altogether transcended by the powerful statements of a visionary writer disguised as a mad scientist: L’appareil se compose d’une chaise, qui agrippe le délinquant dès qu’on l’y fait asseoir; un système de coulisses et de panneaux délimite exactement la portion de son anatomie sur laquelle on doit opérer, et un mécanisme très précis règle le nombre et l’intensité des coups que lui administre un rotin de la plus grande souplesse ; en même temps, un phonographe d’Edison lui dévide des maximes morales, reproches, exhortations, etc., le tout à un diapason assez aigu pour couvrir les cris du coupable… ou du patient. (Jarry, 2006: 48)10

Works Cited Arnaud, N. and H. Bordillon, eds. 1978: Ubu: Ubu roi, Ubu cocu, Ubu enchaîné, Ubu sur la butte. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1980: Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien suivi de l’Amour Absolu. Paris: Gallimard. Arnold, Matthew 1978: ‘Byron’. F. D. McConnell, ed. Byron’s Poetry. Authoritative Texts, Letters and Journals, Criticism, Images of Byron. London: W.W. Norton. 469-470. Barthes, Roland 1973: Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil. —. 2002 : ‘Les maladies du costume de théâtre’. In Écrits sur le théâtre. Paris: Seuil. 137-146. Baudelaire, Charles 1991 (1857): Les fleurs du mal. Paris: GarnierFlammarion. —. 2008: The Flowers of Evil. Trans. James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford UP. Beckett, Samuel 2006: The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2006 (1953): Waiting for Godot. In The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2006 (1957): Endgame. In The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2006 (1961): Happy Days. In The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber.

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Beckson, Karl E., ed. 1970: Oscar Wilde. The Critical Heritage. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Byron, George Gordon 1821: Sardanapalus. A Tragedy, in The Poetical Works of Lord Byron Reprinted from the Original Editions. London: James Blackwood. De Laclos, Pierre Choderlos 2006 : Les liaisons dangereuses. Paris : Gallimard. Dumas fils, Alexandre 1975 : La Dame aux camélias. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Freud, Sigmund 1990: ‘The Uncanny’. A. Dickinson, ed. James Strachey, trans. Art and Literature. London: Penguin Books. 339-376. Hazlitt, William 2003: ‘On Effeminacy of Character’. J. Strachan, ed. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of John Keats. London: Routledge. 241-48. Hustvedt, Asti 2011: Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. London: Bloomsbury. Jarry, Alfred 2006: ‘Battre les femmes’. P. Besnier, ed. Siloques, superloques, soliloques et interloques de pataphysique. Paris: Le Castor Astral. 48-51 Marchand, Leslie, ed. 1973-1982: Lord Byron’s Letters and Journals. 12 vols. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP. Matzneff, Gabriel 1984: La diététique de Byron. Paris : La Table Ronde. Molière 1978 (1666) : Les Fourberies de Scapin. L’Amour médecin. Le médecin malgré lui. Monsieur de Pourceaugnac Paris : Gallimard. —. Le malade imaginaire 1991 (1673) : Paris : Larousse. Müller, Heiner (2006). Quartett précédé de La Mission ; Prométhée ; Vie de Gundling… Trans. Jean Jourdheuil and Béatrice Perregaux. Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit. Pirandello, Luigi 1968 : ‘Essence, caractère et matière de l’humorisme’. In Écrits sur le théâtre et la littérature. L’humour tragique de la vie. Trans. G. Piroué. Paris: Denoël. 115-163. Rousset, Jean 1983: ‘Le journal intime: Texte sans destinataire?’. Poétique 56 : 435-443. Saillet, Maurice, ed. 1962 : Tout Ubu. Ubu Roi. Ubu Cocu. Ubu enchaîné. Almanachs du Père Ubu. Ubu sur la butte. Avec leurs prolégomènes et paralipomènes. Paris : Librairie Générale Française. Shakespeare, William 1993: Henry IV (Part 2). In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. London: The Works: Essential Classics. Wilde, Oscar 2003: The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin.

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Wolfson, Susan 1997: ‘ “A Problem Few Dare Imitate”: Sardanapalus and “Effeminate Character” ’. R. Gleckner and B. Beatty, eds. The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. 201-232. Zola, Émile 2007 (1867): Thérèse Raquin. Paris: Gallimard.

Notes ________________________________ 1

[(Ubu) has no flaw in his liver, in his heart, in his kidneys, or even in his urine! He is just exhausted quite simply, and his boiler is not only about to burst, it is also going to stop working slowly, like a tired engine]. Quotes in French have been translated in English by the author. 2 In Shakespeare, the best diagnoses are usually the work of a ‘fool’ or a candid valet whose comic wit seems to compensate the void of his inexperience to finally unveil the shadow of a medical truth. This is what happens to the recurrent character of Falstaff who, in Henry IV, discovers the symptoms of his physical condition despite the ignorance of his servant and mediator whose task was yet to establish a link between the patient’s illness and the physician’s diagnosis, illustrated here by the old practice of a uroscopy by messenger: “Fal. Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my water? Page. He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy water: but for the party that owed it, he might have more diseases than he knew for” (441). 3 [The theatre requires that its actors be exemplary in terms of physical representation; whatever its moral implications, the theatre in a way celebrates the human body. Its costume as well as its substance must respect that same body, all the while trying to express its human quality: the costume becomes even more justified as the relationship between the costume and its surroundings grows organic]. 4 [Let us now look at a more complex example (…): Cervantes’s Don Quixote which we mentioned earlier. We want to measure its aesthetic value. But how? After the first reading and the impression left on the reader, we will here once again take into account the frame of mind that the author had hoped to create. What frame of mind? We would like to be able to laugh at everything that is made to be comical in the way this poor lunatic is represented and how he applies the mask of folly on all things, on himself and on others]. 5 Since 2000-2001, we know that Dorian Gray is now a medical syndrome (DGS, the Dorian Gray Syndrome), recognized by the Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). 6 [My wretched muse, what does the morning bring? / Dream visions haunt your eyes, and I discern, / Reflected in the shadings of your skin, / Madness and horror, cold and taciturn]. 7 [I shall step on his feet, he will grumble, and I shall say to him: MERDRE, and when I give you the signal, you will throw yourself at him]. 8 [Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which applies symbolically to lineaments the proprieties of objects described according to their virtual nature].

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[An epiphenomenon consists in adding something more to a phenomenon. Pataphysics (…) is the science of what has been added to metaphysics, whether in it, or outside it; the former extending as far beyond the latter as possible, in the same way metaphysics has itself extended far beyond the realm of physics]. 10 [The contraption consists in a chair which grabs hold of the delinquent as soon as he sits down; a system of runners and signs perfectly delineates the portion of his anatomy which needs to be operated upon, and a very precise mechanism regulates the number and the intensity of the blows administered by a very supple device made up of rattan cane; during which time, an Edison phonograph plays out maxims and morals, reproaches and exhortations, etc., with an overall high-pitched tuning fork which is meant to cover up the cries of the culprit… or patient].

CHAPTER FOUR “A SWIRLING, BRILLIANT, CLOUDY MASS OF BLUES”: DAVID HARE’S ADAPTATION OF ARTHUR SCHNITZLER’S LA RONDE ANA FERNÁNDEZ-CAPARRÓS TURINA

The Play Is in the Air For this is an austere and demanding medium. It is a place where the playwright’s ultimate sincerity and good faith is going to be tested and judged in a way that no other medium demands. As soon as a word is spoken on stage, it is tested. As soon as a line is put into the reconstruction of a particular event, it will be judged. (David Hare, 2005: 110)

In 1978 David Hare, invited to lecture at King’s College, Cambridge, delivered a talk titled “The play is in the air”, which became his first sustained attempt to formulate the ideas that had been occupying him in a decade spent half on the fringe and half at the Royal Court and the National Theatre. In it, the writer explained why he had been hitherto reluctant to speak in public, turning down previous invitations, a decision intimately related to the very nature of playwriting: To begin with the obvious: the playwright writes plays. He chooses plays as his way of speaking. If he could speak more clearly in a lecture, he would lecture; if polemic suited him, he’d be a journalist. But he chooses the theatre as the most subtle and complex way of addressing an audience he can find. [...] I didn’t want the audience to hear the tone of my voice. I don’t like the idea that they can get a hand-down version of my plays sitting in a lecture hall and sizing me up. (2005: 110)

Hare’s initial scepticism on the legitimate value of lecturing on his own profession is reasonable but, luckily, it served the playwright to

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realize that public address had the virtue of helping him examine his own ideas and reinforce his status as a political writer “as one who is likely to have an analysis as well as view” (2005: 1). Most importantly, this and other ensuing lectures on theatre, collected in volumes such as Obedience, Struggle and Revolt (2005),1 become a precious material which has the quality of providing a rare, honest and very perceptive insight into the intricacies of an “austere and demanding medium” (Hare, 2005: 110). Hare’s lecture contains some basic essential lessons about the complex interplay of author, text, critic and audience any theatrical performance brings about which, incidentally, are crucial to understand and assess the ‘intrigues’2 that informed both the convoluted history of Arthur Schnitzler’s controversial Reigen, later known also as La Ronde, as well as those provoked, over a hundred years later, by the British playwright’s own contemporary adaptation of the Austrian’s text in The Blue Room (1998), even when they were of a completely different nature. “The first lesson the playwright learns”, Hare asserts, “is that he is not going to be able to control an audience’s reactions anyway. [...] As you can’t control people’s reactions to your plays, your duty is also not to reduce people’s reactions, not to give them easy handles with which they can pigeonhole you, and come to comfortable terms with what you are saying” (2005: 112). Hare’s conception of the playwright’s duty might not necessarily be shared by all of his colleagues, and least of all by audiences, but his aesthetic credo definitely brings him close to the work of his Austrian predecessor. As for the issue of reception, Hare’s statement might seem quite obvious, but, alas, what both plays considered here show, especially Schnitzler’s drama, is that audience response and press coverage can doom the overall perception of a play in ways completely unforeseen, obliterating, regrettably, the work itself. When Arthur Schnitzler wrote Reigen in the winter of 1896-1897, within the relatively short period of three months, he was well aware of the fact that his ten interlaced scenes of sexual encounters would be found indecent, provocative, and obscene. The play opens with a prostitute and a soldier by the Augarten Bridge, over the Danube canal and the second scene follows the soldier into another public space, the Prater, where he then has sex with a chambermaid, who in the next scene becomes the object of her young master’s seduction; the latter, in scene four, entices a young married woman, who is afterwards portrayed with her husband, who, after having idealized their marriage, is seen by the audience in a private room at the Riedhof3 with a sweet maid, who in the following scene has an encounter with a famous poet, in his lodgings. In the ensuing scene, the poet has become the lover of the actress, who subsequently falls

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in the Count’s arms; when, finally, the nobleman wakes up in bed with Leocadia, the prostitute of the first scene, the ‘round dance’, followed through a wide range of society, ends when a circle is closed, suggesting that the whole cycle of infidelities will begin again, in an eternal recurrence. In a letter to Olga Waissnix of 1897 Schnitzler admitted that his play was “completely unprintable” (Yates, 132) and this is why in 1900 only two hundred copies of the text were privately printed at his expense and distributed among friends; but, as several papers brought short notices of this edition and the book circulated freely among the initiated, Schnitzler must have felt it was necessary to make it available through regular publishing channels and it was finally published by Wiener Verlag, which specialized in modernist publications, in April 1903. As Otto P. Schinnerer has pointed out, “it seems almost needless to emphasize that Reigen was not written in a frivolous or lubricious spirit, but rather as an expression of the author’s keen disillusionment through his realization of the sham and hypocrisy that enter into the most intimate of human relations” (840). And yet, its mere publication “had somewhat the effect of a bombshell” (Schinnerer, 840) because Schnitzler, a physician by profession,4 had become with it the most “courageous diagnostician of the people and society of his times” (Nehring, 191), a hierarchic society that resented any form of criticism and one which anxiously recognized in the text’s sexual roundabout the impending danger of venereal infection, especially since syphilis would resist medical treatment for another decade.5 If the circulating copies of the play resulted in censorship in Germany, where the book was confiscated and banned in 1904, the play could never be performed before the end of WWI. It opened in Berlin in December 1920 and in Vienna in February 1921, at the Kammerspiel. Although Schnitzler had consistently refused his authorization for public production, he found out that the play had been performed in several Russian cities without his knowledge and consent and this is why, under Max Reindhart pressure to produce it in Berlin, he eventually accepted to authorize it and assist in the rehearsals and production. Whereas in Berlin there were unsuccessful legal attempts to boycott the opening and some organized demonstrations on the part of nationalistic and anti-Semitic groups during a performance, the premiere proceeded surprisingly smoothly in Vienna, but only for a short period. Two weeks after, a mob of around six hundred people invaded the theatre swinging canes and throwing paper balls soaked in tar, causing such havoc that future performances were forbidden by the police.6 The episode would fatefully determine the ensuing finale of the play’s representation for decades to come because after a trial in which the author, the director of

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the theatre in Vienna and the actors were prosecuted and eventually acquitted, Schnitzler, finally, withdrew the play and forbid any further production.7 A question needs to be posed as to whether Schnitzler’s text was actually so obscene and irreverent as to create one of the biggest theatrical scandals at the turn-of-the-century both in Austria and in Germany. As critic Otto Schinnerer underscored already in 1931: Rarely, if ever, was objection raised to the work for alleged artistic shortcomings […] Rarely the agitation proceeded from genuine moral indignation or disinterested motives. [...] From the tone and temper of the journalistic onslaughts as well as from the very nature of the theatre riots, it is obvious that the vast majority of protestants were animated by political motives based on religious, nationalistic or anti-Semitic bias. (859)

As there is abundant criticism in the field of German studies assessing the context that accursed Reigen and its author,8 and it is out of the scope of this article, it might be interesting to acknowledge instead, in light of Hare’s lecture on playwriting, the significant role that the theatrical nature of the work played in enhancing the polemic. It is difficult to believe that such a violent reaction could have been directed to a form of art other than a theatrical piece, and the scandal, if anything, confirms Schnitzler’s artistry in exploiting the potentials of a medium whose authority, according to the British playwright, lies in “its unique suitability to illustrating an age in which men’s ideals and men’s practice bear no relation to each other” (Hare, 2005: 114): Judgement. Judgement is at the heart of the theatre. A man steps forward and informs the audience of his intention of lifelong fidelity to his wife, while his hand, even as he speaks, drifts at random to the body of another woman. The most basic dramatic situation you can imagine; the gap between what he says and what we seem him to be opens up, and in that gap we see something that makes theatre unique: that it exposes the difference between what a man says and what he does. That is why nothing on stage is so exciting as a great lie. (Hare, 2005: 114)

Hare could be perfectly describing here scenes 5 and 6 of Reigen but it is no wonder that audiences were scandalized when they were confronted with what the play showed: not just one but ten dialogues in which the notable gap between pre- and post-coital conversations, what “is said and what is seen to be done” (Hare, 2005: 114; my emphasis) suggested that the partners had no interest in one another beyond sexual fulfilment, and, moreover, that they would say anything to achieve immediate pleasure.

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Yet, there is another unique feature of the theatrical medium that is of foremost importance not merely to understand Reigen’s reception at the time of its composition but also to deal with the fate of its adaptation a hundred years later as The Blue Room: the very physicality of a performance, its liveness. In turn-of-the-century Vienna the unpredictable dangers of a genuinely live performance were naturally feared by Schnitzler because a staging of his play implied a public display on a stage of the utmost form of intimacy between two people, and indeed, when the play was performed more than twenty years after its composition, audiences were shocked at the sight of real actors embodying what they recognized as an unerring, ruthless mirror of their moral decay. When David Hare was commissioned to adapt Schnitzler’s text in 1998 he knew that the hundred years following the writing of Reigen had seen a “supposed upheaval both in social attitudes and in sexual morals” (1998a: viii) but what the premiere of his adaptation unexpectedly brought about was not so much an interest in the possible validity of the play’s erotic allure and social poignancy but rather, a real fascination with the very liveness of theatrical performance; for when The Blue Room was produced at the Donmar Warehouse in London, what the theatre uniquely promised, at the end of the twentieth century, to audiences raised as cinema and television spectators, was not the appeal of watching the relentlessness of illicit sex, always available on the screen, but that of witnessing the real body, the real presence of the cinema icon cast in the leading role of Sam Mendes’ production, naked on a stage a few metres from their seats: “I knew Ms. Kidman was beautiful” wrote Robert Gore-Langton in his review for the Daily Express, “but in the flesh, she is tall, blonde, mintcool and just eye-sockingly, jaw-droppingly, head-swimmingly gorgeous”.9 Hare has said that a play is not the actors, or the text, but what happens between the stage and the audience: the play is in the air (2005: 118). In this case, however, what occurred between the stage and the stalls was dramatically altered by the performers’ status and by the subsequent press reviews. “Whatever reservations existed about the play (and there were plenty) they were swept aside by in collective adoration of its leading lady” (Wolf, 112). When then Charles Spencer proclaimed in the Daily Telegraph that the play was pure theatrical Viagra, an overnight notice that “contained that once-in-a-lifetime phrase that has gone on to enter the lexicon” (Wolf: 113), there was a craze about The Blue Room that never vanished, even if the guiding emotion conveyed in the air at the Donmar would be, for most of the spectators, completely the opposite to erectile arousal.

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The Blue Room’s Charting of the Treacherous, TwentiethCentury Territory of Projection and Desire Restlessness. Longing. These things don’t go away because of what we call progress. We still search. We still pursue the ideal. We land. We cast off. With luck, we make waves. But finally we have no control of the tide. The playwright, The Blue Room (1998a: 57)

If Schnitzler’s Reigen was a theatrical work fatefully overshadowed by its stormy and uncontrollable social repercussion, when British stage director Sam Mendes decided to produce a new version of the play, a hundred years later, he could not have foreseen the extent to which its staging would also become a “cultural phenomena”10 eclipsing again any appreciation of the dramatic text and the stage production for their own sake. The project arose out of Mendes desire to work with actress Nicole Kidman: for the first time in the history of the Donmar a theatrical venture was deliberately structured around its lead, who happened to be a celebrity, whereas the dramatic text was chosen only afterwards. The result was eventually consistent with the nature of the project: the actress became entirely almost the sole focus of attention of critics and audiences alike, both in London, where the play opened on September 22 1998, and in New York City, where it moved to the Cort Theater, Broadway, on December 13. When there was an agreement on La Ronde being a perfect play to adapt and consider anew, Mendes first thought of Patrick Marber to update it, since the latter had introduced him to Kidman, but Marber declined because he felt that by transferring Schnitzler’s couplings to a contemporary city, the adaptation would have resembled too much his own play Closer, premiered at the National’s Cottesloe the previous year, which hadn’t had yet its full commercial life (Wolf, 100). It was then that David Hare was approached and although he was reluctant at the beginning, out of a “kind of primitive loyalty to playwrights that you shouldn’t mess their work around”, a return to the primary text persuaded him otherwise (Wolf, 100). As a commissioned work and a theatre event that became larger than itself, Hare’s adaptation of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, based on a literal translation by Julian Hammond, has barely received any thorough critical appreciation except precisely as a work of translation (Zojer, 2009). And yet, the playwright’s awareness, as an adaptor, of its problematic timespace quandary, as well as of the fact that any adaptation happens in a particular time and space in a society,11 resulted, beyond the exercise of transnational, transcultural and temporal adaptation, in a very personal act of reinterpretation of the source text. The Blue Room retained the original

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text’s circular structure resetting the play in a contemporary global world and fulfilling thus Mendes’ indication that the action be located in “A Kieslowskian European city –not specifically London but anywhere, so that there is a sense in which the world was very small and the blue room was the world–” (Wolf, 101). As Hare explains in the preface to the Faber and Faber edition of the play, there were many stage versions in different languages after 1981, when the theatrical rights fell temporarily out of copyright, and his was not the first to transfer the action to the present nor to allocate the ten parts to just two actors –Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in the original production. These simple adjustments, however, are crucial in changing the meaning of the work for a contemporary audience. If we limit our focus to the British productions, the major adaptation before Hare’s The Blue Room was the first English production of the play, John Barton’s RSC staging of La Ronde. Barton had always regarded the play as a “minor masterpiece” (Greenwald, 208) and had wanted to stage it since his Cambridge days but he was not able to do it, due to the copyright restrictions, until January 1982. His production explored the play’s Chekhovian elements, and to the resulting wistfulness he added a “theatrical element of high stylization; for example, the scene changes that marked the ten trysts were choreographed Viennese ballets” (Greenwald, 208). The reviews were mixed: some of them criticized the production for being unnecessarily slow and mannered, or too melancholic; yet, in spite of the fact that it was dismissed for failing to offer “any coherent view of the material”, reviews were generally kinder to the production than to the play itself.12 Hare’s free adaptation of La Ronde, although somehow sharing with Barton’s production a kind of Chekhovian spirit, was an adaptation that differed greatly from its predecessor. Set in “one of the great cities of the world” (Hare, 1998a: 1), Hare turned the prostitute and the soldier of the first scene into ‘a girl’ and a cab driver; the parlourmaid was now an au pair; the young master a student in a well-off family; the husband a politician; the sweet maid turned into a model, whereas the poet and the count became a playwright and an aristocrat respectively. The main difference between the two productions emerged, however, rather than from the geographical and temporal update, from the feeling of intimacy both the text and the staging of The Blue Room deliberately emphasized, a quality that is underscored in the cover of the Grove Press edition, which describes it as “a play in ten intimate acts” (1998b). It could be argued that this sense of closeness in Hare’s adaptation might have arisen, in the first place, from the need to respond to the specific materiality of the context in which the project was born, the Donmar Warehouse, a theatre with an auditorium with only 250

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seats “where you really feel as if you are in the room with the people who are acting for you”;13 and not in a less degree, from the requirement that only two actors play all of the parts. Hare understood these demands and created a version that interpreted the text so that it could build up poetically from these circumstances. Schnitzler’s sexual daisy chain was a merciless social satire uncovering sexual and social taboos and the hypocrisy of the strict moral class system ruling high Viennese society – that might have privately accepted that those affairs were common, but was outraged when that promiscuity was publicly promulgated–. By having just two actors transmuting now into several characters, an extended practice in contemporary theatre, the lewdness of the sexual promiscuity is, however, far less evident; and even if theatre spectators are asked to invest the imaginative pact at the core of the theatrical performance with an additional sense of multiplicity, a reduced casting definitely diminishes the lust, the transgression and the peril of the original piece to convey something else.14 Hare was obviously very aware that contemporary audiences would not have been offended by the sexual content of the play, so he needed to explore and intensify a dimension of the piece beyond the common and tamed observation arising from it that people sleep with more than one person. What Hare underscored by confining the round dance of society to the enclosed space of a room which could be no other colour than blue –“not pink, not red, not terracotta, but navy, royal, azure, all those hues” (1998a: 55)– was, essentially, the psychological dimension of the ineluctability of longing and desire. As he explains in the preface to the published text (1998a), Schnitzler’s fundamental subject “is the gulf between what we imagine, what we remember, and what we actually experience. You have to wait years (in fact for Marcel Proust to stop partygoing and get on with his great novel) before you find a European author having the prescience to chart this treacherous twentieth-century territory of projection and desire with as much longing and insight” (1998a: viii). The modernity of Schnitzler’s work is unambiguous and Hare’s adaptation, if anything, proves precisely that Reigen’s seductive structure, insightful dialogues and treatment, as the British playwright notices, seem hardly dated at all (1998a: viii). However, Hare’s interpretation of Reigen’s essential subject reveals a perception of the work bearing an added dimension that could only emerge in hindsight and with the advantage of having cast a glance over all that was to follow in the next tumultuous century. The British writer mentions in his preface, not by chance, Sigmund Freud, who was more than a mere contemporary to Schnitzler. As is well known, the psychiatrist wrote a letter to the writer on the latter’s sixtieth birthday, in

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May 1922, confessing that he had avoided for years meeting him from a kind of reluctance to meet his own double; he confessed to Schnitzler: Your determinism as well as your scepticism –what people call pessimism– your preoccupation with the truth of the unconscious and of the instinctual drives in man, your dissection of the cultural conventions of our society, the dwelling of your thoughts on the polarity of love and death; all this moves me with an uncanny feeling of familiarity. (Freud, 339)

The issues that Freud recognized in Schnitzler’s work emerge clearly in Reigen, but Hare’s subsequent reading of the play is benevolent and compassionate: it lacks the pessimism of the source text and casts a gulf “between what we imagine, what we remember, and what we actually experience” with an acceptance and a leniency the source text never projected. “Why do we do it? Why do we go on?” (Hare, 1998a: 81) asks the Aristocrat in the last scene of The Blue Room; Hare’s revision of the round dance seems to imply that we cannot change,15 but that we can accept that “on we go” (1998a: 84). The playwright explained to Wolf that his desire was to “replace that familiar cynical world-weariness associated with being on ‘la ronde’ with the feeling that ‘la ronde’ is the only place you can live and grow” (Wolf, 119). Hare’s main strategy to reinforce and sustain his own interpretation of Schnitzler’s insights, in a kind of comic self-deprecating gesture, is mainly through the character of the playwright, and more specifically, through the song he sings to the model, accompanied by a piano, in Scene 7, which is obviously not in the original text: Blue, like blue like blue is how I’m feeling Blew like how the wind blew all night long And blew aside your cotton dress revealing This, the opening of the opening of a song You, like how you seemed at our first meeting But are people ever truly what they seem? For soon I felt that subtle, slight retreating That marks the ending of the ending of a dream I’m in the blue room, I’m in the blue The dream was just a dream It wasn’t you [...]

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Chapter Four Blue, not pink, not red, not terracotta, But navy, royal, azure, all those hues From if from space you look at us we’re notta Ball. We’re a swirling, brilliant, cloudy mass of blues [...] Tell me why this lonely feeling hits me That the person who I wanted wasn’t you And let me say, if politesse permits me, I’m left with nothing save the colour blue. (Hare, 1998a: 55)

We also find another clear example of Hare’s reinterpretation at the beginning of Scene 10, when the Aristocrat wakes up in bed with Irene, the prostitute of the first scene, having plainly no memory of how he got there: ARISTOCRAT: Amnesia. A medical term...for forgetting. Synesthesia. A medical term....a medical term for experiencing sensation in a part of the body other than the one directly stimulated. (He smiles, pleased at his success). The whole joke of life: you feel one thing but it comes out as another. Proust tastes the madeleine, but he sees the village. (Hare, 1998a: 81)

As Zojer has pointed out, “Hare’s translational feat” (91) in these lines, an example of his target-text oriented approach, is his unique and successful solution to deal with what was a private joke in the original text and has been usually translated in a very similar fashion to this instance by Davies: “But it’s true, as I see it, Sleep is the great leveller –like his brother Death–” (Schnitzler, 2004: 104). The fact that Hare chose not to refer to death to bring about instead a reflective moment about the meaning of life, quoting Proust as he also does in the preface, reinforces once again his very personal and almost life-affirming perspective, however lonesome at certain moments, of life’s round dance. The illicit couples in David Hare’s theatrical room compose, as another line of the playwright’s song claims, a poetic “swirling, brilliant, cloudy mass of blues” (1998a: 55). When the play was revived two years after its premiere by director Loveday Ingram at Chichester, moving then to the Haymarket, and stripped of the star-names that had made it the hottest theatre ticket in London in 1998, David Hare’s free adaptation looked, according to Michael Billington “a frail, shivering creature” because, the critic argued, it was neither true Schnitzler nor vintage Hare. “You learn more about contemporary sex from Hare’s My Zinc Bed than you do from this half-hearted act of obeisance”, he added (2000). Indeed, in Hare’s play

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of 2000 not just sex, but most importantly, desire, was a central issue; it is difficult to forget Victor’s crucial remark to Paul: “If you were cured, you would be cured of desire. And who wants to be cured of desire?” (Hare, 2000:14). The Blue Room might admittedly lack Hare’s peculiar ability to join the personal and the political that emerges even in those plays that compose the most Chekhovian strand of his work, such as The Secret Rapture (1988), Skylight (1995), My Zinc Bed (2000) and The Vertical Hour (2006), as opposed to the Brechtian-like epic dramas such as Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War (1993).16 And yet, somehow, The Blue Room is consonant with Hare’s own personal and on-going exploration of love on the stage. The final irony of The Blue Room is that the audiences’ response to the original production, their craving to see Nicole Kidman briefly naked on a stage, might itself chart more accurately that ‘treacherous twentieth-century territory of projection and desire’ than David Hare’s reading of Schnitzler’s classic could ever achieve; a desire, the British playwright failed to grasp, crucially shaped in that century by the visual pleasure of the cinematic experience,17 but maybe not particularly by Max Ophul’s 1950 film version of La Ronde, as he suspected. Spectators, especially males, of commercial narrative films, for decades playing on and satisfying their scopophilic and voyeuristic instincts, were now fascinated by the possibility of gazing at a female icon stripped of the mediation of the screen, a dream come true enabled by the theatrical medium, and despite Reigen’s alleged erotic fascination, the fact is that they would have very likely crowded the Donmar anyway with any other theatrical play.

Works Cited Ametsbichler, Elizabeth 2003: ‘A Century of Intrigue: The Dramatic Works of Arthur Schnitzler’. Dagmar Lorenz, ed. A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 187-204. Billington, Michael 2000: ‘Theatrical Dettol in The Blue Room’. The Guardian 3 October (Accessed 15 January, 2013) Boon, Richard, ed. 2007: The Cambridge Companion to David Hare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Freud, Ernst L., ed. 1975 (1960): Letters of Sigmund Freud. Trans. Tania and James Stern. Intr. Steven Marcus. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving 1959: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam.

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Greenwald, Michael L. 1985: Directions by Indirections: John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Newark: U of Delaware P; London and Toronto: Associated UP. Hare David 1991: Writing Left-Handed. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1993: Murmuring Judges. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1994: The Absence of War. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1995: Skylight. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1997: Plays 2: Fanshen. A Map of the World. Saigon. The Bay at Nice. The Secret Rapture. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1998a: The Blue Room: Freely Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1998b: The Blue Room: A Play in Ten Intimate Acts. New York: Grove Press. —. 1999: The Blue Room: Freely Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. New York: Samuel French, Inc. —. 2000: My Zinc Bed. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2001: Racing Demon. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2005: Obedience, Struggle and Revolt: Lectures on Theatre. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2006: The Vertical Hour: A Play. London: Faber and Faber. Hutcheon, Linda 2006: A Theory of Adaptation. New York, London: Routledge. Lorenz, Dagmar C. G. 2003: A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Nehring, Wolfang 1977: ‘Schnitzler, Freud’s Alter Ego?’. Modern Austrian Literature 10, 3/4: 179-192. Mendes, Sam 2002: Foreword. Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping into Freedom. By Matt Wolf. London: Nick Hern Books. Mulvey, Laura 1975: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen 16.3: 6-18. Robertson, Ritchie 2004: Introduction. Round Dance and Other Plays. By Arthur Schnitzler. Trans. J. M. Q. Davies. Oxford: Oxford UP. viixxiii. Schinnerer, Otto P. 1931: ‘The History of Schnitzler’s Reigen’. PMLA, 46.3: 839-859. Schneider, Gerd K. 2003: ‘The social and Political Context of Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen in Berlin, Vienna and New York: 1900-1933’. Dagmar Lorenz, ed. A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 27-57. Schnitzler, Arthur 1982: La Ronde. Adapt. John Barton. Trans. Sue Davies. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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—. 2004: Round Dance and Other Plays. Trans. M. Q. Davies. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wolf, Matt 2002: Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping into Freedom. London: Nick Hern Books. Yates, W. E. 1992: Schnitzler’s, Hoffmanstall, and the Austrian Theatre. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Zojer, Heidi 2009: ‘Vienna-London-Belfast: Schnitzler’s Reigen on the Translation Roundabout’. New Theatre Quarterly 25.1: 88-98.

Notes ________________________________ 1

“The play is in the air” had appeared already in a previous collection, Writing Left-Handed (Faber and Faber, 1991). 2 Cfr. Elizabeth Ametsbichler (2003). The author explains: “Intrigue has many significations. It implies fascination with someone or something; it can insinuate arousing curiosity by using new, unusual, or compelling devices and practices; it signifies underhanded plotting or machinations; it is used to describe illicit or secret love affairs; and in the literary world, it also means the series of complications that form the plot of a play. All of these various connotations of ‘intrigue’ apply to Schnitzler’s dramatic works” (187). 3 As J.M.Q. Davies explains in the notes to his 2004 translation of the play, the Riedhof was a restaurant in the Eighth District of Vienna “well known for its chambres particulières or chambres séparées where illicit couples could spend the evening privately” (402). 4 Born into a medical family of Jewish origin in 1862, Schnitzler, as it was expected from him, followed the career of his father, a prominent laryngologist, and graduated in Vienna in 1885. After three years as a junior hospital doctor, in 1888 he was hired at the Allgemeine Poliklinik, of which his father was the director. From 1887 he was also an editor of the Internationale klinische Rundschau but he increasingly found the medical career uncongenial, being more interested in psychology and in writing. Only after his father death in 1893 did Schnitzler dare restricting his medical work to private practice and devote himself more freely to theatre writing. Cfr. Yates (28-29) and Robertson (viii-x). 5 As Robertson points out: “Reviewing a medical study of syphilis in 1891, Schnitzler stressed that, despite myths to the contrary, syphilis spread more readily through extramarital sexual intercourse” (xv). 6 For a detailed account of the history of the play’s convoluted reception in Austria and Germany see Schinnerer (839-859). The critic surveys the reactions to the play in the main newspapers from the time of its publication, giving also a full account of attempted stagings of the play before its authorized performance in the 1920s, as well as subsequent productions in several European and American cities throughout the twenties. 7 The author’s decision was so radical that he even put a performance ban in his will. His son Henrich waited fifty years after the death of his father before he

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allowed the staging of the play again. The only country eluding the ban was France, as Schnitzler had transferred the rights to his French translator (See Zojer, 97). 8 See also Schneider (2003). 9 Quoted in Wolf (112). Wolf’s whole chapter of his 2002 book (pp. 96-121), gives the most detailed account of the preparation, the premiere, the reception and the hidden intrigues behind the production of The Blue Room. 10 Sam Mendes. “Foreword” in Wolf (2002). 11 See Hutcheon (141-148). 12 For a succinct yet detailed account of the production and its reception see Greenwald (208; 292). 13 Hugh Vanstone, lighting designer of the production, quoted in Wolf (108). 14 Significantly, this specific choice might also be crucial in heightening the inadvertently postmodern quality of Hare’s revision of the original dramatic text. Having two leading actors playing several roles and a quite vague socio-historical framework, actually enhancing the perception of a more private realm than the source ever did, underscores the performativity of the subject that we assume as a given not just after a seminal work such us Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of self in Everyday Life (1959), but the performative turn anchored in the broader cultural development of postmodernism and the whole twentieth century debunking of Western postulates and humanist philosophy. 15 For reasons unknown to the author of this article, the British and the two American published versions of The Blue Room present slight textual differences, and thus, throughout the text, I have used the British edition published by Faber and Faber. In the American 1999 script the questions are, in this case, “How do we change? How do we change who we are?” (Hare, 1999: 75). 16 See Boon (1-11). 17 For a detailed analysis of the cinematic manipulation of visual pleasure, as well as a political use of psychoanalysis see Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking article “Visual Pleasure and Cinema” (1975).

CHAPTER FIVE RELATIONAL SPACES: FROM THE STATE OF THE NATION TO GLOBALIZATION IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH THEATRE MIREIA ARAGAY

Relational Spaces, Relational Stages In Harold Pinter’s short play Party Time (1991), a group of guests at an elegant cocktail party occupy a large room that takes up practically the totality of the stage. They discuss a new club to which most of them belong or are about to join –a club inspired, as one of the guests puts it to general applause, “by a moral sense, a moral awareness, a set of moral values which is [...] unshakeable, rigorous, fundamental, constant” (Pinter 1993: 454)–. The safe, immoderately comfortable world of the club is juxtaposed to another space, a realm of violence and exploitation represented by Jimmy, whose whereabouts are discussed by some of the guests at the party and who appears in one of the two backstage doors at the end of the piece, the one that is never used by any of the other characters and yet remains “half open, in a dim light” from the start (Pinter, 427). From that threshold position, Jimmy delivers a surreal testimonial speech that closes the play, about the brutal effects of violence on his body and psyche. Party Time is not only a play about thresholds and crossings, but it also itself occupies a liminal position, I suggest, within the context of post1989 contemporary British theatre. A glance at its initial reception is instructive in this respect. The play opened at the Almeida Theatre on 6 November 1991, almost exactly two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, apart from a couple of passing references to the Wall itself (Hassell, 1991) and to the Gulf War (Billington, 1991), reviewers

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approached the play within the then already rapidly dissolving framework of the sovereign nation-state, reading it as a depiction of a repressive regime in Britain, Africa, Latin America, Turkey –or, at most, all of these places at once, given the play’s unlocalized, metaphorical setting (Gross, 1991; Lawson, 1991; Morley, 1991; Wardle, 1991)–.1 I would suggest, however, that it is both possible and illuminating to approach Party Time in a way that transcends the nation-state paradigm by situating the play instead within the matrix of the complex, contradictory processes of late capitalist globalization that were decisively intensified after the symbolic end of the Cold War in 1989. But there is another dimension to the liminality of Party Time, namely the fact that it co-existed in the early 1990s with the continuing presence in British theatre of the state-of-the-nation play, social-realist pieces that focus on “specific, fully realized individuals [...] always against a greater sense of history in motion” (Rebellato, 248), often include a “panoramic range of public (and sometimes private) settings”, employ “epic timespans” and are usually performed in large theatres, “preferably with a national profile” (Rebellato, 246). Thematically, these are plays where the state –the public political body– and the nation –people with a “shared temperament, language, history, culture, landscape and so on” (Rebellato, 248)– are jointly examined and often an imbalance between them is diagnosed (Rebellato, 249). David Hare’s trilogy of the early 1990s, formed by Racing Demon (National Theatre, Cottesloe Auditorium, February 1990), Murmuring Judges (National Theatre, Olivier Auditorium, November 1991) and The Absence of War (National Theatre, Olivier Auditorium, 1993), is a highly pertinent instance of the state-of-the-nation play in the context of this essay, given its post-1989 contemporaneousness with both the onset of globalization and with Pinter’s Party Time. As Michael Billington notes in State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945, the progressive collapse of communism in Eastern Europe after 1989 led to the disappearance for left-wing intellectuals, including most British playwrights, of any remaining faith in the grand narrative of state socialism (2007: 327). This was compounded in Britain by a “domestic political coup” in November 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was ousted from the Conservative leadership by her own party (Billington, 2007: 328). Hare’s trilogy was among a series of early-1990s social-realist plays that addressed this double crisis.2 Each play in the trilogy anatomizes a key institution –the Anglican Church, the judiciary and the executive power respectively– through a series of individuals that compose it or come into contact with it. Thus, to take Racing Demon as an example, the play examines a series of controversial questions affecting the Anglican

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Church in the early 1990s –such as the ordination of women, homosexuality within and outside the Church, Christian fundamentalism, the Church’s relations with political power or the role of the Church in a society torn apart by the effects of Thatcherite policies– through six ecclesiastical and six lay characters, men and women, each of whom embodies a different standpoint. The play is built around the confrontation of ideas and perspectives between the different characters in such a way that, beyond the confusion and even despair experienced by many of them, certain solid dramatic, theatrical and even ideological foundations remain untroubled –as Christopher Bigsby put it in 1981 in an extended critical reflection on post-war British theatre, in naturalistic state-of-the-nation plays “language [is] transparent, a clear glass through which to observe [and debate] social realities” (35)–. And just as language –and its corollary, subjectivity– remains stable in Racing Demon, so too do representations of space. Over and beyond the range of locations, we always know where we are in Racing Demon –unambiguously on British (mostly English) soil, in locations that represent different aspects of one key national institution and, ultimately, metaphorically address the disarrayed, divided state of British society in the early 1990s–. In other words, while Hare’s trilogy remained firmly rooted in the state-of-the-nation and the nation-state paradigms, theatrical and political respectively, Pinter’s Party Time was moving in a different direction, one inflected by globalization. One of the key changes brought about by globalization is precisely a radical alteration of the way space is experienced. As early as 1989, in The Condition of Postmodernity, the leading contemporary spatial theorist David Harvey coined the phrase ‘time-space compression’ to designate a defining characteristic of globalization, which he conceived of as the latest “fierce round in that process of annihilation of space through time that has always lain at the centre of capitalism’s dynamic” (1989: 293). For Harvey, however, the growing dissolution of spatial barriers and the increasing perception of spatial interconnectedness result in the “reaffirmation and realignment of hierarchy within what is now a global [...] system” (1989: 295). Therefore, while this latest round of time-space compression compels us “to alter [...] how we represent the world to ourselves” (1989: 240), such transformed representation needs to take into account both the unprecedented possibilities that are opened up and also the dangers with which the new global space is fraught –“fragmentation, insecurity, and ephemeral uneven development” (1989: 296)–. Harvey’s key notion of the ‘uneven geographies’ of globalization is shaped in turn by his distinction between absolute, relative and relational

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conceptualizations of space (2006: 121-26), a distinction that can throw some light on the differential treatment of space in the classic state-of-thenation play as opposed to Party Time and other post-1989 British plays that steer away from the state-of-the-nation paradigm in order to imaginatively address some of the challenges brought about by globalization –Sara Kane’s Blasted (1995), Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) and Martin Crimp’s short play Fewer Emergencies (2002) will be considered here–. It is worth noting that they are all pre-9/11 plays – fascinatingly, Crimp finished writing Fewer Emergencies precisely on 10 September 2001, as indicated on the last page of the 2002 Faber edition– so the focus of this essay is on that transitional moment from the nationstate paradigm to full-scale globalization. “Absolute space”, writes Harvey, “is fixed [...] a pre-existing and immoveable grid [...] a primary space of individuation [...] the space of private property and other bounded territorial designations”, such as nation-states (2006: 121). It is this kind of stable space, as noted above, that is represented in classic state-of-the-nation plays such as Hare’s Racing Demon. In the relational conceptualization of space, in contrast, it is not only impossible to disentangle space from time, as in Einsteinian relative space, but “[a]n event or thing at a point in space cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at that point. It depends upon everything else going on around it” (Harvey, 2006: 124). Ultimately, Harvey argues that there is no ontological answer to the question as to whether space is absolute, relative or relational; rather, human practice makes use of different conceptualizations of space depending on the nature of the phenomena under investigation (2006: 125-26). The radically transformed experience of space-time within globalization seems to require a relational conceptualization, which also underpins political philosopher Étienne Balibar’s notions of the ‘topography of cruelty’ and the ‘superborder’, expounded in his thought-provoking “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence”, a pre-9/11 essay like the plays under examination here. For Balibar, globalization is inseparable from cruelty or extreme violence, which he discusses in the spatial terms of a topography ripe with theatrical metaphors –“the causes and effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and the same stage, but on different ‘scenes’ or ‘stages’” (15; emphasis added)–. Globalization depends on a permanent state of extreme violence “without borders or beyond borders” resulting from the collapse of the Cold War system after 1989, which blurred the boundaries between ‘war’ –‘civil’ or ‘foreign’– and ‘peace’ and between the fields of politics and violence (Balibar, 22; emphasis original). Extreme violence is

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in fact “the very heart of [the] everyday life” of contemporary democratic societies –it is banal, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, rather than exceptional (Balibar, 18-19)– but the crucial fact to be grasped is that it is systematically displaced ‘elsewhere’. Balibar’s key contention is indeed a spatial one, namely, that at the moment when globalization is creating unprecedented possibilities for worldwide interconnection, both economic and cultural, it is also enacting a violent bio-political division of humanity into ‘life-zones’ and ‘death-zones’, “which indeed are intricate, frequently reproduced within the boundaries of a single country or city”, and between which there exists a superborder that is both “decisive and fragile [...] at the same time an object of permanent show and a hot place for intervention” (Balibar, 24).3 Balibar’s decisive yet fragile superborder, in other words, is an eminently relational concept in Harvey’s terms, simultaneously a line of demarcation and the site where the intricate interdependence of processes and events across the contemporary globalized world becomes apparent – which turns it, as Balibar points out, into a key point for intervention. The Balibarian superborder and its concomitant displacement of violence also resonates powerfully with Zygmunt Bauman’s reflection on the ethical crisis of postmodernity, fuelled by the “huge distance –both in time and space– [...] between the deeds and their outcomes” (Bauman, 17), between “the two poles of action –the ‘doing’ and the ‘suffering’ one” (Bauman, 125)–. This essay suggests that Party Time, Blasted, Far Away and Fewer Emergencies operate as ethical solicitations vis-à-vis spectators by simultaneously highlighting and disturbing the superborder through nonnaturalistic, relational representations of space that bring together, within the theatre situation, Bauman’s “two poles of action”.

Party Time: Thresholds and Crossings To go back to Party Time, interestingly, Terry Eagleton’s commentary on the play in the Times Literary Supplement objected to it precisely in terms of its treatment of space. According to Eagleton, “what was always most disturbing about [Pinter’s] drama was the intersection of the two realms [...] of violence and exploitation on the one hand, everyday life on the other” (20); the problem in Party Time, he claimed, was that “the two worlds [the guests at the cocktail party vs. the violence going on offstage] simply occupy different theatrical spaces” (20). However, if the state-of the-nation and the nation-state paradigms are left behind and Party Time is approached instead in the light of globalization, it becomes possible to delineate an alternative view of its treatment of space.

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In Party Time Dusty, Jimmy’s sister, functions as an onstage witness. From the moment she walks in to join the party, she begins asking questions that disturb the superborder between the life-zone and the deathzone, the party and the extreme if unspecified violence going on beyond the half-open, dimly-lit door –the line of demarcation that the rest of the guests want to keep decisively in place–. Dusty’s questions about her brother Jimmy are unsettling precisely because they highlight the fragility of the superborder, unnervingly reminding the other guests and spectators alike that the security and comfort of the life-zone is structurally dependent on the extreme, obscene violence going on ‘elsewhere’, in the death-zone that Balibar refers to as a different stage –in this case quite literally off-stage, beyond the half-open door–. Ultimately, however, it is through theatrical rather than purely discursive means that the “cast iron peace” (Pinter, 437) of globalization – its dependence, as Balibar notes (22), on a state of permanent violence– is forcefully brought home to the audience. Twice in the course of the play “The lights in the room dim. The light beyond the open door gradually intensifies. It burns into the room. The door light fades down. The room lights come up” (Pinter, 442 and 452). Quite literally, that is, the deathzone threatens to invade the life-zone of the party, ‘burning into it’ as well as across the fourth wall into the auditorium. At the end of the play, the room lights are dimmed one last time while the intensification of the light from the door is reinforced by Jimmy’s presence in the doorway and by his voice as he delivers the hallucinatory testimonial speech that evokes the extreme violence he has experienced in the death-zone of globalization: JIMMY: Sometimes I hear things. Then it’s quiet. I had a name. It was Jimmy. People called me Jimmy. That was my name. [...] Sometimes a door bangs, I hear voices, then it stops. Everything stops. It all stops. It all closes. It closes down. It shuts. It all shuts. It shuts down. It shuts. I see nothing at any time any more. I sit sucking the dark. It’s what I have. The dark is in my mouth and I suck it. It’s the only thing I have. It’s mine. It’s my own. I suck it. (Pinter, 456)

The play thus finally brings physically together in the same (theatrical) space the causes and effects of violence, which are normally kept apart on different ‘scenes’ or ‘stages’ (Balibar, 15) –precisely the reason why the bringing together must be non-naturalistic–. An alternative, thoroughly relational spatialization is produced through a theatrical crossing of borders wherein spectators are positioned as double witnesses, both to

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Jimmy’s testimonial speech and to themselves (Felman and Laub, 58) – impelled, that is, to imaginatively fill in the details of the atrocities evoked in Jimmy’s testimonial speech and to reflect, relationally, on how “[their] privileges are located on the same map as [the] suffering [of others]” (Sontag, 92; emphasis added) within a deeply fractured yet thoroughly interconnected global culture–.

Blasting a Hole between ‘Here’ and ‘Elsewhere’ In Sarah Kane’s Blasted, naturalistic spatial boundaries are torn apart in a far more ‘in-yer-face’ manner than in the case in Party Time. As is well known, the play, divided into five scenes and located, according to the opening stage directions, in “a very expensive hotel room in Leeds” (Kane, 3), begins by exploring the abusive relationship between Ian, a middle-aged tabloid journalist, and Cate, a naive young woman, in a fundamentally naturalistic way –characters have names, ages, accents, jobs; the location is English; the language is recognizable everyday English–. In other words, we seem to be in front of a standard socialrealist play; it is only at the end of the second scene, when a Soldier carrying a rifle bursts in and the hotel room is blasted apart by a bomb that leaves a large hole in one of the walls, that naturalistic conventions give way and the play takes off in an increasingly surreal, violent direction. Crucially, the naturalistic stability of place dissolves after the blast at the end of Scene Two. Where are we supposed to be now? Is this still a hotel room in Leeds? We seem to be in the middle of a war, has war come to Leeds? Or has the action been transported to a war zone, possibly Bosnia, where war was raging while Kane was writing the play? There are no simple naturalistic answers to those frequently asked questions; rather, the huge hole in the wall caused by the bomb blast bypasses the boundaries of naturalism in order to signal, simultaneously, the fragility of the superborder between life-zones and death-zones and the transition into the surreal horrors of the second part of the play. The hole, that is, conjures up on stage a relational space where the mutual dependence of the ‘here’ and the ‘elsewhere’ becomes tangible. Kane’s well-known commentary on the play, linking its bipartite formal composition to her awareness of the siege of Srebrenica as she was writing the play, is highly pertinent in that respect: I asked myself: ‘What could possibly be the connection between a common rape in a Leeds hotel room and what’s happening in Bosnia?’ And then suddenly this penny dropped and I thought: ‘Of course, it’s obvious. One is the seed and the other is the tree’. And I do think that the

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Ultimately, however, the hole in the hotel room in Blasted exceeds Bosnia –as Billington notes, for instance, in Thomas Ostermeier’s Berlin Schaubühne production in 2005, the play became “an oblique comment on Iraq” (2007: 357)–.4 The bomb blast blows away the Balibarian superborder and counterpoints Ian’s refusal, as a journalist, to think relationally, to look beyond the borders of the nation-state –“I’m a home journalist, for Yorkshire. I don’t cover foreign affairs” (Kane, 48), he states– in order to become a witness to the Soldier’s experience as both a victim and a perpetrator of atrocity –“Tell them you saw me”, the Soldier asks Ian (Kane, 48)–. The play’s abrupt disruption of the known parameters of naturalistic theatrical discourse, its brutal dissolution of the superborder through the blast and its thematization of witnessing powerfully interpellate spectators by implacably unsettling any attempt at ethical distantiation, at remaining detached voyeurs and thus keeping the atrocities that happen ‘elsewhere’, in the death-zone, firmly and decisively on the other side of the superborder.

Far Away: Resisting Relationality In terms of post-1989, pre-9/11 British theatre, perhaps the crucial thing the bomb explosion in Blasted decisively contributed to blowing away was the inward-looking naturalism of state-of-the-nation plays in order to insist on the relational nature of spaces and experiences in the context of globalization –the fragility of the superborder, the paper-thin wall indeed between life-zones and death-zones, the violence that is the banal underbelly of civilization–. In the original production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2000, an idyllic rural scene featuring a cosy white cottage nestling in very Englishlooking rolling hills, painted on the stage curtain, framed the play’s increasingly surreal exploration of the resistance, on the part of the inhabitants of the life-zone, to acknowledge the thoroughly relational nature of globalization and the fragility of the superborder. With “everybody talk[ing] quietly as if all was normal”, as one reviewer put it (Bassett, 2000), the play hovers on the outer boundaries of naturalism as it opens on a young girl, Joan, who is having trouble sleeping at her aunt’s home after she hears a noise outside, “a shriek [...] like a person screaming” (Churchill, 6). Like Dusty in Party Time, Joan

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insists on asking her aunt Harper probing questions about the noise; she even goes out a window and down a tree in the middle of the night because, she says, “I wanted to see” (Churchill, 7; emphasis added). She is, in other words, a would-be witness, repeatedly dissatisfied by Harper’s patently false replies and bent on exposing the violence she has seen, performed by no other than her own uncle in his own backyard. Joan’s relational questions work to remind spectators that such extreme violence is banal –it tends to be both physically and psychologically displaced, but it actually underpins the ‘normality’ of existence in the life-zones of globalization–. Significantly, the ultimately successful reassertion of the superborder in Joan’s consciousness is celebrated by Harper in spatial terms: Of course. I’m not surprised you can’t sleep, what an upsetting thing to see. But now you understand, it’s not so bad. You’re part of a big movement now to make things better. You can be proud of that. You can look at the stars and think here we are in our little bit of space, and I’m on the side of the people who are putting things right, and your soul will expand right into the sky. (Churchill, 14-15; emphases added)

The play thus suggests that in order to be able to experience and, indeed, enjoy the expansive perception of space that characterises globalization, the inhabitants of the life-zone need to learn –as Joan eventually does– to cancel out from ethical consciousness both the superborder and the violence that sustains it. In Part 2 of the play, an older Joan, tamed into productivity, and her co-worker Todd are engaged in making hats for a competition. The hats become bigger and increasingly extravagant until the point is reached when “A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution” is staged (Churchill, 24). The surreal parade incongruously and provocatively dissolves the superborder as much as it simultaneously discards any remaining traces of naturalism –it brings the life-zone (the ‘artistic’ hats) and the death-zone (the chained prisoners) physically together on stage in a thoroughly relational conceptualization of space that powerfully casts spectators as witnesses to Joan’s resistance to witnessing at this point–. Both Joan’s and Todd’s ethical distantiation is made clear at this point and, crucially, it is linked to their admiration for the hats’ beautiful artistry –“It seems so sad to burn [the hats] with the bodies”, Joan casually points out, to which Todd replies, “No, I think that’s the joy of it. It’s like a metaphor for something or other” (Churchill, 25)– in what amounts to a self-reflexive interrogation of the limits and possibilities of both representing and being a spectator to atrocities in art.

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The Royal Court production of the play underlined the parade scene’s central concern with confronting the audience with the ethical implications of representation and spectatorship through a specific spatial treatment –it was the only scene where the naturalistic limits of the stage were trespassed as the rear opened up to reveal line after line of chained prisoners, including children, shuffling forward towards execution “as if on a catwalk in a beauty pageant” (Aston, 119)–. In the global, apocalyptic, surreal war of all against all that rages in Part 3 of Far Away, in which all kinds of animals and humans, as well as inanimate beings such as coffee, light, noise, the weather and many more are all involved, neither Harper nor Todd nor Joan occupy a privileged position within the life-zone any more –indeed, the fragile superborder seems to have all but collapsed into a permanent, chaotic state of war–. In this context, Joan’s final monologue metamorphoses from a statement of her continuing ethical indifference to the suffering of others –the child under five she has killed, the girls whose mouths were bleeding, the piles of bodies by the side of the road (Churchill, 37)– into a poetic dissolution of all remaining borders when she utters the line on which the play ends, “But I didn’t know whose side the river was on” (Churchill, 38). Joan’s statement foregrounds the point the earlier proliferation of sides involved in the bizarre global war had started to make, namely, the utter absurdity of and the risks involved in the bio-political division of the world into lifezones and death-zones when we all actually live in the same space, the same global, thoroughly relational ecosystem. Joan’s final tentative gesture of putting her foot in the river amounts to an attempt to definitely break down the superborder and actively begin taking ethical responsibility for others and for the globe itself. Together with her young self’s role as witness, the hat parade and the global war, Joan’s stepping into the river gestures to spectators, asking them to see that the death-zones and the lifezones are not truly far away, but rather inextricably bound up with each other in one single global, relational space.

Fewer Emergencies: A Satirical Parable of the Global ‘Topography of Cruelty’ In Crimp’s short piece Fewer Emergencies, the most experimental of the plays being considered here, three nameless speakers, 1, 2 and 3, unmarked for gender and other personal characteristics and located in an unspecified setting, narrate a series of events affecting the child of a wellto-do family, confusingly named Bobby and, on one occasion, Jimmy. Neither the three anonymous speakers nor the absent protagonists are

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traditional naturalistic characters, and the narrated events are never shown happening on stage. But rather than enact a (postmodern) “constant resistance to meaning”, as has been suggested (Ledger, 131; emphasis original), the play’s lack of naturalistic specificity, enhanced by the bare set in its first English production at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2005, is itself one of the means by which spectators are prompted to “consider relationships between text and possible contexts” (Barnett, 17).5 In fact Fewer Emergencies points to a very specific kind of context –the core conflict of globalization, epitomised by the superborder between lifezones and death-zones– and interpellates spectators regarding the position they occupy in such a violently polarized yet relational world. In Fewer Emergencies Crimp creates a highly satirical parable of the global topography of cruelty through imagining Bobby’s house and neighbourhood as a paradigmatic life-zone, a space of material excess. The contents of Bobby’s room range from “a shelf full of oak trees, and another where pine forests border a mountain lake” to pornography (Crimp, 2005: 45). He keeps “the island of Manhattan” in a secret drawer, “the city of Paris” and “a Japanese golf course” in another cupboard, a “wardrobe full of uranium and another full of cobalt [...] and a row of universities –good ones” on a little shelf (2005: 45)–. And the key, of course, “hanging from the shelf, like the Beethoven quartets and fertility clinics [...] the key to use in emergencies, the key to get out of the house”, where he is locked in “for his own protection” (2005: 45). As a rioting crowd threatens to bring down Bobby’s home, the lifezone –Bobby’s home and neighbourhood– and the death-zone –a deterritorialized, nomadic mob of immigrants, whose designated space within globalization lies beyond the superborder, always “under permanent threat of elimination [...] and perceived as a threat to ‘civilization’” (Balibar, 26)– begin to violently intersect in the speakers’ narrative, thus foregrounding the fragility of the superborder, the banality rather than exceptionality of the emergency being recounted, and the deeply divisive yet thoroughly relational nature of globalization. To put it differently, the distance between the causes and effects of violence, which do not normally occur on the same scene or stage (Balibar, 15), becomes blurred in the speakers’ narrative, while at the same it remains firmly in place in terms of theatrical space, since neither the life-zone nor the death-zone is directly displayed on stage, much less shown sharing the same physical ‘scene’ or space. The very real bio-political division of humanity that underpins globalization is thus forcefully highlighted –that is the decisiveness of the superborder that Balibar speaks of.

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At the end of the piece, the key for use in emergencies becomes the main instrument for bringing spectators into the ethical frame through the production, once again, of an alternative spatialization. After Bobby is caught in the hip by a gunshot, Speaker 2 describes him as wanting to “reach the key”, while Speaker 1 adds he is going to use it in order to “open the door”; 2 and 3 then concur he “must be / completely mad” (Crimp, 2005: 47). As the speakers’ narrative imagines the possibility that Bobby might share his space –i.e. let the rioting crowd into the life-zone– their insistence that in the life-zone “Things are definitely looking up [...] Brighter light –more frequent boating– more confident smiles” (Crimp, 2005: 48) is troubled both by their account of how a bleeding Bobby attempts to reach the key and, in performance, by the gradual darkening of both the stage and the auditorium –lit in a fluid, malleable green light up to that point in the 2005 Royal Court production– until a complete blackout is reached and all spectators can hear is, 1 [...] He’s closer to the key. [...] see how / it swings. 2 See how the key swings. 3 That’s right, Bobby-boy. Watch the key. Watch the key swinging. (Crimp, 2005: 49)

On the one hand, by becoming invisible to Bobby, the speakers and spectators alike, the key paradoxically trespasses the fourth-wall boundary, thus effecting a transformation of the theatre situation that conjures up an alternative, relational space. Simultaneously, the key is foregrounded in the speakers’ narrative in such a way that it becomes the site for the ethical dilemma confronting spectators, cast by this stage as witnesses to themselves –acknowledging the profoundly relational character of globalization and refusing or failing to do so are two options that ‘swing’ over their heads, just as the key (invisibly) swings before their eyes–.

Alternative Spatializations and Spectatorial ‘Response-ability’ Party Time, Blasted, Far Away and Fewer Emergencies, in short, are plays where a number of interconnected borders are crossed – fundamentally, the nation-state and state-of-the-nation paradigms are left behind and globalization is addressed through non-naturalistic, relational representations of space–. Both on stage and within the theatre situation, alternative spatializations are conjured up so that, in Erika Fischer-Lichte’s formulation, “the performative space [itself becomes] a liminal space of transformation” (2008: 120) that taps into the audience’s ethical powers of

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witnessing and imagination. Spectators, that is, are compelled to confront the violently divisive reality of globalization and their own ‘responseability’ (Lehmann, 185) in relation to it, as well as prompted to imagine what could be –an alternative global order sustained by ethical proximity and connectedness–.6

Works Cited Aston, Elaine 2001: Caryl Churchill. Tavistock: Northcote House. Balibar, Étienne 2001: ‘Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence’. Constellations 8.1: 15-29. Barnett, David 2008: ‘When is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts’. New Theatre Quarterly 24.1: 14-23. Bassett, Kate 2000: Rev. of Far Away. Theatre Record 20.24: 1577. Bauman, Zygmunt 1993: Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bigsby, Christopher W. E. 1981: ‘The Language of Crisis in British Theatre: The Drama of Cultural Pathology’. Christopher W. E. Bigsby, ed. Contemporary Drama in English. London: Edward Arnold. 11-51. Billington, Michael 1991. Rev. of Party Time, by Harold Pinter. Theatre Record 11.23: 1397. —. 2007: State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945. London: Faber. Churchill, Caryl 2000: Far Away. London: Nick Hern Books. Crimp, Martin 2002: Face to the Wall and Fewer Emergencies. London: Faber. —. 2005: Fewer Emergencies (Whole Blue Sky, Face to the Wall, Fewer Emergencies). London: Faber. Eagleton, Terry 1991: ‘Out of the Closet’. Times Literary Supplement 15 November: 20. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub 1992: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, Erika 2008 (2004): The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans. Saskya Iris Jayn. London and New York: Routledge. Gross, John 1991: Rev. of Party Time, by Harold Pinter. Theatre Record 11.23: 1399. Hare, David 1990: Racing Demon. London: Faber. Harvey, David 1989: The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2006: Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London and New York: Verso.

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Hassell, Graham 1991: Rev. of Party Time, by Harold Pinter. Theatre Record 11.23: 1399-1400. Kane, Sarah 2002: Blasted. London: Faber. Lawson, Mark 1991: Rev. of Party Time, by Harold Pinter. Theatre Record 11 (23): 1397. Ledger, Adam 2010: ‘ “Does What?”: Acting, Directing, and Rehearsing Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies’. New Theatre Quarterly 26.2: 121-32. Lehmann, Hans-Thies 2006 (1999): Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge. Morley, Sheridan 1991: Rev. of Party Time, by Harold Pinter. Theatre Record 11.23: 1395. Pinter, Harold 1993: Plays Four: Betrayal. Monologue. One for the Road. Mountain Language. Family Voices. A Kind of Alaska. Victoria Station. Precisely. The New World Order. Party Time. Moonlight. Ashes to Ashes. Celebration. London: Faber. Rebellato, Dan 2007: ‘From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwriting’. Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst, eds. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama. Oxford: Blackwell. 245-62. Reinelt, Janelle 2001: ‘Performing Europe: Identity Formation for a ‘New’ Europe’. Theatre Journal 53.3: 365-87. Sierz, Aleks 2006: The Theatre of Martin Crimp. London: Methuen. Soncini, Sara 2007: “New Order, New Borders: Post-Cold War Europe on the British Stage”. Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini, eds. Myths of Europe. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 247-61. Sontag, Susan 2004: Regarding the Pain of Others. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wardle, Irving 1991: Rev. of Party Time, by Harold Pinter. Theatre Record 11:23. 139

Notes ________________________________ 1

This was also Pinter’s own view of the play at the time (personal communication). Billington refers to Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest (1990), Tariq Ali’s and Howard Brenton’s Moscow Gold (1990), David Edgar’s The Shape of the Table (1990) and, indeed, Hare’s trilogy (2007: 328-34). On her part, Janelle Reinelt examines three plays, Complicite’s Mnemonic (1999), David Edgar’s Pentecost (1994) and David Greig’s Europe (1994), which “confront the challenge of imagining and critiquing the New Europe” (367), while Sara Soncini reads a series of post-1989, ‘New Europe’ plays in the light of “a set of images, topics and motifs encoded in the foundational European myth, that of Europa and the bull” (247). To Billington’s

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and Reinelt’s lists she adds, among others, Howard Brenton’s Berlin Bertie (1992), David Edgar’s The Prisoner’s Dilemma (2001), and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) and Credible Witness (2001). She devotes particular attention Greig’s Europe (1994), Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Peter Whelan’s A Russian in the Woods (2001). Like the present essay, Reinelt’s and Soncini’s revisions extend to just before 9/11, although neither makes that explicit; unlike the present essay, their focus is on the construction of post-Cold War Europe. 3 The emergence of post-Cold War Europe within the general framework of globalization constitutes, for Balibar, a particular manifestation of the superborder –“along with the development of a formal ‘European citizenship’, a real ‘European Apartheid’ has emerged”, he writes (19)–. The Treaties of Schengen (1985; 1990) and Maastricht (signed 1992; implemented 1993) dissolved internal borders and enabled free circulation for European citizens, while at the same time placing new barriers around the European Union (‘Fortress Europe’) and creating a population of second-class immigrant residents who are not recognized as European nationals and are therefore deprived of full political and social citizenship. 4 Soncini, in contrast, reads Blasted exclusively in the light of “the Yugoslav tragedy” (255). 5 Fewer Emergencies had its first productions in 2004, at the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris and the Schaubühne in Berlin (Sierz, 68). 6 Research towards this essay was carried out with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (research project FFI2009-07598/FILO) as well as of the research group GRAE-Grup de Recerca en Arts Escèniques, funded by AGAUR-Generalitat de Catalunya. An earlier, considerably shorter version, not including Blasted, was presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama (CDE), Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, June 2-5, 2011, and has been published as “Globalization, Space and the Ethics of Witnessing: Party Time (1991), Far Away (2000) and Fewer Emergencies (2002)” in Ethical Debates in Contemporary Theatre and Drama, eds. Mark Berninger and Bernhard Reitz (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012).

PART II TRANSLATING AND ADAPTING FOR FOREIGN AUDIENCES

CHAPTER SIX BECKETT’S THEATRE: TRANSLATING AND ADAPTING ONE’S OWN WORK MARIANNE DRUGEON

Beckett is not the first to have translated his own literary creation,1 but his self-translation stands out because it is systematic. He has produced a bilingual oeuvre, which is also dual, bicephalic according to Edith Fournier (1990),2 because the two versions are stylistically and semantically different. The figure of Janus, the God of beginnings and transitions, and the figure of Echo are recurring mythological references in Beckett’s work, peopled as it is with twins, couples, and monologues with oneself which easily read as dialogues. But central as it is to his work, translating for Beckett is a painful process, because it implies choices, deviations, elisions and corruptions of the original version. This implies not only the words used, but also the atmosphere of the whole play, which is influenced by the country of the language used, and it thus may jeopardize the meaning of the play as a whole, which is not only a text but also a performance.

Similar or Different, Two Differing Versions Beckett repeating his own words through translation mirrors his characters: like the narrator of Stories, he is “always muttering, the same old mutterings, the same old stories, the same old questions and answers” (1967: 134) and like Hamm in Endgame, he enjoys “the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” (110).3 But, just as the stories are not always the same, the translations are but the copies of an original version, and Beckett seems to be daring us to find the meaning of the ever so slight differences that appear.

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The same question has indeed been haunting the critics of Beckett: is Beckett’s use of one language more familiar, or more poetic, more comical or more tragic than his use of the other? According to Ludovic Janvier with whom he worked on the translation of Watt, Beckett used French more freely because it was not his mother tongue. In French Beckett was innocent, and he could go as far as he wished.4 If we compare the two versions of Waiting for Godot, the English sometimes sounds more poetic than the French, for instance with this description of the moon at the end of act one: “je regarde la blafarde” (1952: 73) for “pale for weariness […] of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us” (50). But on the other hand, Beckett is not always successful in rendering the poetry of the French: thus the alternating fourand five-syllable lines of the poetic exchange about the tree in Act one lose much of their rhythm and power in translation: ESTRAGON: Qu’est-ce que c’est? / What is it? VLADIMIR: On dirait un saule. / I don’t know. A willow. ESTRAGON: Où sont les feuilles? Where are the leaves? VLADIMIR: Il doit être mort / Must be dead ESTRAGON: Finis les pleurs / No more weeping. (1952: 15 / 17)

The same conclusion would follow any closer study of the quality of each version. We would thus find, analysing the level of speech, that neither English nor French is more elevated,5 and that instead of translating word for word the first version, Beckett created a whole new dissonant voice in another language. Beckett does not try to repeat word for word each cue, but instead works at creating a whole new dissonant voice. Indeed, Beckett does not merely translate his humour, or his style, but displaces it, varies its character. By a system of compensation he is thus free not to translate some passages, which he deems untranslatable, and to add lines elsewhere in the play. But what is even more telling is Beckett’s way of translating literary allusions, indeed his different versions are not only variations, parodies of his own texts, but also parodies of traditional literary references. Pascale Sardin-Damestoy (2002) takes a very telling example: in Play the English sentence “Kissing their sour kisses” (315) becomes “se baisant jaune de leurs jaunes baisers” (1972: 27). This colourful chiasmic structure also recalls the expressions “rire jaune” (to give a forced laugh) and “rouge baiser” (the bright red colour of a lipstick), and it is an intertextual reference to Tristan Corbière’s collection of poems: Amours Jaunes (SardinDamestoy, 54)

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Beckett is indeed a master at adapting cultural references but what is even more intriguing is how he plays with quotations of famous poets or playwrights: in Happy Days, Winnie quotes Cymbeline (IV, 2, 258): “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” (148), while in the French Oh les beaux jours, she slightly misquotes Racine’s play Athalie (II, 9): “Qu’ils pleurent, oh mon Dieu, qu’ils frémissent de honte” (1963: 32). Indeed, the choir in Athalie says: “Qu’ils pleurent, ô mon Dieu, qu’ils frémissent de crainte” (Racine, 1047). But the best-known instance of such allusion to the literary canon is without a doubt to be found in Fin de partie, with the quotation of Baudelaire’s poem “Recueillement”: Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille Tu réclamais le soir; il descend; le voici. (Baudelaire, 221).

Hamm, in his last monologue, pathetically exclaims: HAMM: […] Un peu de poésie. (Un temps.) Tu appelais – (Un temps. Il se corrige.) Tu RÉCLAMAIS le soir; il vient – (Un temps. Il se corrige) Il DESCEND: le voici. (Il reprend, très chantant.) Tu réclamais le soir; il descend : le voici. (Un temps.) Joli ça. (1957: 110-111)

Hamm himself repeats the lines, and ironically comments on their beauty thus deflating it. The English version reads: HAMM: […] A little poetry. (Pause.) You prayed – (Pause. He corrects himself) You CRIED for night; it comes – (Pause. He corrects himself.) It FALLS: now cry in darkness. (Pause.) Nicely put, that. (133)

This translation of Baudelaire’s poem actually exists, and was published in 1954. It is the work of William Aggeler.6 The line reads: “You cried out for the Evening; Even now it falls”, while other translations of the same poem are all different. Even more telling, in the same collection of poems we find “Le Mort Joyeux”, whose themes are evidently linked to Fin de Partie. Aggeler’s translation of that poem ends with the line: “For this old soulless body, dead among the dead!” and Beckett also used this line in Endgame: “down among the dead. (Normal tone.) Nicely put, that.” (117) whereas this time Beckett’s French version is not a quotation of Baudelaire’s poem. In Fin de partie we find “mais il plongeait déjà, dans la…chez les morts. (Ton normal.) Joli ça.” (1957: 7172), whereas Baudelaire’s line in “Le Mort Joyeux” reads “mort parmi les morts” (Baudelaire, 102). Thus Beckett also plays with the various translations of original poems, as if they were creations of equal worth,

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part of our cultural and literary heritage, to be quoted, misquoted and parodied by his ham actors. But cultural humour is of particular interest in the jokes based on the foreigner’s image of the Englishman, which Beckett, as an Irishman, was able to share with a French audience, but which he seems to have thought unlikely to amuse an English one. Thus in En attendant Godot, Estragon jokes about the English phlegm: “Ce sont des gens câââms” (1952: 20), while the English version merely states: “Calm…calm…The English say cawm” (17). Beckett’s translations, it seems, are another occasion for him to go on playing with words, with registers, with puns and with culture. We nevertheless witness again the freedom with which he cuts some allusions, adds others and finds a whole new balance in the new version. Indeed, it is the meaning of the play as a whole which is defined again, and not only the meaning of a few words or a few cultural allusions. Alan Schneider, when speaking of his first encounter with the theatre of Beckett, when he watched En attendant Godot for the first time in Paris, in French, in 1954, explains how he understood only a small part of the dialogue. His emotional reaction was nevertheless very strong, and when he read the English version the next year, he was as baffled as with the French that he could not understand (Schneider, 181). One can infer from this account that Beckett’s theatre is not only a theatre of words, but that one can be moved by it even without understanding its intellectual meaning, and that one may put it on stage successfully without understanding it. Beckett himself, in a rehearsal of Glückliche Tage, the German version of Happy Days in Berlin, said that when he went to a theatre to put one of his plays on stage he studied the text as if it were written by somebody else (Knowlson, 1986/1990: 278). Not only is each version of a play a whole new creation, but each staging is also a whole new experience. This may contradict the widely held vision of Beckett’s plays and stage directions as very precise and strict, Beckett refusing any freedom of interpretation taken with his text. Tellingly, when he himself put on stage his plays he would change some cues, or some stage directions according to his new interpretation of their meaning. A very good instance of that freedom can be found in his direction of Endgame in 1980. The stage directions of the published version state: “Clov gets up on the ladder, opens the window” (124). But in the notebooks he wrote for the rehearsal, he explains that Clov moves as little as possible because each move is painful for him: he finds it hard to stand erect, and as a consequence, instead of obeying Hamm’s orders, as the initial stage directions implied, he lies to him, and makes believe he

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walks up the ladder to open and close the window. Beckett’s stage directions in his notebook read: “2 steps loud, 2 steps softer” (Knowlson, 1986/1990: 280-281), while Clov remains on the first step of the ladder. His character evolves towards more trickery, more strength also, and the new tension between the two characters thus created puts into question their previous relationship as master and slave. But Beckett was not the only one to put his plays on stage, even when he was still alive: two stage-directors produced many of them, often with his consent, if not in his presence. On the one hand the French Roger Blin, an anti-realist intellectual who was resolutely set against the established theatre; on the other hand the American Alan Schneider, who followed Stanislavski’s teachings and often played the role of cultural adviser for American governments. The two had a very different way of preparing for those productions. Schneider, wearing a cap and a pair of knickers, was resolutely anti-intellectual and looked down on the stage-directors who deemed themselves creative and would take liberties with Beckett’s texts. He produced 33 plays of Beckett. His admiration, his faithfulness and accuracy do not mean he was incapable of suggesting changes, as he did for Play, replacing the name of one of the characters “Arsène” by “Erskine” The published version keeps that change (310), even if Beckett himself did not take part directly in the rehearsal. On the other side of the Atlantic, Roger Blin was the one thanks to whom Beckett became famous, and he was the only one who dared put on stage En attendant Godot. Blin would claim to have no theory and no distinctive style, his whim only seemed to dictate which scene to work on in rehearsal, he would not take notes, and would very rarely audition for the parts because he would choose plays according to the friends he wished to work with. His first staging of En attendant Godot in 1953 was followed by six other versions of the same play, in three different languages. In an interview he puts the stress on the many external circumstances which have an impact on the staging of a play: answering an accusation of having loitered while putting on stage En attendant Godot, he underlines the huge difference between France and the United States as to marginal theatre in the 1950s. While private subsidies can more easily be found overseas, French avant-garde artists have no money and a very few theatres are ready to take the financial risk of putting such plays on stage (Blin, 1986/1990). One may add, as another external element which has a huge impact on a production, the important influence of censorship in the United Kingdom at the time: indeed to Beckett’s amazement, the Lord Chamberlain insisted that in Waiting for Godot the word “erection” be removed. Similarly

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“Fartov” became “Popov” (42), and Mrs Gozzo had “warts” instead of “clap” (24). There even were attempts to ban the play completely, and only in 1964 did the first unexpurgated version of the play open. Its successful reception was also, partly, the result of chance. The critics were at first less than kind, but everything changed after two positive reviews in The Observer and The Sunday Times, and the play suddenly became the rage of London, winning an award, the name of which was especially coined for the occasion: “the Most Controversial Play of the Year”. In an article published on the Internet, Peter Hall explains: At the end of the year, the Evening Standard Awards were held for the first time. I was a non-voting member of the panel when Godot was considered as The Best New Play. Feelings ran high and the opposition, led by Sir Malcolm Sargent, threatened to resign if Godot won. An English compromise was worked out by changing the title of the award. Godot became The Most Controversial Play of the Year. (1997)

On the same line, living in France, Beckett would have found it difficult to have his first plays published directly in English, which can partly explain why he chose French, while at the end of his life, the main reason why he wrote most of his ‘Dramaticules’ in English first is because an English or an American radio or theatre would commission those plays. These are only a few instances of the importance of circumstances outside the playwright’s reach, but, to concentrate again on Beckett’s own choices, we may wonder why he took the trouble to translate all his plays himself. Would any other translator have produced the same result?

Combination, Organisation and Orchestration In a letter to his friend Axel Kaun, written as early as 1937, that is almost a decade before he became a French writer, Beckett wrote: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. (1983: 172)

It seems that for Beckett, language is not necessarily meant to convey a message; it is rather a succession of words which can be combined in various ways, either logically or illogically, so that, literally, his theatre plays on words, plays with words, trying out all possible associations. In

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that respect, the choice of one language over another loses its meaning, and Beckett even claims that he never knows beforehand which language he is going to choose when he starts writing. That claim contradicts the argument of many critics, according to whom the choice of French means for this Irish author a rejection of the mother tongue, as well as a rejection of his mother country, if not his own flesh and blood mother. It rather seems that Beckett, following the surrealists, considered any language as a mere tool, even if, as we have seen, he also associated one language with one culture. We may here be reminded that Beckett chose French in order, so he claimed, to write “without a style”, as he explained, in French, to Niklaus Gessner who was the first to publish a full-length study of Beckett (Gessner, 32). Beckett thus meant that, choosing French, he was not influenced by ways of thinking and speaking, by a culture. This is one more contradiction at the heart of his relation with words and languages, considering how he constantly quoted literary references in French also. Why then translate his plays? It may be, as we have seen, another way for him to go on playing with words. The second version could also be used as a mirror, an instrument allowing the author to check, thanks to a newly-acquired critical distance, his original creation: the reflection in the mirror is a linguistic echo. The nymph Echo was called ‘Double’ in French and ‘Diferencia’ in Spanish in classical times: again we find the same tension between a respect of the original, and a move towards difference, offering a whole new version. The image of the echo furthermore helps understanding how, through translation, Beckett sometimes came to rewrite the original version of his works. This is the case with Eh Joe, translated as Dis Joe. The published English text reads: “sit there in his stinking old wrapper hearing himself” (364), and the translation: “plus qu’à croupir sur ton lit dans ta vieille douiellette puante à t’écouter toimême” (1972: 85). The passage from the third person singular to the second person singular in French actually echoes an earlier version in English: “Sit there in you’re his stinking old wrapper xxxxxxx to yourself: hearing himself” (Sardin-Demestoy, 49)7. The constant movement to-andfro between the two languages is echoed by a movement between the different versions in each language. But Beckett granted himself such freedom only after years of selftranslation: at the beginning of his career as a writer in French, he was above all careful not to let slip any English idiom, and to write as pure a French as possible. He then consciously inserted odd expressions, both in his French and in his English texts. This is a manifestation of Beckett’s love of words, and pleasure in using them and playing with them, giving way to a very astonishing progressive contamination of French by English.

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This first appears in gallicisms, or “Frenglish”. In Play, the sentence “We were not long together when she smelled the rat” (308) was thus translated in Comédie as: “Nous n’étions pas longtemps ensemble et déjà elle sentait le rat” (1972: 12). Here Beckett decided against the equivalent translation of the expression “to smell the rat” which could have been “découvrir le pot aux roses”, and instead voluntarily produced a contaminated language, which also makes him translate the whole sentence word for word: “Nous n’étions pas longtemps ensemble” should more idiomatically have been “cela ne faisait pas longtemps que nous étions ensemble”. This new language seems slightly misplaced. According to Ludovic Janvier, Beckett’s way of writing English is slightly French, and his way of writing French is rather English: Cela me fait penser à une interference de langues, telle qu’on peut la voir apparaître chez Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud et, plus encore, Verlaine, c’est à dire quatre poètes qui parlaient l’anglais. […] Ca me paraît très bien aller avec le Beckettien, cette violence faite à la langue depuis une autre musique. (Janvier and Vaquin-Janvier, 64)

Here the use of the term “Beckettien” refers to Beckett’s own personal language, a very individual one, with its own sounds, its own interferences, its own references. This new language also creates a new type of theatre: Bernard Dort (1986/1990) thus notices the evolution in the way actors played Beckettian parts throughout the second part of the twentieth century. After the quite economical and spare acting of the 1950s, a new generation of actors offered a more varied translation of the plays on stage, and Dort links this to the fact that those actors evolved in two theatrical worlds, constantly wavering between the French and the English theatrical traditions, not forgetting the German and Italian traditions, for some of them, wavering also between French and English, and thus avoiding the temptation of taking up a set style. Thus David Warrilow, who worked under the direction of Alan Schneider, did play the parts of various plays both in French and in English. To illustrate his argument, Bernard Dort does not talk of Warrilow, but rather of actors who have actually been influenced by one tradition, or more than one: he analyses the acting of Pierre Dux as Hamm in Fin de partie, which was influenced by Labiche. Hamm was turned into an authoritative and cautious bourgeois. This, according to Bernard Dort, gave the character almost too much harmony, never allowing the grotesque into his play, and this was probably reducing Beckett’s character to only one reading, whereas he should always be on the brink of imbalance. The source of such loss of balance is to be found in

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Shakespeare rather than in Molière, so here Dux lacked a whole theatrical tradition the better to play his part. On the other hand, when Michel Bouquet played Pozzo in En attendant Godot, he managed to offer more than Roger Blin’s rather English eccentricity, adding a tinge of French realism to his character. He also suggested sudden moments of tension when Pozzo would not be only a reassuring and polite puppet anymore, but also a machine that could destroy other people. Thus, through the combination not only of different languages but also of different theatrical traditions, Beckett’s theatre was made hybrid, international, transnational. As we have seen, this hybridity does not only mix words but also sounds, and indeed, Beckett’s theatre should be orchestrated rather than put on stage. This has an important impact on Beckett’s role as a translator. Indeed, he would entirely give up translating a play if he was not able to find its own music, its own rhythm in the new language. Then he would only ‘adapt’ his play, and not ‘translate’ it. For instance, the first draft of Ohio Impromptu barely bears any correction, and the final version is semantically very close to the original in English.8 This is not the case with A Piece of Monologue, which went through several rewritings, and was finally “adapté de l’anglais par l’auteur” (1986: 27), with notably many lines not having been translated at all, because Beckett was unable to find the musicality of that play in French. This musicality really became of central importance in his later plays, and he said about Footfalls: “What matters is the rhythm of the piece –the words are merely what pharmacists call the excipient–” (qtd. by Brater, 38). But this search for a harmony of sounds was present at the beginning of Beckett’s career as well. Thus, Agnès Vaquin-Janvier recalls how he would react when faced with a problem in a translation: he seemed to be silently following an interior and very complex itinerary, like a music or a rhythm. He would count on his fingers, and translations would be chosen more because of the number of syllables in the words than because of the meaning of the words. This was true not only of the cues of the characters, but also of the stage directions, as the choreography of the moves had to be in harmony with the orchestration of speech (Vaquin-Janvier, 57-59). Alan Schneider also talks about Beckett’s taste for accuracy and order, as well as for rhythm, and adds that it never proved a limit to his own freedom as a stage director: “More than any other playwright, he deepened my own experience as a stage director” (Schneider, 186). The actor Jack McGowran has the same feeling: “Beckett cares for accuracy as regards intonation, rhythm and movement, and this seems rigorous, directive, but he never limits the imagination. He creates a space of freedom for the actors to work in, which they very rarely enjoy in the theatre today” (qtd.

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by Schneider, 186). Schneider also explains very technically how he comes to terms with a play by Beckett: “With the help of the silences which the playwright himself has interspersed his text with, I’ve always looked for the rhythm which organizes the play. […] Above all I’ve tried to work only with actors whom I thought were adapted to Beckett’s world” (Schneider, 185). One could go as far as talking of actors attuned to their text. Similarly, the actor David Warrilow (1986/1990) explains how, when he acts in a play by Beckett, he is guided by its music. He refuses to discuss the meaning of the play, never talks to Beckett about it either, but reacts first and foremost to its musical qualities. He also recounts that, working on A Piece of Monologue, he strove to pronounce the consonant sounds as precisely as possible, and on later listening to a recording of his voice, he discovered how it changed his voice, and gave it an oldfashioned and strange tone. This alien voice is the only one able to speak this alien music, Beckett’s own language, and unsurprisingly Warrilow also remarks that he did not have the same voice when acting in the English or in the French version of the same play. Delphine Seyrig, a French actress, uses the image of an orchestra: Il est comme un chef d’orchestre, il bat la mesure. […] Quand on travaille avec Beckett on se prend à regretter de ne pas avoir cette éducation presque musicale. […] Sam n’essaie pas d’expliquer ce que la pièce veut dire, la partie invisible de la pièce, il dit qu’il faut faire cela et cela, il faut le faire avec son corps, sa voix, ses lèvres. (Seyrig, 344)

Translators, stage-directors and actors, whether they be French, British or American seem thus to agree on the prevalence of music over meaning: a music which is different in each language, but also a return to the fundamental sounds of life and death, as Beckett himself defined his own theatre. Indeed, in a letter to Alan Schneider in 1957 Beckett writes: “My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else” (1983: 109). This very famous quotation can lead us in many different directions to understand this evolution in Beckett’s theatre. First of all we may notice how the adaptation of a play to the stage creates a sort of echoing chamber. Very specifically, the different productions that Beckett directed have had a concrete influence on his work over other plays. When, in 1980, Beckett put the stress on the rhythm and the noise of Krapp’s steps when he walks up and down the stage in Krapp’s Last Tape, or Clov’s movements to and from his kitchen in Endgame, it was most certainly the

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result of a previous work on Footfalls that Beckett had created at the Royal Court theatre in 1976. As sound becomes more important than meaning, so in A Piece of Monologue, a whole section of the text in English has been left out.9 The description of the positioning of the mouth, of the tongue and of the lips mimics not only the sound of the word “birth” (428), but also manages to impart its meaning. The word is born of the mouth, and the fundamental, defining moment of the birth of the character, his first breath (“faint cry”) (428), is echoing in the text in a very powerful way. Here the adaptation in French could not suggest the same idea with the word ‘naissance’, and Beckett, who at first had resolved not to translate the play at all, eventually decided to cut whole sections, once more disintegrating words through the process of translation. Translation is thus part of that process of disintegration which he systematically went through, with his mother tongue, then with his adopted language, and then again in the passage from one to the other. Each revision of a text is indeed an occasion for him to trim it, and get to the fundamental core of it. In an interview to the New York Times in 1956, Beckett explains: “At the end of my work there’s nothing but dust –the unnamable–. In the last book –L’innommable (1953)– there’s complete disintegration. No ‘I’, no ‘have’, no ‘being’. No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on” (The New York Times, 5 May 1956). This goes further than what he told his friend Axel Kaun he wanted to reach. Grammar, here represented by the nominative, the accusative and the verb, is disintegrated and turned into grains of dust, the very grains Clov talks about at the beginning of Endgame: “grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap” (93). Just like in the endgame in a chess play, when the pawns cannot move towards an ending, the playwright is stuck with his impossible heap of sounds, and there is no way to go, because he has gone as far as possible towards disintegration of meaning through disintegration of language. Here the end of the same letter to Axel Kaun appears as a manifesto: “Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. […] Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved”.10 Thus we find ourselves faced with a contradiction in terms: because choosing to translate a text is, by definition, adding another text, other words, more meaning, how can that be described as a movement towards disintegration?

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Towards Disappearance by Dint of Addition Translating a text, that is, writing it a second time in a different language, is also, as we have seen, rewriting the text, reworking its tone, its rhythm towards even more perfection. For Beckett, that work was very painful. The mere idea of having to translate Fin de partie was terrible, as he explains in a letter in 1957: “How sick and tired I am of translation, and what a losing battle it is always. Wish I had the courage to wash my hands of it all, I mean leave it to others and try and get on with some work” (Letter to Greevy, 3 July 1957, qtd. in Knowlson, 1996/2009: 438). Besides he found the result very disappointing: a few months later he confessed to the same friend “I find Fin de partie dreadful in English, all the sharpness gone, and the rhythms.” (qtd. in Knowlson, 1996/2009: 438). At the rehearsal of the play in London, on hearing his own translation of Clov’s punning remark about his telescope –“a multitude in transports of joy, That’s what I call a magnifier” (106)– he is said to have exclaimed: “It’s a rotten line. Bad translation… The more I go on the more I think things are untranslatable” (qtd. in Cockerham, 144). This incident shows that, for him, translation was not easier than creation. Indeed, it was a much more strenuous labour, which even made him physically ill, as Agnès Vaquin-Janvier remembers, after they had worked together on the translation of Watt: Une fois qu’il a été en possession du texte complet en français, il a tout réécrit à la main, sur des petits cahiers, et ça a été un tel effort qu’il en est tombé malade. […] Il a retravaillé à ce moment-là le fonctionnement interne du texte, les mécanismes qui doivent se mettre en route à l’intérieur de chaque séquence. Il est parfois arrivé à des résultats très éloignés du texte anglais, mais qui fonctionnaient en fait de la même manière, et c’était de ces déplacements apparents que naissait la fidélité vraie. (VaquinJanvier, 59)

The word “déplacement” could here be translated as ‘dislocation’, that is not only the discrepancy between the two versions, the change in location, but also the same process of dislocation, of body and mind, of the text and of Beckett himself. The translation of a play is for Beckett another occasion to try and reach the unreachable perfection, just as his characters try to reach the unreachable end; and just as the characters dislocate their bodies in the process, Beckett dislocates his text. It seems there is a curse cast on the whole project: Beckett was never satisfied because each play, each translation, and each performance could be made more perfect. He would count the words, count the number of steps, entrances and exits of

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his characters, count the number of syllables in his translation, and remain constantly dissatisfied with the result. Similarly Alan Schneider was very often dissatisfied with his own work; and he would also bear contradictory criticisms. He was very generally accused of not taking liberties with the text, of sticking madly to it, but when he added one fading light at the end of Footfalls, after having asked Beckett for permission, he was criticized for taking that liberty, because that stage direction did not appear in the text, which had been published before production. The dissatisfaction felt by the playwright, the stage director and the audience may in fact arise from the very subject of the play, a physical unease and a psychological unrest. It is arguable whether one language or the other is more economical: several critics have tried to demonstrate that in general the English versions are shorter, but I am more convinced that it rather depends on the play, and that, just as cutting here and adding there in the translation of one play amounted to a whole new play which had a balance of its own, if some English translations are shorter than the French ‘original’ such as Waiting for Godot, or Endgame, on the other hand Oh les beaux jours and Comédie are shorter. What is significant nevertheless is that it is always the second version, that is the translation, which is shorter than the previous one, and this is in keeping with the general progression in Beckett’s theatre towards an ever greater concision and density. Indeed we have seen how Beckett’s theatre is fraught with echoes and repetitions which seem meaningless, but whose meaning is to be found in the very fact of their being constantly repeated. But all useless repetitions are simply erased: if possible, Beckett always prefers to shorten, to retract, to lose matter and words. Pauses are thus omnipresent, and actually represent a real challenge for stage directors and actors: how long is a ‘pause,’ are ellipses as long as a ‘pause’? If we look at the text of Endgame for instance, the very regular occurrence of those pauses turns them into musical rests, which separate the different melodies of the speech. If we look at Not I, the dots seem to swallow speech, but, when put on stage, the tempo of the voice is so quick that all the actresses who played Mouth found it very hard to have time to breathe. On the other hand, Come and Go, where the stage directions indicate “silence” (354-355), is obsessed with the void and with unsaid words. When Beckett put that play on stage in 1966, he even lengthened the duration of the performance, the better to represent the omnipresence of silence.

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Paradoxically, Beckett and his characters are tempted by complete silence, but cannot renounce talking: there is a definite movement towards the least.11 The actress Billie Whitelaw who played the part of Mouth and was directed by Beckett uses a beautiful image: “Of course, he would always have an eraser because each time he drew a line he would take out his eraser and start erasing it into a very faint trace of a line” (Whitelaw, 334). Once more, even if the tendency is the same, something remains in the end, a very faint line, a few fundamental sounds, an impossible heap. For Beckett the process which is at work in self-translation is the same as the one at work in the creation of a text, and it is the same which directs his production as a whole. In this passage from Assez, this movement toand-fro of creation is perfectly described: Au début quand il parlait c’était tout en allant. Il me semble. Ensuite tantôt allant tantôt arrêté. Enfin arrêté uniquement. […] Il lui arrivait de s’arrêter sans rien dire. […] D’autres cas principaux se présentaient à l’esprit. Communication continue immédiate avec redépart immédiat. Même chose avec redépart retardé. Communication continue retardée avec redépart immédiat. Même chose avec redépart retardé. Communication discontinue immédiate avec redépart immédiat. Même chose avec redépart retardé. Communication discontinue retardée avec redépart immédiat. Même chose avec redépart retardé. (1967/1972: 37-41)

This long and repetitive speech perfectly mimics this alternation between different languages, but also between poems, novels and plays. Beckett wanted to finish but found it impossible, and was thus paradoxically stuck in eternal repetition. This phenomenon of a repetitive speech is to be likened to a psychoanalysis where the patient will repeat his story, repeat his pain, because he is unable to find his place, centre stage, just like Hamm, who wants to be “right in the centre” (105), or Krapp, who appeared slightly off-centre stage in Beckett’s production of the play, whereas he himself had stated, in his stage directions, that he should be in the centre. Beckett’s characters are dislocated, once more in both meanings of the word. The different versions of the opening sentence of A Piece of Monologue embody that evolution. The first version reads “My birth was my death”, the second “Birth was my death”, the third “Birth was his death”, and the final version “Birth was the death of him” (Sardin-Damestoy, 211). We witness here the same process of dislocation, throwing the character off-centre, from the first person singular to the third person singular. The character is talking about himself, as if he were somebody else. He is divided in body, mouth or voice.

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All the characters tell stories, they try to tell the perfect story, keep repeating the same old story, amend it, as Beckett would constantly rewrite his texts, for each production, and for each translation. In Beckett’s world, to reach the perfect story is to end, and to end is to remain silent, to die. So Beckett differs, puts off the end, by organizing a constant movement to-and-fro between the different and differing versions of his texts. But such babbling is a pleasure, and the myth of the Tower of Babel is not a punishment anymore.

Works Cited Aa.Vv. : 1990 (1986) : Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett. [special issue, hors-série]: Paris : Jean-Michel Place. Aggeler, William, trans. 1954: The Flowers of Evil. Fresno, CA: Academic Library Guild (Accessed 21 January, 2013). Baudelaire, Charles 1972 (1861): Les Fleurs du Mal. Paris: Poésie Gallimard. Beckett, Samuel 1952: En attendant Godot. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1957: Fin de partie. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1959: La dernière bande suivi de Cendres. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1974 (1963): Oh les beaux jours suivi de Pas moi. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1967: Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Press. —. 1972 (1967): Têtes-mortes. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1972: Comédie et actes divers. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1978: Pas suivi de Fragments de théâtre I et II, Pochade radiophonique, Esquisse radiophonique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1983: Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London: John Calder. —. 1986: Catastrophe et autres dramaticules. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 2006 (1987): The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1990: Proust. Trans. Edith Fournier. Paris: Editions de Minuit. —. 1992: Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Blin, Roger 1990 (1986): ‘Conversations avec Lynda Peskine’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett [special issue, hors-série]: 159-169. Brater, Enoch 1987: Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theatre. Oxford: Oxford UP. Cockerham, Harry 1975 : ‘Bilingual Playwright’. Katarine Worth, ed.

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Beckett, the Shape Changer. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 139-159. Dort, Bernard 1990 (1986): ‘L’acteur chez Beckett, advantage de jeu’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett [special issue, hors-série]: 227234. Forestier, George, ed. 1999: Athalie. In Racine. Théâtre-Poésie. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Friedman, Alan W., ed. 1987 : Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP. Gessner, Niklaus 1957 : Die Unzulanglänglichkeit der Sprache : eine Untersuchung über Formzerfall und Beziehungslosigkeit bei Samuel Beckett. Zurich : Juris-Verlag. Greenblatt, Steven, ed. 1997: Cymbeline. In The Norton Shakespeare, London: Norton. Hall, Peter 1997: ‘Peter Hall Looks Back at the Original Godot’ (accessed 21 January, 2013) Janvier, Ludovic and Agnès Vaquin-Janvier 1990 (1986) : ‘Traduire avec Beckett : Watt’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett [special issue, hors-série]: 57-64. Knowlson, James 1990 (1986) : ‘Samuel Beckett metteur en scène : ses carnets de notes de mise en scène et d’interprétation critique de son œuvre théâtrale’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett. [special issue, hors-série]: 277-289. —. 2009 (1996) : Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Noudelmann, François 1998 : Beckett ou la scène du pire (Etude sur En attendant Godot et Fin de partie). Paris : Champion. Perloff, Marjorie 1987 : ‘Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader’. A. W. Friedman, C. Rossman and D. Sherzer, eds. Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP. 161-174. Sardin-Damestoy, Pascale 2002 : Samuel Beckett auto-traducteur ou l’art de l’empêchement. Arras : PU Artois. Schneider, Alan 1990 (1986) : ‘A. Schneider et le théâtre de Beckett aux Etats-Unis’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett [special issue, horssérie]: 181-186. Seyrig, Delphine 1990 (1986): ‘Haute precision’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett [special issue, hors-série]: 342-347. Shenker, Israel 2005 (1956): ‘Interview with Israel Shenker in New York Times, 5 May 1956’. L. Graver and R. Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett.

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The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge. 160-163. Warrilow, David 1990 (1986): ‘La musique par les sens’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett [special issue, hors-série]: 251-254. Whitelaw, Billie 1990 (1986): ‘Travailler avec Samuel Beckett’. Revue d’esthétique. Samuel Beckett, [special issue, hors-série]: 333-335. Worth, Katharine, ed. 1975 : Beckett, the Shape-Changer. A symposium. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Notes ________________________________ 1

One can indeed think of Vladimir Nabokov or Julien Green, or indeed be reminded that self-translation was a common practice in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. 2 See her introduction to her translation of Proust (1990). 3 All subsequent quotations from Beckett’s plays in English will refer to the 1987/2006 edition unless specified. Quotations from his plays in French are preceded by the year of publication. 4 Ludovic Janvier very elegantly puts it: “Je dirais que l’anglais produit du bruit, un bruit plus proche du corps, et le français de la rumeur, une chose plus lointaine, de l’ordre de l’évocation, et non de la presence” (63). [I would say that English produces a noise, a noise which is closer to the body, while French produces a murmur, a distant sound, a reminder rather than a presence] (My translation). This explains why the first pronoun singular appeared first in French (in English the “I” was present only in the poems). 5 A similar study is to be found in Harry Cockerham’s (1975) excellent article concerning humour, with the example of Waiting for Godot, and more specifically Lucky’s speech. 6 Aggeler’s translations can be found on the Internet: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/321 < Last accessed 1 January 2013 > 7 See Pascale Sardin-Demestoy (2002) and her “dossiers génétiques” at the end of the book. 8 See Pascale Sardin-Damestoy’s “dossiers génétiques” (2002). 9 Among other passages, this has not been translated by Beckett: “Faint cry in his ear. Mouth agape. Closed with hiss of breath. Lips joined. Feel soft touch of lip on lip. Lip lipping lip” (428). 10 This quotation is discussed by Marjorie Perloff (37). 11 Noudlemann talks of “processus d’amoindrissement” (60) never reaching zero: an asymptotic equation towards zero.

CHAPTER SEVEN LACLOS, HAMPTON: ENGLISH ESPRIT VS FRENCH WIT LYDIA VÁZQUEZ

Humour, Esprit and Wit in the Eighteenth Century One of the most striking features when exploring Stephen Frears’s film adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1988) is both its lack of accuracy as regards to the original text and the extent to which such ‘unfaithfulness’ to Laclos’s work resides in the difficulty to translate and adapt the ‘national’ peculiarities of French humour for the English stage. It is well known that French esprit radically differs from English wit, and so do its Gallic homologues raillerie and plaisanterie. The English word ‘humour’ appeared for the first time in French in 1725. Voltaire claimed the existence of the meaning in French under its Gallic form humeur so as to snatch the monopole of ‘humour’ to the English. As Voltaire put it in a letter to the Abbé d’Olivet in 1761, Ils [les Anglais] ont un terme pour signifier cette plaisanterie, ce vrai comique, cette gaité, cette urbanité, ces saillies, qui échappent à un homme sans qu’il s’en doute; et ils rendent cette idée par le mot humeur, humour, qu’ils prononcent yumor; ils croient qu’ils ont seuls cette humeur, et que les autres Nations n’ont point de terme pour exprimer ce caractère d’esprit. Cependant c’est un ancien mot de notre langue, employé en ce sensa dans plusieurs comédies de Corneille. (Voltaire, III, 126)1

The word humour took a very long time to enter the French language as its first occurrence dates from 1932, making a very risqué entry, both linguistically and ideologically speaking. A similar version is found in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1772), although the entry, which was anonymous, was not attributed either to Diderot or De

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Jaucourt, who were the authors of the entry humeur that preceded it. The anonymous author justified its use by the need to discern between humeur as a bodily, mood fluid, and ‘humour’ as an intellectual exercise –mainly linguistic– the aim of which is to make laugh and smile. The Encyclopédie’s chauvinistic scope –most of its contributors were French– made its claim that ‘humour’ was originally French. Nonetheless, at the turn of the century, its English credentials were acknowledged by a profound admirer of northern countries, Madame de Staël. In De la literature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), she wrote: La langue anglaise a créé un mot, humour, pour exprimer cette gaîté qui est une disposition du sang presque autant que de l'esprit ; elle tient à la nature du climat et aux mœurs nationales , elle serait tout à fait inimitable là où les mêmes causes ne la développeraient pas. […] Il y a de la morosité, je dirais presque de la tristesse, dans cette gaieté; celui qui vous fait rire n’éprouve pas le plaisir qu’il cause. L’on voit qu’il écrit dans une disposition sombre, et qu’il serait presque irrité contre vous de ce qu’il vous amuse. Comme les formes brusques donnent quelquefois plus de piquant à la louange, la gaieté de la plaisanterie ressort par la gravité de son auteur. […] Ce que les Anglais peignent avec un grand talent, ce sont les caracteres bizarres, parce qu’il en existe beaucoup parmi eux. (Madame de Staël, I, 263)2

In the nineteenth century, a modern lexicologist, Littré, challenged the Académie by proposing a new pronunciation of the term that followed the French phonetics and rejected the widespread English diction. Littré’s daring recommendation nationalised the term for good as French and, in so doing, he confronted the universal (i.e. French) conceptualisation of humour with the peculiar, eccentrically English character. Montesquieu devoted an extensive epigraph in one of his Pensées to English humour: L’humeur des anglais est quelque chose qui est indépendant de l’esprit et en est distingué […]. Cette humeur est distinguée de la plaisanterie […]. Je la définirai, dans la plaisanterie, la manière de rendre plaisamment les choses plaisantes, et c’est le sublime de l’humeur […] Ce que les images sont dans la poésie, l’humeur est dans la plaisanterie. (qtd. by Baldensperger, 183)3

According to Montesquieu, English humeur is deeply connected with poetry, as they both deal more with form rather than with meaning. Moreover, when he scrutinises in his Pensées the tone of what he terms raillerie (‘taunt’, ‘mocking’, ‘ridicule’) and its rhetorical instrument, the

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pointe or saillie (‘wit’), Montesquieu points out yet a further feature of English humour. According to the French philosopher, raillerie, as opposed to French persiflage (‘bad joke’), means ‘no evil’. Raillerie, therefore, Diderot argues, needs to be expanded [S]ur tout le monde, pour faire sentir qu’elle n’est que l’effet de la gaieté où nous sommes, et non d’un dessein formé d’attaquer quelqu’un en particulier […] Enfin il faut avoir pour but de faire rire celui qu’on raille, et non pas un tiers. (qtd. by Bomer, 75)4

According to Montesquieu, raillerie would be a main feature to be found in English humour, whilst persiflage, on the other hand, is a typically French practice. L’Abbé Prévost, dating its origin in 1735, defines persiflage as follows in his Manuel Lexique (1750): L’art, ou l’action, de railler agréablement un sot, par des raisonnements & et des figures qu’il n’entend pas, ou qu’il prend dans un autre sens. (I, 229)5

French writers acknowledged the superiority of French humour over plaisanterie. For instance, the Abbé Morellet, a contributor to the Encyclopédie, enumerated the eight French vices that ruined conversation in his Swift-like Essai sur la conversation (1812), the eighth being the plaisanterie. In spite of their radical defense of national, Gallocentric humour, the French did not take long to put the fresh, newly found English humour in practice. A most illuminating example is Diderot who, in his short story L’oiseau blanc, conte bleu (1749), exhibits a wide array of ‘national humours’, yet concentrates on the specificity of English humour when declaring his admiration for Swift, Addison and Hoggarth. Paradoxically, however, Diderot eventually takes sides with the French tradition of the plaisanterie, and contends that the real wit (esprit) is based upon the association of ideas, as opposed to the fake wit merely founded upon the association of words, which he considers to be the basis of English humour. A peculiar case dating from the second half of the eighteenth century is that of Choderlos de Laclos. In a similar tone to Montesquieu’s epistolary novel, Lettres Persannes (1721), Laclos’s use of humour is typically English, as it is meant to ridicule mundane society as well as the libertinage that consumed it at the time, Nonetheless, as will be seen in what follows, although essentially English in his style, Laclos’s humour radically differs from the one that Hampton would exhibit in his theatrical adaptation of the novel three centuries later.

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From Les liaisons Dangereuses to Dangerous Liaisons Laclos had indeed read Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) as well as Corbyn Morris’s An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire and Ridicule (1744). While the former taught him how to use comic satire, the latter showed him that there were two kinds of humour: “active” and “passive”. “Passive humour” is practiced by what he terms the “humourist”, that is, by “a person in real life, obstinately attached to sensible peculiar oddities of his own genuine growth, which appear in his temper and conduct” (qtd. by Wickberg, 30). On the contrary, “active humour” defines the so-called “man of humour”, or “one who can happily exhibit a weak and ridiculous character in real life, either by assuming it himself, or representing another in it, so naturally, that the whimsical oddities and Foibles, of that Character, shall be expos’d” (qtd. by Wickberg, 30). In his novel, Laclos features “humourists” as well as “men of humour” so as to make a “man of humour” out of his reader (just as much as the author himself, together with his epistolary narrators, were). Laclos imitates Fielding and Swift yet attempting altogether attempts to preserve his French uniqueness. He thereby turns his novel into a curious instance of cultural hybridity that eventually is superseded by a Rabelaisian, if not Molièresque or La Fontainian, esprit gaulois. This absolute Frenchness in his use of the comic mode is positively imperceptible in Hampton’s ‘witty’ version, as can be seen in a number of piquant sequences –namely the ‘human desk’ scene, the passing out of the Présidente, the secret meetings of Dancény and Cécile, or the lesbian relationship between Madame de Meurteuil and Cécile– that, in the English play, neutralise the veiled satirical humour of their French counterpart. A myriad of persifleur characteristics can be enumerated that differentiate Laclos from Swift’s or Hampton’s raillerie. Laclos’s novel features a number of characters whose unique aim is to pave the way for comic scenes. For instance, the kneeling shoemaker whom Cécile takes for a suitor as in a dreamlike, medieval legend, evinces the young girl’s lack of education as a result of the confinement in a convent to which rich young ladies were forced at the time. This detail is almost neglected in Hampton’s play, as there is no trace of it in the script. Reversely, Azolan, a belittled ‘Figaro’ in the French novel due to his naivety, appears in Hampton’s version as Valmont’s double-self, one provided with a perverse sense of irony, and whose his libertine appetites outdo his master’s.

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A further aspect typical of the French comic tradition that enables us to establish a substantial difference between Laclos’s original text and Hampton’s theatrical adaptation is what could be termed as the ‘ciphered nominalisation’ within the novel. A tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, in Laclos’s novel every single character’s name conceals a cunningly symbolic meaning. Cécile, as its Latin etymology gives away (Caecilia, from the Latin root caecus, ‘blind’), represents the visionless woman who progresses undiscerningly, exploring her identity in the middle of emerging sexual urges and societal obligations; the unsighted one who, following perverse ‘guide dogs’, ends up falling over a cliff. Valmont, a lexical mixture of ‘valley’ (vallée) and ‘mountain’ (mont), reunites in his name a heart-rendering contradiction that forecasts his tragic destiny. He ascends the crest of passion hand in hand with Madame de Tourvel while at the same time he walks placidly in the mantle of libertine indifference. Merteuil encompasses the sound of death (mort) with a botanical ending that reminds of a reputed, aphrodisiacal berry (myrtille). She is a sort of ‘living dead’: she decides to ‘die’ in order to become a monstrous libertine, and mourns through her name (mort-deuil: ‘death-mourning’). Madame de Tourvel is the beautiful tower (tour-belle); Danceny is the dancer as well as occasional poet, and Gercourt is a short (court) herb (gerbe), with no management skills (gère court). His opposite is Prévan, a farsighted character in his etymology (prévenir, prévient, prévenant). Belleroche can be easily interpreted and Azolan is the goshawk, swift and shrewd. Émilie is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s character’s antagonist and Madame de Rosemonde is the ‘rose of the world’, representing the beauty of an inner world in which all the characters seek redemption from societal constraints (Altarriba & Vázquez, 117-119). In Hampton’s English version the French names have been preserved, which deprives them of their symbolic meanings. Moreover, apart from the semantic loss, in a few cases they have even been transformed into more easily pronounced names such as ‘Bastide’, instead of the original ‘Gercourt’, in what could be regarded as an homage to Jean-François Bastide, the author of La petite maison (1753), although it is unlikely that the name would make any sense to an English-speaking audience. Nevertheless, a number of common and symbolic features are found both in the original text and in its English adaptation. In his play, Hampton faithfully kept Laclos’s ‘anatomic desk’ scene, as well as the ‘key’ that opens every material or metaphorical door, and Danceny’s and Valmont’s phallic swords and spears. Apart from these symbolic props, Hampton did follow the original novel when textually reproducing for the stage the social and religious satire of current topics at the time such as the lack of

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instruction of women within convents, social libertinage and hypocrisy, the ridicule of mondanité, or women’s subsidiary position in society. Stylistically, Hampton’s use of irony is much more frequently based on effects derived from play on words (chiefly polysemy and a number of rhetorical figures including metaphors, metonymies, litotes, hyperboles, repetitions or antithesis). Nevertheless, the overwhelming presence of warfare and hunting lexicon, which is one of the features most explored by Laclos’s modern criticism, is practically non-existent in Hampton’s adaptation. The scarce military and fighting references in the play seem to be a substantial loss as regards the original; when put on the stage, Hampton merely seems to anecdotally acknowledge their presence in relation with Laclos’s text, rather than constructing a whole new play that revolves just as much as the French original around hostile strife and contest. It is possible to contend that all these resemblances and differences unveil a common use of irony and wit whose aim differs in both authors. Contrary to the English-speaking tradition, the use of irony by the French author is not intended to be an oral, linguistic game of mundane and gallant sociability, but a grave and solemn act whose consequences may be tragic. If the seducers in Les liaisons dangereuses are bound to a tragic fate, it is not because their behaviour was evil, or because they confessed what they did, but because they wrote it (Fabre, 1979).

Irony, Persiflage and Rewriting Subterfuges Du Marsais argues that irony “est une figure par laquelle on veut faire entendre le contraire de ce qu’on dit” (199).6 Moreover, Jean Fabre states that, in literature, irony is the rhetorical figure by which “intelligence shines” (146-147). It is important to note that the title of Laclos’s text ironically rephrases the mother of Madame de Genlis’s, the Marquise de Saint-Aubin’s novel, Le Danger des liaisons (1763). Laclos is therefore writing against a previous text. English wit was introduced in French rococo by means of the pointe, the ironic agent featured by a newly coined word in the eighteenth century: the persiflage. As said above, the Abbé Prévost defined the persiflage as “l’art, ou l’action, de railler agréablement un sot, par des raisonnements et des figures qu’il n’entend pas, ou qu’il prend dans un autre sens”. Similary, Rousseau and Diderot conceived the project of a journal that unfortunately did not go beyond its draft phase, entitled Le Persifleur. Moreover, the climactic period of the French vogue of persiflage is usually found in the Regency –a period starting in 1715 and concluding in 1723,

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mainly characterised by moral freedom– and declined around 1760 due to the moral and sentimental tone of the time. It could be argued that persiflage turned into raillerie during the second half of the century –an epoch dominated by pessimism–. In Laclos’s novel, there are five occurrences of the word, and its use is always related to a critical debasement of the typically English play on words. As the Marquise would have it in the Letter CLIX, Je n’aime pas qu’on ajoute de mauvaises plaisanteries à de mauvais procédés […] Quand j’ai à me plaindre de quelqu’un, je ne persifle pas; je fais mieux: je me venge. (Laclos, 1782/ 1987: 495) 7

Consequently, more than the mere product of wit, irony proves to be a lethal weapon in the hands of Merteuil, whom Mme Riccoboni, a novelist and a friend to Laclos’s, described as a “monster” (Laclos, 1782/1979: 759). As a consequence of this, French irony differs from the English in its noirceur; its criminal, dark essence. Yet it could be contended that in Laclos’s novel the major murderer is neither Valmont nor the Marquise de Merteuil, but the master of ceremonies and of ironies: the author himself. He is the one who kills a traditional kind of reader so as to pave the way to a new readership capable of participating actively in the construction of a new type literature. In this regard, Hampton lacks his forerunner’s opportunities, for the novel’s pre-textual apparatus stands as the space privileged for the deploying of the author’s irony. The initial parts of the novel –the “Avertissement” and the “Préface”– are a token of the irony that Laclos is going to provide his reader with. Throughout these two paratextual sections the author embodies the function of a mere editor of a compendium of letters, the responsibility of which does not belong to him. He thus follows the typical masks of authenticity that characterise the eighteenth-century writer in search of verisimilitude. Yet the editor transcends his function when he openly implodes those masks and ridicules his reader by alleging to have “de fortes raisons de penser que ce n’est qu’un roman” (Laclos, 1782/1987: 1).8 He continues to deny any reflection of its period in the novel and, consequently, he annihilates any didactic or educational aim of the text. At the end of the preface, the reader is completely confused by an editor who is demystifying the work he is editing in an effort to uphold the opposite implications of his own words and of the text itself. Like a number of works prior to Les liaisons dangeureuses, the narrative revolves around a set of characters that flesh out the role of

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victims and executioners and embody virtues and sins. Yet due precisely to such ironic paratextual strategy, in Laclos’s novel the ironic mode lies in the characters’ being typified as victims. Mme de Volanges and her daughter Cécile are the victims of the libertines, and it is thanks to them that we realise the meaning of the irony displayed by Laclos in his foreword when contending that good mothers should give this book to their daughters to read. Moreover, as to Mertueil and Valmont, their masterful and dexterous use of irony is fired against their victims, and even more against each other. Hampton’s version, however, overlooks this detail, and chooses to present the two seducers as partners in crime in an act of complicity. In other words, tragic rivalry as translated by irony in the French novel is dismantled by libertine connivance and camaraderie in its modern English adaptation. Progressively, in Laclos’s novel, gentle persiflage turns into wicked raillerie, which condemns characters both to a social and physical death. One of the most illuminating examples of dark raillerie is represented by the ‘anatomic desk’ scene. A classic mise en abyme of the act of writing, the sequence is embedded within tragic tones in Laclos, whereas in Hampton’s version it is reduced to mere erotic entertainment: [E]t malgré les tourments que vous me faites éprouver, je crois pouvoir assurer sans crainte, que, dans ce moment même, je suis plus heureux que vous. En vain m’accablez-vous de vos rigueurs désolantes ; elles ne m’empêchent point de m’abandonner entièrement à l’amour, et d’oublier, dans le délire qu’il me cause, le désespoir auquel vous me livrez. C’est ainsi que je veux me venger de l’exil auquel vous me condamnez. Jamais je n’eus tant de plaisir en vous écrivant; jamais je ne ressentis, dans cette occupation, une émotion si douce, et cependant si vive. Tout semble augmenter mes transports : l’air que je respire est brûlant de volupté ; la table même sur laquelle je vous écris, consacrée pour la première fois à cet usage, devient pour moi l’autel sacré de l’amour. (Laclos, 1782/1987: 132133)9

Words and expressions like “despair” and “vengeance in a sacred altar” resonate as wounds in the original text. Hampton, however, condenses and dulcifies the tragic scene in a few sentences: VALMONT: (writing) My dear Madame de Tourvel, I have just come...to my desk… (Émilie understands now. She turns her head to smile up at him) Don't move, I said. (He resumes) ... in the middle of a stormy night, during which I have been tossed from exaltation to exhaustion and back again. The position in which I find myself as I write has made me more than ever aware of the power of love. I can scarcely control myself

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sufficiently to put my thoughts in order; but despite these torments I guarantee that at this moment I am far happier than you. (Hampton, 28)

Laclos’s tragic scene turns into a gentle exercise of Hampton’s wit. The final death –either physical or social– of all the characters in the novel reduces its reading to an ironic clash between the author and the reader. This is the main difference between English wit and French esprit, or, in other words, English persiflage and French raillerie. English persiflage implies a gentle use of irony, whereas its French counterpart, far from the former’s witty tones, aims at hurting and spoiling the object of ridicule, which in Laclos’s novel proves to eventually have lethal consequences.

The Author, the Editor and their Audience Hampton’s Francophile background compels him to rewrite a French work he admires, yet his adaptation shapes a new tone. Although the play faithfully follows the novel’s tragic denouement, Hampton wrote an almost comic ending to the plot that was received less pathetically by the English audience than by the French reader due to his use of irony. The French original novel did not seek laughter as response. But Hampton’s adaptation induces its audience to yield into gentle, naïve smiles in a number of occasions. The English version is peppered with a myriad of refined plays on words and witty expressions. The comic mode is easily perceived in Valmont’s and Azolan’s saillies just as much as when Valmont instructs Cecile to learn the Latin words for sexual organs or in his witty replicas after finding out about Cecile’s abortion. This is why the tragic ending comes off more naturally in the original text than in its English adaptation, where it stands as a coup de theater, a witty artifice defying verisimilitude in a plausible ending. A further ironic turn of the screw is provided by the editor’s “Avertissement” in which he ridicules the author of the letters: “En effet, plusieurs des personnages qu’il met en scène ont de si mauvaises moeurs, qu’il est impossible de supposer qu’ils aient vécu dans notre siècle” (Laclos, 1782/1987: 1).10 This sentence is very likely taken from Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), a play that had not been performed in 1782 but that could be read in the Parisian salons. Bearing in mind that the play was actually written in 1788 (although performed for the first time six years later), we can assume that Laclos was familiar with it, just as much as his potential readership. The famous preface to the play is quite telling in this sense: “ […] Je conviens qu’à la vérité la generation passée ressemblait beaucoup à ma pièce […] mais que, pour la generation présente, elle ne lui ressemble aucunement; que je n’ai jamais rencontré ni

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mari suborneur, ni seigneur libertin, ni courtisan avide…” (45).11 Following the persiflage tradition, Beaumarchais brings a smile to his reader’s face, as there is nothing more common in his epoch than to find such rejected behaviour amongst his fellows. Laclos wants his readers to remember Beaumarchais’s preface so that he can be paired with the French playwright, although, in a letter to Mme Riccoboni in April 1784, he rejects such comparison, and argues that his characters did not exist in real life just as much as Molière’s Tartuffe was a mere product of his fancy. In this sense, Laclos deconstructs the ironic strategies he employs by means of using a further ironic mechanism against himself and his own work. The opening sentences of the editor’s preface display the subterfuge of stripping the irony of its ironic substance: Cet ouvrage, ou plutôt ce recueil, que le public trouvera peut-être encore trop volumineux, ne contient pourtant que le plus petit nombre des lettres qui composaient la totalité de la correspondance dont il est extrait. Chargé de la mettre en ordre par les personnes à qui elle était parvenue, & que je savais dans l’intention de la publier, je n’ai demandé, pour prix de mes soins, que la permission d’élaguer tout ce qui me paraîtrait inutile ; & j’ai tâché de ne conserver en effet que les lettres qui m’ont paru nécessaires, soit à l’intelligence des événements, soit au développement des caractères. Si l’on ajoute à ce léger travail, celui de replacer par ordre les lettres que j’ai laissé subsister, ordre pour lequel j’ai même presque toujours suivi celui des dates, & enfin quelques notes courtes & rares, & qui, pour la plupart, n’ont d’autre objet que d’indiquer la source de quelques citations, ou de motiver quelques-uns des retranchements que je me suis permis, on saura toute la part que j’ai eue à cet ouvrage. Ma mission ne s’étendait pas plus loin. (Laclos, 1782/1987: 3-4)12

The author’s true confession underlies the mask of the editor. For, as the reader is fully aware, Laclos did mean to publish the letters and even wrote quite a few more, after which he spent a considerable amount of time carefully selecting, dismissing, and chronologically reordering them, a kind of task he describes as “not very arduous” despite its fastidiousness. A further example of Laclos’s ironic twist is one of the most emblematic replicas in the novel proffered by Valmont: “ce n’est pas ma faute” (‘It is beyond my control’, ‘It is not my fault’). As it is well-known, the Marquise proves to be jealous of Valmont’s falling in love with the Présidente Tourvel. In spite of their pact to remain impermeable to love in their predatory game, the Count has been continuously postponing his breaking apart with Madame de Tourvel. Rightly interpreting his reluctance as a token of love for his prey, the Marquise resolves to dictate to him the fatal letter through which he will leave her (Letter CXLI). The

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letter resorts to a further mise en abyme sequence full of metafictional raillerie: Un homme de ma connaissance s’était empêtré, comme vous, d’une femme qui lui faisait peu d’honneur. […] Cet homme avait une amie […] Elle lui fit donc parvenir sans aucun autre avis la lettre qui suit, comme un remède dont l’usage pourrait être utile à son mal. “On s’ennuie de tout, mon Ange, c’est une loi de la Nature; ce n’est pas ma faute. Si donc je m’ennuie aujourd’hui d’une aventure qui m’a occupé entièrement depuis quatre mortels mois, ce n’est pas ma faute. Si, par exemple, j’ai eu juste autant d’amour que toi de vertu, et c’est sûrement beaucoup dire, il n’est pas étonnant que l’un ait fini en même temps que l’autre. Ce n’est pas ma faute. Il suit de là que depuis quelque temps je t’ai trompée: mais aussi, ton impitoyable tendresse m’y forçait en quelque sorte! Ce n’est pas ma faute. Je sens bien que voilà une belle occasion de crier au parjure: mais si la nature n’a accordé aux hommes que la constance, tandis qu’elle donnait aux femmes l’obstination, ce n’est pas ma faute. Crois-moi, choisis un autre Amant, comme j’ai fait une autre maîtresse. Ce conseil est bon, très bon; si tu le trouves mauvais, ce n’est pas ma faute. Adieu, mon Ange, je t’ai prise avec plaisir, je te quitte sans regret: je te reviendrai peut-être. Ainsi va le monde. Ce n’est pas ma faute”. (Laclos, 1782/1987: 451-452)13

Hampton’s version is merely reduced to witty irony, which results in a myopic rendition of Laclos’s complex text: VALMONT: I'm so bored you see. It's beyond my control. TOURVEL: What do you mean? VALMONT: After all, it's been four months. So, what I say. It's beyond my control. TOURVEL: Do you mean… Do you mean you don't love me anymore? VALMONT: My love had great difficulty outlasting your virtue. It's beyond my control. TOURVEL: It's that woman, isn't it? VALMONT: You're quite right. I have been deceiving you with Émilie. Among others. It's beyond my control. TOURVEL: Why are you doing this? VALMONT: Perhaps your merciless vulnerability has driven me to it. Anyway, it’s beyond my control. TOURVEL: I can’t believe this is happening. VALMONT: There's a woman –not Émilie– another woman, a woman I adore. And I'm afraid she's insisting that I give you up. It’s beyond my control. (Hampton, 90-91).

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Contrary to what can be construed from Hampton’s play, by avowing “it is beyond my control”, Laclos’s characters are being more sincere than they ever thought to be. Laclos’s character follows Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste’s mirror-like structure, as Diderot’s anti-hero continuously blames his lack of freedom on a subjugation to a grander cosmic order, which, in the end, does indeed happen to be the author himself. To conclude, it could be argued that Les liaisons dangereuses is, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote, a French mise à mort, a tragic assassination of the traditional novel, whilst the theatrical version and its posterior film adaptation by Hampton are an ‘en deçà’, a gentle, ironic and ‘persifleuse’ performance of the love triangle formed by Merteuil, Valmont and Tourvel. We could argue that the French novel complies with its role: to provoke fear in a readership that has to reevaluate itself. And so does the English version, the aim of which is purely to entertain the modern playgoer.

Works Cited Altarriba, Antonio and Lydia Vázquez 2008: La paradoja del libertino. Madrid: Liceus. Baldensperger, Fernand 1907: Études d’histoire littéraire. Paris: Hachette. Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de 1985 (1784): Le mariage de Figaro. Paris: Bordas. Bomer, John M. 1988: The Presence of Montaigne in the Lettres Persannes. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications. Diderot, Denis 1946 (1798): L’oiseau blanc. Conte bleu. Paris: Éditions du Mouflon. Dirks, Mary Douglas, trans. 1958: ‘The Preface to The Marriage of Figaro’. The Tulane Drama Review 2.2: 3-27. Du Marsais, César Chesneau 1775: Les Tropes. Paris: Prault. Fabre, Jean 1979: Idées sur le roman, de Mme de la Fayette au Marquis de Sade. Paris: Klincksieck. Griffiths, Ralph and G. E. Griffiths 1766: The Monthly Review or Literary Journal by Several Hands. Vol. 34. London: Ralph Griffiths. Hampton, Christopher 1985: Les liaisons dangereuses. London: Faber and Faber. Laclos, Choderlos 1979 (1782): Correspondance. In Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1987 (1782): Les liaisons dangereuses. Paris: Librairie Générale Française.

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—. 2005 (1898): Dangerous Liaisons. Trans. Ernest Dowson. New York: Barnes & Noble (last accessed 1 January 2013) Howes, Alan B., ed. 2002 (1971): Laurence Sterne: The Critical Heritage. London & New York: Routledge. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Monsieur de la Brède et Baron de 1985 (1721): Lettres persannes. Paris: Bordas. Morris, Corbyn 1744: Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire and Ridicule. London: Roberts & Bickerton. Morellet, M. 1812: Éloges de Madame Geoffrin, suivis de Lettres de Madame Geoffrin et à Madame Geoffrin, et d’un Essai sur la conversation. Paris: H. Nicolle. Prévost, René 1755: Manuel lexique ou dictionnaire portatif des mots francois dont la signification n’est pas familiare à tout le monde. 2 vols. Paris: Didot. Staël, Germaine de 1836: Oeuvres complètes de Madame la Baronne de Staël-Holstein. 2 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot. Voltaire 1877: Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. 3 vols. Paris: Sautelet et Cie. Wickberg, Daniel 1998: The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Notes ________________________________ 1

[They (the English) have a term to signify that pleasantry, that vis comica, that gaiety, that urbanity, those fallies which escape as it were without intention; and this they express by the word humour, which they pronounce yumor, and of which they believe themselves solely possessed, no other nation having a word to express this character. Nevertheless, it is an ancient word in our language, and used in the same sense by Corneille in several of his comedies]. Translated by Ralph Griffiths and G. E. Griffiths (310-311). 2 [The English language has created a word, ‘humour’, to express this gaiety, which is an element of the blood almost as much as of the mind; it is dependent upon the nature of the climate and the customs; it would be quite inimitable wherever the same causes did not develop it. (…) There is moodiness, I would say almsot sadness, in this gaiety; he who makes you laugh does not participate in the pleasure that he causes. One can see that he writes in a somber mood, and that he would be almost irritated with you because you are amused by him. As an abrupt manner sometimes gives more point to praise, the gaiety of the humour is thrown into relief by the gravity of its author. (…) The English paint whimsical characters with great talent because there are a great many such among them all]. Translated by Alan B. Howes (407-408).

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[English humour is something separate from l’esprit and distinguished from it. (…) This humour is distinguished from la plaisanterie. (…) I would define it as the way of presenting funny things nicely; it is the sublimity of humour (…) Humour is for the plaisanterie what images are for poetry]. Quotes in French have been translated into English by the author unless specified. 4 […needs to be expanded to the whole world, so as to show that it is the product of gaiety and not the result of intending to hurt anyone particularly (…) The aim must be to make laugh the one we are laughing at, and not a third person]. 5 [To make fun of someone nicely by means of reasonings and images he does not understand, or misunderstands]. 6 [A figure that means the opposite of what it says]. 7 [I do not like people to follow up sorry conduct with sorry jests; (…) When I have ground of complaint against people, I do not quiz them; I do better, I avenge myself]. Translated by E. Dowson (1898/2005). 8 […good reason to believe it is only a novel]. Translated by E. Dowson (1898/2005). 9 [(A)nd in spite of the torments which you make me suffer, I think I can assure you without risk that at thus momento I am happier than you. In vain do you overwhlem me with your terrible severities; they do not prevent me from abandoning myself utterly to love, and forgetting, in the delirium which it causes me, the despair into which you cast me. It is so that I would avenge myself for the exile to which you condemn me. Never had I so much pleasure in writing to you; never have I experienced, during such an occupation, an emotion so sweet and, at the same time, so lively. Everything seems to enhance my transports; the air I breathe is laden with pleasure; the very table upon which I write to you, consecrated for the first time to this office, becomes love’s sacred altar to me]. Translated by E. Dowson (1898/2005). 10 [Certainly, several of the personages whom he brings on his stage have morals so sorry that it were imposible to believe that they lived in our century]. Translated by E. Dowson (1898/2005). 11 [I quite agree that the truth of a generation ago was much like the truth in my play (…) but that in no way resembles the present generation; and, moreover, that I have never known a suborning husband, a licentious nobleman, an avaricious courtier…]. Translated by Mary Douglas Quirk (1958, 26). 12 [This work, or rather, collection of letters, which may perhaps still be thought too weighty, contains nevertheless only a very small portion of the correspondence which made up their total number. Charged with putting them in order by the people with whom they were deposited, and who, I knew, intended them to be made public, I asked nothing for my pains except permission to cut anything which in my opinión might not be the purpose. And in fact I have tried to conserve only those letters which seemed necessary either to the understanding of the events or to the development of the characters. If one adds to this not very arduous task that of placing such letters as I have allowed to survive in the right order –and I have almost always arranged them chronologically– and finally some short and occasional notes, whose sole purpose, for the most part, is to indicate the origin of a few quotations or explain the cuts that I have taken the liberty of making, my

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entire contribution to this work will be known. My aims did not go beyond that]. Translated by E. Dowson (1898/2005). 13 [A man of my acquaintance was entangled, like you, with a woman who did him little honor. (…) This man had a friend (…) She him, therefore, without any other explanation, the following letter, as a remedy whose application might be useful to his disease: ‘One tires of everything, my angel: it is a law of nature, it is not my fault. If then I am tired today of an adventure which has occupied me exclusively for four mortal months, it is not my fault. If, for instance, I jad just as much love as you had virtue, and that is saying much, it is not surprising that one should finish at the same time as the other. It is not my fault. Hence it follows that for some time past I have deveived you: but then your pitiless fondness in some measure forced me to it! It is not my fault. Today, a woman whom I love to distraction demands that I sacrifice you. It is not my fault. I am very sensible that here is a fine opportunity for calling me perjured, but if nature has only gifted men with constancy, while it has given women obstinacy, it is not my fault. Believe me, take another lover, as I have taken another mistress. This advice is good, very good; if you think it bad, it is not my fault. Adieu, my angel; I took you with pleasure, I leave you without regret: perhaps I shall return. This is the way of the world. It is not my fault]. Translated by E. Dowson (1898/2005).

CHAPTER EIGHT TRANSLATIONS IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY: AGUR, EIRE… AGUR MARIA GAVIÑA COSTERO

Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929), a Northern Irish playwright highly influenced by his birthplace, has produced a dramatic oeuvre firmly rooted in his community, from where he dissects human behaviour both in its most personal and in its most openly social aspects. Using the imaginary village of ‘Ballybeg,’ on the Donegal coast, as his own microcosm, the author reflects on universal issues such as language and its ability to produce and prevent communication, the use of language as a tool to gain and maintain power, and its indissoluble link with the personality and culture of a people. Translations was premiered in Derry in 1980 by Field Day, the company created by Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Rea. It deals with the cultural and linguistic clash brought about by British colonization. This play has achieved an enormous importance among scholars over the years, especially after the surge of post-colonial studies, and it was also the first of Friel’s plays to be translated into Spanish. Bearing the name of Agur, Eire... Agur –‘Good bye Ireland, good bye’–, the Spanish version of Translations was premiered in San Sebastian in 1988.

Translations Translations takes us to Ireland in 1833, when the main language was still Gaelic and Ballybeg was called Baile Beg. The Ordnance Survey has undertaken the mapping of Ireland with the aim of ‘standardizing’ the Gaelic place names, that is, translating them into English in order to avoid confusion, both for the army and for the landowners. This job is carried out by the English sappers, commanded by Captain Lancey, who arrive with Lieutenant Yolland and a Baile Beg native, Owen, recruited in

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Dublin, who will fulfil the role of translator. This young man turns out to be Hugh’s youngest son. Hugh, an alcoholic and erudite old schoolmaster, teaches children and adults in an old barn that serves as the school, a ‘hedge school’. In this village, only the teacher and his two sons –the prodigal Owen and Manus, the eldest son who helps his father with the lessons and looks after him– can speak English; the rest can only speak and understand Gaelic. Yolland falls in love with the beauty of the place, including young Maire. She requites his love, although neither of them can speak the other’s language. This love is the origin of the tragedy: Yolland disappears, and we assume that the Donnelly twins are behind the incident, as they are the representatives of the guerrilla warfare against the English. The British army threatens evictions and the destruction of crop and cattle if Yolland does not turn up. Manus flees because he knows he is suspected, as everyone in the village knows how much he loved Maire. Owen becomes aware of his share of responsibility in the annihilation of the Gaelic language and abandons the map to join the people, who are getting ready for the reprisals. The play concludes with Hugh’s reflections on the end of their culture and their need to find their own place in the new landscape. Friel made it clear that his play was not about poor Irish peasants oppressed by the British army but about language and languages, about the impossibility of translation, about what is lost and what is manipulated through translations, and, as Robert Welch explains, about the cultural conflict that colonization originates: “Translations embodies an awareness of cultural differences, and the tragedies and violence they generate. It is an unsentimental analysis of the politics of language” (187). The author uses different languages: students learn and read Latin, Greek and Gaelic at the hedge school. In addition, in a play whose subject matter is essentially linguistic, we find a very appropriate resource which shows both the status of the Gaelic language in our days and the problem of the lack of communication, at the same time giving the play its comic twist: English represents both the language of the colonizers and that of the colonized. All the characters speak in English, although they do not understand each other. The audience witnesses many comic situations of misunderstanding and incomprehension between characters who are speaking the same language. Friel takes advantage of what is clearly a deficiency –the ignorance of the Gaelic language by the majority of the Irish population, which forced him to write in English for the Irish audience– to highlight the extinction of this culture and to denounce the inability of spoken language to establish real communication. If we compare the play to the Ulster situation in the 80’s, we can understand the

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author’s intention in staging how the representatives of the conflicting groups assigned very different meanings to the same vocabulary. This approach also helps to lighten a very deep ideological undercurrent, causing hilarity almost up to the end of the play. Brian Friel borrows the ideas expressed by Hugh in the play from George Steiner’s After Babel (1975). The combination of Steiner’s theories with the map elaborated by the Ordnance Survey produces a very fruitful metaphor on the transformation of the identity of a people caused by colonization. In this sense, Lieutenant Yolland’s words when he realizes what they are really undertaking with this standardization would be the best synthesis of both streams of thought: YOLLAND: […] It’s an eviction of sorts [...] OWEN: And we’re taking place-names that are riddled with confusion and… YOLLAND: Who’s confused? Are the people confused? OWEN: … and we’re standardizing those names as accurately and as sensitive as we can. YOLLAND: Something is being eroded. (Friel, 420)

Translations was Field Day’s first production. Its premiere took place in the emblematic Guildhall, symbol of the Unionist power in Derry ever since it had been built by The Irish Society in 1887. The historical moment was most appropriate: a mainly Catholic town which had always been ruled by the protestant minority, had at that time a population increasingly concerned with the civil rights strife. The night of the premiere was, according to journalists of different political colours, thrilling. All of them agreed that the play accomplished an understanding never seen to date. The Irish Press review of that night, for instance, evidences this feeling of communion: [A] unique occasion, with loyalists and nationalists, Unionists and SDPL, Northerners and Southerners laying aside their differences to join together in applauding a play by a fellow Derryman [...] Famously, the company received a standing ovation, led by the Mayor of Derry, Mrs Marlene Jefferson, a Unionist. In the audience, applauding alongside her, were Sinn Fein councillor and Republican community activist Eamonn McCann, Mary Holland, another senior journalist on the Irish question, and John Hume. (Coult, 81)

Critics at the time reacted as they had done with Friel’s previous play, The Freedom of the City, inspired by the tragic events known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. If the reviewer shared pro-unionist ideas, the play would be

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considered republican. Christopher Murray presents us with two samples of this point of view; in the first Lynda Henderson qualified the play as dishonest: “Its seductiveness adroitly disguises its dishonesty. It is dishonest to both the cultures it represents” (Henderson, 24). Edna Longley considered that the play represented a very specific religious approach: “Friel, then, translates contemporary Northern Catholic feeling into historical terms” (Longley, 29). Peacock replies to this partisan and sectarian definition of the play: It does not present itself as an overtly political play. It contains profound insights of course, but it is wrong to attempt to extract from the play any single, encoded parti pris message [...] It is about culture before politics. It is elegiac rather than activist –humanistic rather than ideological–. The theme of the play is cultural dispossession. (Peacock, 123)

The appeal of the play among scholars, nonetheless, proves its symbolic power and the depth of its ideas. Notwithstanding its philosophical, political and linguistic interest, Translations has also been a success with audiences, as Martine Pelletier points out: Translations occupies a place apart, both among Brian Friel’s dramatic works and in the history of theatre in Ireland […] [It] has been widely hailed as a masterpiece, a watershed in Irish theatre, has enjoyed countless revivals, has toured extensively [...] and has been translated into several languages. (Pellletier, 66)

Traduccions Due to the particular linguistic approach of this play, it was only a logical consequence that the first translator in Spain was a Catalan who translated it into his mother tongue. Translations was published by Faber and Faber in 1981. In 1984 Josep Maria Balanyà translated it into Catalan and submitted it to the ‘Josep Maria de Sagarra’ translations award, convened by Institut del Teatre of the Diputació de Barcelona. The play did not win the award; nonetheless, it is deposited in the library of the Institut del Teatre. There are two copies: a photocopy of the manuscript, written in pencil with side notes, and a typewritten play, with the notes at the end.1 The translation was called Traduccions and respected the original faithfully. It keeps the convention of the play by using a single language, Catalan, to represent both when the actors are supposed to be speaking Gaelic and when they are supposed to be speaking English. Balanyà keeps

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the names of the characters and places from the original play. This version is highly accurate, and the rhythm of the dialogues closely follows that of Translations, even in the many colloquialisms with which Friel registers the twists of today’s English in Ireland. Balanyà does not translate the Latin and Greek quotations from the play. He makes use of existing Catalan translations instead: for the quotations from the Odyssey he uses Carles Riba’s translation, and for Virgil’s quotations from The Aeneid and The Georgics he uses Miquel Dolç’s translation. In Balanyà’s version we find some explanations about different aspects of Irish culture and history which are mentioned in the play. In his side notes he clarifies his decision to use ‘escola de pagés’ for ‘hedge school’, explaining in detail what these schools were. He also explains who Daniel O’Connell was (as he is mentioned by a character), what the ‘Great Famine’ was (as there are references to the potato blight), and what the rebellion against the British in 1798 meant. Traduccions was never published, although Balanyà owned the translation rights into Catalan. Guillem Jordi Graells, who was working at the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona at that time, had read this version of Translations, as a member of the jury in that edition of the Sagarra award. This was his first approach to the drama of the Irish playwright. The reading would be decisive for the subsequent implementation of the two productions of Friel’s plays directed by the Catalan director Pere Planella.

Agur, Eire… Agur In 1986 a drama course was organized in San Sebastian, taught by Pere Planella, one of the co-founders and directors of Barcelona’s Teatre Lliure. The members of the Hernani company ‘Taldea Antzerki Tanttaka’, founded in 1983, and the Pasaia company ‘Teatro Topo’, founded in 1985, attended the course as students. At the end of it both companies, which until that time had been amateur and had performed only their own creations, proposed to Planella the production of a play that could be considered significant in the Basque context of the time. G. J. Graells had established a good relationship with the members of Tanttaka as a result of that drama course. He suggested Friel’s play, as he had known it from Balanyà’s translation. Director and companies approved the play and decided to produce it in 1988. It was to be a coproduction between Tanttaka and Teatro Topo with Pere Planella as director. The reasons for choosing this play were explained by the producers in the programme:

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This play by Brian Friel, in its theme and features, allows us to deal with and express an opinion on some burning topics of our community, that society from which we emerged and to which we want to pay respect with our work and our view on those problems. (Theatre Programme of Agur, Eire… Agur, performed in San Sebastian in 1988)2

The translation into Spanish was made by Teresa Calo, who also took part as an actress. However, this production had a double version: one was thoroughly in Spanish –this language representing the Gaelic of the inhabitants of Baile Beg and the English of the soldiers– and another used the Basque language to represent Gaelic and Spanish to represent the English of the sappers. This second version, with Basque spoken in eighty percent of the play, was carried out by Iñaki Alberdi and Julia Marín. Planella introduced some changes, such as the songs sung on several occasions, or the fact that the dumb girl, Sarah, plays the accordion to communicate with the others. The reasons for these changes, according to the director, can be found in the similarities between the Irish people and the Basque people, one of them being their passion for music and dancing. With the addition of the songs and the accordion, Planella felt that he represented more faithfully the spirit and the joy of the Irish people. As a matter of fact, Sarah was not played as destitute or helpless, as we would expect from Friel’s description of her as having a “waiflike appearance” (Friel, 383). The director wanted as well to “open Hugh’s cryptic world, too cultured to be understood by the audience.”3 Apart from the changes, there were also some deletions from the original play. Manus, the eldest son, is not presented as lame. Therefore, when Owen and Yolland talk about him, his lameness is not mentioned, nor the cause of it –that their father had fallen across his cradle when Manus was a baby–. Furthermore, he would not be the object of Doalty’s hurt sarcasm when he was afraid of Manus being easily caught by the soldiers in his escape, as he would go “limping along the coast” (Friel, 438). Hugh does not borrow money from Owen, and this detail helps in the original play to evidence an important trait of his personality: he is extremely intelligent and learned but terribly useless and wholly dependant on his children in any pragmatic task. As the loan is not mentioned, the opportunity to speak about Hugh’s book is lost. In Translations, he explains that he is writing a book with the bombastic title of “The Pentaglot Preceptor or Elementary Institute of the English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Irish Languages; Particularly Calculated for the Instruction of Such Ladies and Gentlemen as may Wish to Learn without the Help of a Master” (Friel, 419). This title reveals several of his features:

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his learning and pedantry, but, above all, his acute sense of humour, which allows him to consciously parody himself. The omission of these two things in Agur, Eire... Agur results in a highly idealized character, far from the pathetic teacher that Friel was probably trying to portray in order to avoid the audience’s identification with him. Another important alteration is Hugh’s final monologue –Friel’s homage to O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924)– when he is reciting the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid as an image of cultured Ireland’s colonization by barbarous England. In Agur, Eire... Agur this is not a monologue but an admonition to Sarah and Maire. Hugh speaks to them and tells them a story, and this change also helps to enhance the idea that he is the bearer of truth. The director and the companies in charge of the Basque production tinted the play with the colours they felt closest to. This can be seen in the poster designed to advertise the play, where we observe one of the characters with her mouth grossly erased. The symbolism is therefore evident: the Irish people, like the Basque people, had their language erased; their capacity to express themselves was suppressed by force when their mother tongue was eliminated. The effect produced is certainly dramatic. Planella explained his approach in the programme of the play: We have been exceptionally lucky to find a play […] that meets the desired conditions of quality, impact and theatricality. Brian Friel, an Ulster author, reflects a historical circumstance […] that bears a clear and striking parallelism to the historical and contemporary reality of the Basque Country. That is why we have found his play timely and suggestive, fully valid for our cultural and social context […] I was also attracted both by its theatrical qualities and its theme, insofar as being a Catalan, I have lived in a similar context. […] The play presents a historical process which explains –in Ireland and here– many present-day things. And this raises acute issues for reflection. (Theatre Programme of Agur, Eire... Agur, 1988)

The director explained years later that for him Friel was criticizing the narrowness of the Gaelic culture at that time; but obviously the solution was not colonization: “The author is criticizing the enclosed world of the Gaelic culture. Gaelic culture was disappearing because it was not opening itself, but the solution was not colonization” (1998). And his reasons for finding the play especially attractive and theatrical could be found in its apt dialogues, in Friel’s deep knowledge of the history of his country, and in the issues the play deals with, since for Planella language is the most intimate question for a people: “When you deal with language you are

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dealing with the most intimate thing for a people, the effect on the audience is deeper” (1998). Agur, Eire... Agur was premiered on March 18 at the Teatro Principal in San Sebastian. Both the Spanish version and the version in Basque and Spanish were performed on the same day. The play toured for a year in the Basque Country and Navarre. In every theatre the play was performed first in the Basque and Spanish version and afterwards in the Spanish version. However, this was not the initial plan, as J. M. explained shortly after the premiere in San Sebastian, the company intended to perform in Spain after a period of six months in the Basque Country: The play will be on tour for a year. It will be performed in different places in the Basque Country and in September it will be shown throughout the State [Spain]. […] The distribution of the play in the Basque Country is virtually guaranteed; there are already several performances under contract. (Egin, 26 March 1988)

In fact, however, the outcome was not as planned. G. Carrera wrote in an article a year later about the failure of the supposed exportation of the play: The companies from Gipuzcua sought the collaboration of Pere Planella […] In addition they had Antoni Corominas –the usual scenographer of the Lliure theatre– for the stage design. Finally they chose a contemporary play, Translations, by the Irishman from Ulster, Brian Friel, which they called Agur, Eire... Agur. All this should have made the play perfect for exportation; although, in the end, that was not the case. (El Correo Español, 6 June 1989)

The reasons for this failure were quoted by A. G. from the press conference given by the company in 1989. As the assistant director Fernando Bernués pointed out, they had realized that the Basque nationalist audience showed an interest in Agur, Eire... Agur that could not be equalled outside the Basque Country. This was actually worded by programmers from the rest of Spain in the theatre convention held in San Sebastian, where the company was told that although the production had high quality, the Spanish audience could not be interested in it: Even Fernando Bernués […] acknowledged that after this long year of touring the play in the Basque Country, they have detected a ‘special interest on the part of the Basque nationalist audience’. But he also assumes that, given the problem dealt with in the play, it becomes difficult to show it outside the Basque Country. ‘We confirmed this in the theatre convention held in San Sebastian. There were programmers from the

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From the very beginning, the reception of Agur, Eire... Agur was highly conditioned by the particular political bias it received. The identification between the Basque Country and Ireland focused the audience’s attention only on the play’s political aspects. As the director explained, the audience empathized with what was happening on stage: “The audience identifies with what is going on in the play for many reasons: because they witness a language and culture colonized by an oppressing force, but also because it mentions terrorism” (1998). This political bias had both positive and negative effects for the play’s impact. On the one hand it obviously achieved a higher number of performances than was expected by the producers, who extended the tour from the initial plan of six months to almost a year and a half. However, they could not sign any contracts outside the Basque Country and Navarre. Theatrical criticism also participated in this prejudice. Thus, we can find an article by Ángel Amigo about the imminent premiere of Agur, Eire... Agur in which he devotes more arguments to the contemporary political situation in Spain than to the text or the staging of the play: We have much closer examples of the different valuation we can give a language in the Basque Country [than the one in the play]. Some phenomena that are considered normal in our society would be unthinkable in Ireland. [...] For the politicians who consider themselves nationalists, the learning or the knowledge [of the Basque language] has an unquestionable value. [...] In the Basque Country the ideological adherence to a project usually involves a kind of appropriation of its values and the more radically this is done the more neatly the real problems are forgotten. Seen from this perspective, it is a matter of difficult solution for those who feel guilty for not speaking Basque or those who think that you cannot be Basque if you do not know the Basque language. The Catalan case is another example of how the same problem can be materialized in a very different manner. The Catalan language was developed centuries ago, with the protection of powerful political system that allowed that nation to confront its own journey towards self-government with a solid and prestigious culture. Whereas in the Basque Country the Basque language has never been used –until now– either by the political or the economically powerful classes, and therefore it was never developed as the language of a civil culture. In Catalonia, despite the lack of official protection, Catalan continued developing. (El Diario Vasco, 6 March 1988)

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Marisol Garmendia directs us towards her ideological perspective on the play with the title she assigns to her article ‘Irlanda y el gaélico, Euskadi y el euskera, Agur, Eire… Agur’ –‘Ireland and Gaelic, the Basque Country and Basque, Agur, Eire…Agur’–. After summarizing the plot, she makes a comment about the parallel situation of Irish, Basque and Catalan: “At this stage you will have already grasped the parallels and the similarity between them and us, Irish people, Basque people (Tanttaka, Topo) and Catalan people” (Deia, 18 March, 1988). Juan Antonio Migura repeats the same idea about the parallels between the situation in the Basque Country and that shown in the play: [The play] tells a story that is wonderfully pertinent in today’s Basque Country, the linguistic conflict between a native language and a dominant language. […] Brian Friel reflects a historical circumstance with an evident and striking parallelism with the current historical reality in the Basque Country. (Diario Vasco, 16 April 1988)

Pedro Barea, having commended Friel’s play and Planella’s direction, cannot help but direct his view towards the Basque society. In his article he does not believe the play to be relevant in the circumstances of those years in the Basque Country and Spain, nor does he think that the Irish situation could be compared to the Basque situation: What may be more questionable is the relevance of the parallels offered by the play. At the moment, today, with a situation which is not the Spanish situation of twelve, fifteen, twenty or fifty years ago. With a situation which, fortunately, should not be considered the same in Ireland or in the Basque Country. […] But that debate would not be theatrical but ideological or political. (Deia, 22 April 1988)

Barea would express the same idea in an article for a different paper, where he shows his concern for the possible controversy that the play might provoke: Concerning how this play will fit in the troubled reality of the Basque Country, and the controversy it may provoke in a moment in which we do not have certain political constraints which presided over the life of the country for so long, we will have to wait and see as events develop. (El Público, April 1988)

Carlos Bacigalupe also presents an ideological reflection instead of a piece of theatrical critique. He points out Planella’s attempted parallelisms between the Irish situation and the Basque situation of former days; and also the Basque audience’s unavoidable identification of the English

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sappers with some similar soldiers with the same re-naming purpose in their own country. For Bacigalupe the stance of the play was more critical than threatening: Pere Planella seeks parallels [...] and he finds them no doubt in that old Basque reality of past years, when linguistic impositions tried to extend a new linguistic regime erasing the dear, traditional old one. This stance [...] gives Agur, Eire... Agur a special value in the Basque audience’s eyes. Because everyone [...] can make the evident exchange to identify the English sappers with others of similar style and with similar re-naming intentions. That is why the perspective of the problem for us is more historical than contemporary, more critical than threatening. (Egin, 13 June 1989)

However, despite this prejudiced and biased view of the play, it was also warmly received by critics. Begoña del Teso praises the staging, the text, the actors, and the director, even qualifying the play as sound theatre: The play is beautiful, fresh, and agile, it is sensitive and has personality and it transforms its message of denunciation into pure theatre with fleshand-blood characters. [...] I find the staging serious, careful, and highly detailed, looking for and finding the beauty of lights, earthy colours [...] and an atmosphere which although not excellent, was good enough, [...] the actors are right. Some are very good and others are simply correct, and careful and commanding direction can be sensed. [Planella’s] Agur, Eire... Agur has the solidness of good old theatre. (Deia, 20 March 1988)

Pedro Barea commends the artistic interest of this production despite its controversial character, with praise for the director, the scenographer and the actors: The excellent direction of Pere Planella achieves a solid and strong result. Andreu Rabal’s images, precise, beautiful, with a corporeal stage full of expressiveness, careful dressing [...] The actors [...] credit a well done job. [...] theatrically speaking, the controversial production has a more than interesting artistic level. (Deia 22 April 1988)

Carlos Bacigalupe, notwithstanding his oblivion of more pertinent aspects in relation to the theatrical value of this production, also praises the result, informing the reader of its critical and commercial success: Here we have one of the most noteworthy achievements in our theatre. [...] critical and commercial success has accompanied its evolution. [...] Let me insist on it being the most serious thing in the Basque theatre of late […]

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Tanttaka and Topo can feel satisfied with the lasting value of their work. (Egin, 13 June 1989)

Conclusions Director Pere Planella sympathizes with Brian Friel’s views and makes them his own, or rather assimilates them to his own, as has been observed in his particular reading of Translations. His Agur, Eire... Agur, which he takes to his own ideological domain, would perhaps be far from the study on hybridism intended by Friel in this play, a hybridism which avoids any dogmatic interpretations of history or any one-way denunciation. The playwright insisted on the linguistic aspect of his play in the reflections he wrote in his ‘sporadic diary’, where he recorded the thoughts that he entertained while creating Translations. At the beginning of June he would write: What worries me about the play –if there is a play– are the necessary peculiarities, especially the political elements. Because the play has to do with language and only language. And if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost. (Murray, 75)

And a month later he again evidenced his refusal to create a play that could be “overwhelmed by the political element”: One of the mistakes of the direction in which the play is presently pulling is the almost wholly public concern of the theme: how does the eradication of the Irish language and the substitution of English affect this particular society? How long can a society live without its tongue? Public questions; issues for politicians; and that’s what is wrong with the play now. The play must concern itself only with the exploration of the dark and private places of individual souls. (Murray, 77)

Agur, Eire... Agur demonstrates precisely what Hugh tries to make Maire comprehend and what Yolland tells Owen: something is lost, eroded, deformed in translation. Planella’s version was a commercial success in the Basque Country, but on the way it dropped the humanistic and integrative vision that permeates the original play. Therefore the audience from outside the Basque Country could not be interested in it. As for the critique raised by the play, it was only a logical consequence of the light in which director and companies illuminated the play, and of its controversial subject. Most of the journalists could not escape the temptation of using the play as an excuse to vent their own political reflections, forgetting in many cases the play’s aesthetic appeal. This

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response calls Friel’s intentions into question, although, as he well knew, language is a political issue, like everything that concerns a collective, and controversy is unavoidable when this issue is so brilliantly presented on stage. Thus the playwright managed to write a play which does not become propaganda, but which, because of its capacity for polemics, is fertile and conscience-stirring.

Works cited A. G. 1989: ‘Agur, Eire... agur, un conflicto lingüístico en Bilbao’. Deia 6 June. Amigo, Ángel 1988: ‘Agur, Eire... agur’. El Diario Vasco 6 March. Bacigalupe, Carlos 1989: ‘Agur, Eire... agur’. Egin 13 June. Barea, Pedro 1988a: ‘Irlanda como espejo’. Deia 22 April. —. 1988b: ‘Agur, Eire... agur. Solidez en la forma, polémica en el contenido’. El Público April 25-26. Carrera, G. 1989: ‘Dos compañías guipuzcoanas entran en el teatro Arriaga con la obra Agur, Eire... agur’. El Correo Español 6 June. Coult, Tony 2006: About Friel: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Del Teso, Begoña 1988: ‘Respondeum ba’. Deia 20 March. Friel, Brian 1996 (1984): Plays One: Philadelphia, Here I Come!. The Freedom of the City. Living Quarters. Aristocrats. Faith Healer. Translations. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Garmendia, Marisol 1988: ‘Irlanda y el gaélico, Euskadi y el euskera, Agur, Eire... agur’. Deia 18 March. Henderson, Lynda 1986: ‘A Dangerous Translation’. Fortnight 235, 10-23 March: 24. J.M. 1989: ‘El grupo de teatro Tanttaka estrenó con éxito Agur, Eire... agur’. Egin 26 March. Longley, Edna 1985: ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’. The Crane Bag 9.1: 29. Migura, Juan Antonio 1988: ‘Hoy, representación teatral sobre la problemática lingüística de Irlanda’. Diario Vasco 16 April. Murray, Christopher ed. 1999: Brian Friel. Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999. London: Faber and Faber Limited. O’Casey, Sean 1998 (1949): Three Dublin Plays: Shadow of a Gunman. Juno and the Paycock. Plough and the Stars. London: Faber and Faber Limited.

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Pelletier, Martine 2006: ‘Translations, the Field Day Debate and the Reimagining of Irish Identity’. Anthony Roche, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 66-77. Planella, Pere 1998: Unpublished Personal Interview. Barcelona, 8 December. Steiner, George 1975: After Babel. Oxford: Oxford UP. Taldea Antzerki Tanttaka and Teatro Topo 1988: Theatre Programme of Agur, Eire... Agur. San Sebastian: n/s. Welch, Robert 1993: Changing States: Transformation in Modern Irish Writing. London: Routledge.

Notes ________________________________ 1

The topographical numbers of the two copies in the library of the Institut del Teatre are 16238N and 19151N. 2 Quotes in Spanish, Basque and Catalan from theatre programmes and newspapers have been translated into English by the author. 3 These arguments were explained to the author of this article by Planella in an unpublished interview carried out in Barcelona on the 8th of December, 1998.

CHAPTER NINE THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT A NIGHTINGALE: THE TALE OF PHILOMELA BY TED HUGHES, TIMBERLAKE WERTENBAKER AND JOANNA LAURENS MIGUEL TERUEL

Foreword If I were a story, I would love to be retold. And if granted a second wish, could I please be retold in another language? Adapted, translated, or both, who cares… But ah, the sheer joy of travelling through time and space! Stories are, of course, meant to outlive their authors, ‘the hand that mocked them, the heart that fed’, as Shelley famously put it in his “Ozymandias”. But once out of nature, what bodily form shall they take? Some stories are forgotten, some are reread, some rediscovered… But to be retold, adapted, translated! That would be the key to the future! That’s what happens with the best stories. Some of them are so good that they become common property, and nobody remembers any more who told them in the first place. This is the case with many children’s stories, with The Thousand and One Nights, with plots and characters from the Bible, with scenes and characters from Shakespeare, with the best of classics and contemporaries… And naturally, this is the case with Ovid. His stories in the Metamorphoses were not really his, but he gave them the form in which they have travelled, all over Western art and literature, and probably beyond… Tom Stoppard thought of a cricket-bat in The Real Thing to describe the same process…

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This article is ready to trace and describe three recent ‘bodily forms’ – it was Yeats who wrote these words, in his “Sailing to Byzantium”– of the tale of Philomela. Our versions were written at the brink of the old and at the beginning of this new century, so we’ll be dealing with a story that has travelled over two thousand years. Isn’t that amazing, in this age of the next minute? That is Literature, if you ask me, the glue of imagination that keeps humans together in time and space, ‘gathered into the artifice of eternity’. I know there should be no need to rephrase now the details of the story (Reid, 895-898), but I will sketch here the main events of the tale, as given shape by Ovid in Book VI of his Metamorphoses, for the sake of clarity in the following sections. King Pandion of Athens rewards Tereus, King of Thrace, for his help in wars and gives him in marriage his daughter Procne. The omens are unpropitious, both at the ceremony and on the wedding-night. Their son, Itys, is born of this ill-fated union. Five years later, Procne misses her sister Philomela and convinces Tereus to go to Athens and bring her to Thrace. In Athens and on the return voyage, he becomes obsessed with Philomela. Upon arrival in Thrace, he rapes her, cuts out her tongue and hides her. Tereus tells Procne that her sister is dead, but Philomela waves a tapestry explaining her story, and has it sent to her sister. She doubts at first, but finally, during the Bacchanals, meets Philomela and they plot their revenge on Tereus. They kill his son, cook him and serve him up for his father’s dinner. When Tereus eats his son and finds out, he madly pursues both sisters. The gods take pity on all three, and relieve them from the world through metamorphoses into birds: Tereus is turned into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale. Of course, the story was already retold in different versions in Ovid’s time. From his predecessors, Sophocles and his lost play Tereus – reconstructed by modern philology, mentioned in Aristophanes’ The Birds– offers the most common variant, that which transforms Procne into a nightingale, and Philomela into a swallow. Later, Virgil would imagine Philomela as the mother who loses his son. And then, gathered at the core of the tale, but opening up the details, the history of art and literature has continued to push into life their story. In our presentation, we shall start with Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid (1997), as this will enable us to describe the closest version, and then we shall proceed to trace and compare the fate of our characters in two contemporary plays: Timberlake’s Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale (1989) and Joanna Laurens’ The Three Birds (2000).

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Ted Hughes “Tereus” is the title of the episode as included in his Tales from Ovid (1997), published not long before his death. In the published script (1999) for the stage version, it appears as “Tereus and Philomela”. In his Tales, Ted Hughes translates twenty-four episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His twenty-four poems are electrifying, and succeed in conveying to modern readers “the current of human passion” he finds in the core of the original: Above all, Ovid was interested in passion. Or rather, in what a passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis –passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural–. (Hughes, 1997: ix)

His versions are excellent examples of creative translation. Their relation to the original Latin texts is faithfully flexible: without straying too far from their source, they have mutated in an Ovidian manner (Teruel and Montalt, 2005), and they now breathe in contemporary English and for contemporary readers. It is our purpose in this section to offer a succinct description of the ways in which Hughes has modulated his Ovidian material in the collection as a whole, and a specific and more detailed examination of his dealing with the episode of Tereus and Philomela. Out of the 250 stories that Ovid weaves pentadically in the fifteen books of his Metamorphoses (from the creation of the world up to his own writing days under Augustus, right at the beginning of the Christian era), Ted Hughes chooses freely, following his own interests. The opening episodes are parallel to those in the original, but soon he breaks with Ovid’s order and structure –the subtle links between episodes, and focuses on those stories where he feels more at home–. He discards historical and military matters, and concentrates on the episodes charged with emotional and sexual energy, and with violence and the power of nature (Shapiro, 1997). These are of course the main themes of his own exploration in the whole of his poetry. As for poetic form, Ovid wrote his transgressive mock-epic in hexametres, and not in the elegiac couple tradition, favouring thus his parodic and narrative intention. And it is precisely this impulse of narration –tinged with overt narrator’s self-awareness– that Ted Hughes follows closely in his retelling. His free verse flows with narrative ease, in the same vein of his Birthday Letters (1998), grouping stanzas in three, four, five or six lines of mainly four beats, unless dramatic tension requires

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otherwise, generally making effective use of enjambment and rhythmical efficacy. In his ebb-and-flow approach to these stories, Hughes manages to bridge the gap between ancient myth and contemporary experience. There is something about the tone, an overall feeling of continuity in human behaviour and reaction that relieves the modern reader, and renews their faith in literature as one of the clues to our condition. Significantly, it is within language that this wonderful operation takes place, since it is through language that humans actualize the world. Ovid’s characters speak Ovid’s words in Hughes’ version, but his rephrasing allows them a ring of actual urgency. Let us have a closer look at his “Tereus”, in search of examples. Hughes, as Ovid, keeps a story-teller’s position in the text, their vantage point for distance and irony. Hughes also uses it for contemporary resonance. Compare a literal rendering hoc quoque post facinus (vix ausim credere) fertur saepesua lacerum repetisse libidine corpus. (6.562-563, Kinney and Styron, 1999) Even after that dire deed Men say (could I believe it), lusting still, Often on the poor maimed girl he worked his will. (Melville, 138)

with Hughes’ translation: After this, again and again — Though I can hardly bear to think about it, Let alone believe it — the obsessed King Like an automaton Returned to the body he had mutilated For his gruesome pleasure. (Hughes, 1997: 237)

“Like an automaton” is a good example of his ebb-and-flow strategy. And the choices of clear, contemporary wording bring the text home. This is the modern, urgent feeling we recognize in his whole version. Quite often in his Tales, Hughes sounds impatient with the olden formulae: Iam tempora Titan quinque per autumnos repetiti duxerat anni, (6.439-440, Kinney and Styron, 1999)

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Now season followed season, as the sun Led on the years; five autumns glided by, (Melville, 134) Signa deus bis sex acto lustraverat anno; (6.572, Kinney and Styron, 1999) Through all the twelve bright signs of heaven Had journeyed and a whole long year had passed. (Melville, 139)

And he swiftly simplifies: Five years passed. (Hughes 1997: 230) A year went by. (Hughes 1997: 237)

But his more personal mark is noted when we come across the many examples of expansion: tectoque profanes incubuit bubo thalamique in culmine sedit. hac ave coniuncti Procne Tereusque, parentes hac ave sunt facti; (6.431-434, Kinney and Styron, 1999) An unclean screech-owl like a nightmare sat Above their chamber on the palace roof. That bird haunted the couple’s union. That bird haunted their parenthood. (Melville, 1986: 134) Then an owl Flew up from its dark hole to sit on the roof Directly above their bed. All that night It interrupted their joy — Alternating little mewing cries With prophetic screams of catastrophe. And this was the accompaniment of omens When Tereus, the great King of Thrace, Married Procne, and begot Itys. (Hughes 1997: 229)

Mark the amplification of the workings of Tereus’ desires: spectat eam Tereus praecontrectatque videndo osculaque et collo circumdata bracchia cernens omnia pro stimulis facibusque ciboque furoris accipit, (6.479-482, Kinney and Styron, 1999)

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As Tereus watched, already in his thoughts He fondled her, and when he saw her kisses And how she hugged Pandion, everything Thrust like a goad, his passion’s food and fire. (Melville, 136) Tereus stared at the Princess, Imagining her body in his arms. His lust Was like an iron furnace – first black, Then crimson, then white As he watched her kiss and caress her father. (Hughes, 1997: 232)

Or the description of his first reaction to Philomela: “Suddenly he himself was like a forest / When a drought wind explodes it into a firestorm” (Hughes, 1997: 230). And the movements of her tongue when Tereus slices it off at the root: The stump recoiled, silenced, Into the back of her throat. But the tongue squirmed in the dust, babbling on – Shaping words that were now soundless. It writhed like a snake’s tail freshly cut off, Striving to reach her feet in its death-struggle. (Hughes, 1997: 237)

All of our examples point to signal the translator’s priority: to underline and expound the comparisons of characters’ emotions and actions with animals and natural forces, as if they were connectors with the supernatural. In this way, the texture of imagery prepares the linguistic ground for the final metamorphoses, where characters, transformed by extreme passion, will be transcended out of their mortal forms into permanent inhabitants of the universe. Again, this negotiation between humans and the other dwellers of the universe is explored systematically in the whole of Ted Hughes’ poetry. Firmly rooted in his anthropological interests –myth and the resilience of life, humanity and natural violence– Hughes’ writing responds with vivid alertness to the convivial space he finds in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And it is my suggestion that he also finds in his Tales a transcending mirror for his own version of his own myth –the public story and the private history of his tragic and extreme relationship with Sylvia Plath. This is the challenge he meets in his final Birthday Letters. But it is impossible to read this episode of Tereus and Philomela, or the starcrossed sad fate of Pyramus and Thisbe –the two final stories of the collection– without this knowledge and this reflection.

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On 9th April 1999, a stage version of Tales from Ovid was presented at The Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production, directed by Tim Supple, was based on an adaptation of Hughes’ Tales prepared by Tim Supple himself and Simon Reade. Supple and Reade selected ten tales from the original twenty-four and transformed them very carefully for the theatre. Hughes’ words and stanzas are respectfully preserved, and the adapters’ intervention is almost merely technical (Monrós, 2005), that is, they split the verse passages into dialogue and they only add the odd word when needed for dramatic effect. In “Myrrha” and in our “Tereus and Philomela” they provide, respectively, a female Chorus and a Story-Teller, who were already present in the original poems by Ted Hughes. Their version is devised for eleven actors (six women, five men) and three musician performers.

Timberlake Wertenbaker Almost a decade before the publication of Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid, Timberlake Wertenbaker presented The Love of the Nightingale at The Other Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon, on 28th October 1988. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Garry Hines, her play was later transferred to The Pit, in London, and has become since one of her best-known, most visited works. From her early connection with the Royal Court to recent plays, such as Galileo’s Daughter (2004), or The Line (2009), where she explores the relationship between Edgar Degas and Suzanne Valadon, she has written a very valuable volume of work, and she stands as one of the most interesting contemporary playwrights in English. Her plays –Our Country’s Good (1988), Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1992), After Darwin (1998), Credible Witness (2001), to name but a few– are always deeply theatrical, and relevant to present social concerns, even though very often, as is the case with her version of our Philomela story, they take their plunge from the past, by text or context (Teruel, Picó and Morello, 2006). Her writing –which, I insist, is crafted specially for the theatre and its specific possibilities– includes many instances of translation and adaptation, from the classics (Sophocles’ The Thebans: Oedypus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Kolonos, Antigone 1992 and Elektra 2010, Euripides’ Hecuba 2001 and Hippolytus 2009) to Racine (Phèdre 2009) and Marivaux, or to modern authors like Maeterlinck, Gabriela Preissova, Anouilh, Mnouchkine, or De Filippo –let us not forget her Filumena, unrelated to our heroine–.

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Her use of language is clear and flows with deceivingly simple ease, a quality which helps her arguments, usually concerned with questions of identity, silence and power, and the social location of art, in their traffic among characters on stage. These are her words of presentation for the play, in the “Introduction” to the first volume of her Plays: In The Love of the Nightingale […] I followed the theme of being silenced. In this case, where there was no redemption, the silencing inevitably led to violence. […] Although it has been interpreted as being about women, I was actually thinking of the violence that erupts in societies when they have been silenced for too long. Without language, brutality will triumph. (Wertenbaker, 1996: viii)

On 7th July 2006, a Spanish version of the play premiered at Alzira, and then travelled all over Spain –notably making best use of the Teatro Romano in Mérida during the Festival de Teatro Clásico (Torres, 2006), and of the Teatro Romano in Sagunt– before finally settling down for the season at the Teatre Rialto in València, where it alternated Spanish and Catalan versions. I was fortunate with the chance to translate the play into Spanish, together with Jorge Picó, who directed the production commissioned by Teatres de la Generalitat Valenciana. Sabina Morello translated the play into Catalan.1 The following notes, aimed at describing the ways in which Wertenbaker adapts and transforms the story of Philomele, are directly inspired by my own very joyous and fruitful experience while accompanying the play into rehearsal, production, and tour, and by academic discussion of the play (Marí, 2005). Wertenbaker expands her characters into theatrical dialogue, and intervenes in the play in significant ways. She opens up spaces for the development of female characters –especially for Philomele, but also for her sister Procne, and for Niobe, a servant who does not appear in the sources– perhaps in more complex measure than in the case of Tereus. Philomele breathes life of her own in Wertenbaker’s version, both as a young girl who shares with her sister her curiosity about the world and men: Oh, yes, I feel such things, Procne, such things. Tigers, rivers, serpents, here, in my stomach, a little below. I’ll tell you how the serpent uncurls inside me if you tell me how it’s done. (1989: 2)

Or as a young woman who tries to seduce the Captain of their ship on their long way to Thrace, smelling danger:

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But most obviously in her final speech to Tereus, where she threatens his power: My body bleeding, my spirit ripped open, and I am the cause? No, this cannot be right, why would I cause my own pain? That isn’t reasonable. What was it then, tell me, Tereus, if I was not the cause? […] What did you tell your wife, my sister Procne, what did you tell her? Did you tell her you violated her sister, the sister she gave into your trust? […] Did you tell her I pitied her for having in her bed a man who could screech such quick and ugly pleasure, a man of jelly beneath his hard skin, did you tell her that? […] You call this man our king, men and women of Thrace, this scarecrow dribbling embarrassed lust, […] And if, women of Thrace, he wants to force himself on you, trying to stretch his puny manhood to your intimacies, you call that high spirits? And you soldiers, you´ll follow into a battle a man who lies, a man of tiny spirit and shrivelled courage? […] Let my sister rule in his place. (1989: 34-36)

Procne’s struggle and compromise with her fate is also voiced in the play: You’re going? Of course, you must. The evening is soft, look, stars too. We do not have many evenings together. I was frightened of your evenings when we were first married. That is why I sent you to Athens for my sister. I am a woman now. I can take pleasure in my husband. (She approaches Tereus, but he puts her away from him and leaves. When he is gone, she holds the bottom of her stomach) Desire. Now. So late. Oh, you gods, you are cruel. (1989: 38-39)

And Niobe –all tears, as described in Hamlet, and in her own myth– is especially powerful, both as the voice of patriarchal wisdom for selfadjustment and as the author’s theatrical device to comment on what we don’t need to see, Tereus’ sexual violence on Philomele:

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So it’s happened. I’ve seen it coming for weeks. I could have warned her, but what’s the point? Nowhere to go. It was already as good as done. I know these things. She should have consented. Easier that way. Now it will be all pain. Well I know. […] Oh dear, oh dear, she shouldn’t scream like that. It only makes it worse. Too tense. More brutal. Well I know. […] There. It’s finished now. A cool cloth. On her cheeks first. That’s where it hurts most. The shame. Then we’ll do the rest. I know all about it. […] (1989: 30-31)

This is a spine-chilling speech. Terrifying and beautiful: Niobe goes about her work as she remembers how her small island fought and lost to Athens, and how her body was also conquered. ‘Countries are like women. It’s when they are fresh they’re wanted.’ Now that she is an unwanted, invisible old woman, she thinks of the lemon trees in her island… Another addition by Wertenbaker, equally useful in terms of dramatic construction, is that of the Choruses. She devises a Male Chorus, and a Female Chorus, and as the author herself directs, they never speak together. Instead of presenting a single, authoritative view on events, they perform their classic function in a real chorus of voices. The five voices of the Male Chorus resonate from history: MALE CHORUS: We are here only to observe, journalists of an antique world, putting horror into words, unable to stop the events we will soon record. MALE CHORUS: And so we reach the lonely port of Imeros. It is dark, there is no welcome. MALE CHORUS: We are not expected. MALE CHORUS: No moon in the sky. MALE CHORUS: This is unpropitious. MALE CHORUS: But that we already knew. Could we have done something? And now? MALE CHORUS: We choose to be accurate, and we record. (1989: 14)

Or they discuss the meaning of myth, from public speech to unlikely story: What is a myth? The oblique image of an unwanted truth, reverberating through time. (1989: 19)

While the five voices of the Female Chorus, in their intimacy with the female characters of the play, express forebodings, intuitions, and continually ask questions:

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One of Wertenbaker’s most interesting interventions on the myth has to do with Philomele’s exposition of Tereus’ rape. Tongueless, in the classical stories she weaves a tapestry designed to tell the details of her story, which she manages to send to Procne. In her version, Wertenbaker has Philomele organize a play-within-the play, a dumb show with dolls, as part of the Bacchae festivals. This appeal to the capacity of the stage to multiply the limits between fiction and reality is a common strategy to show truth in the fictional universe of a theatre play. Think again of Hamlet, for example. Wertenbaker had already resorted to the effect in the early part of her story, when Tereus is strangely touched by the fragment of Phedra he watches in Athens with Philomele. As we mentioned, self-referential theatrical depth is a feature of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s playwrighting (Dymkowski, 1997). As we approach the end of the play, we find another instance of metatheatrical dramaturgy. Just as Niobe would spare us the sight of Tereus’ violence with her comments, in Scene 19 two soldiers, one on the other’s shoulders, struggle to peep upon the Bacchanal and describe not too clearly what we are not allowed to see. This is for our benefit: we will not watch the barbarous cannibalistic revenge related in the myth, and the author clears the way for a more positive, life-enhancing, alternative ending. And here we find the final relevant intervention by Wertenbaker on the classical story. Indeed, her retelling of the story opens a new space for the character of Itys, who now takes an unexpected importance. In Jorge Picó’s production, Itys was a puppet, made of plaster and draped in white bandages, aided by an actress for movement and sound. Among the many findings of his direction –the panelled mirrors for backstage, the bathtub for Tereus and for Philomele, the huge paperboat for the sailing, the gardens of balloons in the Thracian forest– perhaps this

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was the most beautiful and inspiring: a child on stage is always a challenge for fiction, but a puppet is the real child we all imagine. “A child is the future” (Wertenbaker, 1989: 46), had quietly suggested Helen from the Female Chrous. Wertenbaker’s Itys is offered a second chance in the story. He will not be used to perpetuate the violence and raise the climax to the final point of transformation; rather, we will find him sitting among the birds, after the metamorphoses, and talking with Philomele, the Nightingale, playing and learning to ask questions. Itys’ education is the future.

Joanna Laurens The Three Birds (2000) is Joanna Laurens’ debut play, and it was first presented at the Gate Theatre in London on 19th October 2000 in a production directed by Rebecca Gatward. She has been writer-in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the National Theatre Studio, and is also the author of Five Gold Rings (2003), Poor Beck (2004) and The Queen of Hearts (2011). The three birds are of course Tereus, Procne and Philomela, as transformed by Sophocles in what has been reconstructed of his lost play Tereus (Fitzpatrick, 2001). Her next play, Five Gold Rings –staged in 2003 at the Almeida, directed by Michael Attenborough (Loveridge, 2003)– explores a recognizable contemporary situation. Laurens used again classical material in Poor Beck, produced by the RSC at the Soho Theatre in 2005 and directed by Daniel Fish (Cummings, 2005), where she retells the episode of Myrrha from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The first thing that strikes attention in Laurens’ writing is her very personal use of language. She writes her plays in stranged, powerful verse: there is a fresh, incantatory quality in her lines that feeds our imagination and awakens our too, too stolid linguistic connection with the world. In her own words: We all know what naturalism in theatre means. […] But what is nonnaturalism? How can we describe something that is a negative, defined by the fact that it’s not something else? The fact is, non-naturalism is a false category, a category hiding lots of other forms, which we fail to see because we don’t have the words for them yet. (Laurens, 2003)

The result is a daring approach to dramatic matter, a blurring of time and space expectations, an estrangement that keeps us alert. Laurens’ version of the Philomela story was warmly received by critics (Gardner, 2000). Her depiction of beauty and brutality, combined in her

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memorable, dramatically effective poetic language (Maltby, 2008) was hailed as a promising start for such a young playwright. In her “Introduction” to the published play she points to her interests: The plot pivots around the literal silencing of Philomela through the symbolic removal of her tongue and the subsequent revenge exacted through the silencing of yet another minority voice, Itys. In society, each individual, each of us, experiences life from the perspective of the ‘outsider’ in relation to some aspect of ourselves. […] This fluid concept of the marginalised seems particularly relevant to the modern world, and yet is so simply reflected in this ancient story through Itys’ ‘metamorphosis’ inside his father – where individual boundaries literally break down (Laurens, 2000: 8)

She mentions Sophocles’ Tereus as her cue. This is clear in the detail of the final transformations –it is Procne who becomes a nightingale, while Philomela is turned into a sparrow– but, most importantly, in the construction of Tereus himself. We had grown accustomed to a lineal, simplistic portrait of the Thracian warrior, even to the point, as in Wertenbaker’s version, of archetypal caricature. Laurens starts from a more interesting possibility: what if Tereus is genuinely in love with Philomela, instead of merely and conventionally obsessed with her physical beauty? Dramatically, the fate of rape and violence imposed by the mythical story explodes in this rewriting with renovated power, being here –as it always is– unexpected and unexplainable. But listen to Tereus himself, struggling to express his love for Philomela ‘with the wonder of a child’: But my life is light of woman and when she, when Philomela, laughs each sound is a catstepon piano keys Strugglepause. Hold. Release And sometimes it jars when I give these thoughts to me, feels as though my bonebolts will burst their brackets and I don’t know how much longer I can be night’s aloneflier. (2000: 14-15) I love her con fuoco, The sort tramps warm their hands at, […]

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I love her in the Lydian mode volante and off the beat. I trail her name like a comforter, HanselGretelbread to find my way back. (2000: 35)

Or his indifference for Procne –“Proc-ne. A clumsyknock name to my Philomela. […] Procne. Your name limps.” (2000: 22-23)–, and his renitence to answer to her lovecalls from their bedchamber: “How talk now?/There’s a gaping wound upstairs that speaks me” (2000: 27). Can you hear the note of this idiosyncratic style? The irony, the strange compounds and valiant lexical options? Laurens mixes languages and registers, forces inflections, collocations, and unused potencies. How about “citrusy tears” (2000: 11)? The two sisters’ intimacy is also constructed into language. When they think of their reunion, they repeat, each one on her own, as in a nearly autistic incantation, the same words of estrangement: Five years back you-me seawalked here. Five years she-me been all s’mithered up. Five years crying the cricots of gulls. And circling. Five. (2000: 33, 38)

Philomela’s playful word-games with her sister make stark contrast with her unsuccessful attempts to speak Tereus’ speech, as if she was trying to learn a foreign language. But when he rapes her, at the broken sound of “ ‘I love you and I’ll view an all of you?’ ” (2000: 39-42), she breaks into mocking scorn and disdainful repetition: I will tell the whole fucking world what a cunt you are. I’ll sonner la cloche as you rang mine. Ding a long, dang dong. Tereus’ dick is four inches long. I could be a kid now, sucking my own thumb. It’s all ugly now isn’t it? All fucking fuscously disfigured. She laughs ‘I love you and I’ll view an all of you’? ‘I love you and I’ll view an all of you’? What?? Wait till they hear. (2000: 41)

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Tereus cuts her tongue in mid-sentence, and from then on Philomela mouths her language “in complete silence repeatedly; bewildered –looking at the empty air where her words should be” (2000: 42). When Procne receives from the Chorus and interprets Philomela’s needlework –Laurens’ version of Ovid’s tapestry, or Wertenbaker’s dumb show– her rage and desire for vengeance is also fed by words: Grind his prick on triangular edges of a smashed window, or take quills and slashay out eyes. Eastern torture to give him one up the arse, until his shouts turn to chinesewhispers. (2000: 53)

The Chorus in The Three Birds serves his classical purpose, jumping over time. commenting on characters and precipitating the action in the final part of the play. Their voice is not unified, as if taking up the hint from Wertenbaker’s choruses, but Laurens goes some steps further and has them speak in different languages as well: Jersey Norman-French, AngloSaxon, Proto Indo-European, Irish and Welsh. They mix their sentences, “creating the effect of cross-rhythms” (2000: 42). Sometimes they speak the language of the play, as separate members, and, leading into the Epilogue, they manage to recite their line together: “Sun, greatest glory of the horse-loving Thracians” (2000: 64), which comes straight from the surviving fragments of Sophocles’ play. As for Itys, there is no pity or second chance for him in this version. In fact, his only words in this feast of language are those he gabbles –his mother’s song– just before she kills him, stabbing at his heart while Philomela slits his throat. When we reach the Epilogue, we watch Pandion picking up props from the stage, “as a parent clearing up after children” (2000: 65). Pandion is the earthliest character in the story, in all versions. He is incapable of passion, so he stays well clear of any transformation. These were his words when he gave away his daughter: Is a day. A great day. Procne, you will marry Tereus. You leave for Thrace. It’s all arranged. Yes; I’m happy you’re happy. Let’s all be happy. Now, I’m to bed. This is fastspoken, but I’m about to fall asleep. (2000: 20)

And this is the beginning of his speech, with his arms full of things, before he closes the play: Gone. Gone. Gone. Three birds flew away when I got here,

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pulled to air like jetwindowed rain. A questioning crested hoopoe. A nightingale at mourning. A sparrow. (2000: 65)

This play is much darker than Wertenbaker’s. Outsiders have been silenced by violence, or literally devoured. The final transformation of the characters brings here pretty brief relief, and it does not bode well for the world. If only Itys had been given the chance to learn another language… For Itys’ linguistic education, you see, is the future.

Coda In the last thirty years, there has been a quickening of interest in the Greek and Roman classics, evidently fruitful in English Literature. This little renaissance has of course to do with the discussion, rereading and rewriting of tradition proposed by recent critical and authorial viewpoints: from approaches based on sex and gender to postcolonial and cultural studies (Harrison, 2009). Authors have frequently visited the hall of mirrors of the past in their search for the present and the future. And in that space, it is little wonder if they have agreed to linger around Ovid (Martindale, 1998; Brown, 1999): he is in fact a collector of stories, and his rich narrative material lends itself quite naturally to adaptation and transformation. His collected stories, very much like Shakespeare’s, provide the perfect combination of recognizable plots and open characters that guarantee their growth and persistence in the hands of modern authors. The works by Hughes, Wertenbaker and Laurens that we have described above are faithful and flexible witnesses of this renewed interest. And it is in this context that we should also mention After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, an anthology of poems by forty-two poets –Hughes among them, providing four of his early Tales– based on Ovid’s collection, edited in 1994 by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, and The World’s Wife (1999), the popular ironical rewriting of the lives of several patient wives of their illustrious husbands, many of them included in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Fernández and del Río, 2008). As for Philomela, I wrote elsewhere (Teruel, 2006) about the reading of her myth in the English canon. We could also argue that, inevitably, this fertile ground has also sprouted a renovated interest for translation, and this is excellent news for

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English Literature, by tradition a little too reticent in this respect. But the list of egregious translators is now long, and promise-crammed: Ted Hughes has worked on Seneca (Oedipus, 1969), Lorca (Blood Wedding, 1996), Aeschylus (The Oresteia, 1999), Racine (Phèdre, 1999) –that’s another thread, the Phaedras of Hughes, Wertenbaker, Tony Harrison and Sarah Kane – and Euripides (Alcestis, 1999), Seamus Heaney contributes with translations from the Irish and Scottish classics, with his wonderful Beowulf (1999) and The Burial at Thebes (2004, based on Sophocles’ Antigone) and Simon Armitage has translated Mister Heracles, after Euripides (2000), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006), Homer’s Odyssey (2006) and The Death of King Arthur (2012). And this is just some of the poets! Shakespeare was a keen reader of Ovid (Bate, 1993; Taylor, 2000), as many of his plays and poems testify. The tale of Philomela must have caught his attention particularly, since he uses the motive several times in his works, most notably in Titus Andronicus and in Cymbeline. It was commonplace in his time –Francis Meres coined the phrase in his Palladis Tamia (1598)– to see how ‘the sweet, witty soul of Ovid’ lives in Shakespeare. Was this what Ovid had in mind when he wrote the word ‘vivam’ (I shall live!) at the end of his Metamorphoses? I hope that we have helped to show how Ovid’s sweet, witty soul has vibrantly continued his happy transmigration. Although Ovid himself might agree that all this travelling about, all this flux of changing forms, would not really be possible without the stories. One of them, perhaps the tale of Philomela, might remind him, after Caliban: ‘You wrote me, and my profit on’t is, I know how to fly’… Through time and space… Adapted, or translated, or both. Gathered at the core, light on the wings.

Works Cited Bate, Jonathan 1993: Shakespeare and Ovid. Cambridge: Clarendon. Brown, Sarah Annes 1999: The Metamorphosis of Ovid: from Chaucer to Ted Hughes. London: Duckworth. Cummings, Dolan 2005: Rev. of Poor Beck, by Joanna Laurens. Culture Wars 18 March (Accessed 1 June, 2012)

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Dymkowski, Christine 1997: ‘ “The Play’s the Thing”: The Metatheatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker’. Nicole Boireau, ed. Drama on Drama: Dimensions of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage. New York: St. Martin’s. 121-135. Fernández, Jorge and Emilio del Río 2008: ‘Ovid Laureate: personajes de las Metamorfosis en Ted Hughes y Carol Ann Duffy’. Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 33-34: 97-118. Fitzpatrick, David 2001: ‘Sophocles’ Tereus’. The Classical Quarterly. New Series. 51(1): 90-101. Gardner, Lyn 2000: Rev. of The Three Birds, by Joanna Laurens. The Guardian 24 October (Accessed 1 June, 2012) Harrison, Stephen J., ed. 2009: Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Hofmann, Michael and James Lasdun, eds. 1994: After Ovid: New Metamorphoses. London: Faber & Faber. Hughes, Ted 1997: Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses. London: Faber & Faber. — 1999: Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid. Adapt. Tim Supple and Simon Reade. London: Faber & Faber. Kinney, Daniel and Elizabeth Styron 1999: Ovid Illustrated: The Reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Image and Text. Univ. of Virginia Electronic Text Center. (Accessed 1 June, 2012) Laurens, Joanna 2000: The Three Birds. London: Oberon. — 2003: ‘Make It Up’. The Guardian 11 December (Accessed 1 June, 2012) Loveridge, Lizzie 2003: Rev. of Five Gold Rings, by Joanna Laurens. A Curtain Up London Review 18 December (Accessed 1 June, 2012) Maltby, Kate 2008: ‘Verse Makes a Comeback on Stage’. Standpoint August (Accessed 1 June, 2012) Marí, Anna 2005: ‘El mito de Filomela i Procne a The Love of the Nightingale, de Timberlake Wertenbaker’. Francesco De Martino and Carmen Morenilla, eds. Entre la creación y la recreación: la recepción del teatro greco-latino en la tradición occidental. Bari: Levante. 333345.

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Martindale, Charles, ed. 1998: Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Melville, A. D., trans. 1986: Ovid: Metamorphoses. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Monrós, Laura 2005: ‘El mito de Eco: de Ovidio a Ted Hughes’. Francesco De Martino and Carmen Morenilla, eds. Entre la creación y la recreación: la recepción del teatro greco-latino en la tradición occidental. Bari: Levante. 347-385. Reid, Jane Davidson 1993: The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1900s. 2 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Shapiro, James 1997: ‘Sex and Violence in Latin Hexameter’ Rev. of Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes. The New York Times 14 December (Accessed 1 June 2012) Taylor, Albert Booth, ed. 2000: Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Teruel, Miguel and Vicent Montalt 2005: ‘Ovidi, Metamorfosis, Ted Hughes…’. Rafael Beltrán, Purificación Ribes and Jorge L. Sanchis, eds. La recepción de los clásicos. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Literaris 10: 293-314. Teruel, Miguel, Jorge Picó and Sabina Morello, trans. 2006: El amor del ruiseñor/L’amor del rossinyol. Introd. Miguel Teruel. València: Teatres de la Generalitat Valenciana. Teruel, Miguel 2006: ‘Lecturas inglesas del mito de Filomela’. José Vicente Banyuls, Francesco De Martino and Carmen Morenilla, eds. El teatro greco-latino y su recepción en la tradición occidental. Bari: Levante. 637-665. Torres, Rosana 2006: ‘Mérida rescata uno de los mitos menos conocidos de Ovidio’. El País 31 July (Accessed 1 June, 2012) Wertenbaker, Timberlake 1989: The Love of the Nightingale. London: Faber & Faber. — 1996: Introduction. Plays One: New Anatomies. The Grace of Mary Trverse. Our Country’s Good. The Love of the Nightingale. Three Birds Alighting on a Field. By T. Wertenbaker. London: Faber & Faber.

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Notes __________________________________________ 1

I would like to mention here the names of those who made it happen. Actors: José Banyuls, Pablo Gomis, Jesús Muñoz, Manolo Puchades, Juli Cantó, Empar Canet, Isabel Rocatti, Inés Díaz, Pau Pons, Esther Morente, Inma Sancho, Rosanna Espinós; Lights: Lionel Spycher; Stage Design: Paco Azorin; Sound: Mariano Cossa; Puppets: Haydeé Boetto; Movement: Leonardo Santos; Photography: Vicente Jiménez; Production Coordinator: Xochitl de León.

CHAPTER TEN “IS IT HAPPY CATS OR IS IT AN IRELAND FREE WE’RE AFTER?”: ANIMAL RIGHTS, TERRORISM AND AMERICAN AUDIENCES’ RESPONSE TO MARTIN MCDONAGH’S THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE CLAUDIA ALONSO RECARTE

Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore has attracted much criticism mostly on account of its depiction of Irish stereotypes and its indulgence in violence. Patrick Lonergan (2012), the leading scholar on McDonagh, has focused much of his work on the global representation and reception of his plays in order to analyze the playwright’s potential as a commentator of universal concerns that reach far beyond the Anglo-Irish political debate. By picking up on Lonergan’s excellent research, my aim is to analyze the reception of The Lieutenant of Inishmore from the standpoint of the animal rights debate. I would like to raise some considerations regarding the audience response to animal violence, and how that response translates within the American context at a time when terrorism and national security have gravitated towards the center of public legislation and sociopolitical discourse. By examining and theorizing about the relationship between human violence, animal abuse, and terrorism, we may better approach the type of imagery evoked in post 9/11 American audiences and the additional political connotations the play can reflect.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Irishness and Violence The Lieutenant of Inishmore was written by McDonagh in 1994, in the midst of the so-called Irish troubles. The second of the Aran Islands Trilogy,1 the play is primarily set in a cottage in Inishmore, circa 1993. In

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the first scene we encounter Donny, a middle-aged man, and Davey, a teenager sporting long hair, discussing whether a half-decapitated black cat lying on a table in the center of the stage is alive or dead. As Donny picks up the cat, its brains plop on the table, and the audience gets the first glimpse of the gore tone of the play. It is soon revealed that Wee Thomas, the cat, belongs to none other than Padraic, Donny’s son and selfproclaimed Lieutenant of Inishmore and a member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). For fifteen years Wee Thomas has been Padraic’s best friend, and he was now in the care of Donny while Padraic was ‘liberating’ Northern Ireland from the British. Fearful of his retaliation, Donny and Davey resolve to let Padraic down easy and tell him that Thomas is feeling a little sick. The second scene shows Padraic somewhere in Northern Ireland sadistically torturing a drug dealer by the name of James for selling marijuana to children (and, in Padraic’s view, preventing them from joining forces with the republican cause). As Padraic waits for James to decide what nipple he would rather have sliced off, he receives a call from Donny, who informs him of Thomas’s poor health. Padraic is violently upset and smashes and shoots the phone, but not before telling Donny that he will be in Inishmore the next day. Taking advantage of Padraic’s emotional state, James, still hanging upside-down, pretends to sympathize with his love for cats and gives him some advice on how to cure ringworms. Padraic releases James and even hands him change to get to the hospital. A series of absurd and in crescendo violent scenes ensue. We meet Davey’s sister, sixteen-year old Mairead, who wears cargo pants, has cropped hair and is a fine air rifle shooter with a penchant to shoot cows’ eyes. Mairead not only has terrorist inclinations but also a crush on Padraic, who initially rejects her advances on account of her lack of femininity. We also witness Donny’s and Davey’s desperation as they paint with shoe-polish Mairead’s orange cat, Sir Roger, to pass as Wee Thomas, and we learn that it is three INLA members, Christy, Joey and Brendan, who are responsible for the cat’s death. The three men have bashed Wee Thomas’s head to lure Padraic to Inishmore and kill him, as he has mindlessly been executing drug dealers without consideration of the financial loss this means for the INLA. When Padraic arrives to the cottage and realizes Donny’s and Davey’s deceit, he shoots Sir Roger and proceeds to murder both men. Right before shooting them, however, he is surprised by a visit from Christy, Brendan and Joey, who disarm him. The three men take Padraic outside to finish him off, but soon enough rush back into the cottage to protect themselves from Mairead’s ambush. Mairead has shot the INLA men and blinded them, and in a macabre scene

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in which the romance between her and Padraic is kindled, Joey and Brendan are killed. As a last confession, Christy tells Padraic that it was them who battered Wee Thomas. In the last scene, we encounter a blood-covered stage in which Donny and Davey are dismembering the limbs and heads of Christy, Brendan and Joey, while Padraic is caressing Wee Thomas’s grotesquely lifeless body. Padraic and Mairead have decided to head to Northern Ireland and organize a new splinter terrorist group, the Wee Thomas Army. But when Mairead realizes that Padraic has killed Sir Roger, she executes him, and instructs Davey and Donny to saw Padraic’s corpse as well. Having appointed herself lieutenant, Mairead leaves to do some thinking and mourn her cat, warning Donny and Davey that she will be back the next day to carry out what sentence she decides upon after an investigation. Upon her exit, a black cat nonchalantly enters through a hole in the wall, and Donny and Davey (and the audience) realize that the actual Wee Thomas is alive and well. “So all this terror has been for absolutely nothing?” (MacDonagh, 68) Davey asks. To avenge the violence that has been unleashed in his name, the two men point their guns at Wee Thomas. But neither of them can bring themselves to shoot, and the stage fades to black as they feed Wee Thomas some Frosties. There are two obvious levels of violence in the play that are determined by the ontology of the victims: that directed towards other human beings and that directed towards animals. Not surprisingly, it is the implications of the former that have generated heated debates amongst academics, while animal violence is deemed as either a symbolic, minor reflection of the characters’ brutality or as an instrument through which to expose radicalism and absurdity. I will first attend briefly to the controversy surrounding atrocities towards humans in order to better develop my latter argument on the paradoxical linkage with animal violence. Violence towards other human beings is intrinsically and inevitably bound to McDonagh’s highly personal characterization of Irishness in his plays, a characterization that is often attacked for its alleged exploitation of negative stereotypes and political opportunism. Although of Irish descent, the fact that McDonagh was born and raised in southeast London and only spent summer holidays in western Ireland contributes to what many understand as an English-biased representation of Irish identity. McDonagh himself has admitted that “thinking about being Irish only came into my life when I decided to write Irish plays”, and that “it will take a long time for the baggage of me being a Londoner to be in the past” (O’Toole and McDonagh, 66). In practically all of the plays there lingers a recognizable trace of the McDonagh trademark of

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Irishness: verbal and physical violence, humor, irony, parody, visceral, thuggish and confused characters, patricide or matricide (or other forms of murderous bloodshedding), gender blurring, etc. In sum, as José Lanterns states, his drama “undermines and destabilizes the very foundational elements of Irish nationalism, beginning with the nuclear family (the private sphere) and extending to the public institutions of the state and the church” (17). As a result, some critics have spearheaded highly opinionated observations against the playwright. Most notably, Mary Luckhurst has notoriously argued that “McDonagh is a thoroughly establishment figure who relies on monolithic, prejudicial constructs of rural Ireland to generate himself an income” (35). She eventually goes on to add that The Lieutenant is a play “that lets the English off the hook because it reinforces familiar stereotypes about ‘Irishness’ and ‘Ireland’ that were originally invented to brutalise a nation and justify colonisation” (37-38). Lonergan, on the other hand, warns readers and spectators against conceiving McDonagh’s characters as realistic portrayals of Irishness (nor humanity, for that matter). McDonagh’s representation of Irishness through terrorism in The Lieutenant is indeed highly problematic. The play stands as a farcical response to the Northern Irish Troubles, which lasted from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and to the republican terrorist IRA and INLA groups. For all of the terrorist principles for actions against the English, however, Padraic, Christy, Joey, Brendan and Mairead appear confused regarding the history and the aims of the nationalist movement (Lonergan, 2012: 76); all attempts at intellectualism trigger absurd conversations in which the characters’ ignorant viewpoints are exposed as the grotesque motives for their brutal actions. As Eamonn Jordan points out, McDonagh’s decision to write the play “was prompted in part by his rejection of Republicanism and his disgust with the murders carried out by the IRA” (201), having himself stated that it was concocted “from a position of what you might call pacifist rage. I mean, it’s a violent play that is wholeheartedly anti-violence” (qtd. by O’Hagan, 2001). The cruelty stemming from INLA extremism comes through between father and son, between lovers, between brother and sister, and even between same-cell terrorist members. The level of gore onstage is unprecedented in modern western theater, and critics have often regarded it as a sensationalist step beyond Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995). Aside from the cat brains, the routine shots and blood spurts (reminiscent of films in the line of Quentin Tarantino and John Woo) and the last scene’s blood-daubed stage infested with body parts have earned the play an emblematic position within Britain’s ‘New Brutalist’ and ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre of the 1990s. Aleks

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Sierz describes the latter as “any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message” (4). Yet what are we to make of the aesthetic choices and methods employed by McDonagh to criticize that violence? Lonergan (2012: 83) counts thirty-six real victims (including innocent civilians) of IRA and INLA bombings and attacks that are mentioned or alluded to in The Lieutenant, usually within the frame of comic or absurd dialogues and situations. In describing the tone of his craft, McDonagh has declared that “I walk the line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. And yeah, I tend to push things as far as I can because I think you can see things more clearly through exaggeration than through reality” (qtd. by O’Hagan, 32). It is the fleshing out of this position where, in Lonergan’s opinion, the magnificence of The Lieutenant resides. As the focus shifts from authorial intent to audience ethical response, the play excels in resisting interpretative reductionism: [McDonagh] will invite us to laugh at jokes about Irish terrorism before reminding us that we are laughing about the deaths of real people. This means that the confused morality of McDonagh’s characters will almost certainly be mirrored by the confused responses of audiences at his play. The confusion often provokes consternation and irritation, but it should also provoke thought. […] Faced with the amorality onstage, the only response for an audience is to react morally. (Lonergan, 2012: 83-84)

It is precisely this ethical response, this moral commitment of audiences which interests me, for it is in those crevices where the staging of animal violence gains a new meaning within the context of post 9/11 America.

Animal Violence and Audience Response The Lieutenant initiates discussions on violence that only just begin with the sensitive subject of national identity. Worldwide audiences have also articulated their concerns for the make-believe violence towards animals. Lonergan reports that the Japanese adaptation of the play in 2003, under the title Wee Thomas, disregarded the Irish political context to focus “on the moral question at the heart of the play: why a cat’s life can seem more valuable than a person’s” (2012: 94). Beyond the content, the play invites a few observations on the ethics of the theater business: although props are used to ‘enliven’ both Sir Roger and the black cat with the ill luck of looking like Wee Thomas, the real Wee Thomas is played by a flesh-and-bone feline. As a result, some animal rights advocates have

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expressed their repudiation. In 2002, the Noord-Nederlands Toneel theater, for instance, had to face the Dutch Animal Protection Society’s protest against The Lieutenant’s use of live cats. As one campaigner put it, “an animal has no choice whether to play a part in the drama or not”, and “a cat belongs at home near the fireplace not on stage as an attraction for an audience of 300 people” (Daily Times, 8 October 2002). From the beginning, the fact that The Lieutenant could potentially become the target of protests of different sorts was not lost on producers. McDonagh wrote the play in 1994, yet it was not until 2001 that a company accepted to stage it. Two theaters which had successfully produced his other works (the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Court) rejected it, McDonagh believed, mostly on account of the profound political and terrorist commentary at a time when negotiations for the Northern Irish Peace Progress were steady. The playwright (in)famously referred to the Royal Court as ‘gutless,’ and retaliated by refusing to produce any more plays until The Lieutenant was taken to the stage (although both companies claimed that their motives for turning it down were based on artistic quality). The Lieutenant was finally premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in May 2001, by which time the Northern Ireland peace progress was established, and was well received by audiences and reviewers. What is of interest for our case, however, is that McDonagh, just as much as theater companies themselves, were convinced that aside from the IRA and INLA issues involved, it was the presentation of animal cruelty onstage which seconded audiences’ potential attacks against the play. Rick Lyman writes in his 1998 interview with McDonagh for the New York Times that: [McDonagh] is having a little trouble producing [The Lieutenant] in London. He thinks this is partly because it ‘looks at the Northern Ireland situation in an entirely new way’ and partly because bad things happen to animals. ‘I’ve figured out a way where it will appear that a cat is being blown up,’ he says. ‘It isn’t, really, but the audience will believe that it is. I think it makes some people feel uncomfortable.’ (Lyman, 19)

Once produced, the RSC made it a point to warn audiences that all traces of animal cruelty were the sole illusion of dramatic make-believe. There was “some evidence of the nervousness that the show might provoke protests from animal rights groups” (Lonergan, 2012: 90), and the company’s director of marketing, Kate Horton, made sure to let audiences know that “no cats are hurt in reality” (qtd. by Lonergan, 2012: 90). Witness to the RSC’s publicity to appease spectators was Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, who asserted that “the extent of violence against animals in this play

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– two cats assassinated, cows blinded, and a dog killed when it chokes on its owner’s severed nose – is unprecedented”, and that as a result of the “horrific violence”, The Lieutenant was “openly offensive to Irish republicans, animal rights advocates, and others” (161). In a review significantly titled “Sick-buckets Needed in the Stalls”, another critic for The Guardian, who attended the preview performance, wrote that “moralists will object to the scenes of brutality; terrorists and their sympathisers to the mockery of Irish freedom-fighters; and animal rights campaigners will fret about the simulation of dead cats and the participation of a real one” (Lawson, 2001). He later states that “McDonagh has also, I think, deliberately set a trap for English audiences and reviewers, which is to have us worry more about the cats than the humans killed. Soppiness about creatures is our national vice” (Lawson, 2001). The critic’s closing comments reveal a concern for what he regards would be a myopic interpretation of the play: “It would be a pity if its reception finally comes down to controversy over the treatment of moggies” (Lawson, 2001); ‘moggies’ being a British designation for common or mixed-breed cats. The Lieutenant was finally premiered in the United States in February 2006 at New York’s Atlantic Theater, and was then transferred in May to Broadway and nominated for four Tony Awards. Although no animal rights protesting – at least, of a significant magnitude – has been reported thus far, there must have been some unrest on the part of theater companies as to the audience’s reactions. In January 2006, the New York Times published a profile on William Berloni, the leading “agent to the stars of the animal kingdom” (Mallozzi, B4). The article emphasized the humane treatment of animals under the tutelage of Berloni, stressing that most of his clients were “rescued from animal shelters” and that he made sure to put the animals “in comfortable quarters near their jobs to ensure they are happy, well-fed and energetic before taking to the stage or working in front of a camera” (Mallozzi, B4). Included in the list of promising stars was a Mr. Ed, for whom an apartment in the Upper West Side had been found in order to keep him as comfortable as possible for his upcoming rehearsals as Wee Thomas in The Lieutenant. Precedents of the controversy in Britain and the Netherlands could have caused some alarm amongst producers, and the article’s underscoring of humane treatment of animals could have resulted from animal rights lashes against the entertainment industry. Whether this was the case or not, producers were certainly well acquainted with what had happened in Europe. In a personal conversation with the author, Berloni stated that he was asked to refrain from doing further publicity so as not to reveal the involvement of

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an actual animal in the play and not spoil his unexpected intervention. The electrifying finale certainly had its desired effect. Berloni recalls that They brought a replica of the set from Europe so the director Wilson Milam and the playwright Martin McDonagh were very specific on the details of how to make our cat Eddie work. It surprised me they did not tell me of the response the cat’s entrance would get. The first night Eddie entered he got a response I had never heard on an animal’s entrance. It took us a week to get Eddie used to the audience reaction.2

Nonetheless, from a general standpoint, The Lieutenant did not so much stir a protest against the use of a live cat in the United States. In her blog, the New York-based playwright Susana Cook contrasted plays such as The Lieutenant to gruesome and cruelty-motivated theater performances in which “animals do die. They become the victims of artists intending to create a sense of shock” (Cook, 2010). The naturalism and realism of the Pittsburgh production, however, stirred at least one critic enough to believe that perhaps violence of some sort (she does not specify as to whether she refers to actual or fictive) could be unleashed on the live cat: “Having surfeited on violence, I found myself desperately hoping that the imperiled feline who appeared near the play’s end would be spared” (Anderson, 295). This reaction suggests that McDonagh’s decision to use a live cat –who, incidentally, has the power to determine the play’s final lines, depending on whether he eats the Frosties or not– could have been motivated by an impulse to push the audience to the extreme and, for a few moments (as Davey and Donny point their guns at Wee Thomas), make them agonize in their fear of going beyond make-believe to actual killing. Writing for the New Yorker, John Lahr states that “when, at the end of the play, a live black cat […] hops through the window and heads for his food, he seems a startling emissary from the natural world, supremely indifferent to the madness and murderous blight of Homo Sapiens” (94). The contrast between the obliviousness of the animal and the very demands not only of a play in which the plot’s engine has proven to be violence, but also of the very roots of tragedy as a ritual of animal sacrifice, creates a disturbing tension that is met with relief once Thomas (both the ‘actor’ and the character) is redeemed. This contrast may also be conceived as one in which the Irish tradition of “bringing presumably dead characters to life on stage” (Dean, 25) is met with the fact that “an animal about to be slaughtered is a metaphor that most suits each character in tragedy” (Castellucci, 25). Dean (2012) has described McDonagh’s tendency to employ back-to-life characters as part of his dramatic conventions, and we must not forget that for all the absurdity, banality,

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and comicity in The Lieutenant, both the political allusions and the fates of the characters can be regarded as tragic. Because of Mairead’s prophecy of returning the next day (most likely to finish Darvey and Donny off), the murder of Wee Thomas would have been suitable for a completion of the tragic circle of vengeance and fate. The Lieutenant certainly excels in hammering down the fourth wall, both emotionally and ethically. The sympathy that audiences experiment towards the cats is one that parallels (in the view of many, in a less than desirable way), the devotion that Padraic feels towards Thomas. In McDonagh’s work, animal cruelty is commonly featured, and for most critics, it represents a metonymic extension of the psycho and sociopathic symptoms of characters. Milder displays include allusions to throwing bricks at cows, stomping geese and axing cats, such as in The Cripple of Inishmaan, while more vivid examples can be seen in the explosion of a cow and the blowing of a rabbit’s brains in the film Six Shooter. Yet, at the same time (and most infamously, through the character of Padraic in The Lieutenant), McDonagh often exalts the human-animal bonds of friendship and love. As Karen O’Brien notes, “characters exhibit extreme behaviour in both their exploitative and violent treatment of animals, on the one hand, and their capacity for close connections to the animals, on the other” (184). This ambivalent relationship to nonhuman animals is processed by audiences in a manner that is not unlike the urgency of ethical response described by Lonergan regarding the comic effect of terrorism. Audiences are pushed to react morally to the cruelty and suffering inflicted upon animals, and because such atrocities are usually committed within the context of hilariously banal dialogues and incongruent situations, the audience finds itself in the position of having to assess their own laughter and their moral right to enjoy and be entertained by such representations. Unlike the case of laughing at IRA and INLA terrorism and victims, however, the paradoxical combination of animal nurturing and abuse within the comic mode acquires further significance because of the ethical counterpoint it erects against human violence. In other words, to check one’s reaction to animal cruelty in The Lieutenant is not just to balance out whether the play succeeds in comically trivializing animal suffering to the point that one is compelled (much against his or her moral principles) to laugh. Beyond this consideration is the fact that, as most scholars, critics, and reviewers agree, the audience, like Padraic and Mairead, seem to care more about cats than about the people (and victims of terrorism, at that). David R. Gammons, director for the play’s production at the New Rep Theater in Massachusetts, declared that “I’ve done a lot of plays where everybody dies at the end. However, if you tell people that a cat dies in the

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play, they’re all up in arms. What McDonagh is doing, and I think brilliantly, is pointing out that our sympathy as an audience is aroused exponentially for the cat but not necessarily for the humans” (qtd. by Donovan, 21). In short, “McDonagh shows his audience that they will condemn terrorists as animals, while also caring about the fate of a cat that wanders around the stage littered with human body parts” (Lonergan, 75). Whether the connection between one’s own response and Padraic’s love for his cherished Thomas is acknowledged or not, what is clear is that American audiences find the characters’ ambivalence deeply disturbing and sickening: Lee Williams wrote in the Houston Press that “McDonagh’s world is populated by soulless idiots who care more for cats than they do for each other” (2006). These kinds of remarks echo those that had been articulated by London critics: “What can one say of a world where the fate of one particular feline seems to matter more than the victims of the chipshop bombings that Padraic so willingly perpetrates?” (Wolf, 56). Critics have been particularly vocal about what they regard as a pathetic weakness for cats on the part of the otherwise thuggish, bloodthirsty characters: “[McDonagh] is focusing our attention on the absurd sentimentality which worries and fusses over the death of a terrorist’s cat” (Rees, 30). Corollary to the play’s animal sensitivity is Padraic’s remembrance of Thomas as he is being readied up for his execution: “Full of memories of Wee Thomas this house is. How asleep in me arms he’d fall, the armchair there. Aye, and purr and yawn. How he’d pooh in a corner when you were drunk and you’d forget to let him out, and he’d look embarrassed the next day then, as if it was his fault, the poor lamb” (McDonagh, 47-48). Padraic is not the only one, however, who has a soft spot for Thomas. Touched by his apparent death, Davey says “Poor Wee Thomas. I did like him. Which is more than I can say for most of the cats here. […] But Wee Thomas was a friendly cat. He would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall” (McDonagh, 5-6). Even Joey displays a deep remorse for having battered the cat. In analyzing the British and American press, one finds that this sentimentality is identified as the source of comic absurdity. Benedict Nightingale admits for the New York Times that “I, for one, was to be found nervously giggling when Donny paused from carving up torsos to defend his son, who had dug up his squashed cat and was tearfully cradling it: ‘It does help the mourning process’” (28). In his review of the Atlantic Theater Company’s production, Ben Brantley advises to “please turn off your political correctness monitor along with your cell phone”, one of the disquieting twists being that “sentimentality is reserved for animals” (5). Reporting the play’s staging in Chicago, Catey Sullivan

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mockingly states that “[Padraic] loves his cat, wee Thomas, with the slobbering, sentimental devotion of the world’s most earnest Hallmark card” (12). It is interesting that the humor provoked by the bizarre oxymoron of cat-loving-terrorists legitimizes the reviewers’ own farcical, teasing tone. “Padraic is targeted as a loose cannon who needs to be put down like a mad dog. A bad analogy, that, because Padraic hates dogs” writes Dennis Brown (2008) for a St. Louis paper; “With its blinded cows, trampled mams, choked dogs (who’ve been fed their master’s noses), and toenail-deprived drug dealers, it’s quite the festive little cartoon massacre” (Mondello, 48), writes a critic for the Washington City Paper. Reviewing The Pillowman, another critic of the New York Times takes the opportunity to introduce the playwright as follows: “Martin McDonagh has never killed a kitten. He has never torn the wings off flies, blown up a stove or bludgeoned a woman to death with a fireplace poker. He is a pacifist, a perfectionist and, he promises, a very happy person” (McKinley, A1).

The Lieutenant and America’s War against Terror So far we can establish the following ideas on The Lieutenant: (1) authorial intent indicates that it is a violent play with anti-violent aims; (2) IRA and INLA terrorism is depicted as pointless, and its leading agents as absurdly sentimental thugs lacking quality intellectual foundation; (3) animal violence is comically used to expose a well-established sentiment of ridiculousness at caring more about animals than about people, both in the case of the characters and of the audience; and (4) animal violence cannot be ethically regarded on its own terms because the play demands it to be seen as a counterpoint to terrorist action. Having viewed the general response to animal cruelty from American audiences, in this final section I analyze the implications of intertwining terrorist themes and animal abuse within the nation’s post 9/11 policies. Indeed, for many American spectators, the 9/11 trauma mitigated IRA connotations of the play, evoking instead the image of terrorism as the country had suffered it and the War on Iraq. Gregory Boyd, director of the play’s production in the Alley Theatre of Houston, stated that “English audiences understand the Irish politics in the play better than Americans do –I think viewers here see it more through the lens of the war on terrorism–” (qtd. by Erickson, 32). While Boyd asserted that “our audiences have been understanding the play’s humor and responding with cheers and lots of buzz” (qtd. by Erickson, 32), Robrt Pela described in the Phoenix New Times how people kept leaving the theater in disgust. In compliance with the dissenters, Pela summarizes: “Violent murders.

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Bloodshed. Vivisection. Dead cats. I’m not laughing” (2007). Many viewers such as Juliet Wittman, who writes a review for a Denver publication, were probably hesitant to even attend: “I have enough trouble forgetting what bloody, vicious times we live in to go about my daily life with some semblance of equanimity. When I see blood, I think of dead soldiers, civilians dismembered by bombs. When I see a man hanging from the ceiling, I think of Abu Ghraib” (2008). What does the confection of animal violence within anti-terrorist political commentary imply in this context? In considering Anglo-Irish relations, critics have focused on the ironic and parodying effect produced not only through INLA members’ sentimentality, but through the symbolism the cats evoke. Lanterns notes that “the felines in The Lieutenant of Inishmore have the personal and political aspirations of their owners projected upon them and thus become carriers of meaning, at the same time that such signifying practices are undermined by the absurdity of the device” (21). Mairead’s cat is named after the nationalist Roger Casement, and, as Dean (231) points out, in a poetic drive echoing Eamon de Valera’s 1943 speech as Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister), Padraic exhorts: “All I ever wanted was an Ireland free. Free for kids to run and play. Free for fellas and lasses to dance and sing. Free for cats to roam about without being clanked in the brains with a handgun” (McDonagh, 60). The conversation between Christy, Joey and Brendan on feline-killing is just as much enmeshed within references to British oppression: “I won’t claim credit for battering a cat […] That sounds like something the fecking British’d do. Round up some poor Irish cats and give them a blast in the back as the poor devils were trying to get away, like on Bloody Sunday”, says Joey (McDonagh, 28). Lonergan (2005: 74) additionally points out that McDonagh signifies on the Irish stigma of being portrayed as animals and subhuman beasts through the play’s treatment of humans as animals and animals as humans. But analyzing American response to animal violence in The Lieutenant in the light of 9/11 complicates the interpretation of the play in a new way. On October 26, 2001, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act. The Act, a document of 342 pages, was meant to battle against terrorism through a redefinition of actions constituting terrorist acts and a re-legislation on measures and punishments to combat it. As the government placed increasing emphasis on national security, the profiling of domestic terrorists became broader. Domestic terrorist acts were those which “appear to be intended [my emphasis] (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction,

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assassination, or kidnapping” (USA Patriot Act, Sec. 802). The broad definition of “coercion” and “intimidation” legitimized, in the view of many, extreme accusations between citizens as panic clouded the judgment on what could be regarded as suspect behavior, and what has come to be known as the witch-hunt in the war against terror began. Though legal, anti-war demonstrations were deemed as unconstitutional, and students and other campaigners were routinely examined on the grounds of alleged treason. As a consequence to the Patriot Act, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and its lobbyists became one of the top priorities in government authorities’ ‘watch lists.’ Although explicit reference to radical animal rights actions was not initially contemplated in the Patriot Act, the fact that the ALF sought to liberate property (for such is the legal status of animals), made their rescues fall into the category of theft. These actions themselves require breaking and entering, and have often led to arson with the object of property destruction. Because of this, as a number of activists rightly predicted, “the liberating of an animal will ultimately pull an activist into the Act’s definition of ‘terrorist’” (Black and Black, 291). As US representative Greg Walden stated, “Let’s call the ELF and the ALF for what they truly are –terrorist organizations–” (qtd. by Best, 316). The first ALF signs in the States came about in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ironically enough, the movement was born in 1976 in England after Ronnie Lee, a member of The Band for Mercy, had been released from prison, where he had “learned to mimic the IRA, adopting the organizational structure of decentralized, small, autonomous cells” (Liddick, 40). Because of the ALF’s lack of central organization and membership guide (anonymity for most members is an imperative in order to evade prison), direct action on behalf of the ALF may be performed by any person whose personal conscience leads him to follow his principles. The ALF Guidelines stipulate as methods “to inflict economic damage to those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals”, and as objectives “to reveal the horror and atrocities committed against animals behind locked doors, by performing nonviolent direct actions and liberations” (Animal Liberation Front Guidelines, 8). It additionally indicates “to take all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human and nonhuman” (Animal Liberation Front Guidelines, 8). With this non-violent agenda, the ALF has persistently denied any connection to animal rights actions which have resulted in death or physical harm of humans, though it has not condemned acts involving personal threats and high-scale property destruction. However, after 9/11 and the Patriot Act, activism for animal rights was increasingly portrayed in the media as the result of terrorist

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organization. Steven Best describes how on October 23, 2001, CNSNews.com “hypothesized that the ALF could be behind a wave of anthrax attacks on US citizens, since they were known to invade laboratories and could be working with foreign terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda” (318). From early on, before 9/11, the ALF had been under FBI scrutiny, and although not explicitly mentioned in the Patriot Act, as we have seen, members were right in their predictions: in January 2005, the Department of Homeland Security named the ALF a domestic terrorist threat. It is only a year later and in the midst of this highly-publicized and national obsession with (animal rights) terrorism that The Lieutenant is staged in America. Although Lonergan believes that the premiering in New York almost five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center “was seen as a return to normality after a terrorist atrocity” (2012: 95), I would argue that the US government and the media’s public stigmatization of the ALF calls for additional considerations as to how The Lieutenant could have been received. To begin, the rhetoric on domestic terrorism surrounding the ALF might suggest parallelisms with characters’ psychological combination of INLA radicalism and sympathy for cats. “No longer will [Thomas’s] smiling eyes be there in the back of me head, egging me on, saying, ‘This is for me and for Ireland, Padraic. Remember that,’ as I’d lob a bomb at a pub, or be shooting a builder” (McDonagh, 44), Padraic laments. Padraic and Mairead kill in the name of their cats, and so does the media spread the notion that animal rights advocates ‘terrorize’ innocent American citizens in the name of lab rats, whales, beagles or baby seals. The reviews we have seen above are indicative of the audiences’ perception of the topic of animal cruelty as banal when juxtaposed to human violence, and as instrumental for the trivializing of the tragedy involved in human harm. It is not just the IRA and INLA that McDonagh succeeds in parodying: animal rights groups are also ridiculed in more than one way. Mairead, for example, perverts ALF stipulations with her penchant to shoot at cows’ eyes as a “political protest” against the meat industry. “If you take the profit out of the meat trade it’ll collapse in on itself entirely. […] For who would want to buy a blind cow?” (McDonagh, 19). Similarly, The Lieutenant distorts the ALF’s ethical imperative to treat and regard each and every animal as an individual in order to counteract speciesism. Wee Thomas and Sir Roger are indeed humanized through their owners’ discourse to the point that they seem more capable of human emotions than the people themselves. However, Padraic has no problem letting a cocker spaniel choke on its owner’s nose because “I don’t like dogs, I don’t” (McDonagh, 45), nor shooting Sir

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Roger because he is “unhygienic.” On top of murdering people, blinding the very victims the ALF is sworn to protect, carelessly letting a dog asphyxiate and executing a cat on account of hygiene makes a very vicious and twisted statement on what caring for an animal as an individual can lead to. In a way, therefore, audiences can be led to believe not only that the labeling of the ALF as a terrorist cell is legitimate, but that their ethics are so deformed that their radicalism will eventually turn against its own principles (in much the same way that INLA –and even family– members revolt against one another in the play). Such an interpretation of animal terrorist commentary in the play overlooks the type of historical analogies that the ALF and ELF draws upon for justification. Contrary to the Al Qaeda links or the disgraceful mark of ‘domestic terrorism’ propounded by their detractors, they liken their anti-violence stance to the movements led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi, and they publicly project their tactics as desperate measures not unlike the urgency required to battle slavery and concentration camps: If we are trespassing, so were the soldiers who broke down the gates of Hitler’s death camps; if we are thieves, so were the members of the Underground Railroad who freed the slaves of the South; and if we are vandals, so were those who destroyed forever the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. (Qtd. by Schnurer, 121)

What is commonly referred to since the Patriot Act as ‘domestic terrorism,’ is regarded by the ALF as the ultimate war for freedom. The institutionalization of speciesist atrocities, many of which employ cruel tactics and are made possible by the legal status of animals as property, is in turn viewed by animal rights advocates as the vilest standardization of terrorism. The statistics of animals killed annually in the most established industries in the US alone are alarming: over 10 billion for food consumption, 17-70 million for testing and experimentation, over 100 million for hunting, and 7-8 million for the fur industry (Best and Nocella, 361). The war against speciesism, the ALF believes, is the natural ethical crusade following the war against racism and sexism. Many people feel uncomfortable with the analogies of slavery or the holocaust, and it is hard to say whether they are overall beneficial or detrimental to the ALF’s public image. If we recall reviews of The Lieutenant, the conception of animal and human violence as opposing themes prevents an analysis of the former from an isolated perspective, and thus only gains meaning because of the stark contrast it marks with the latter. In other words, sympathy for animals is used by McDonagh for comic purposes and for arousing guilt in viewers. “It should [my emphasis]

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shock [audiences] that they can care more about animals than people”, says Lonergan (2005: 76). The operative term here being “should”, however, it does seem unfair that spectators ought to feel remorseful precisely because anthropocentric ethics insist on the incompatibility of human and animal cruelty. As we have seen, some production companies were well aware of the potential reaction of audiences to animal suffering, and took necessary precautions to avoid protest. What Lonergan and several reviewers and critics argue is that the initial compassionate response to animals should be checked and, after rationalization, dismissed as morally wrong. Contrary to the heterogeneousness of violence in accordance to the ontology of the victim, animal rights ethics would establish a continuum between man and animal slaughter on the basis of suffering that would allow for audiences’ sympathy for the cats to become morally acceptable.

Conclusion American audiences’ response to The Lieutenant of Inishmore raises some compelling issues when analyzed under the lens of animal rights within the post 9/11 context of war against terror. The reviews that have been collected in this essay reflect the ethical ambivalence of sympathy towards animal suffering and the repudiation of such sentiments on the grounds of its juxtaposition to terrorism and human violence. Although I have found no textual evidence of spectators’ connections of the play to the ALF, the social, political, and media stigmatization of the organization as a terrorist group, I believe, suggests that the theme of animal rights within the discourse of terrorism could not have been far from spectators’ minds. If, as Lonergan argues, McDonagh’s plays constitute an amoral space to be ethically filled by each individual, one is left with such complex questions as whether giving in to animal sympathy indicates disrespect to terrorist victims, or even whether feeling strongly against the play’s display of animal cruelty hints that one is espousing an unconstitutional (and potentially, terrorist) sense of empathy. As The Lieutenant is stripped from its signifying on Anglo-Irish relations, so it emerges as a globalized play that all too perfectly invites for further research on how the sociopolitical spreading of the anti-terrorist discourse in America can bring new meanings to McDonagh’s work.

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Works Cited Anon. 2002: ‘Animal Rights Campaigners Protest at Use of Live Cats in Play’. 8 October 2002 (Accessed 15 January 2013) Anon. 2004: Animal Liberation Front Guidelines. Reprinted from the ALF Primer 2004: Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? New York: Lantern. 8 Anderson, Monica Fay 2008: ‘Review of The Lieutenant of Inishmore’. Theatre Journal 60.2: 294-298. Best, Steven 2004: ‘It’s War! The Escalating Battle Between Activists and the Corporate-State Complex’. Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? New York: Lantern. 361-377. Black, Jason, and Jennifer Black 2004: ‘The Rhetorical ‘Terrorist’: Implications of the USA Patriot Act on Animal Liberation’. Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? New York: Lantern. 288-299. Brantley, Ben 2006: ‘Terrorism Meets Absurdism in a Rural Village in Ireland’. Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by Martin McDonagh. New York Times 28 February:1, 5. Brown, Dennis 2008: ‘Off With His Furry Little Head! The Rep’s Lieutenant of Inishmore Defies Description. Just Go See It’. Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by Martin McDonagh. The Riverfront Times 1 October: n/a. Castellucci, Romeo 2000: ‘The Animal Being on Stage’. Performance Research 5.2: 23-28. Cook, Susana 2010: ‘Animals Onstage’ (Accessed 15 January 2013) Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick 2012: ‘Martin McDonagh’s Stagecraft’. Richard Rankin Russell, ed. Martin McDonagh: A Casebook. London and New York: Routledge. 25-40. —. 2002: Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by Martin McDonagh. Theatre Journal 54.1: 161-163. Donovan, R. 2008: ‘A Bloody Riot: New Rep’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore’. The Boston Irish Reporter 1 October: 31. Erickson, Charles T.: ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore: Alley Theatre’. American Theatre 25.3: 32-33. Jordan, Eamonn 2012: ‘McDonagh and Postcolonial Theory: Practices, Perpetuations, Divisions and Legacies’. Patrick Lonergan, ed. The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh. London: Methuen Drama. 193-208.

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Lahr, John 2006: ‘Blood Simple’. Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by Martin McDonagh. New Yorker 13 March: 93-94. Lanterns, José 2007: ‘The Identity Politics of Martin McDonagh’. Richard Rankin Russell, ed. Martin McDonagh: A Casebook. London and New York: Routledge. 9-24. Lawson, Mark 2001: ‘Sick-buckets Needed in the Stalls’. The Guardian 28 April (Accessed 18 January 2013) Liddick, Donald R. 2006: Eco-Terrorism. Westport: Praeger. Lonergan, Patrick 2012: The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh. London: Methuen Drama. —. 2009: Commentary and Notes. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. By Martin McDonagh. London: Metheun Drama. xvi-lvii; 70-78. —. 2005: ‘Too Dangerous to Be Done? Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore’. Irish Studies Review 13.1: 65-78. Luckhurst, Mary 2004: ‘Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore: Selling (-Out) to the English’. Contemporary Theatre Review 14.4: 3441. Lyman, Rick 1998: ‘Most Promising (and Grating) Playwright’. New York Times Magazine 25 January. Mallozzi, Vincent 2006: ‘Sit, Stay, Fetch and Don’t Chew the Scenery’. New York Times January 9. McDonagh, Martin 2009 (2001): The Lieutenant of Inishmore. London: Metheun Drama. McKinley 2005: ‘Suffer the Little Children’. Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by Martin McDonagh. The Pillowman. New York Times 3 April: A1, 9, 11. Mondello, Bob 2008: Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by Martin McDonagh. Washington City Paper 3 October: 48. Nightingale, Benedict 2002: ‘What Does Realistic Mean on the Stage, Anyway?’. New York Times January 13. O’Brien, Karen 2012: ‘A Symbiotic Relationship: The Works of Martin McDonagh and Ecocriticism’. Patrick Lonergan, ed. The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh. London: Metheun Drama. 179-192. O’Hagan 2001: ‘The Wild West’. The Guardian 24 March (Accessed 15 January 2013) O’Toole, Fintan, and Martin McDonagh 1998: ‘Martin McDonagh’. BOMB 63: 62-68. Pela, Robrt 2007: ‘Bloody Horror: Nothing to See Here’. Phoenix New Times 27 September (Accessed 15 January, 2013) Russell, Richard R. ed. 2007: Martin McDonagh: A Casebook. London and New York: Routledge. Rees, Catherine 2005: ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Politics of Morality in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore’. New Theatre Quarterly 21.1: 28-33. Schnurer, Maxwell 2004: ‘At the Gates of Hell: The ALF and the Legacy of Holocaust Resistance’. Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? New York: Lantern. 106-127. Sierz, Aleks 2000: In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber. Sullivan, Catey 2009: Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, by Martin McDonagh. Windy City Times 13 May: 12. USA Patriot Act. Williams, Lee 2006: ‘There Will Be Blood in The Lieutenant of Inishmore’. Rev. of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Martin McDonagh. Houston Press 7 February (Accessed 15 January 2013). Wittman, Juliet 2008: ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore: Spurts of Laughter, Spurts of Blood’. Westword 13 March (Accessed 18 January 2013) Wolf, Matt 2002: ‘Terrified (and Laughing About It)’. American Theatre 19.5: 55-57.

Notes ________________________________ 1

Included in the Aran Islands Trilogy are also The Cripple of Inishmaan, which premiered at the Royal National Theatre in 1997, and The Banshees of Inisheer, yet unpublished and unproduced. 2 Personal letter to the author.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr. Claudia Alonso is an English lecturer at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain. Her two main fields of research are, on the one hand, the field of animal rights and welfare in Anglo-American historiography, literature and culture, and, on the other, the study of jazz and bluesidiomatic mythography and mythopoeia in American culture. She has published in numerous specialised journals such as Atlantis, Miscelánea, Revista de Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense and Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, and has presented papers in conferences held in Spain, the United States, France and England. Dr. Mireia Aragay is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English and German, University of Barcelona, and Life Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her research interests focus on Harold Pinter and contemporary British theatre, film adaptations of literary classics, Shakespeare and critical theory. She has published widely in these areas; most recently, she has edited Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (Rodopi, 2005) and co-edited British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She is Principal Investigator of "The representation of politics and the politics of representation in post-1990 British drama and theatre", a three-year research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2009-07598/FILO). A Fulbright scholar and a graduate from Oxford and Harvard University in British Romantic studies, Dr. Caroline Bertonèche is Maître de Conférences (Senior Lecturer) in English literature at the University Stendhal in Grenoble, France. She was awarded in 2001 the Keats-Shelley Second Essay Prize Award and is the author of a doctoral thesis on John Keats and poetic influence. She published many articles on the Romantic poets and women writers, on the link between poetry and medicine as well as on the question of heritage and the rewriting of myths. She also wrote two books on John Keats: Keats et l’Italie. L’incitation au voyage (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2011) and John Keats. Le poète et le mythe (Lyon : Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2011). She is now working on a French

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Contributors

translation of Keats’s Anatomy and Physiology Notebook and editing a book on literary consumption and the poetics of pathology. Dr. Marianne Drugeon is Maître de Conférences (Senior Lecturer) in English Literature at the University of Montpellier 3, and a former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-St-Cloud. She specialised in contemporary British Theatre. She wrote a thesis and published several articles on the committed theatre of David Edgar, edited an issue of the Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens on Oscar Wilde and published an article on the illustrators of Salome: http://www.oscholars.com/RBA/thirty- one/ 31.7/Articles.htm. Dr. Ana Fernández-Caparrós Turina is assistant professor at the English Department of Universidad de Extremadura (Spain). She earned her PhD at Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2011 with a European doctoral thesis entitled La poética de la imaginación en el teatro de Sam Shepard (Poetics of Imagining in Sam Shepard’s Drama). Her main line of research is contemporary drama in English, and more specifically, American drama. Research abroad includes three-months funded stays at City University of New York (CUNY, Jun/Aug. 2007), Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB, Feb/Apr. 2009) and Georgia State University (GSU, MarApr. 2012). She has contributed papers to specialized international conferences and published several articles in scholarly journals on New York’s Off-Off Broadway scene, as well as on the theatre of Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett and David Hare, among others. Dr. Maria Gaviña Costero is Assistant Professor at the English Department of Universitat de València, where she earned her PhD with a thesis about the dramatic oeuvre of Brian Friel and its reception in Spain. Her main research interests are in the fields of contemporary Irish drama from a postcolonial perspective, the relation between literature and conflict, and theatre reception. She has published the book Érase una vez Ballybeg: la obra dramática de Brian Friel y su recepción en España, and several articles on contemporary Northern Irish theatre. Dr. Laura Monrós is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Valencia. Her research has centred in the reception of classical mythology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in Britain and in Postcolonial contexts, as well as in the performing and gendering of Victorian Burlesque. In 2004 she became a fellow of the Theatre Research Group GRATUV (Grup de Recerca i Acció Teatral de la

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Universitat de València), leaded by Prof. Carmen Morenilla, and was a research associate at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at Oxford University in 2007, where she currently is Honorary Research Associate. Dr. Ignacio Ramos Gay is a Senior Lecturer in French & Comparative Literature at the University of Valencia, in Spain. He holds a BA in English and French, an MA in Translation Studies, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Valencia. He has specialised in nineteenth-century European drama and popular culture. He is the author of Oscar Wilde and French Boulevard Theatre (2007), and has published a wide range of articles on theatre adaptation in journals like Revue de Littérature Comparée, Romantisme, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, Revue des Sciences Humaines, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Pennsylvania Literary Journal. He is the team leader of the Research Project funded by the University of Valencia, titled “French Drama in Victorian England: Theatre Adaptation, Transnationality and Authorship”. Dr. Miguel Teruel is a Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Valencia. His interests include translation and intertextuality. He has edited and translated into Spanish, very often in collaboration, several plays by William Shakespeare (Macbeth, Romeo y Julieta, Noche de Reyes, Hamlet, Antonio y Cleopatra, La tempestad, Bien está lo que bien acaba), Tom Stoppard (Arcadia, Rosencrantz y Guildenstern están muertos, La disolución de Dominic Boot, Tú serías Pura, y yo Franco), and Timberlake Wertenbaker (El amor del ruiseñor), Thomas De Quincey's Confessions, Byron's Don Juan, a selection of poems by John Keats, etc. He is currently writing on literary translation and working with Paul S. Derrick on a Spanish version of poems by Richard Berengarten. Lydia Vázquez is Full Professor of French Literature at the University of the Basque Country, in Spain. Her main fields of research are eighteenthcentury libertine literature and gender studies. She is the author of L’Europe cannibale (Pleins feux, 2005), Lumières amères: l’amertume au XVIIIe siècle (Himéros, 2008), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Síntesis, 2008), La paradoja del libertino (Liceus, 2008). She has also published numerous French authors into Spanish, namely Marivaux, Francis Carco, Robert Desnos and André Gide.