The Satin Slipper

What can one say about a play that is 11 hours long? I refer to Paul Claudel's "The Satin Slipper" which has just been staged in its entirety at the Theatre de l'Odeon. The play was first performed during the war, but since then it's only been put on two or three times -- for obvious reasons. Making a radio report about it, I watched the first hour and a half, and then the last hour and a half. If what I saw is representative, then all I can say is that anyone who sat through the whole thing has my fullest admiration. It makes one ponder on the vast difference that separates the French and the British cultural worlds. The idea of this being put on in a West End theatre is laughable. As far as I could make out, "The Satin Slipper" is a long, long, long series of philosophical and poetical discursions about love and God. Of plot, I could identify very little -- certainly no dramatic tension. To my view, it was the embodiment of tedium. And yet the theatre's 700 seats were all taken, and it has had a packed four week run. People I spoke to in the audience were ecstatic. I interviewed the director Olivier Py, who said the play had changed his life. And the actress Jeanne Balibar said that for her it was like an American TV mini-series like Lost or The West Wing -- full of hidden themes. But the answer to that is surely that in the Anglo tradition we write tight exciting stories which engage the attention, and then use them to evoke deeper themes. The French way seems to be to go straight to the deeper theme, and then talk about it - ad nauseam. Personally I find it effete and elitist.

Germaine Tillion

An uplifting experience last weekend: seeing the world premier of an operetta written in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Adding to the poignancy: the fact that the author, Germaine Tillion, is still alive and indeed has just celebrated her 100th birthday. The story is hard to beat. Germaine Tillion was a resistance member betrayed in '42 and sent to Ravensbruck a year later. In October 44, concealed by her comrades in a packing crate, she composed the operetta-revue which she called "Le Verfugbar aux Enfers". It means "The camp-worker goes to hell" -- Verfugbar being the German term for "available" workers, i.e. ones not assigned to major projects. The piece is certainly odd. It begins with a character called The Naturalist, who conducts a quasi-scientific analysis of the life-form that is the "Verfugbar". Behind him are a chorus of female slave-workers (Ravensbruck was almost exclusively for women) led by professional singers who break periodically into song. Tillion was no musician, so she resorted to snatches of popular tunes from pre-war days: operetta, chanson, even advertising jingles. To these she put words that mix burlesque with a very black humour. "Once we were known for our sex-appeal, now our batteries are well and truly dry," two inmates sing to the tune of Au Clair de la Lune. The operetta was never performed of course: it would have triggered a terrible punishment. But in the evenings Tillion would read out sections of her script to raise morale. It became a survival mechanism. In 1945 Tillion learned that her mother -- who was also at Ravensbruck -- had been killed in the camp gas-chamber. She herself managed to leave shortly before the end of the war. For years the script of "Verfugbar" lay hidden in a drawer. Tillion, who became a well-known ethnologist, feared that it would be misconstrued. How could she have written something "humorous" in a concentration camp? But now that it has been resurrected, it stands simply and movingly as a testament to the human spirit of endurance. Sadly Tillion was too frail to attend the performance at the Theatre du Chatelet, but the cast sang for her at her home in Paris. It must have been an extraordinary moment.

ADJANI

The high point of the autumn theatre season in Paris, we are told by every magazine and newspaper screaming it from the roof-tops, is Isabelle Adjani's return to the stage as Mary Queen of Scots. The last week, she has been displayed on just about every conceivable front page, looking as mysterious and as beautiful as ever, but with her 51 year-old skin now showing a weird baby-milk smoothness. As usual in these affairs, the French press is quite unbearably sycophantic. Her interviews are unreadable screeds of panting hero-worship. Only France-Soir was willing to put the boot in. It revealed that rehearsals for "The last night of Mary Stuart" by the little-known German absurdist Wolfgang Hildesheimer were not exactly easy. One fellow actor walked out as Adjani staged a series of crying-jags, it said. All that is as it may be. What really gets my goat is that three days after this long-awaited performance, there is not one single review available -- in the press or on the Internet. I -- and the rest of the intereseted public -- have still not the slightest idea what she was actually like. If this was London or New York -- and it was indeed the highpoint of the theatre season -- then the next day's editions would have been full of it. It all goes to show the essential emptiness of so much French "culture". It has not been reviewed because in the elitist world of Paris theatre no-one can imagine that ordinary people might have an interest in the show's quality -- or Adjani's as an actress. All I have read so far is that on the opening night the stalls were full of celebrities and that they gave her an ovation. Well, whoopy-do.