Shakespeare en devenir

Richard II in the Honour Court of the Papal Palace: Forgetting Shakespeare in order to find him?

Par Florence March
Publication en ligne le 01 décembre 2010

1I find the spectator and the researcher within me quite difficult to reconcile. The spectator's pleasure sets off the researcher's desire to work on the performance, which means overcoming fascination to adopt a critical distance. On the other hand, the spectator's frustration may turn out to be the researcher's good fortune. Failure to fulfil the spectator's desire and to meet his expectations provides an analytic counterpoint to study the creative process at work in a theatrical performance. This is the way I feel about Richard II, newly translated by Frédéric Boyer and directed by Jean-Baptiste Sastre, which was scheduled from 20th to 27th July 2010 during the Avignon Festival. I'll thus consider this particular performance of Richard II as one more standpoint from which to examine the issue of Shakespearean configurations in the Honour Court of the Papal Palace, the cradle of the festival, and the way text and performance interact with this medieval place well-known for resisting the theatre1.

2I'll start with a brief historical reminder to explain why Richard II finds itself at a mythological crossroads and how demanding the expectations it generates among festival-goers are2. Then I'll attempt to analyse Boyer's and Sastre's negotiations with text and performance.

3The staging of Shakespeare in the Honour Court of the Papal Palace in September 1947 was a founding gesture which gave birth to the first festival, then called a Week of Art in Avignon. Why was Richard II selected by Jean Vilar together with two other plays by contemporary French dramatists?

4Vilar's intention was to revive French national popular theatre out of Paris, and reinvent a direct relationship between stage and audience, breaking away from the constraints of Italian playhouses. He naturally turned to Greek and Elizabethan theatre configurations. Hence his choice of the Honour Court for open air performances in front of large audiences, so as to create the conditions for a theatrical ceremony, a communion.

5Regarding the repertoire, Vilar wished to make popular audiences familiar with canonical as well as contemporary texts, defining the festival as both a theatrical showcase and laboratory. Shakespeare's pedigree in France had been established by the Romantics, Victor Hugo and Stendhal proving particularly influential3. The Romantics, who advocated a break away from the constraining rules of composition of French classical drama, set up Shakespeare's plastic drama as a symbol of freedom. They praised the variety of plots, the interaction of different levels of language, the mixture of tragic and comic modes, the alliance of the sublime and the grotesque, which address spectators from all social classes and which had been recurrently denounced in previous centuries4. Shakespeare's narrow association with the notion of popular theatre in France dates back to the Romantic Movement, even though the critic Roland Barthes pointed out the gap between Hugo's universalist statements and the bourgeois audience his plays addressed5. The translation of the complete works of William Shakespeare by François-Victor Hugo, son of the famous poet, contributed to their popularization in France.6

6At the beginning of the 20^th century, Firmin Gémier founded both the National Popular Theatre and the Shakespeare Society, carrying on their association:

Si l'on veut que le théâtre retrouve sa grandeur, sa dignité, il faut qu'il s'adresse de nouveau à la nation. Shakespeare et Molière sont toujours les deux premiers poètes dramatiques parce que, sortis du peuple, ils écrivent pour lui. Acteurs tous deux, ils restèrent en communion directe avec lui7.

If we want the theatre to rise again and regain dignity, it has to address the nation. Shakespeare and Molière are still the first two major dramatists because they came from the working class and wrote for it. Both of them being actors, they kept in touch with it.

7This association was strengthened by Vilar's symbolic choice of a Shakespearean history play to launch the first Avignon Festival in the post-war context of 1947. Jean Jacquot argues that the choice of Richard II, which initiates two tetralogies dramatizing more than a century of civil war and closing on the advent of a new dynasty, was particularly appropriate to this Week of Art which brought about the promise of a renewal, of some kind of faith in the future8. No doubt Vilar's theatrical contribution to the national reconstruction recalled Shakespeare's role at a time when England was inventing itself as a nation. The Elizabethan's bold, inventive and poetic treatment of language participated in the national linguistic project to develop the vernacular as a vector of cultural identity. His histories contributed to the construction of a collective memory and the critical appropriation by English spectators of a national History. Richard II was probably the most adapted play of both tetralogies to Vilar's theatre of conscience, which moved away from the romantic interpretation, although not radically. Moreover, the period of the tragedy coincided with the time when the Papal Palace was erected in the 14th century, thus designating it as a particularly fit setting.

8From the 19th century on, Shakespeare has thus become intricately interwoven with French cultural heritage, not only as a constant reference and a model for popular theatre but also as a catalyst for national cohesion through communion and debate. Such collective appropriation of Shakespeare after World War II was not only a French phenomenon but a European one. Richard II was also put on during the first Edinburgh International Festival, only weeks before the Week of Art in Avignon. Jan Kott and very recently Dennis Kennedy9 showed how Shakespeare was interpreted, translated, staged, adapted, and recycled so as to explore a diversity of national political contexts. In Kennedy's words, "Shakespeare was a cultural Marshall Plan10". The explosion of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation over the past twenty-five years now shows his global influence11. The metonymy "Shakespeare" which substitutes the author's name for his work, fusing the dramatist and his canon, is a sign of mythification, generally referred to as bardomania or bardolatry. Whether treated as a myth or a "multinational brand12", Shakespeare has become an acknowledged universal monument and can hardly be dissociated from such notions as sacredness and authenticity.

9It is thus quite challenging for artists to try and meet with audiences' particularly demanding expectations, based on idealised representations of text and performance. Such expectations clash with the reality of Shakespearean texts which resist fixity for a number of reasons, some of them I will just mention here: the context of the Renaissance "culture of borrowing13" (evoking Borges' bibliocosm, a metaphor for the constant circulation and interaction of literary texts which defines literature as eminently dynamic)14; the co-existence of different versions of a same text linked to variations from one quarto to another or between quarto and folio; the highly plastic or adaptogenic quality of Shakespeare's plays. In order to bridge the gap between creation and reception, and to negotiate complex pacts of performance, Peter Brook advocates forgetting Shakespeare so as to begin to find him15. We'll see how relevant this recommendation is with regard to the translation and staging of Richard II for the 64th edition of the Avignon Festival in 2010.

10In 1947, Jean Vilar commissioned Jean Curtis to do a new translation of Richard II, meant for the stage16. This was in keeping with his desire to experiment with new forms of theatre in Avignon. When Ariane Mnouchkine put on the play in 1982, she translated the play herself17, and Jean-Baptiste Sastre in his turn commissioned Frédéric Boyer to do it in 2010.

11Boyer is a novelist, poet and translator, competences that he clearly finds impossible to dissociate. His translating experience of Richard II is first and foremost a catalyst for creation. He transposes Brook's recommendation to the translating process, forgetting Shakespeare's Richard II in an attempt to find it.

12But what does "forget Shakespeare" mean when you are to translate Shakespeare into a different language? In an interview for France Culture in July 2010, Frédéric Boyer insisted that he did not translate word for word. This sounds like an obvious statement, but Boyer probably meant to explain he did not endeavour to recreate Shakespeare's style in 21st century French but rather aimed to find the gist of Richard II through his own style of writing, which he did not attempt to neutralize. In rejecting literal translation, Boyer broke away from a logic of equivalence, a system of balance, so as to avoid a comparative study of Shakespeare's and his Richard II which would inevitably trap him into a misleading dialectic of faithfulness and betrayal. Significantly, Boyer skirted around editorial questions which could bring him back to this binary reasoning, ignoring them in his foreword and answering them sparingly during the press conference. Basically, his main source consisted in the first quarto (1597), to which he added the deposition scene taken from the first folio (1623), thereby conflating two different states of Shakespeare's text. Being quite aware then that the notion of an original Shakespearean text is merely a fiction, he contributed a new layer to the palimpsest. His translation ought not to be read in comparison or opposition to but in the continuity of an open dramatic heritage. In his postface, Boyer defines a literary work as "an installation undergoing constant evolution", warning the reader against "the illusion of a closed, civilized heritage18".

13It is quite revealing that before translating Shakespeare, Boyer directed a new translation of the Bible19, the "plural text20" par excellence as it is fraught with repetitions and contradictions from one book to another or within a same book. The genetic process of both the Bible and Shakespeare's works, plural and hybrid texts resisting the notion of authenticity, coincides with Boyer's approach to translation:

Traduire, c'est irrémédiablement transformer et créer une version supplémentaire en faisant le deuil nécessaire d'une V.O. Le mot version est à entendre étymologiquement comme une torsion, un tour (du latin vertere : tourner, faire tourner) imprimé à l'œuvre ou au texte que l'on traduit21.

To translate is to transform and create one more version while necessarily mourning an original version. The word version is to be understood etymologically as a torsion (from the Latin vertere: to turn, to change), a twisting of the work or of the text which is being translated.

14Boyer carefully avoided the formal debate on prose and verse in Richard II. Whereas Curtis opted for prose and Mnouchkine for blank verse, he wrote a contemporary "long prose poem22" meant to convey the essence of Shakespeare's baroque writing. He does not obliterate his identity as an author in the translating process, far from it. His short, broken sentences and paratactic style ensure the dynamism and rapid rhythm of the Shakespearean source:

KING RICHARD
Then call them to our presence. Face to face,
And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear
The accuser and the accused freely speak.
High-stomached are they both and full of ire,
In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire23.

RICHARD
Eh bien ! appelle-les devant moi.
Face à face.
Confrontation.
Je les écouterai parler librement
accusateur et accusé.
Ils ont l'estomac si bien accroché tous les deux.
Colère.
Enragés.
Sourds comme l'océan
rapides comme un feu. (I.1, p. 46)

15Different levels of language coexist, although orality is constantly privileged and archaisms such as the royal plural disappear:

KING RICHARD
We thank you both. Yet one but flatters me us,
As well appeareth by the cause you come,
Namely, to appeal each other of high treason. (I.1.24-25)

RICHARD
Merci, merci tous les deux.
Mais l'un d'entre vous cherche à m'avoir.
Sinon pourquoi tous les deux venir ici même accuser l'autre de haute trahison? (I.1, p. 47)

16Grammatical ellipses work as the stylistic metaphor of the implicit part of Richard II, a text about loss (there are 25 occurrences of the word "nothing" in the text edited by Forker, and 44 occurrences of its French equivalent "rien" in Boyer's translation). The elliptic quality of the text also makes it appropriate for the stage where it can interact with a performance text. More generally, the sophisticated use of space on the page – a characteristic of Boyer's writing style, as well as the unconventional formats of a number of his books – contains in germ its potential development in the three-dimensional space of the stage.

17The complex sound pattern in Shakespeare's tragedy finds a way through Boyer's aesthetics of manducation (the titles of some of his books are quite significant in this regard: Hammurabi Hammurabi; Mes amis mes amis, as well as his poem Comics. 20 petites litanies)24, relying heavily on alliterations and assonances, syllabic and lexical repetitions and echoes, syntactic parallels and semantic associations. Boyer endeavours to capture Shakespeare's Richard II "in his own words, in his imperfect, incomplete language25". He thus ingested and chewed the cud of Shakespeare's tragedy so as to produce his own version of it, the appropriation process mirroring his ruminative writing. In this respect, Boyer's collection of prose poems entitled Vaches26 (Cows) constitutes an appropriate metaphor of his style.

18Boyer as writer is omnipresent in the translation, a phenomenon which is echoed on stage as he plays several minor parts. More generally, the figure of the writer was meant to haunt the stage through the participation of Florence Delay from the Académie française, as well as Jean Echenoz and Pierre Michon – the last two finally being prevented from acting. Interestingly, Michon is the author of Corps du roi (The King's Bodies)27 of which he gave a public reading during the Avignon Festival. In this collection of short studies of major writers such as Beckett, Flaubert, Faulkner and Hugo, Michon applies Kantorowicz's theory of The King's Two Bodies to the writer who as a man is subjected to the human condition of mortality, and yet is also part of an immortal, dynastic body enthroned and sacralized by the text28. As if to confirm Michon's position, Florence Delay embodies on stage the institution of the Académie Française, whose members are called the Immortals and who, once elected cannot resign their seat (just as Richard II cannot be unkinged). The wheel comes full circle as the tragic dialectic at the core of Richard II resurfaces in the very act of writing, which for Boyer is intricately entangled with the act of translating, defined as appropriation rather than mere transmission, "adoption rather than adaptation29". Boyer's bold enterprise consists in reversing the relationship between source and target in the translating process as an act of memory. At the crossroads of two mythologies, that of Shakespeare and that of the Avignon Festival which it contributed to create, Richard II does not need to be remembered. The situation is different from what it was in 1947 when the play had never been performed in France. It is now Shakespeare's tragedy that ought to remember us through translation:

Nous sommes oubliés des œuvres et de leurs langues. Les retraduire c'est réveiller leur mémoire de langage. Leur dire nous sommes là nous aussi, et faire en sorte que nous puissions nous entendre. Leur faire dire: faites-vous entendre en nous, réveillez-nous [...]30.

We are forgotten by literary works and their languages. To translate them means waking up their memory of language. It means telling them that we are here too and managing to get along together. It means having them say: make your voices sound within us, wake us up [...].

19At the mythological crossroads of Shakespeare, the Honour Court and the Avignon Festival, contemporary translation may thus be defined as a "pact of survival31" for 21^st century readers, audience and artists. Resurgences of Boyer's theory of translation are woven into the performance text as contemporary writers haunt the Honour Court, making their voices resonate in it as if to ward off the ill fortune of the dummy seated at the silver table, stage left, throughout the show.

20Boyer's new translation answers Vilar's wish that the festival be a laboratory in which Shakespeare should not be considered as a "guaranteed income32", but as an incentive for artistic creation.

21Jean-Baptiste Sastre is familiar with English Renaissance drama. He put on Tamburlaine the Great by Marlowe in 2001 at the National Theatre of Chaillot – a theatre associated with Jean Vilar who directed it from 1951 to 1963. As a Villa Medicis laureate in 2005, he went for a residence in London to study Elizabethan drama. He was thus a legitimate choice to stage Richard II for the Avignon Festival.

22A recent book edited by French academic Marie-Claude Hubert on theatrical rewritings argues that seeing something you have already seen is a major source of pleasure33. Yet, it seems that "palimpsestuous works" may also be a major source of frustration as they generate very demanding expectations. Stage director Hubert Colas defines the pact of performance as building a common experience with unknown material. But what about building a common experience with such mythic material as Shakespeare in the Honour Court? The pact of performance needs to be grounded on obliquity, indirectness, through defamiliarization of the so-called familiar object. Stage directors must work on strategies of demythification, desacralization, like Thomas Ostermeier, the artistic director of the Schaubuhne in Berlin, who put on Hamlet in the Honour Court in 2008. Catching the audience unawares, he started the play with the purple patch "To be or not to be" which was then repeated twice more during the performance. Structural displacement as well as multiplication were his ways of negotiating with the audience's expectations. When Ariane Mnouchkine directed Richard II in the Honour Court in 1982, she defamiliarized both play and place culturally and geographically, submitting them to Asian influence through references to kabuki, nô and bunraku. Defamiliarization had to be radical to avoid comparison with Vilar's founding gesture in 1947.

23Sastre's staging of Richard II in the Honour Court reactivated the memory of the festival. For instance, choreographer Olivia Grandville presented a parallel show entitled "A week of art in Avignon34" – the very name of the festival in 1947 – with the participation of her mother, former actress Léone Nogarède, who happened to play the part of the queen in Vilar's Richard II. An exhibition to commemorate Vilar's staging of the play was held in the Maison Jean Vilar. Interviews crystallized the comparison with Vilar. Instead of negotiating with references to the collective memory, taking them into account to redirect them deftly, Sastre remained silent – a form of passive resistance that did not encourage forgetting Shakespeare and Vilar but rather fuelled the festival-goers' fantasies.

24Yet, if Sastre resisted the weigh of memory in his discourse (or absence of discourse), his stage arrangement nevertheless signalled the weight of history in a place already pregnant with it. Evocations of a palimpsest suggested the traces of earlier forms of Richard II in the Honour Court. The silver leaves covering the table, also meant to figure a miniature stage, called to mind the different layers of performance texts. A film of the imposing wall of the Honour Court was processed and projected on it like a second skin, blurring its appearance, and thereby questioning its immutability. Though it would have fitted the dramaturgy of the play, the vertical dimension of the Court was not exploited, and the action kept at ground level as if weighed down by collective memory. This impression was confirmed by the huge horizontal beam crossing the stage, and burning slowly as to remind one of the passage of both dramatic and performance time. In fact, the stage arrangement with the dummy and burning beam suggested respectively the vanity of life and its shortness. The massive medieval wall facing the spectators worked as a gigantic mirror confronting them with History.

25Video sequences 1 and 2

26© Avignon Festival / La Compagnie des Indes - 201035

27It is precisely this frontal, direct relationship between stage and audience which seems problematic. It allows no possibility to put the well-known play at a distance, to neutralize and redefine expectations. Staging Hamlet in 2008, Ostermeier chose to ignore the Court, yet the to and fro of the mechanized acting platform called for constant refocusing on the canonical play. To reinforce this symbolic element of the pact of performance, Hamlet handled a video camera, filming both stage and audience. Ivo van Hove's immersive pact of performance for The Roman Tragedies in 2007, though not in the Honour Court, required the spectator's immediate cooperation, blurring the frontiers between stage and audience, aesthetic object and expectations, so as to create conditions for a powerful common configuration of the plays.

28Boyer and Denis Podalydès in the title role both successfully negotiated the defamiliarization of both text and tragic character, skimming over the surface of the palimpsest. But in the theatrical space pregnant with history and saturated with expectations, despite an almost naked stage, it turned out to be difficult to make room for the nothingness so central to the play.

29At a mythological crossroads, Shakespeare at the Avignon Festival, and more precisely in the Honour Court, challenges artists and audiences to keep making his drama "a battleground for thought, 'anything but a museum or high altar'36". It seems hardly possible for festival-goers to forget Richard II, but what is it exactly they remember?

30Appreciation of Shakespeare has traditionally been rooted in language. Kennedy stresses the contradiction at work here, since Shakespeare is performed in translation more frequently than any other playwright37. Far from the quest for a fictional original text, Shakespeare's written words thus become a pretext at the Avignon Festival. Boyer attempted to resolve the paradox, drawing near to what Brook calls an ideal performance script: "a new play, written in French, and written by Shakespeare38".

31Sastre's Richard II also questions the nature of the pact of performance in the Honour Court. In the other show staged there during the festival 2010, Papperlappap, Christoph Marthaler challenged the Court and titillated the audience by displacing the action behind the wall for long sequences (up to 10 minutes). Both performances seemed to call for different stage configurations and new modes of spectating in this historical monument.

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