New Statesman & Society, 2/9/96
By David Jays
Theatre directors are shamelessly raiding the cinema for inspiration. This might put burns on seats, but, argues David Jays, it is endangering the immediacy of theatre.
The audience at the Barbican cheers and hisses, howls adulation and contempt. Pity, it's only a sound effect. The real audience for the RSC's disastrous production of Les Enfants du Paradis produces the odd titter and patters polite applause. Theatre, it would seem, just doesn't push the right visceral buttons any more. So what does the job nowadays? Movies, of course.
British theatre has fallen for the common belief that the big screen is where it's at. Sometimes this means crass thievery: the advertisements for Macbeth at Wimbledon promise "The Original Reservoir Dog!", nicking Tarantino's suit-and-shades poster and scrambling on a bandwagon already leaving town. Movies have gate crashed repertoire as well as marketing: Manchester stages the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, Fellini's La Dolce Vita opens soon in Sheffield, a musical Jean de Florette looms. Marcel Carne's beautiful 1945 film is the basis of the RSC show, a musky love story set in the 19th-century Parisian theatre, where four men, including the magical mime Baptiste, pursue Garance, sometime actress of relaxed virtue and serene integrity.
Simon Callow directs his own adaptation of Jacques Prevert's screenplay, and has spoken enticingly of trying to examine the lost phenomenon of grand romantic acting. It's a fascinating quest, but the conditions to support it have disappeared. Great performers offer not just their current work, but all their previous characters, their past lives.
Repeated viewing of favourite roles renews the artist's sloughed-off skin, but was only possible when actor-managers regularly reprised hits throughout their careers. Sarah Bernhardt played La Dame aux Camelias for almost 30 years, Irving tolled The Bells for 34. Close-up cinema changed the way an actor steals our soul, and video makes that experience continually available. Nowadays, I can pop into Blockbusters and see Chaplin and Pfeiffer every evening, or morning.
No one is more immediate than sparring, barging Katharine Hepburn, her assertive energy rewound and played again. Few leading players now can afford to build a career in theatre alone -- Maggie Smith is perhaps the last classical star who guarantees full houses.
Despite theatre's unique immediacy, drama only rarely makes the cultural running. Except, perhaps, with performers who burrow into their own bodies to explore fragile mortality. The ICA leads the field, showcasing sexy, scary artists like Annie Sprinkle and Ron Athey. For Germany's Raimund Hoghe, who recently performed Meinwarts here, his own disabled frame is the focus for a mediation on memory, the Holocaust and Aids, as he waltzes through red candles to a crackling gramophone. Callow laments the dimming of the actor's soul; I would argue that these performers address our deepest concerns by pitching their tents on the body itself.
Video killed the matinee star, now it imperils stage adaptations: who accepts substitutes? In Les Enfants du Paradis, a rag-and-bone man, mimicked in Baptiste's pantomime, bellows that they've stolen his silhouette, his identity. Light-fingered companies slipping into silver-screen garb are probably wise to batten on Carne or Fellini, rather than familiar Hollywood classics--who to cast as Bogart or Bacall? As art-house cinema flourishes, a night out at Les Enfants offers sophisticated kudos without subtitles. Cosmopolitan heaven. Theatres often attempt to disguise the fact that going to the theatre involves watching a play. Nicholas Nickebly encouraged a voracious trend for adapting novels; with Penguin Classics reduced to crumbs, the locusts move on to green film archives.
Callow's commitment to the exalted performance of personality is scuppered by his own production, which reduces his cast to scampering fleas. Cinema's great gift to the actor is the close up, allowing performers to flood the screen; at the Barbican, focus is dispersed by Robin Don's hideous revolving set, cramming the stage with scaffolding and stairways. Piped music dribbles throughout, a large cast capers in the margins. The eye continually strays from Garance and her tortured suitors to, say, the arresting circus performer walking on her hands, or the haughty tragedienne clicking at her lime-green knitting.
Screen comparisons aside, the talented cast glimmers feebly. Helen McCrory captures Garance's direct serenity, striding over the stage in white satin; Rupert Graves' button-eye Pierrot is a dull speaker but an ace mime, images rising through his body like bubbles. Only Joseph Fiennes dazzles, as the criminal dandy Lacenaire, secateur wrists stretching from his cuffs. He purrs with menace, pacing with a subdued spring as if his boots conceal velvet-padded paws.
Les Enfants provides a glorious spectrum of disappointed yearning. Unrequited passion, emotion wilting with habit, the hollow ache of sex without tears, all are etched in Prevert's dialogue, to be filled by actor and tender audience. It's sadly apt that the biggest laugh at the Barbican is Baptiste's impassioned: "If all the people who lived together truly loved each other, the world would shine as bright as the sun!" The cynical audience simply chuckles at the dunderhead, sitting on its hands and on its heart.
Theatre is a magpie art, and there's no reason why the show couldn't have worked. David Glass, preparing La Dolce Vita, co-directed (with Mike Alfreds) a triumphant version of Les Enfants with a tiny cast, a bare stage, and unabashedly theatrical imagery. But whipping the screen from screenplays is difficult work. Finical Lacenaire disdains the theatrical art of "making an audience's heart beat faster at the same time every evening"; he prefers his heart to beat alone. Lacenaire should hire a video.
"Les Enfants du Paradis "plays at the Barbican, London, until 2 March
