L'Intérieur, directed by Claude Régy for the Festival d'Automne

L'Intérieur, directed by Claude Régy for the Festival d'Automne

Maurice Maeterlinck wrote Intérieur in 1894 for marionettes, and Claude Régy first directed the play in 1985 with a French cast. Tonight I saw Régy’s revisited production with Japanese actors from the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center. Though I can imagine the play with marionettes, it’s hard to imagine the fragmented, almost mechanically pronounced words of this short play being spoken in French by French actors. The Japanese cast, speaking in very resonant, almost musical tones was perfect. It was as though they held the resonance of Maeterlinck’s words translated into Japanese in their voices which were, in turn, held in their bodies as vessels. The spoken dialogue is sparse, simple, factual almost, and yet it too, like the voices that reverberate in the bodies of the actors, is profound. They announce statements that expland well beyond the events taking place on stage, such as the old man’s warning: « Prenez garde ; on ne sait pas jusqu’où l’âme s’étend autour des hommes »

L'Intérieur, Directed by Claude Régy for the Festival d'Automne

The beauty of this production is in the slow, silences of the staging. A family—a mother, father, two girls and a child—are in their house, and the most significant event in the moment is that their child sleeps. “Outside” the “house,” a separation of spaces that is bare, but distinct, on Régy’s stage, some people comment on what is taking place inside the house. And then, they must tell the family that one of their daughters has drowned in a nearby pond. But how?

L'Intérieur, Directed by Claude Régy for the Festival d'Automne

It’s a play about death. Played out in the tension between inside and outside the house, the Japanese actors in this version of the play are like ghosts. Dressed in simple clothes, most of the time, they walk on white sand, slowly so that we can hear every footstep, the sand underneath their shoes. The silence of the step was loud in a theatre full of people so still. The silence of the step became a language of its own. The light changed very subtley, slightly, so there were times we could see the actors’ faces, until it faded away again and they became silhouettes. And there were times when the translucent light of the night was blue, at others, the characters were walking slowly, through a world of yellow.   

Although the words are profound, I was struck that in a piece focused so specifically on death, how it happens, how to live in the presence of death, what it means, how it transforms the lives of those around it, and so on, there was a distinct absence of melancholia, even mourning. In fact, all emotion was held in the performance, as well as the meaning of the words. Apparently, Régy and the actors have no language in common. He directed a cast without speaking their language. Surely this must contribute to the importance of the resonances and sonorities of the language, making them as heavy as the meaning of the words? Together with the meditative like movements and the haunting, mysterious light, the unique use of a foreign language created an indistinction between conscious and unconscious. This created further distance from the language, allowing the light, the stage, the characters’ movement to fill spaces beyond language. And it was in these spaces that the most significant things were communicated.