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Performed Disembodiment in Duras’s Fictional Spaces
By
Lib Taylor
This article will explore the play of disembodiment and corporeality in a cluster of
Marguerite Duras’s texts and performances, particularly focusing on India Song
(1992, first published in France 1973) and Eden Cinema (1992, first published in
France 1977).1 Not easily categorised as novel, film, theatre or even symphonic
poem, this body of texts occupies spaces between forms and genres, merging
fiction and memory, destabilising reading with material performance and
counterpointing live and mediated action and sound. The titles suggest a kind of
intermediality and indeed Duras subtitles the published French version of India
Song ‘texte-théâtre-film’ (1973), to convey her own mystification of its
representational form. Paralleling this hesitation between fictional modes and
forms, the texts are characterised by an interplay of the embodied dead and the
disembodied living. In both India Song and Eden Cinema theatrical ‘vitality’ is
located in figures who, we are told, are dead: Anne-Marie Stretter in India Song
and the Mother in Eden Cinema. Their material bodies haunt the performance
space, lingering in it rather than acting upon it, while their dynamic significance is
evoked through a cacophony of voices and narrators, ‘live’ figures, albeit barely
more than shades themselves, whose stories circulate around and animate the
dead.
The question of how to delineate Duras’s texts by medium, genre or form
is embodied at another level by discourses that define Duras herself as
‘unknowable’, despite her acclaimed status a writer of international significance.2
Her biographer, Laure Adler, came across the following jotting on a scrap of
paper amongst her archive held at Institut de la memoire de l’édition
contemporaine in Paris after the writer died:
I say nothing to no one. Nothing about what goes through my life, the
anger, the wild movements of my body towards that dark, hidden word
pleasure. I am modesty, I am silence itself. I say nothing. I express
nothing. About what is important, nothing. It is there, unnamed,
untouched. (2001: 8) 3
She is deemed a writer whose life is indecipherable, whose writing represents
loss and negation, whose films embody death, non-appearance and lack and
many of whose plays are regarded as non-theatrical and unperformable (Willis
1987, Cohen 1993). In a third strand of the problematic play of presence and
absence, the texts work with and through the embodiment of Duras herself within
performances, despite a deliberate erasure of herself from her own history. The
presence of Duras, dead now for more than ten years, is materialised through
her voice amid the recorded soundtrack in the film of India Song and through her
unmistakeable imprint on the voice-over of Eden Cinema.4 Duras was brought up
in French Indochina on the edges of poverty and respectability between the First
and Second World Wars and her writing, her prose fiction and her screen and
1
play writing, continually traces and retraces the shadows of her colonial
childhood. Yet though her own life becomes the primary material for much of her
creative output, its biographical status is never assured as she revisits the same
events and relationships over and over again, recomposing and reinventing them
(and herself) each time.
Neither India Song nor Eden Cinema have any substantial performance
history in the English language.5 India Song is a collage of fragmented and
incomplete stories prompted by the appearance of the figure of Anne-Marie
Stretter, the wife of the French Ambassador in Calcutta. It delineates a social
milieu that defines her importunately through a myriad of voices which both
desire and imprecisely remember her. She is a magnet for memories, and the
focus of longing for her enthralled lovers.
Lilo Baur in the role of Anne-Marie Stretter in India Song by Marguerite Duras directed by
Annabel Arden’s and Annie Castledine at Theatr Clwyd, Wales in 1993
The unspeaking Stretter lingers on stage as peripheral characters construct her
narrative, in the setting of the last stages of an exhausted French colonial rule in
India. This dwindling of colonialism is embodied by the gradual physical and
mental collapse of the barely-present Vice-Consul of Lahore, glimpsed at the
edges of the same narrative fragments. Set in French Indochina between the two
World Wars, Eden Cinema depicts Suzanne and her brother Joseph who tell the
story of their mother’s struggle to protect her land from constant flooding by the
Pacific Ocean (the farming concession Duras’s own mother toiled
over). Obsessed by the possibility of holding back the water, the Mother resorts
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to extreme and unscrupulous measures to raise money to fund this hopeless
enterprise, until ultimately the endeavour kills her. Though this article does not
allow the scope to discuss it in any detail, it is worth noting that Savannah Bay
(1992: first published in French in 1982) is a third variation of a Duras text that
depicts an absent central character whose identity is constructed by voices; a
grandmother and granddaughter evoke the absent Savannah who is their
respective daughter and mother and whose name repeats that of the spatial
location of the play.6
The form of the plays
As theatre, India Song, Eden Cinema and Savannah Bay take on a fluid dramatic
form in which text, music, images, light, sound and voice are interwoven to create
elusive memory plays, partly about the instability and intangibility of the past.
Characters are tentative and only partially present ghosts who haunt the stage as
they enact tales of ‘trauma, loss, separation’ (Willis, 1987: 11). All three plays
centre on characters who are dead and whose stories are told through halfrecalled memories of the living, memories which fade almost as soon as they are
conjured.
The security of identifying any single Duras work as itself an independent
textual ‘body’ is difficult to establish when beginning an analysis of her work,
since each text is a retelling or imperfect re-embodiment of the others. The
narratives from one Duras fiction (film, novel or play) permeate others, distorting
and reforming the events, histories and relationships, juxtaposing fragments of
personal history with invented fictions, reconfiguring the relationships between
fabrication and actuality. Eden Cinema is part of a nexus of intertextual
narratives, prose and drama, that draws on the story of Duras’s mother, first
explored in Duras’s autobiographical 1950 novel Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique
(The Seawall) and later woven into her 1984 short novel, L’Amant, subsequently
adapted into a popular film The Lover in 1992.7 India Song interweaves
fragments of narratives taken from other Duras fictions, from, for example, Le
Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Le Vice-Consul (1965) and La Femme Du
Gange (1973). One text is destabilised by its encounter with another so her
works are a constant process of reformation and re-inscription, a dynamic
interplay of fictions, half-truths, incomplete memories, constructed realities and
dreams. Their volatile potential is exploited in performances of her work for
theatre as meanings of space, time, presence and body are continually
renegotiated through an interplay of fluid, intermedial forms. They create not a
coherent synthesis of drama and music, but a deliberate destabilisation of
bounded representational forms.
But more than linking the plays at the metatheatrical level of their family
resemblances of concerns, forms and discourses, I shall focus on the notion of
(dis)embodiment in the spatial and temporal realisation of the work in
performance. My aim is to connect notions of disembodiment to the ambivalent
figuring of ‘character presence’ and death, representations of time and place on
stage, and the historical narratives fragmentarily constructed. Furthermore, I
intend to link each of these beyond the borders of the texts to their author’s
3
unstable biographical self-presentation. India Song, Eden Cinema and Savannah
Bay all summon up the dead to tell their stories, or rather to have them told by
others. At the beginning of Section 1 of India Song, the Voices discuss Stretter:
Voice 2: After she died, he left India…
[Silence]
[…]
Voice 2: She’s buried in the English cemetery…
[Pause]
Voice 1: … she died there?
Voice 2: In the islands [Hesitates] One night. Found dead. (1992: 123)
In the opening section of Eden Cinema, Joseph tells the audience:
Joseph: It’s there that we were young. There that the mother lived her
greatest hope. There she died. (1992: 53)
and at the beginning of Savannah Bay Madeleine says:
Madeleine: I know you now. [Long pause] You’re the daughter of the child
that died. Of my daughter that died. [Long pause] You’re the daughter of
Savannah. (1992: 100)
In all three of these performances the notion of ‘performed (dis)embodiment’ links
the presence of live performers standing-in as, or for, the vital bodies of the dead.
It is the enervated and weary bodies of the living who conjure them up in
dialogue and voice-over. The focus of this analysis is an examination of the
functioning of voice-over in India Song and particularly in Eden Cinema. It will not
refer in detail to Savannah Bay since the strategy of voice-over is not used as a
system linking past and present in that play. Moreover, while the Mother in Eden
Cinema and Stretter in India Song are physically materialised, the tangible
presence of Savannah is traced across the physicality of her mother and
daughter in Savannah Bay, rather than the dead Savannah incarnate on stage.
Voice-over, sound and space
As Gabrielle Cody states: ‘Duras disorients our spectatorship by using voice as
her main representational frame’ (2000: 81). In India Song no-one speaks on
stage. The present on-stage action is conjured up by off-stage voices, thus
marking the stage action as reminiscence, separated temporally from the Voices
which function as an evocation of absent times and figures. As Duras states in
her summary of the play at the end of the text, ‘The Voices do not address the
spectator or reader, they are totally independent. They speak among themselves,
and do not know they are being heard’ (1992: 182). In Annabel Arden’s and
Annie Castledine’s Theatr Clwyd production of India Song (1993) the Voices
were embedded into an orchestration of music, non-verbal cries, street and
animal sounds signifying ‘India’ and comprising a through-composed sound
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score which accompanied the choreographed visual performance. In Ivo van
Hove’s Dutch production of the same play with Het Zuidelijk Toneel, seen at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1999, voice was separated from other sound effects and
the music. Music was presented live on stage by a small group of musicians
embedded into the visible action. The voice-over in this performance was
transmitted through two loudspeakers mounted at the ends of a very large
mechanical rotor arm which continually revolved above the stage. It was a kind of
combination of the tropical ceiling fan, which Duras describes in her stage
‘instructions’, ‘Nothing moves, nothing except the fan, which moves with
nightmare “unreality”’ (1992: 123), and huge helicopter blades. While a theatre
spectator’s relationship with visible action will necessarily involve a separation
between seer and seen, choices of how to relay aural elements (directionally, by
means of amplification, etc.) modify the audience’s experience of voice, music
and other sound effects to create different kinds of involvement or separation.
Although Arden’s and Castledine’s version was an end-on performance, the
sound seemed to reach out to enfold the audience with an immersive effect. The
Voices were whispering in the ear of the audience while ‘watching’ the action with
them. Voice-over was made dynamic and involving in a different way in van
Hove’s production since the enormous rotor carrying the sound source revolved
above the performance as well as over part of the audience seating space (inthe-round in the original Dutch performance but end-on with some members of
the audience seated on stage in Edinburgh). Thus the Voices drifted in and out of
focus and thereby were perceived as continually shifting their position in relation
to the action and to individual members of the audience. These two productions
found different ways of separating and linking the stage action with voice-over,
and spectatorship with active listening.
5
'"India Song" by the Dutch company Het Zuidelijk Toneel (co-production with Holland Festival),
directed by Ivo van Hove, 1998. This performance was presented at the Edinburgh Festival in
1999 where it won an Arch Angel for Best Direction.'
In Eden Cinema performers do speak as characters on stage, though the
performance also includes voice-over. The activity of narration is split between
the live figures of Suzanne and Joseph, and Suzanne’s recorded voice,
interspersed among scenes that re-enact aspects of the story. Live narration
functions as a means of access to the present time of the action (framing it in the
present tense, and explaining the often silent tableaux that the audience sees),
but Suzanne’s recorded voice-over is also a reflective and subsequent discourse,
supposedly spoken after the death of the mother. Lived time and experience are
refracted across different temporalities and voices, including those of the dead.
The through-composed soundscape comprising voice-over, sound and music is
the principal way of locating space and time, merging temporalities and
overlapping memories. The voice-over is suspended between temporalities and
links the audience with the action as a re-seeing or recalling by the characters,
positioning the audience as voyeurs of action recreated for them. In the 2005
production of Eden Cinema in Reading, a recorded voice-over of Suzanne was
created in the early stages of rehearsal.8 This was mixed with music and other
sound effects layered over it to create a single orchestrated score. In
performance, some scenes featuring the embodied Suzanne as a character on
stage included moments where she listens to her own disembodied voice on the
voice-over sound track, reflecting on that moment from a future anterior point:
Suzanne enacts what will have been.
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Charlotte Bunker as Suzanne listening to her own voice in Eden Cinema by Marguerite Duras at
the University of Reading, directed by Lib Taylor, 2005
The audience listened to a future Suzanne, while watching her own past made
present on stage. The voice-over called the past Suzanne up for the purpose of
(re)enactment.
The sound elements respond to and illuminate the already intermedial and
fluid components of Eden Cinema (theatre, cinema, narration, sound, music and
text). Time and space, experience and memory, life and death are all made
volatile as voice-over disrupts spatial and temporal securities and bodily realities
by its different acoustic relationship with the audience from the rest of the
performance. Structured as a layered narrative, Eden Cinema is about memory,
the past interrupting the present, as the rememberings of family stories are
composed and recomposed, deferred across the multiple perspectives of
characters and audience positions. So in the Reading performance a fluid
kaleidoscopic form was developed using resources which creatively
counterpointed live and mediated action and audio-visual forms.
Through the embodied presence of the dead mother, the son and
daughter Suzanne and Joseph are drawn back to their past to recall a story they
only half remember and want to forget. At the start of the text, Duras states:
Then they talk of THE MOTHER, her past, her life. Of the love she
inspired.
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The MOTHER remains motionless in her chair, expressionless, as if
turned to stone, distant, separate – as is the stage – from her own story.
The others touch her, stroke her arms, kiss her hands. She remains
passive: what she represents in the play goes far beyond what she is and
far beyond her own responsibility.
Everything that can be said in the play is said by SUZANNE and JOSEPH
– the MOTHER – the subject of the story – never speaks directly about
herself. (1992: 49)
However, the Mother’s vital presence is more compelling than the apparent live
figures of her children who are but washed-out shades of themselves.
Suzanne (Charlotte Bunker) and Joseph (Sam Milsom) recall The Mother (Anne Latto) while The
Corporal (Ben De Montagnac) stands by in Eden Cinema, University of Reading, 2005
Similarly in India Song Anne-Marie Stretter is the figure around whom stories
circulate, but as Duras insists, ‘No conversation will take place on the stage, or
will be seen. It will never be the actors on the stage who are speaking’ (1992:
138), and Stretter’s identity is constructed through the memories and prompted
recollections of a chorus of voices, a group of tentative and uncertain speakers
who we hear but do not see. She is assembled by these scraps of halfremembered and overheard fragments as off-stage voices fade in and out of the
sound composition. In both plays we are compelled by the theatrical auratic
magnetism located in figures whose material bodies haunt the performance
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space rather than act upon it. This poses a theatrical challenge in staging these
works, namely how to represent/perform memories through the static action and
the invocatory dialogue of others. Across these plays, Duras sets up a tension
between present but dead central figures, who are crucial to the drama but
relatively inactive, and secondary living characters whose role is to summon up
the half-remembered stories that delineate the dead.
Space and time
It is by conflating temporal frames that Duras accomplishes the revivification of
her dead figures. Both India Song and Eden Cinema are set within the interwar
period of French colonialism, locating the displaced body of the central figure
among and separate from the dispossessed and colonised in India and in French
Indochina. Both central women are allied to the dispossessed colonised
populations who surround them – the Cambodian poor and the silent aged male
servant known as the Corporal for the Mother, the people of India and the
itinerant Savannakhet Beggar Woman for Anne-Marie Stretter. Moreover the
central characters are themselves colonised by the voices and figures who
delineate them and without whom their stories cannot be told. The colonial
spaces of the mise-en-scène are de-realised like the dead figures who inhabit
them. The settings reflect those cultural milieux, bleached and salt-washed, but
in neither case is the geography nor the historical moment securely or reliably
assured. When I directed Eden Cinema the challenge was to realise a
performance whose location is fixed with no degree of certainty; where the
meaning of theatrical space is continuously renegotiated; where at any point
theatrical time is diffused across two or more historical moments; where
characters inhabit spaces no more than tentatively. For example, the sea is both
on the doorstep of the family home, from where it threatens to flood the plains on
which the family’s crops are planted, and at the same time it is 30 kilometers
away from the house that comprises the main location of the action.
The stage is a large empty space surrounding another, rectangular space.
The rectangular space represents a bungalow, furnished with chairs and
tables of a Colonial type. Very ordinary, very worn, very poverty-stricken
furniture.
The empty space around the bungalow is the plain of Kam, in Upper
Cambodia, between Siam and the sea. (1992: 49)
But then early in the action the Mother recalls, ‘Nothing would grow in the plain.
The plain didn’t exist. It was part of the Pacific. It was salt water; a plain of salt
water’ (1992: 51).
9
Charlotte Bunker as Suzanne looks out across the Cambodian flooded ‘plain’ in Eden Cinema,
University of Reading, 1993
The storytellers simultaneously inhabit both the space and time of the
story, the historical moment from which they recall the story, and the theatrical
present and reality in which the story is conveyed to the audience. Stage space
fluidly expands and shrinks to encompass room, house, veranda, fields, and
roads and cities beyond. The insubstantial quality of space and time is reflected
most obviously in the figure of the Mother. Her living presence both within the
theatrical space and as part of the cultural location is no more than provisional
and speculative. The time and space of the drama are made precise through
mise-en-scène, but this is momentary and mutable, since the space is more
importantly self-conscious and theatrical, opened up for recollection, re-staging
and embodiment of the mother’s presence. So the theatrical space itself appears
to have an agency of its own in summoning up the mother and, in turn, her
presence evokes the son and daughter whose stories body her forth for the
audience. There is a cyclical and recursive compulsion whereby the mother
cannot exist theatrically without the children and the children cannot unburden
themselves of their tale without the presence of the mother. The implication is
then that stage space is also the space of the psyche, and the space of the
maternal body. Theatrical ‘vitality’ insists on the materiality of bodies seen on the
stage but is constructed through a mise-en-scène drained of life.
Multimedia technology and intermedial forms offer new opportunities for
exploring Duras’s texts in performance. The organising question when designing
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my own production of Eden Cinema was how to configure motifs of memory,
autobiography, gender and racial identity, storytelling and dreaming by
representing them in live and mediated forms. In contrast to India Song, in which
there is no live voice, Eden Cinema combines recorded and amplified off-stage
narration with the ‘live’ voices of the mother, children, and the daughter’s lover
(made even more complex by the presence of a silent Cambodian servant whose
silence is required by his colonised position but who also represents symbolically
the silence of the mother about her own dispossessed role). The stage space is
rendered insecure by a double slippage, first between Suzanne’s and Joseph’s
framing narration addressed to the audience and the enactment of their mother’s
story, and second, between the enacted narration and Suzanne’s off-stage voiceover retrospectively and omnisciently commenting on it.
Suzanne (Charlotte Bunker) tells The Mother’s story in Eden Cinema, University of Reading,
2005
This very complex arrangement of present action, retrospective narration by
figures on stage and recorded voice-over reflecting on the stage action
destabilises both time and space, distancing and deferring it from the audience
while simultaneously conjuring it up. However, in each of these narrations, more
or less distanced from the supposed time and space of the mother and children’s
story, there is little energy or engagement with the staged relationships and they
are infused with a strong sense of loss and negation. It is a reverie about a place
where the audience, conscious of being in the theatre, is, at the same time,
participating in a dream about a location that they could never experience
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because the action is so filtered through Duras’s own contradictory and
fragmented spatial and historical representation of place and time.
Furthermore, as part of French colonialism (though members of a very
poor and disempowered group) the characters’ presence in Indochina is
transitory. They have only a tenuous claim to the geographical and cultural space
they inhabit, and their colonial occupation of the location is ‘improper’. The
Mother’s presence in Indochina has been no more than temporary, and the play
ends with Joseph saying to the indigenous population (and the audience):
Joseph: We’ll take her body far away. She was not of your race. Even
though she loved you, even though her hope was your hope and she
mourned the children of the plain, she was not of you race. She was
always a stranger in your country.
[Pause]
All of us were always strangers in your country. (1992: 95)
Place is defined equally provisionally in India Song, where action shifts
impossibly between the ambassadorial residence in Calcutta and the off-shore
islands. In her ‘General Remarks’ at the beginning of the text Duras states:
The names of Indian towns, rivers, states and seas are used here
primarily in a musical sense.
All references to physical, human or political geography are incorrect: You
can’t drive from Calcutta to the estuary of the Ganges in an afternoon.
Nor to Nepal. The Prince of Wales hotel is not on an island in the Delta,
but in Colombo. (1992: 120)
India is evoked not as a realistic geographical location but as an erotic and exotic
space of dreams and desires, like Stretter’s own body. As with the Mother, Duras
associates Stretter with place. Rather than form part of the formal embassy and
its activities, she is identified with India, its dispossession and exploitation.
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Iona McLeish’s set for India Song, Theatr Clwyd, Wales, 1993
She occupies the unofficial marginal and shadowy spaces of colonial life and,
through her, the audience focus on the covert social transactions which occur on
the edges of the diplomatic community. The chorus of Voices recall and
comment upon this action which they only just glimpse. They fade in and out of a
vocal score as figures drift in and out of their (and the audience’s) visual field.
The stage-space becomes a place through which figures pass and possibly
pause, but which is rarely fully inhabited, except by the figure of Ann-Marie
Stretter. In both plays the spaces cannot exist without the dead women nor the
women without the space.
Duras haunting the body of her work
Duras’s fiction, and not the least her work for the theatre, played out the
possibilities of her own life. Duras, vague, evasive, forgetful and resistant in
relationship to her own history, is strangely absent from her own biography but is
sharply present in the fictional texts which perform and inscribe her identity. A
very tangible example of this is in relation to the film version of India Song (1975)
which she directed. The film, to a degree, draws on her own colonial experience
but this sense of her personal involvement is heightened when her own
unmistakable cracked voice is used as one of the chorus of Voices. Though the
voice-overs in this film/play do not function as strongly authorial, rather as
tentative and uncertain narrators, the presence of Duras herself endows the film
performance with her distinctiveness. Her voice inscribes the performance
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indelibly with her identity and emphasises the link between her performed
biography and her fiction.
Duras was born in French Indochina, in 1914. Her father, a teacher, died
when she was seven, and her mother, also a teacher, remained in South-East
Asia, struggling to keep the family together. One of the ways her mother aimed to
make money was by playing the piano at the Eden Cinema. Another of her
mother’s money-making schemes was to buy an agricultural concession, which
she wanted to work for profit. But the land she obtained was poor and prone to
flooding and her mother embarked on a series of hopeless attempts to build seawalls or a barrier to keep the floods at bay. The effort of making a living wore her
mother out and eventually killed her. Eden Cinema is one of a series of texts
(prose, film, performance) that function as a way for Duras to ‘work on’ the idea
of her self, her biography, her history, her identity as composed of a cluster of
mutable stories. Although known as an essayist, a novelist, a script writer, a film
director and a playwright, Duras’s work resists easy categorisation. It challenges
the boundaries of genre conventions and refuses orthodoxies. As Sharon Willis
points out, she has directed films that have no narrative, she writes film scripts
that read like novels, she writes theatre and films in which the actors ‘read’ rather
than embody their roles (1987: 1). Her novels are like stream of consciousness
diaries or memory fragments in their insubstantial evocations of people, locations
and events. Just as the texts cannot be situated in terms of media category, so
their status as fact/fiction or invention/biography cannot be determined. India
Song, Eden Cinema, and Savannah Bay all reflect her own biography refracted
through a fictional lens. Her own ghost haunts her writing, and this was given
literal form in her own sound contribution to the film of India Song. Film, of
course, has been theorised as both screen and mirror, recalling French poet,
screenwriter and director Jean Cocteau’s line in Orphée (1950): ‘mirrors are
gates through which death comes and goes. Moreover if you see your whole life
in a mirror you will see death at work’. As a time-based medium that presents
absent figures as if they were present, film is always potentially presenting the
ghosts of its performers at the same time as insisting on their presence on the
screen. Duras’s abiding interest in film has permeated her theatre where ghosts
are ever-present. The distinctive presence of her own voice in India Song is
symbolic of the way in which her own life and voice – her own body – can be
seen as haunting the fictions, while the fictions make meaning of her life. In
exploring the figuring of disembodiment in Duras’s work for the stage, three
interconnected issues appear: the potential of stage space to evoke the dead,
the function of voice-over to destabilise time and space, and the ambivalent
traces of Duras as locating and dislocating signs.
Lib Taylor
Lib Taylor is Head of the School of Arts and Communication Design at Reading
University, where she researches and teaches theatre. She has published on
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contemporary performance, multimedia, gender and British Theatre. She is a
theatre director and some of her research takes the form of practice particularly
performances incorporating mediated images. Her edited collection, The
Indeterminate Body, focuses on the body in an array of disciplines across the
arts and humanities, including theatre, dance and film. She is currently
collaborating on an AHRC funded project, ‘Acting with Facts: Performance of the
Real in Theatre and Television since 1990’.
Notes
In this article, quotations from the plays are from Barbara Bray’s translations
(Duras: 1992).
1
She won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, for her
novel L'Amant (1984, The Lover).
2
3 It
is not clear whether this scrap of paper is part of a draft of a fictional work, a
page torn from Duras’s own personal journals or a note on a loose sheet. Adler
(2001: 8) notes that sixteen boxes of personal archives were transferred to the
IMEC shortly before Duras’s death including drafts of fictional works, personal
material, unpublished projects, photographs and personal journals. The scrap
was among these unclassified papers and therefore whether Duras was referring
to herself or to a fictional character cannot be ascertained, but as this article
argues, distinctions between modes in Duras’s writing are indeterminate.
4 Duras
was born in 1914 and died in 1996.
5 Initially
written in response to a commission by Peter Hall as a possible opening
performance for the National Theatre in the UK, Duras withdrew the theatre
performing rights when she made the film of India Song in 1975. The first
production of India Song was at Theatr Clywd, Mold, Wales in 1993, directed by
Annabel Arden and Annie Castledine, designed by Iona McLeish, sound
designed by Oliver Productions. The first production of L’Eden Cinéma (Eden
Cinema) was presented by the Renaud-Barrault Company and opened at the
Théâtre d’Orsay in 1977 with Madeleine Renaud in the role of the Mother.
6 Savannah
Bay was first performed by the Renaud-Barrault Company in Paris in
1982 with Madeleine Barrault in the role of Madeleine.
7 In
Eden Cinema the relationship of the young girl to the Lover is completely
different to the one depicted in the novel and film of The Lover.
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8 Eden
Cinema directed by Lib Taylor at the University of Reading, December
2005.
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