The insoluble pancake

Over the past month, I have made two trips to the “Theatre Bouffes du Nord” with my friends to see two performances of short plays by Mr. Samuel Beckett. You know it is the Beckett centenary now, so there are many performances of his works in Paris. In London, I’ve heard, Harold Pinter is making probably his last ever stage performance in Krapp’s Last Tape.

Beckett of course is in that very small group of people who were successful in a language other than the language of their birth. Nabokov comes to mind. Beckett translated his own books back to English, from French; he said that process improved his style. He wanted to pare things down, to produce words which were simple and unaffected. Passing his words through the hand-wringer of a double translation perhaps was a way to achieve this.

The Theatre Bouffes du Nord is itself an amazing venue. From outside, arriving from metro “porte de la chapelle” (behind the Gare du Nord) one sees, on the other side of the street, what seems to be an ordinary row of Parisian apartments. Tall narrow buildings. Except that at the first floor level one sees the words “Theatre” and of course there is normally a large crowd of people standing outside, waiting. The theatre is completely integrated into the apartments around it. Or rather, the apartment buildings have grown up around the theatre. It was derelict for twenty years before Mr. Peter Brook took over in the early seventies. And did not restore anything! The theatre was left exactly as it had been; the seats were changed, but the rest remained untouched. One imagined that a lot of things had been said and seen and heard inside those walls, ancient tired air, old emotions…

The space inside the theatre is strange, and it is not like any theatre I have been to before. I am reminded a little of the unfinished Cathedrale de Beauvais: the stage is foreshortened, and the building itself is very very high. Each row of balcony reaching up to the domed glass ceiling is encrusted with centuries old intricately carved stucco. The stage is narrow, and there is almost no distance between it and where the audience sits. One is actually sitting on the stage. And behind that, there are tall walls painted a rough sienna brown.

Each performance I saw there lasted one hour and consisted of three short pieces written by Mr. Beckett. The very first was classic Beckett: a man who can’t walk (he is confined to a wheelchair) and a man who can’t see (he has his cane) confront each other. Both need the other in a very fundamental way — to see and move — but neither can stand to be with the other. What to do? They cannot escape. They run away from each other but always return. They are tender and violent. Blasts of absurd vaudevillian Beckettian humour provide relief for what would otherwise be an insupportable situation…

I won’t describe the other five pieces here. Just to mention that I felt that the first evening’s performances I found perhaps more interesting, and certainly easier to follow for me (well okay I admit, one of three pieces was without words – remember all this is in French!). But what was most amazing about the first evening was the lighting. Long rays of light fell on the sienna walls of the theatre. Somehow they seemed to change colour! At one time, they were a deep red, the colour of morning, the dawn. But then there was a clear colour, ochre; the soil of tuscany perhaps a little further away. A midday sun. This all happened before my eyes, but in a way I didn’t fully understand, I couldn’t really comprehend what was happening.

At several times all the lights went out in the theatre, we found ourself in a profound darkness. But not all that profound; from the high domed window, a weak pale glow filtered in from the night-time clouds over Paris, illuminated by the light from a million streetlights. Then a spotlight would come on, and it would illuminate a human face. Behind that, the century-old shape-shifting walls of the theatre. In that darkness, it was quite remarkable how one’s entire universe shrinks right down to that one point of reference, a human face in the void. I listened hard to each word because remember there was the filter of language to be traversed. Time, of course, stretched out in a very curious manner, under this weight of light and concentration. The hour was finished much sooner than one might have thought it would.
Technorati Tags: Paris, Beckett, Theatre

Last night I was at the “Cite de la Musique” to see Steve Reich and Musicians. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Reich for many years now, ever since a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Different Trains. Before I moved to Paris I had never heard any of his music actually performed (too much time spent in remote locations far from anywhere worth being…) But here in Paris his compositions are a regular fixture, and I must have been to at least six or so concerts in the last three years which featured one or two of his works. Last night one had the unique opportunity to hear Steve Reich’s music performed by Steve Reich himself, and his ensemble that have been playing with him for almost forty years I guess…

The “cite” was full to bursting point. I’ve never seen so many people there before. Leaving the metro 5 at the porte de pantin I was amazed to be accosted by people offering to sell me a ticket for the show. This never happened at any other concert I’d been to! Obviously this was a big event. I took my seat with two friends just before the concert began. The lights dimmed, the audience fell silent, and then – all the musicians got up and left. There had been some confusion over who got which set of notes! One of the violinists reappeared and ostentatiously placed a thick set of music on a stand and left again; a few seconds later his colleagues reappeared.

The first piece they played was the extremely moving Daniel Variations, a piece of music written for the journalist Daniel Pearl who was executed by Pakistani militants in 2002. The first time this music has ever been performed in France. Like in Different Trains, Reich scores his music to follow the cadences of speech – this case, words taken from the Book of Daniel; and words spoken by Daniel Pearl on the video of his own execution. The phrase, “My name is Daniel Pearl” is sung a dozen, two dozen times. ” My name is Daniel Pearl”. How could those people have done this thing? Pearl himself was a violinist; and when those words are sung, the string section comes to life, it’s melody shadows the words of Daniel Pearl. “My name is Daniel Pearl (I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California)”. Listening to Reich’s music I really felt it as something vital and living, a statement against the stupidity and pointlessness of the loss of Daniel Pearl’s life. Not all a requiem.

The intermission — and then Music for Eighteen Musicians. For this one, Mr. Reich came out from behind the mixing desk where he’d been stationed before, and took turns at the piano and xylophone. Looking at his musicians one certainly gets the impression that they’ve all been together on this musical journey for a long time. What I found myself thinking was — my gosh! this is the ultimate expression of Steve Reich’s music — by Steve Reich himself! The piece is quite long, and certainly one needs a certain kind of determination to remain concentrated throughout the entire time. For those of you who know Mr. Reich’s music, this one is particularly hypnotic, pulsating, yes, say it — minimalist — but at the same time it is full of all those wonderful contrapuntal structures that a hard-core Bach listener like me likes so much. At one wonderful point in the performance, Mr. Reich and three of his collaborators all play together on the same xylophone! At the same time, I was certain that one guy near the back of the mini-orchestra played the same note for the entire 58 minutes….

At the end of performance, Reich and his musicians were rewarded by rapturous applause. I felt a need to stand up and applaud too. Thanks Mr. Reich and happy seventieth birthday!

Before I left for the Germany I was at the cinema — I went to see Antonioni’s The Passenger (the English title is much better than the Italian or French one, if you ask me). The film, apparently, has not been in cinemas for a decade or so, and was re-released last year. It was on at one of my favourite cinemas, Le Champo, so I went along. For the very last projection. The one at 21.45, at the dead end of the day. And just like the other films of his that I’d seen, I feel a need to record here what I have seen.

The film is in English, and in colour. Mr. Jack Nicholson plays a reporter travelling through the remote wastes of Africa in search of important people, leaders of the resistance. That one great interview which could explain everything. But he finds nothing. His targets are elusive, they disappear. The sands shift and he is lost thousands of miles from where he should be. Antonioni, of course, pulls the camera back, we see the dunes and desert wastes, and hear the harsh breath of wind across the sands, see Nicholson’s desparation in the midst of this void.

Somehow — we are never sure how — he find his way back to his hotel, a small village, a few stone walls lost in the sand. He calls on his neighbour, a man he’d spoken to for a few minutes and finds — the man is dead. And he notices something, looking at his passport — he resembles the dead man, just a little. Enough to pass for him in this land far from white man. Surely this man’s life is simpler than his? He decides that he is the dead man, that the dead man is him. He lifts the dead man’s appointment book and sees the journeys he will have to make.

This idea is the core of Antonioni’s film. Does it really matter who you are, actually? From very early in the film it becomes clear that the answer is no, really it does not. Nicholson’s new identity is just as marked as his old one. That the film can only have one possible ending is very clear.

Every frame of the film is as carefully framed as a painting. Nicholson crosses ocean waters in a cable car, is suspended alone above the blue waters, unsupported. The film proceeds at slow, glacial pace but this does not matter as there is so much to look at, the buildings and people, the long shots full of space and distance. Nicholson arrives at each destination marked in the appointment book to find one empty square after another. No-one arrives. He waits for Godot. But others know who he is now. At the end, for the last frames of the film, a long unbroken shot carefully takes in many details over the course of almost ten minutes. It is a perfectly choreographed termination to Mr. Nicholson’s doomed trajectory. A great film, as great as any of the other Antonionis I have seen.

Ringberg castle — do you know it? “Schloss Ringberg” to those who speak German. A castle in the forests of Bavaria. I’ve just spent five days there, from the Sunday before last, to Friday morning. An easy journey to make, a one hour flight from Paris CDG to Munich, then a one-hour bus journey. Heading south, to the mountains. The alps. Forests and trees. A flat level plain, then suddenly steep hills, mountains. The castle gate, the heavy wooden door: we had arrived. I say we: I was there for a meeting, there were perhaps forty of us lodged in the castle for the week. A strange and incomplete place. Incomplete seems to be the best word I can think of to describe it. Of course, now, it is completed, but not to the original design. Not what the makers had intended. The architect and the archduke, hopelessly separate from each other who could only be together whilst they worked on this project which would never be finished.

Over the course of the five days I was there, I filled in the details of the construction of the castle, how it got to be the way it was. My understanding deepened. But I was surprised, constantly, by at least one or two ghosts peering over my shoulder, by figures appearing two steps ahead of me, by a long look that I wasn’t expecting in place where there was no one. Crossing the castle garden at midnight, past the swimming pool empty of water for decades, I would be be surprised by a sudden shadow in the bushes — then I would realise, again, for the tenth time, that it was a nothing more than a silent static statute which had unnerved me. Opening the door of the tower where I was sleeping I would be greeted by the architect, peering back at me from his canvas, one of the many self portraits he had painted which were hung throughout the castle.

The paintings, yes, I knew I would have to talk about the paintings. An early period, a late period. The early period carries heavy echoes of all that happened here in Paris, that play of light and colour seen for the first time in canvases at the start of the century. After that, it is man and nature, together. Heavy-handed obtuse attempts to convey the elemental nature of the world, spring, virility, the seasons, life. A great theme. But in this man’s hands it becomes a figure in lederhosen happily pole-vaulting over a half-sleeping cow. Or a man in the forest with dog at his heel, surrounded by abundant forest life, hands clasped in prayer, radiant light streaming from him to the animals around him.

On the castle’s main staircase hangs the central work, the dead heart of the castle. An enormous tableau which had been hidden for years, but now is visible to all. Two men stand side by side on hilltop. They are looking towards their castle, which either has not yet been built or is finished, completed. It is the archduke and his architect. Behind them far below are the blue waters of the Tergensee, the tiny houses of the village. A dog sits attentively at the Archduke’s feet. There is a tense air in the space between the two figures. An attraction, but too many lines to be completed, paths to be found which do not exist. In the painting, the colours, shades, gradation of light and dark are horribly off, terribly wrong, incorrect. It is enough, really, indicate that these figures exist, and not to make them real.

The Archduke would never live in his castle, preferring the luxury of a hotel in Munich; and the architect would die alone there, in 1947, the depths of winter I suppose, his project unfinished. Do I really need a castle like this, the Archduke asked himself at the end, a man like myself, with no family, no retinue? A deal is made, eventually, the castle is given to the Max Planck society, and money is found for its upkeep, refurbishement. Scholars now arrive from remote corners of the globe to discuss pressing issues concerning the distant Universe. Or any field of human endeavour. But when I think of that place now I think of that canvas hanging over the castle’s staircase, of these two figures, the Archduke and his architect. Lines not drawn to their point of completion.