The Rape of Lucrece (Le Viol de Lucrèce) (review)

Abstract

The Rape of Lucrece (Le Viol de Lucrece) Presented by the MC93 Bobigny, the Theatre National du Luxembourg, and the Theater im Pfalzbau Ludwigshafen, at the Theatre National de Toulouse, Toulouse, France. October 17-20, 2006. Adapted for the stage and directed by Marie-Louise Bischofberger. Translation by Yves Bonnefoy. Set by Raymonde Couvreu. Lighting by Marie-Christine Soma. Sound by Nathalie Cabrol. Choreography by Arco Renz. Costumes by Marie-Louise Bischofberger, Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz, Comedie Francaise. With Pascal Bongard (Narrator, Tarquin, the Nurse, a Messenger, Collatine), and Veronique Sacri (The Wife, Lucrece). In his 1594 narrative poem, William Shakespeare plunges the reader in medias res at the heart of the crime. The poetic text compels us to follow Tarquin's unnatural pilgrimage to Lucrece's shrine of chastity. In Bischofberger's 2006 adaptation, we followed a different and unusual guide into this tale: a twenty-first-century couple tells a bedtime story of love, lust and martyred chastity. This exploitation of the dramatic nature of Shakespeare's poem in both its poetic and dramatic translation was grounded on the theme of the fracture. The poem has been fractured by its author who gave it a hybrid nature, both poetic and dramatic, then fractured by the translator, Yves Bonnefoy, who transposed the inner dynamic of its words into a foreign tongue; lastly, it was fractured by the director who gave the poem in translation a full theatrical shape. The fractured text of The Rape of Lucrece was a significant raw material for the audience as it already symbolized the discordant world of the protagonists. The polyphonic effect of the Shakespearean text was carried a step further by Bischofberger. Firstly, she chose to modify the argument so as to lull the spectator into the tale of Tarquin and Lucrece; but this was not enough. The scenography chose to retain the text's poetical and philosophical culture at the margins of the stage. The Argument of the poem was turned into a choric interlude enabling both audience and characters to enter the action with the same subtle brutality as in the Shakespearean poem. A woman entered in an elegant, immaculate evening gown, followed by her husband in a dark suit. A small door opened upstage to let them on the main stage: a massive reclining surface torn in the middle by an impressive trap system bordered on the left-hand side corner by a simple white mattress. The playing space was set up as a resolutely modern loft with eclectic objects (a Spartan helmet, a sword, a basin, pieces of armor, a locker, a lamp, and on each side two music stands) scattered about. The bedroom, as a visual and diegetic hub, was slightly off-center. The bed loomed over the central abyss, and its unsteady position foreshadowed the chaotic intercourse to come. At the very beginning of the performance, the couple circled around the wooden floor of the stage before settling amorously on the bed. The sheer contrast between the military paraphernalia invading three corners of the reclining platform stage and the bed was both an ominous warning and a way of establishing this prologue as part of an archetypal world of courtly love. The couple seemed oblivious to the visual chaos around them and absorbed in trying to stop time and to enter the mythical stage of absolute love. The husband offered to tell his wife a tale of love and dignity, of sadness and cruelty. Suddenly, the amorous face-to-face was turned into a cruel game between lovers. The husband-narrator started putting on pieces of the armor before ending his prologue and lying on the bed with his wife. The unnatural superimposition of the military and the domestic worlds foreshadowed the imminent rape. We, as well as the characters, were on a dramatic threshold. The Prologue was about to give way to the main plot and the characters were about to alter their identities to perform the rape. The pieces of armor were no longer mere stage objects, but full props, dramatizing the poetic paradox of Tarquin's armor of nudity: he doth despise / His naked armour of still-slaughtered lust. …