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Theatre Journal 53.4 (2001) 645-647



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Performance Review

The Marriage


The Marriage. By Witold Gombrowicz. La Comédie Française (Salle Richelieu), Paris. 26 April 2001.

Polish playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was a French and Argentinian émigré whose work was largely banned in communist Poland during his lifetime. The Marriage (1944), Gombrowicz's most ambitious and difficult play, has found appropriate theatrical proponents at the Comédie Française in director Jacques Rosner (an admirer of Brecht and the child of Polish Jews who emigrated to France in the 1930s) and Andrzej [End Page 645] Seweryn (a Polish actor who joined the Comédie Française after several years with the Peter Brook company and is currently their lead actor). In the production, Seweryn plays Henry, the lead and tacit self-portrait in Gombrowicz's play.

The Comédie Française production belatedly fulfills Gombrowicz's wish for his works to be staged by established classical companies before more avant-garde ones--although the production history of The Marriage in France and Poland has been exactly the reverse. The Marriage can be understood as a theatrical jazz riff on characters, plots, and themes from Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, Faust, and Calderón's Life is a Dreamplayed in counterpoint with Jarry's Ubu Roi. Like Hamlet, Gombrowicz's drama begins with Henry's homecoming, which is also the dream of the exiled Gombrowicz in Buenos Aires in 1944. The play is ultimately both a black mass and an exorcism, a potentially cathartic confrontation with the darkest aspects of the self and a degraded and corrupted social order.

Rosner's boldest directorial choice is the casting of Seweryn in the leading role. Henry is supposed to be in his twenties, a Polish soldier on the front in Northern France at the end of World War II, dreaming of his return to Poland. Seweryn, already in his fifties, instead plays Henry as Gombrowicz the middle-aged exile in Argentina at the time that he wrote the play. One price for this apt but high-concept approach is the potential confusion of any audience not already familiar with both the play and Gombrowicz's biography. The other is the diluting of the play's ending and its implications for the character of Henry. Seweryn's otherwise bold and passionate performance (for example, he fully exploits a passage in act 3 to stage a tour de force assault upon the etiquette, decorum, and propriety of the actor/audience relationship of the elegant Salle Richelieu) is ultimately blunted by his choice at the end to step out of the play and back into the persona of the dreaming--but ultimately detached--Gombrowicz in exile. This loss is one no program note can correct. [End Page 646]

Rosner and Seweryn, however, do engage the play's charged and complex erotic dimension. Woven throughout the play are classic Oedipal conflicts (Henry's violent displacement of his father and symbolic rape of his mother) and an inverted version of the story of Goethe's Faust and Gretchen. Henry's sexuality reflects his protean and ambiguous sense of identity and Seweryn's performance clearly embodies the character's implied bisexuality. One of the iconic moments of the production is a three-way embrace of Henry, his fiancée Molly, and his youthful companion Johnny, with each of the characters in turn being sandwiched by the other two.

In spite of her few lines, the character of Molly is the ethical and erotic crux of the play. Céline Samie plays the character as a robust and rather dim blond bombshell straight out of a Feydeau farce. Such an interpretation, however, flies in the face of Gombrowicz's apparent design to make Molly a latter-day composite of Goethe's Gretchen and Shakespeare's Ophelia and Desdemona. The choice to perform Molly as an exile from boulevard comedy instead veers into crude misogyny via hoary theatrical cliché. While Gombrowicz was hardly a feminist, he was a radical and thorough critic of patriarchy and his treatment of sexuality and gender was ultimately more nuanced...

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