 |
| 'Versailles' - Photo by Johan Persson |
Before going to see Peter Gill’s ‘Versailles’at the Donmar Warehouse, I read an interview with him by Richard Eyre (‘Talking Theatre - Interviews with Theatre People’, 2011) in which he speaks about his response to DH
Lawrence’s plays, which he produced at the Royal Court in 1968. He says that there were stage directions that
Lawrence probably imagined would take place off stage, but Peter Gill brought
them out into full view of the audience so that meals were cooked on
stage. He says, “The thing about theatre
is that when somebody’s stabbed you don’t get shocked, but when somebody makes
a cup of tea and drinks it, there’s something very shockingly real about it.”
(Eyre, p.222)
It is this part of the interview that I
delighted in the most. Indeed, we talk
about immersing the audience in a world that feels real, with characters we
believe in, and what is more believable than a character who needs to eat,
drink, or use the bathroom? Thankfully,
in seeing ‘Versailles’, I was able to experience this first hand. Partway through the first scene, the maid
brings forth a steaming pot of tea, a jug of milk and an array of cakes. For the rest of the scene, dialogue takes
place in between mouthfuls of cake and sips of tea, served to the
character/actor’s taste. Apart from
making the audience hungry for a slice of what the actors are having, to see Geoffrey
Ainsworth (Adrian Lukis) take a sip of his tea really is shocking. It is like seeing a puppet breathe, as if
Joey from ‘War Horse’ were able to gallop on stage himself and whinny and neigh.
What I mean is, the characters become a real human
being beyond the text. In having the characters’
desires served in one aspect of their lives, the degree of belief in what they
want, need, desire through the play is increased tenfold. But it doesn’t end there - and this is the
beauty of Peter Gill - because he makes sipping tea far more interesting than
that alone. The thing is, you would
think that to drink tea and eat cake does not actually contribute explicitly to
the play, it is just the playwright and director doing something quirky and
outlandish. However, through the empty
dishes an interesting point is made of the will to eradicate the class system, poignantly
realised in the maid entering to clear the dishes away and Constance Fitch
(Helen Bradbury), a woman of upper class standing, offering to help her. But what it does most of all is highlight
that these are people – human beings with normal whims, fancies, tastes and
needs – beyond the class system as well as beyond the play.
The only point of contention I have with
the play is that it is ‘intellectual theatre’ for which you really ought to do
some background research before sitting down to this three hour dialogue on the
First World War. The interactions that
are loaded with an ulterior motive, or that are cleverly relevant to society
100 years later, are rather wonderful. But I don’t think it was Gill’s
intention to astound us all with a political point on a level in
which the audience are alienated from the society of the play. By the second interval, I felt it
necessary to kick myself awake with a coffee, as if raising a “cheers” to the
actors on stage, all of us sipping in unison.
Oh. What
a lovely parallel. But again, I don’t
think incorporating the audience into a classless society through the need for caffeine is quite what
Gill intended...
