Kuharski, Allen J.

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 Swarthmore CollegeWorks   Theater Faculty Works   12-1-2001  Review Of "The Marriage" By W. Gombrowicz And Performed By La Comédie Française  Allen J. Kuharski Swarthmore College, akuhars1@swarthmore.edu  Let us know how access to this work benefits you.  Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-theater  Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons   Recommended Citation Allen J. Kuharski. (2001). "Review Of "The Marriage" By W. Gombrowicz And Performed By La Comédie Française". Theatre Journal. Volume 53, Issue 4. 645-647. http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-theater/37  This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theater Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu.                                                        Access provided by Swarthmore College (2 Jul 2015 15:28 GMT)7KH0DUULDJHUHYLHZ$OOHQ-.XKDUVNLTheatre Journal, Volume 53, Number 4, December 2001, pp. 645-647 (Review)3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVVDOI: 10.1353/tj.2001.0112For additional information about this articlehttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v053/53.4kuharski.htmlPERFORMANCE REVIEW / 645nity. Its strategy of sewing together fragmentscaptures the community’s unresolved struggles,the variety of its individual personalities, and,finally, its ultimate resistance to ever being whollycontained within any representation.DEBBY THOMPSONColorado State Universitypiece were stunning and sensitive, with theminimalist set and stark lighting matching theWyoming landscape and the vast starry Laramiesky (set design by Robert Brill, lighting design byBetsy Adams). The set felt very accurate, she said,except for the inclusion of rows of sagebrush, notthat sagebrush is absent in the Wyoming land-scape, but that it evoked a clichéd version of theWestern wasteland. The theatrical equivalents, for(L to R) John McAdams, Barbara Pitts, StepheThe Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and tn Belber, Amy Resnick and Mercedes Herrero inhe Tectonic Theater Project. Photo: Ken Friedman.me, were the visual references to Our Town. Duringthe funeral and trial scenes, characters held blackumbrellas, creating an image that was visuallystunning but also felt imposed. The sagebrush andumbrellas encapsulate, for me, the recalcitrance ofsmall-town Western clichés amidst a sincere at-tempt to represent the possibility of a true west.But an even more powerful image for The LaramieProject, which came out in the talkback and whichshadows the title, is The Names Project, the vastpatchwork quilt (too big now to ever be shownwhole) commemorating the lives of the many andvarious people who have died of AIDS. What theNames Project does for the gay/AIDS community,The Laramie Project does for the Laramie commu-THE MARRIAGE. By Witold Gombrowicz. LaComédie Française (Salle Richelieu), Paris.26 April 2001.Polish playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) was a French and Argentinian émigré whosework was largely banned in communist Polandduring his lifetime. The Marriage (1944), Gom-browicz’s most ambitious and difficult play, hasfound appropriate theatrical proponents at theComédie Française in director Jacques Rosner (anadmirer of Brecht and the child of Polish Jews whoemigrated to France in the 1930s) and Andrzej646 / Performance ReviewSeweryn (a Polish actor who joined the ComédieFrançaise after several years with the Peter Brookcompany and is currently their lead actor). In theproduction, Seweryn plays Henry, the lead andtacit self-portrait in Gombrowicz’s play.The Comédie Française production belatedlyfulfills Gombrowicz’s wish for his works to bestaged by established classical companies beforemore avant-garde ones—although the productionhistory of The Marriage in France and Poland hasbeen exactly the reverse. The Marriage can be un-derstood as a theatrical jazz riff on characters,plots, and themes from Hamlet, Richard III, Othello,Faust, and Calderón’s Life is a Dream played incounterpoint with Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Like Hamlet,Gombrowicz’s drama begins with Henry’s home-coming, which is also the dream of the exiledGombrowicz in Buenos Aires in 1944. The play isultimately both a black mass and an exorcism, apotentially cathartic confrontation with the darkestaspects of the self and a degraded and corruptedsocial order.Rosner’s boldest directorial choice is the castingof Seweryn in the leading role. Henry is supposedto be in his twenties, a Polish soldier on the front inNorthern France at the end of World War II,dreaming of his return to Poland. Seweryn, alreadyin his fifties, instead plays Henry as Gombrowiczthe middle-aged exile in Argentina at the time thathe wrote the play. One price for this apt but high-concept approach is the potential confusion of anyaudience not already familiar with both the playand Gombrowicz’s biography. The other is thediluting of the play’s ending and its implicationsfor the character of Henry. Seweryn’s otherwisebold and passionate performance (for example, hefully exploits a passage in act 3 to stage a tour deforce assault upon the etiquette, decorum, and pro-priety of the actor/audience relationship of theelegant Salle Richelieu) is ultimately blunted by hischoice at the end to step out of the play and backinto the persona of the dreaming—but ultimatelydetached—Gombrowicz in exile. This loss is one noprogram note can correct.Henry (Andrzej Seweryn, center) and Molly (Céline Samie, upper right) in the Comédie Française’sproduction of Witold Gombrowicz’s The Marriage, directed by Jacques Rosner. Salle Richelieu, Paris.Photo: San Bartolomé.PERFORMANCE REVIEW / 647Rosner and Seweryn, however, do engage theplay’s charged and complex erotic dimension. Wo-ven throughout the play are classic Oedipal con-flicts (Henry’s violent displacement of his fatherand symbolic rape of his mother) and an invertedversion of the story of Goethe’s Faust and Gretchen.Henry’s sexuality reflects his protean and ambigu-ous sense of identity and Seweryn’s performanceclearly embodies the character’s implied bisexual-ity. One of the iconic moments of the production isa three-way embrace of Henry, his fiancée Molly,and his youthful companion Johnny, with each ofthe characters in turn being sandwiched by theother two.In spite of her few lines, the character of Molly isthe ethical and erotic crux of the play. Céline Samieplays the character as a robust and rather dimblond bombshell straight out of a Feydeau farce.Such an interpretation, however, flies in the face ofGombrowicz’s apparent design to make Molly alatter-day composite of Goethe’s Gretchen andShakespeare’s Ophelia and Desdemona. The choiceto perform Molly as an exile from boulevard com-edy instead veers into crude misogyny via hoarytheatrical cliché. While Gombrowicz was hardly afeminist, he was a radical and thorough critic ofpatriarchy and his treatment of sexuality and gen-der was ultimately more nuanced and paradoxicalthan Rosner’s production conveys.In contrast to the disappointing vulgarity ofSamie’s Molly, Roland Bertin and Christine Fersengive bold and confident performances as Henry’salternately shell-shocked and obstreperous par-ents. Gombrowicz’s play, which proves no less anopportunity for Bertin than for Seweryn, is anexcellent ensemble vehicle. Yves Gasc as the Drunk-ard, Henry’s ultimate foil and doppelgänger, alsoexpertly exploits his role as a kind of Mephisto-philian gang leader. Laurent d’Olce plays Johnny,Henry’s confidant and alter ego, his Horatio andunwitting Cassio, and provides Seweryn with astrong counterpoint of attractive youthful vigorand insouciance.For Roland Bertin, the production is his swansong after a long and distinguished career withthe Comédie Française. Bertin’s massive bodyunexpectedly resonates with the play’s height-ened language, in which every possible variationof the words “pig” and “swine” are obsessivelyrepeated. Bertin’s body, which moves aggressivelyand even haughtily in the role, provides a visualself-indictment of both himself and the family.Henry must struggle to deny his father’s obvious“swinishness” no less than Molly’s apparent pro-miscuity. Bertin clearly relishes the role, and hisgo-for-broke attack raises the stakes for everyoneelse involved.Rosner’s direction is overall a savvy, if cautious,blend of classical and experimental approaches toGombrowicz’s work. His staging pointedly refer-ences the work of Tadeusz Kantor (e.g., goose-stepping soldiers in oversized uniforms, Molly’sgrotesque transformation into Henry’s bride, a land-scape dominated by a broken wooden cross). De-signer Thierry Leproust’s flat and monochromepainted backdrops recall the work of Polish artistFranciszek Starowieyski, whose exquisite and cruelimages in turn evoke the annotated anatomicaldrawings of da Vinci.While the combination of Gombrowicz’s textwith Rosner’s staging is certainly a stretch for theComédie Française and its audience, apart from theprestigious venue the production ultimately breaksno new ground for the play that wasn’t explored inthe 1970s. Rosner’s “establishment” production onthe one hand reaffirms Gombrowicz’s place in thecontemporary theatrical canon alongside the likesof Genet and Pinter (who are also part of thecompany’s season this year) and on the other belieshis ongoing appeal to a variety of innovative youngdirectors across Europe. Based on the audience’sresponse at the two early performances I attended,however, the production’s provocations seemed aswelcome as they were overdue.ALLEN J. KUHARSKISwarthmore CollegeLE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME. By Mo-lière. La Comédie Française (Salle Riche-lieu), Paris. 19 December 2000.The centerpiece at the Comédie Française thispast season was Jean-Louis Benoit’s production ofMolière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the acknowl-edged masterpiece of that “total theatre” genre ofthe seventeenth-century, the comédie-ballet. A fore-runner of the modern musical comedy, but quicklysupplanted by the Lully/Quinault operatic reper-toire, the genre of comédie-ballet effectively diedwith its creator, leaving Le Bourgeois gentilhommesubject to scholarly and critical distortion that forcenturies erroneously considered it flawed as dra-matic art, while all the while acknowledging itspopularity. One of the company’s most producedworks, the play has seen no fewer than four pro-ductions at the Comédie Française since the SecondWorld War, those directed by Jean Meyer, Jean-

Review Of  The Marriage  By W. Gombrowicz And Performed By La Comédie Française

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Review Of The Marriage By W. Gombrowicz And Performed By La Comédie Française

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