"Simply Sitting in a Chair": Questioning Representational Practice and Dramatic Convention in Marguerite Duras's L'Amante anglaise and The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise

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• ”Simply Sitting in a Chair”: Questioning Representational Practice and Dramatic Convention in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante anglaise and The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise
• Shelley Orr (bio)

One doesn’t know in life when things are there. They escape you . . . You want to know what it would take for it to be so. For me to be on stage saying nothing, to let myself see, without especially thinking about something. That’s right.

Marguerite Duras, La Vie matérielle, translated by Carol Barko (1987)

It is difficult to create a believable, sympathetic character while simply sitting in a chair answering questions for an hour, but Ms. Zabriskie pulls it off. As the actress stares off into space, wrings her hands in her lap, or clutches the hem of her skirt, we see the bleakness of Claire’s life as clearly as if she had been a neighbor.

Wilborn Hampton, review of Duras’s English Mint/L’Amante Anglaise (1988)

For both French novelist Marguerite Duras and American theatre critic Wilborn Hampton, the theatre is a place to see, an understanding in line with the Greek théatron (the seeing place, “a place for ‘looking at’ something”), from which the theatre takes its name. ¹ However, what one sees in the theatre and how one sees it are quite different for writer and critic. Hampton expects to see characters and dramatic action in accordance with the conventions of mimetic realism and, in the case of the production of Duras’s 1968 work L’Amante Anglaise that he reviewed, [End Page 312] in accordance with the more specific conventions of the crime drama or drame policier. In her play, however, Duras questions the former and only appears to adhere to the latter as she challenges what is among the oldest of theatrical forms: the murder mystery. Ever since Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex laid a foundation for the genre (thanks in part to framing provided by Aristotle’s Poetics), with its cause-and-effect, linear plotline, in which each clue builds the emotional intensity until the climax reveals all, the murder mystery has been a favorite of playwrights and novelists. In her L’Amante anglaise, however, Duras mimics the form to question and undermine theatrical realism’s ability to engage in a project of uncovering the truth.

We can get a sense of Duras’s project of mimicry, subversion, and critique in L’Amante Anglaise—as well as Hampton’s inability or unwillingness to understand it—in Hampton’s review of Stages Trilingual Theater’s English-language production of the play, which was performed in 1988 at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater under the title English Mint/L’Amante anglaise. At the start of the performance, the audience members hear the report of a murder in recorded voice-over, a clear convention of the crime drama. Nearly the entire dialogue of the play consists of the questioning of the main suspect, Claire, and her husband, Pierre, by a character aptly and simply called “the Interrogator.” In his review, Hampton notes that Grace Zabriskie, who played Claire, faced difficulty in her effort “to create a believable, sympathetic character.” ² For Hampton, this difficulty has largely to do with the (playwright’s) restriction placed on her that she sit in a chair during her interrogation. He goes on to describe the ways in which the actor worked to overcome this limitation of static staging, pointing to the gestures that gave him the mimetic illusion of knowing “Claire.” Yet Hampton is clearly disappointed that the overall experience of L’Amante anglaise does not sustain the kind of illusion that is common to the crime drama of revealing the truth. Although he acknowledges late in his review that “Ms. Duras has always eschewed such things as plot and narrative in her work,” he regards this as an error or a demonstration of poor judgment. He does not consider the goals or effects of not employing “such things,” nor does he address the idea that L’Amante anglaise might be deliberately mimicking and then subverting the expectations associated with particular theatrical conventions to critique them. He spends his review describing the little information that [End Page...