Marguerite Duras: un théâtre de voix / A Theatre of Voices by Mary Noonan and Joëlle Pagès-Pindon (review)

This is a rich, enterprising, and immaculately edited collection bringing together scholars and practitioners engaging with Marguerite Duras’s work for the theatre, conceived compellingly in terms of ‘voices’ (dramatic, textual, collaborative, authorial). The focus is predominantly on the later corpus, yet the interdisciplinary range and consistency of the themes addressed from multiple perspectives result in one of the most cohesive and farreaching volumes on Duras’s theatre to date. Following a short preface outlining the project, the volume is divided into four parts. The first, ‘Les Voix du texte’, explores forms of textuality. Joëlle Pagès-Pindon proposes Duras’s experimentation with vocal address and sonic fields in Agatha as a poetics of the ‘livre dit’ (p. 4). Exploring modes of listening in multiform works such as India Song (texte–théâtre–film), Mary Noonan presents auditory perception in psychoanalytic terms as a radical form of loss for both actor and spectator. Taking the example of La Musica deuxième, Laurent Camerini demonstrates how Duras’s continuous rewriting across stage and screen directly affects characterization and performance. Pursuing a more thematic approach, Julien Botella examines ‘la lumière théâtrale’ in L’Éden cinéma, Savannah Bay, and La Musica deuxième, while Neil Malloy analyses the dramatization of the marginalized in Duras’s 1970s theatre. Part Two, ‘Les Voix de la scène’, is concerned with staging and opens with an illuminating discussion by Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux of the momentous 1969 production of L’Amante anglaise at the Théâtre national populaire, drawing on archival recordings and samples of the annotated working script. Aurélie Coulon explores the hors-scène and the varying strategies of figuring the invisible deployed by different directors, while Lib Taylor uses her experience of staging late Duras to formalize the performability of theatrical space and Duras’s creation of sonic collage. Quentin Rioual and Vincenzo Mazza assess Duras’s long and fertile collaborations with the director Claude Régy and the Renaud-Barrault company respectively, underlining her pioneering status as a female playwright in France. Sabine Quiriconi shows deftly how Duras’s development of a hybrid, transmedial theatre corresponds to current trends in French dramaturgy, notably the performative and virtual. Part Three, ‘Témoignages scéniques’, addresses modalities of silence. The actress Denise Aron-Schröpfer considers ‘visual silence’ in the various iterations of La Musica; Marie-Pierre Cattino reveals with detailed reference to Écrire how Duras harnesses lived silence as a poetic force for the stage; and Isabelle Denhez provides a close, intermedial reading of the wordless fire sequence in the film Nathalie Granger (1972) and its ‘re-editing’ in the written version that followed. The final section is devoted to a fascinating interview with Duras in 1985 by Helga Finter, published for the first time in its original version and notable more for Duras’s insistence on the sacrificial nature of theatre and her passion for Chekhov than for any immediately new perspectives on her own project.