Abstract
This is not Julien Guill’s first attempt at staging Shakespeare. In 2017, he already directed a successful diptych, Les Pièces vénitiennes (Le Procès) [The Venetian Plays (The Trial)], an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice and Othello for two actresses, focusing exclusively on Shylock and Othello as they confront their accusers. Le Roi Lear (Chronique) [King Lear (A Chronicle)] also relies on a reduced cast of four actors and a bare stage. For more than 10 years now, such principles have been at the root of Guill’s ‘théâtre enragé’ (‘enraged theatre’), a notion that, in French, rhymes with ‘théâtre engagé’ (‘committed theatre’). Guill’s ‘Manifesto for an enraged theatre’ lays down fifteen rules which claim to break away from conventions by promoting productions free from technical constraints, without machines and stagecraft, and performances that centre on acting and actors’ body language, on the power of words rather than spectacular effects, as well as on committed spectators and their capacity for imagination. Every night, Compagnie provisoire (Provisional Company) plays in a different venue, quite often one that was not originally designed to host theatre performances. They rehearse on the very same day in radical conditions, on an empty stage and with service lights only. First and foremost, they invite theatre communities to embark on a human adventure. Given their ethos, it comes as no surprise that Shakespeare should rank among their favourite authors. Their production of King Lear, in particular, literalised the idea that the whole tragedy builds up from ‘nothing’.
The minimalist aesthetic, which ruled out spectacular artifice, was ostensibly assumed in a self-reflexive way. When Lear took shelter from the storm in a hovel and asked his fool to ‘draw the curtains’ (3.6.80), the latter literally ran downstage, looking frantically for hangings, which he could not find as the performance space had been totally stripped of all its drapes. All dressed in neutral, casual clothes – black tops and blue jeans – actors changed roles in full view of the audience, who quickly internalised the conventions. As the Fool, Sébastien Portier wore a woollen cap, which he took off to play Kent. A token of madness, whether artificial or natural, a similar hat was also worn by Lear from the moment his ‘wits beg[a]n to turn’ (3.2.67). Camille Daloz performed a whole generation, Lear’s three daughters and Gloucester’s two sons, breaking with the long-established tradition of having the same actor double as the Fool and Cordelia. Wearing a jacket when playing Edmund, he took it off as Edgar and stripped to the waist as Tom.
Guill’s choice to cast actresses as Lear and Gloucester (respectively, Fanny Rudelle and Dominique Léandri) and a single male actor as Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia pushed Shakespeare’s deconstruction of gender stereotypes to the very limit, questioning the definitions of virility and femininity as could be expected in the sensitive context of the #MeToo movement. In such a configuration, Lear’s biased remark in the source text, ‘And let not women’s weapons, water drops, / Stain my man’s cheeks!’ (2.1.466–7), stood out even more conspicuously, drawing the spectators out of their comfort zone. Yet one could object that the dramaturgical treatment of the gender issue sometimes proved difficult to decipher. When in response to Lear’s command, ‘Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here’ (3.4.106–7), all the actors stripped half-naked, how should this gesture, anything but sensual, be read? As one more instance of what has now become conventional nakedness onstage? As evidence of Lear’s assumed feminisation and Goneril’s and Regan’s assumed masculinisation? Or as a radical challenge of the conventional binary distinction between male and female? The production’s intention to address the gender issue was obvious throughout, but the argument underlying it sometimes lacked lucidity.
Deliberately renouncing all kinds of technology was a way for Compagnie provisoire to foreground Shakespeare’s text (in a French translation by Jean-Michel Déprats) and its capacity for stimulating the imagination, thus developing a direct relationship with the audience, based on cooperation and playful interaction. With no intention to reconstitute the historical conditions of performance in Elizabethan public playhouses, they nevertheless succeeded in reviving the jovial, popular atmosphere that presumably reigned in Shakespeare’s Globe. The lights unconventionally remained on in the auditorium until the final scene when they progressively went down, darkness befitting the accumulation of deaths onstage. Throughout the performance, the borderline between stage and audience was thus constantly blurred by the lights that united them in one and the same space where they could see each other distinctly, and in which the public was not an anonymous mass in the dark but an assembly of individuals with their idiosyncrasies, whom the actors apostrophised directly, without the mediation of microphones. Right from the beginning, Lear remained onstage while his three daughters and the Fool/Kent walked into the auditorium, waiting to be summoned. When Cordelia’s turn came, she kept repeating ‘nothing’ from the audience, the proxemics emphasising the growing divide between herself and her father, which led to her banishment, as well as the empathy the spectators started developing for her character.
Lear’s abusive authority was intensified as he ordered the public about, asking them to go and fetch his Fool. The Fool in particular proved very efficient in hyphenating stage and audience, past and present, comedy and tragedy, transforming the whole playhouse into an acting area. Asking a spectator his name, he made him complicit in his argument with Lear: ‘Mathias and I were just thinking that…’ Summoned by Lear to join him on stage, he reluctantly crossed the auditorium, meandering between the rows of spectators, stopping to chat with someone, sitting on someone else’s knees, stumbling over another person’s feet, or climbing up a seat to shake hands with yet another. Onstage, the Fool mostly evolved in the proscenium area, close to the audience, with whom he kept cultivating intimacy. He thus referred to the history of Théâtre Jean Vilar, a former wine storehouse and a place of conviviality, inviting the spectators to appropriate the venue in a jocular way.
Staging the storm scene according to the rules of Guill’s ‘enraged theatre’ paradoxically turned out to be a real challenge. The sense of disorder and confusion was created by the soundscape as well as bodily language. As thunder could be heard in the distance, the Fool sitting on the edge of the stage opposite the audience, rolled anxious eyes while looking up at the flies. With the wind coming up, the actors started circling the stage to the rhythm of a bass throb, running ever faster as the sound grew louder until reaching a hardly bearable level. The storm encompassed the audience, who found themselves on the heath with Lear, the Fool, Kent, and Gloucester.
Considering that their work is still in progress until it has repeatedly confronted the audience, Compagnie provisoire experimented with two different versions of the scene on the consecutive evenings of 30 and 31 January. In Théâtre Jean Vilar, they pretended they were screaming although they were not uttering a sound. The night after, in Théâtre Jean-Claude Carrière, they opted loudly to shout the text over the noise of the storm, sometimes lowering their voices on purpose so that the spectator could only get snatches of dialogue. Interestingly, as they explored these ways of making the audience uncomfortable, the illusionistic strategy turned out to be more efficient than the non-illusionistic one.
‘Is this the promised end?’ the spectator was entitled to wonder as Camille Daloz, cast in multiple roles, performed four deaths in a row and triggered off sceptical laughter among the audience. Although the production played throughout rather convincingly on the borderline between tragedy and comedy, the apocalyptic end missed its point. And yet, the very last image proved powerfully poetic. The Fool, who had remained motionless at the back, left stage, moved forward into the square of light that had been delineating the acting area since the beginning of the performance and stopped still at the very limit between light and darkness, facing the audience, his head bent down in mourning. Meanwhile, downstage, Lear was crying over Cordelia’s corpse, until he exclaimed, ‘And my poor fool is hang’d!’ (5.3.304). The line suddenly conferred another meaning to the fool’s solemn posture, suggesting a new, striking image, whose efficiency certainly lay in its simplicity.
Guill’s ‘enraged’ production of King Lear invited the audience, if not to ‘see better’ (1.1.159), at least to reconsider the play in a different light, both literally and figuratively, since all the efforts focused on building a direct relationship between text, actors, and audience, in the spirit of the Shakespearean tradition.