Staging Writing or the Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras

Staging Writing or the Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras LILIANE PAPIN Marguerite Duras's plays have been produced all over the world. She has herself directed many of them and has never ceased writing for the theater. Among the numerous other directors of her theater work. one finds the names of Peter Brook, lean-Louis Barrault and Claude Regy. Her fascination with the theater and the quality of her work are unquestionable. Yet, in her critical essays or in comments to journalists, Duras has often belittled her own stage productions and theater in general. In reference to India Song, which she originally wrote as a stage project for Peter Brook but which she then decided instead to produce as a film, she justified her choice by stating that "film is more flexible (malleable) and less burdened by the weight of the actor.'" For anyone interested in the relationship between performance and text. however, this very ambivalence is well worth studying and can be most enlightening. It offers a rare opportunity to observe first-hand an unfolding process through which Duras endeavors to resolve a dilemma which is at the core of contemporary reflection on the nature of "representation.to Duras's constant movement from one form to another, her shifting back and forth between fiction, theater, film , radio and television, illuminates the direction and evolution of a writer who, beyond the confines of "genre," has played with the given limits of each form and pushed those limits to their extremes. In this respect, she is probably one of the most representative authors of our time, an age characterized by the blurring of clear boundaries among genres. In the case of theater, which is the focus of the present essay, the relationship between text and performance has undoubtedly undergone drastic alterations. Together with the growing importance and prestige of the director, the concept of "adaptation" has emerged. Partly due to the influence of film, which has further widened the concept by borrowing material from various literary sources, the notion of theatrical "text" has also changed. The playwright used to write for the stage and followed certain "rules" (e.g., Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras 129 dialogue, division into acts and scenes, etc.). In the past, the director and writer were one. If one goes back to classical tradition, a play was often wrinen with a specific company in mind, and the writing of the text was adapted to specific circumstances of production. The text was not seen as a separate entity; the issue of textual' 'fidelity ," the questioning of the meaning of "interpretation," had not yet arisen. For Duras, however, although she is herself both writer and director, the two functions were initially quite separate and often perceived as antagonistic. The concept of text is for her veiled in a certain aura of sacredness, a "pure product" that is necessarily submitted to a distortion, through the process of performance, whether in film or theater. Duras finds adaptation for the stage, however, more cumbersome and more distorting than adaptation for film; in her own words, stage "writing" is less "pure" than film writing. But both film and stage productions are always considered in reference to a matrix which is the "text," the "pure" point of reference. Why, then, has Duras even bothered to continue producing both plays and films? The paradoxical answer is that the attraction resides in the very process of this distortion and the struggle it entails. In theater, she works against the constraints of a given tradition and against the nature of theatrical representation , pushing them to their limits while knowing she cannot totally overcome them. In the parameters of that tension and impossibility lies the source of both her interest in and impatience with the theater. The direction of her work on stage throughout the years can best be summarized as a constant striving to recapture the lost "textual purity." In this respect, Duras's work seems diametrically opposed to the direction opened up by Artaud, whose goal was to widen the gap between text and performance, to rediscover the "purity" of theatricality, and whose ultimate ideal was the creation ofa theater without text, a theater...