Abstract
Guillaume Vincent is a young French director who is not afraid of major texts or generic transfers. One of his early works was a staging of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Far from rushing into his productions, he allows himself time to experiment. He worked on this production for more than 2 years and tested sections of it on audiences before it opened in Reims in October 2016, moving to the Ateliers Berthier, a theatre in the former warehouse of the Opéra Garnier on the northern fringe of Paris, in April 2017 and on to the Printemps des Comédiens Festival in Montpellier in June.
The concept was bold and highly original: to combine stories ‘freely inspired’, the programme tells us, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses with A Midsummer Night’s Dream – hence the title, Songes et Métamorphoses, and a two-part show that lasted more than four hours. Vincent has already turned tales into drama (in 2011, he staged Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’). Combining Shakespeare and Ovid was an apt way to mark the fourth centenary of the former’s death in 2016 and the bimillenary of the latter’s death in 2017. As Shakespeare and his contemporaries have proved over and over again, Ovidian poetry lends itself to dramatization, through the imagery, dialogues and transformative action in Metamorphoses and the lovers’ complaints in Heroides. Unfortunately, Vincent’s production, which grew out of drama workshops in schools, prison and with an amateur group, failed to coalesce convincingly into an artistic whole, while nonetheless offering memorable moments.
The main tales from Ovid staged in the first half of the show were Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, Iphis and Ianthe, Myrrha, Pygmalion and Procne. Dialogues written by Vincent were combined with passages from Ovid. For Dream, Vincent used Jean-Michel Déprats’ crisp, stage-worthy translation, published by Gallimard, into which he injected songs and music from Benjamin Britten, Felix Mendelsohn and Henry Purcell.
The show got off to a promising start. The lights rose on a raised dais in the centre of the stage, with a colourful, naïve backcloth reminiscent of Douanier Rousseau that seemed to have been assembled from children’s artwork, a mirror serving as a pool and rounded silver rocks; children dressed in tunics impersonated nymphs and young men to enact the Narcissus story. Adults sat watching, their backs to the audience. The onstage spectators clapped, children joined their parents, who stood around the teacher, Monsieur Gaillard (Gérard Watkins), congratulating him – until, somehow, the festive atmosphere went sour when a parent hinted that the teacher might be a paedophile.
The scene then moved to a classroom in a secondary school, with four teenagers, two boys and two girls. Monsieur Gaillard came in, as if time had moved forward and these were the children from the Narcissus show. The girls, Mira and Sophie, explained that they preferred the story of Iphis and Ianthe to the myths he had set them. The teacher expressed dismay: this was a Catholic school, in no way could he allow them to play the parts of two girls falling in love.
Rebelliously, they did so, briefly, then pulled him into another play, turning the tables on him: he was clearly out of his depth. While the girls did a quick costume change, the boys sat him forcibly in a chair, where he became Cinyras having breakfast with his provocative teenage daughter Mira/Myrrha who was naked under a very short nightie (Elsa Agnès), and a friend of hers, Sophie (Elsa Guedj), in a ginger wig. On realizing that Mira was in love with her father, Sophie flirted with Cyniras and let him believe she might join him in the night. Wearing Sophie’s wig, Mira followed her father backstage through a door, closing it behind her. When she re-emerged, in dim lighting, she was heavily pregnant; she removed her wig and moved slowly front stage, arms outstretched and fingers splayed as the text related her transformation into the myrrh tree from which Adonis is born. To this reviewer, this stylized metamorphosis, which followed Ovid’s text closely, was one of the most effective moments of the production.
Rather as in Dream, where the first scene with the mechanicals follows the tensions at the Athenian and fairy courts, there followed a moment of fun and games which staged the rehearsals, ambitions and rivalries of an amateur company, questioning, as the mechanicals do, the challenges and limits of impersonation and staging. This broke the Ovidian thread and went on for rather too long, but it may have been necessary to provide a form of respite, before the discussions between the amateur players slid into another dark tale, literalized onstage by a dark, inset stage, with dark draperies, a sofa, television set and kitchen table. A woman in a black Elizabethan gown jarred in this setting, suggesting time was out of joint; from the children to the teenagers to this weary-looking woman in her forties, time seemed to have moved depressingly forward. Here was Nicole/Procne, powerfully played by Emilie Incerti-Formentini, worrying about her sister Philomel’s disappearance. The domestic setting made this story all the more suffocating when it transpired that Procne’s husband, Christian/Tereus, a brutish lout, had raped, mutilated and imprisoned Philomel in the cellar under the house.
In contrast, Dream, after the interval, was something of a disappointment. The Ateliers’ deep wide stage seemed suddenly too large for the cast, swallowing up the characters who seemed to spend a lot of their energy moving around the oversized space. Brown panelled walls below a skyline of trees simultaneously suggested a large ballroom and a forest, with fog, blue lighting and tinsel for a moonlit atmosphere. The stage was bare throughout most of the play, except when a dais was brought in for the Pyramus and Thisbe play, which recreated the disorganized, happy-go-lucky atmosphere of amateur performance that had preceded the Myrrha tableau.
This Dream was mostly fun and games, a relief after the darker Ovidian moments, perhaps. While the first part had explored Ovid’s tales by drawing on the metatheatrical tricks and changes of mood of Shakespeare’s comedy, the reverse was not so evident. True, there were the same actors, wearing similar, or identical costumes: Demetrius’s checked kilt recalled the red one worn by Narcissus; and Incerti-Formentini created a fleeting sense of unease when she appeared as a fairy, wearing the same black gown she had worn as Procne. Overall, though, there was no heightening or expanding of the Ovidian material already present in the play – the Pyramus and Thisbe playlet, whose side-splitting comedy can veer into moving pathos when well performed, left this reviewer with no memorable impression. Potentially unsettling undercurrents – which to some extent seemed to have been suggested by the scenes from Metamorphoses in the first half of the show – were overlooked, deflected or swept aside in favour of comedic moments, with no undertow of sexual violence and danger. One instance of this was when Demetrius (Makita Samba) threatened to abandon Helena (Elsa Guedj) to the forest beasts or, worse, to rape her – lines which recall his namesake and the Ovidian rape of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus as well as Ovidian myths such as the story of Callisto, and serve as a reminder that love may be thwart with danger when two young people meet in a dark forest far from the controlling framework of civilization. Here, Demetrius simply pulled down the coloured boxer shorts he wore under his kilt and stood there with them round his ankles, in danger of tripping himself up if he made a grab for Helena, looking and sounding ludicrous – there was no way his words could seem in any way a threat and this Helena was rightly unimpressed. Inevitably, the audience, a large part of which consisted of high-school teenagers, laughed – after having gasped in dismay at the Ovidian tales of incest and cannibalistic infanticide.
As Puck, Gérard Watkins was excellent, moving around on tiptoes, knees slightly bent, like some kind of ineffectual grasshopper – in the continuity of his inability to control events as a teacher in the first part of the show. The performance earned him the best-actor award from the French Critics’ Professional Association. The four lovers in the forest were performed by the actors who played the teenagers in the Myrrha sequence. They gave their parts bounce and energy but, because of Vincent’s directorial choices, they failed to reach the depth Elsa Agnès had revealed in her impersonation of Myrrha.
The unifying thread that ran through the two parts of the production was a metatheatrical exploration of performance, with embedded plays and audiences. The focus was on amateur players being caught up in the stories they enact, and the inextricable web of fantasy and reality they get themselves into, from which the audience ultimately releases them. In this respect, the overall performance worked. Yet, as a fan of both Ovid and Shakespeare, this reviewer expected more play on the themes of dreaming and transformation announced in the name of the production, more interaction between the worlds of both Ovid and Shakespeare.