L’amante anglaise

Jillian Murray.

Celebrating Duras is a special week dedicated to the writings and plays of the French author and film-maker Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) hosted by the inimitable La Mama theatre, as part their Celebrating Women Festival 2014 .

The stage play L’Amante anglaise is adapted from the original novella which was written in 1967 by Duras and explored the grisly murder of a woman in small village in France where the body was cut up into pieces then disposed by being put onto passing freight trains – all that is, except the head. Both the original text and the theatre play are structured by interviews with an un-named questioner. 

On stage we first meet with Pierrre Lannes (Robert Meldrum) who is the husband of the self-confessed murderer. In his narrative about his wife and how they live, he reveals the basic facts of the events which led to the murder. And it is through his cool answers about his life married to Claire Bousquet that we learn of the interior landscapes of characters which are enduring themes in Duras’ writing. 

Meldrum’s performance was thorough and effective as the self serving husband who never quarreled with his wife, but whose detachment failed to ignite the real love which the more poetic character Claire craved.

Through a simple and effective costume change, the actors then swap from interviewer to subject and it is then the turn of the protagonist Claire (Jillian Murray), who answers questions about her marriage and her relationship to both her husband and to her deaf and mute cousin Marie-Therese Bousquet, who was part of the unhappy household in Viorne for twenty-one years.

It is intelligent theatre directed to maximise both the singularity of the characters and their emotional stranglehold on each other. This is by no means a simplistic rendition of a crime of passion. Instead the genius of the staging with the simplicity of two chairs, and the deft and concise on-stage costume changes, makes the audience intimately connected to the subjects. The minimal stage action allows us to draw closer still to the subtle everyday language which is at the core of this tale of ‘reason and insanity, guilt and responsibility and love and loneliness’. Laurence Strangio’s taut direction sees a production where the talented actors convey a sense of the lack of connection the three are living with; it is this emotionally dysfunctional dynamic which is revealed to have been the setting for the murder. 

Jillian Murray particularly must be commended on her charismatic tour de force. She inhabits the charismatic accused Claire Lannes bringing a vital energy on stage as she exposes more and more her distress with people ‘eating and sleeping’ or ‘standing in the hall.’ And yet she does not readily accept the label of ‘madness’, and that is what makes the drama so compelling, as she nevertheless accepts that she should be imprisoned for life. It is a highly charged and moving performance which peaks when her cousin’s body blocks her ability to see a view of her garden.

The play left me with a haunting sense of alienation and disassociation in which the web of relationship disconnection has its tragic consequences. The sadness is that such stories as these are echoed frequently in the increasing examples of domestic violence in our own time. Strangio, Meldrum and Murray have successfully expressed a parable not only in celebration of a fine writer, but also alerted us to the inexplicable damage that can be lived when pain is not acknowledged or expressed. A magnificent and quietly dramatic production.