A desire for Duras: Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch on the writer's erotic, existential mystery

Part philosophical meditation, part fantasy, Marguerite Duras’s 1982 novella La Maladie de la Mort comes to the stage in a hi-tech Edinburgh festival show

There’s something about Marguerite Duras that emboldens a theatre-maker. Almost two decades ago, Ivo van Hove staged the writer’s India Song in a production so languid and dreamy that audiences felt no urgency to leave at the end, with the smell of citronella still wafting in the air.

In Edinburgh earlier this year, Jemima Levick and Fleur Darkin created a dance-theatre version of The Lover, throwing voiceovers and pop music into the mix. “She’s so bold as an artist,” Levick said at the time. “I like to think she’s smiling down saying, ‘Yeah, give it your best shot, ladies.’”

Little surprise, then, to find theatrical adventurer Katie Mitchell bending the rules to turn La Maladie de la Mort (The Malady of Death) into a filmic study of voyeuristic desire. In this production from the Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris, her stage becomes a television studio where two actors, half-hidden by cameras, play out Alice Birch’s adaptation and are projected in monochrome on a high-level screen.

“Duras often provides a static, fixed environment and her writing is quite filmic, so it lent itself to the technique of live cinema,” says Mitchell, a fan of Duras since her late teens. “What’s wonderful is she often leaves little provocations to artists. At the end of La Maladie, there’s a note that says, ‘If you were making this into a piece of theatre, this is the sort of way I would ask you to think about it.’”

A compulsive recycler of her life story, Duras wrote the 1982 novella in response to her late-blooming relationship with Yann Andréa. He was a fan-turned-muse, nearly 40 years her junior, whose homosexuality, although no obstacle to their love, was a source of fascination and frustration to her. Joining Duras in bouts of heavy drinking, Andréa was hopelessly devoted. “She’s a drug,” he told a friend. “I’m her main focus, the focus of all her attention. No one has ever loved me like that.”

Part existentialist meditation, part erotic fantasy, La Maladie de la Mort abstracts itself from its autobiographical roots to tell the tale of a man and woman who come together in a hotel room. She has agreed to sleep with him for a substantial sum of money. He, lost and alone, wants to find out if he’s capable of love. In his efforts to get close to her – or perhaps to get close to his own absent emotions – he spends long hours gazing at her.

That gazing presented Birch with a problem. On the page, Duras creates an air of strangeness by withholding information about the woman. But on stage, where enigma can look like passivity, Birch realised she needed to explain the woman’s presence.

“About two days in, Katie and I asked ourselves why on earth we were doing this,” says Birch. “The making process had to stop and I rewrote the whole thing. If a production has asked someone to stand on stage and be passive – and that person is a woman – then why have you asked them to do that? None of that is to suggest Duras’s text is not feminist or radical, it just functions in a different way.”

“Duras resists giving a cause for the man’s illness because she wants to keep it mythic, epic and political,” says Mitchell, whose version, updated for the internet age, finds a cause in the desensitising effects of online pornography. The challenge was to avoid reproducing the very thing they were commenting on. “If we were doing scenes of nudity, we wanted the male body to be scrutinised in the same way the female body was scrutinised,” says the director. “The discussions included male and female camera operators, who had strong opinions because they were the people who were going to be framing the bodies. It led to a lot of debate.”

Her use of film draws out the voyeuristic nature of the relationship and the role of us, as spectators. We are watching the watchers as they watch each other. At its most head-spinning, she produces an image in triplicate: a woman in the flesh, a mobile phone framing the woman and a video projection of the phone as it does so.

Such sexual frankness is consistent with Duras’s life and work. Born in 1914, she was brought up by expat teachers in French Indochina, now Vietnam and Cambodia. In her novel The Lover, she would recount an illicit sexual awakening in the company of a rich Chinese man, 12 years her senior. It was a relationship that was as financially advantageous to her impoverished mother, by then a widow, as it was thrilling to the 15-year-old Duras.

Today, the affair would be considered abusive. Certainly it haunted her imagination as late as 1984 when she wrote The Lover and still later, in 1991, with The Lover from Northern China. But it would also set her on course for a life of sexual emancipation. This was a woman who had an affair with the witness at her wedding. Her husband, the writer Robert Antelme, lived with her and Dionys Mascolo, who fathered her son, Jean. To complete the French stereotype, both men had affairs of their own.

Duras was also politically active, whether as a wartime member of the resistance or as a communist campaigner. “What attracts me about Duras – and also Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar and Virginia Woolf – is they are thinking deeply about the world they are living in as well as doing incredibly radical art,” says Mitchell. Duras turned out novels, opinion pieces, reportage, plays and film scripts, most famously Hiroshima Mon Amour. As a director, she shot 19 experimental films, described by Jean-Luc Godard as, “books that see, books that observe”.

Under the influence of Italian writer Elio Vittorini, Duras developed a poetic writing style that, in its rhythms, loops and repetitions, was akin to music. A superficial reading might erroneously link that style to her drinking. “Alcohol was invented to help us tolerate the void that is the universe,” she wrote and, as social drinking merged into alcoholism, she would consume up to eight litres of wine a day. In the middle of writing La Maladie de la Mort, she was forced into rehab.

“Part of you can’t believe she touched a drop of alcohol because it’s so complicated and profound,” says Birch. “I couldn’t get that in my most lucid moments. But it doesn’t feel like it’s part of the work. Whether it came from her conscious or her subconscious, there’s real clarity of vision and thought.”

“It reminds me of people talking about Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness and saying she just wrote what came out,” says Mitchell. “The level of mathematical structuring in Woolf’s writing, in order to create the impression of a stream of consciousness is breathtaking. It’s the same with Duras. There’s no sense of it being imprecise or out of control. Every sentence is finely crafted.”

Contributor

Mark Fisher

The GuardianTramp

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