Staging Writing or the Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras

Abstract

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. 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.