La Dispute

Paris Opera in 1974, and for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival (August 1976) he staged Wagner's Tetralogy. CCopyright, 1977, by Raymonde Temkine. Photographs by Claude Bricage. 'translated by Philippa Wehle. Philippa Wehle teaches French Literature at SUNY/Purchase and Fordham University, and has worked for the Avignon Festival in France. LA DISPUTE Rosette Lamont In 1973, when he was not yet thirty years of age, Patrice Chereau, the new co-director with Roger Planchon of the Theatre National Populaire at Villeurbanne, presented in the course of their first season his initial version of Marivaux's penultimate play, La Dispute. Booed off the stage of the Comedie Francaise on the day of its creation (October 19, 1744), published when the dramatist was close to sixty (March 1747), this somber tragicomedy by an aging, highly successful writer fell into oblivion until its resurrection at the Festival d'automne and, three years later, in its third incarnation , as part of the 1976-77 Paris season of the TNP. Set in a mythical kingdom, Marivaux's play centers on a controversy between a Prince and his consort, Hermiane, as to whether men or women were the first to be faithless in love. The Prince has it in his power to settle their dispute by means of an experiment on living human beings. Some eighteen or nineteen years earlier, the Prince's father, now apparently no longer alive, thought in his wisdom to shut up in a large castle, built for this particular purpose, two infant girls and the same number of males. These were brought up by two black servants, brother and sister, in perfect isolation from society and from one another. Thus, each had never set eyes on a white face, on a being of his or her generation until the day when all four are to be led out to participate, without their knowledge, in a final test of the question posed. The would-be scientist-philosophers, Hermiane, the Prince, and the court, position themselves to observe their guinea pigs. The two couples enact in this play within the play - both for the observers and the wider audience of the theatre - the discovery of love and sex in this Garden of Eden as well as the birth of evil in society. The initial couple's idyllic isolation is invaded by the presence of a parallel couple. It is clear from Marivaux's play that men and women are equally guilty, equally corruptible . 78 Chereau's three versions of La Dispute's staging are not only reinterpretations or re-readings of Marivaux's play, but a way of carrying the latter many steps further, linking it with the dramatist's private inner world. In order to lend a third dimension to the flat characters of the disputants, Hermiane and the Prince, the director has pieced together a Prologue, the length of which corresponds to a traditional first act. It is made up of bits and pieces out of the seldom read, magnificent texts assembled in the 1969 volume by the Editions Gamier, Jounaux et oeuvres diverses. These meditations and notations published at irregular intervals, in various publications, between 1717 and 1755, allow us a glimpse into the thought processes of a writer whose personal life, except for the most superficial facts, remains a mystery. La Dispute Every word spoken by the lovely Hermiane, the Prince, and the three ladies-in-waiting comes from Marivaux's texts: Lettres au Mercure, Le Spectateur Francais (Marivaux's answer to The Spectator of Addison and Steele), the ironic L Indgent philosophe, a forerunner of Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and the no less ironic Le Cabinet du philosophe, the grave Reflexions sur l'esprit humain, and Reflexions sur les hommes, the dramatic sketch L'Education d'un prince. The man whose name was used to coin a word signifying a sublimely elegant and clever form of badinage, "marivaudage," appears in these writings as a moralist in the tradition of his beloved Montaigne and, closer to his own epoch, of La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld, and the philosopher Pascal. As a satirist he reminds us of Swift and Sterne. For the modem reader, however, the Edition...