In Paris for a few days, and a new production of L’Anniversaire (The Birthday Party). The venue was the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, just a few steps from the river, but (as so puzzlingly often with interesting theatre in Paris) resolutely right-bank. Still, a nice vél-lib ride away.
By chance, this must be one of the first major new productions to open since the news of Harold Pinter’s death (though presumably, planned beforehand). It certainly had a celebratory feel - the current issue of L'avant-scène théâtre is given over to the text, alongside a series of tributes and commentary pieces.
I’ve seen a number of Birthday Party productions in recent years:- Bristol Old Vic’s last-minute filler production- with its interesting focus on the Petey/Meg relationship (Meg’s curtain line about being the belle of the ball as achingly self-deluding as Blanche DuBois, a South Coast Streetcar)- and the Lyric Hammersmith’s exuberant fiftieth-birthday Birthday Party. Both, however, retained and respected the naturalism of the boarding house setting, both beginning with Meg’s head cheerily popping through the serving hatch. Michel Fagadau’s staging, however, edged the play towards something slightly more expressionistic, yet without abandoning the specificities of the fading beach-house charm.
An enormous, bare wooden table dominated the stage, its excess denying the table’s ‘tableness’ on a realistic plane, at the same time as it drew attention to its signifying potential. This design picks up cleverly from a throw-away reference (if such things actually exist chez Pinter) to the table, to propose the surface as a supplementary plane of representation… on which. the characters walked and talked, caroused and caressed. The fluidity of Stan’s ascent onto a chair, his smooth stride across the table, and descent via another chair, was visually pleasing in its precise physicality, while the extra plane offered an objective opportunity to negotiate the tension between the realistic and the symbolic that has always lain at the heart of this early work.
At the back of the stage, three large mirrors enclosed the set in the way that the naturalistic serving hatch has done in more traditional productions. The mirrors, carefully angled, refracted as much as they reflected, and proposed an alternative audience regard on the action.
The Birthday Party was first staged in Paris in December 1967 at the Théâtre Antoine. Despite six years of exposure to Pinter’s work, reviewers of L’Anniversaire would raise exactly the same frustrated questioning of the plot as their uncomprehending London homologues had when first encountering Pinter and The Birthday Party in 1958. Intriguingly, the disruption of the production chronology, whereby Pinter’s first full-length play was the fourth to be produced in Paris, also caused confusion. One reviewer, apparently accusing Pinter of borrowing from himself in the future with The Birthday Party, wrote that from a new author: ‘je dirais : voilà un homme qui cherche quelque chose, qui ne l’a pas encore trouvé, mais qui ira quelque part, voilà un auteur à suivre. Mais venant de Pinter, le même texte ne me semble que système.’ (‘I would say: here’s a man looking for something, who hasn’t found it yet, but who will go places, here’s an author to follow. But coming from Pinter, the same text seems to me to be just his usual tricks’).
This new, production, was the first to propose a new text to replace Eric Kahane’s canonical version. The key to any translation of Pinter is the Melbourne question. If much of Pinter is hard to translate, the key interrogation scene in this play, where Stanley is subjected to an increasingly bizarre series of unanswerable questions, must be almost impossible. Martin Esslin’s amusing article on translating Pinter in Germany shows how the question ‘Who watered the wicket in Melbourne’ has proved particularly taxing for translators not au fait with Pinter’s beloved cricket. The worst translation that Esslin identifies ended up with Stanley challenged to answer the question ‘Who pissed on the town gate in Melbourne?’. Traduttore, traditore, as they say. This new translation, however, successfully negotiates the Melbourne trap, though the phrase must sound more dislocated to a French audience for whom the word ‘guichet’ may not conjure up three stumps and bails as quickly as it might for a cricket-loving (or at least cricket-conscious) home audience. The most successful feature, however, of the new translation is its courage to give up. That is, while cultural transposition is sometimes possible, sometimes it’s better not to bother. ‘Lower Edmonton’ could be transposed to a similarly anonymous, almost silly sounding, Parisian suburb (but then the banlieue in Paris does not have the same cultural signifying force as Metro-land does in the South-East), but it’s less jarring perhaps to omit the topological reference all together, and the text successfully negotiated this tension between literal translation, cultural transposition, and creative omission.
All in all a refreshing interpretation of an early Pinter classic, and a worthy tribute to the continuing vivacity of the late Pinter’s writing.
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