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THE CRITIC AS CRITIC
July 2003
republished November 2016
Herodias in London
Review by Peter Dunwoodie
Stéphane Mallarmé: Hérodiade, Theatro Technis, Crowndale Road, London NW1, 10th-24th June 2003; dir.
Themelis Glynatis
'Abolished […] none of this happened'. Such an ostensibly inauspicious beginning and ending are reminiscent
of Beckett; but in this case they frame the first performance in the UK of Mallarmé's Hérodiade, directed by
Themelis Glynatsis - a young director who has worked on Lorca, Artaud and rarely performed plays of the
avant-garde like Heiner Müller's Medea material and Hamlet machine. Originally conceived for the theatre, in
1864, Mallarmé hoped that Hérodiade would be produced by the Théâtre-Français. By autumn 1865, however,
after the rejection of his Le Faune, intermède héroïque, it had become clear that Hérodiade would fare no better. It
was not until 1871 that the text of this early work appeared in the Parnasse contemporain under a title which
foregrounds incompleteness, generic ambivalence and distance: 'Fragment d'une étude scénique ancienne d'un
poème de Hérodiade'. He did not return to it actively until 1898, and was working on a prelude and a finale at
the time of his death. By then the poem that it had become, renamed Les Noces d' Hérodiade. Mystère, had very
little to do with theatre and, despite its title, even less to do with the orientalising productions so popular in
France at the time (with Strauss, Flaubert, Huysmans or Gustave Moreau for instance). For Mallarmé the poem
was to be 'a legend stripped of dance, and even of the vulgarity of the head on a plate', an evocation of the
'shadow of a princess', a virginal absence suspended, motionless, in a crepuscular moment.
The challenge, for Themelis Glynatsis, was to stage this piece he describes as 'oozing discontent with theatre', to
endow these shadows – Hérodiade, John the Baptist and the Nourrice – with bodies that would somehow
transcend their own corporeality, evoking a dream-space shaped not by physical limits but by Mallarmé's
symbolist poetry. A striking minimalist set and stark, simple costumes (by Kate McDermott) plunge the
audience into the initial experience of contrasting and complementary modes of being / non-being: Black, the
shrouded Nourrice, part classical mourner/sibyl, part down-to-earth servant (played here by the actor Carey
Thring); and white, Hérodiade (Danae Stefanou), part bride, part lightly-clad maiden in her boudoir. Black, the
stage space, a 12-foot circle demarcated by black, dice-like cubes, circumnavigated by the Nourrice; and white,
the pool of light froma single projector (the work of Oliver Bruce),forming a circle within that circle, a space of
fascination and revelation. Black, the trousers of John the Baptist (Philip Hayden) and the long pole that first
marks the unlit circle's diameter on the blacked-out stage, then the bars of his prison; and white, his torso
where, head fixedly bowed to the axe, shoulder muscles capture the movement of wings in flight–or the spasms
of a decapitation.
The three characters emerge painstakingly slowly into this space, which first takes shape around the tall figure
of the Nourrice, suspended in stasis and ennui. In radical contrast to the fast acting theatre modern audiences
have become accustomed to, Hérodiade is a slow, pensive work which aims to touch the audience's imagination
through an experience of immobility. In a minimalist aesthetic inspired by Beckett both Nourrice and Hérodiade
are repeatedly frozen then released into slow, repetitive gestures, those of the heroine in turn childlike, jarring,
mechanical–automaton or hysteric–and graceful, fluid. In the dominant–unnatural–movements, the trace of
gestures rather than the presence of action, the bodies convey the introspection, duality and deferral at the heart
of Mallarmé's verse, the ecstatic self-absorption of a Hérodiade caught up in both frigidity and sensuality
(child/temptress, ice/fire, snake/swan) and a John the Baptist consumed by the sacred, already beyond the
shackles of the flesh.
The bodies, all-too-present on stage and yet abstract, as though consciousness were elsewhere, are the vehicle
Glynatsis has chosen to investigate the power of language to shape space and time. 'Whereas the body', he
writes, 'appears trapped in an eternal monotony, the voice develops and expands, and subsequently becomes
the central source of action in the performance’. Mallarmé's arcane and non-dramatic text–in a translation by
C.F. MacIntyre revised by Glynatsis and Stefanou–is largely well served by the three actors (except where the
volume rises to levels where distortion impedes comprehension). It is not a text that can be 'followed' in any
conventional sense; rather, it envelops and captivates on stage–through whispers, cries, changes of tempo and
pitch–in a series of alternate monologues. Even when, in the central section, Hérodiade and the Nourrice evolve
through fractured dialogue, their voices seem rather to unfold as simultaneous monologues, accompanied by a–
tenuous, haunting, immaterial–Violin and String Quartet by Morton Feldman (another link with the world of
Beckett since he also composed a one-act opera based on a Beckett text, Neither).
Oscar Wilde, who first met Mallarmé in 1891, published his own Salomé in France and England in 1893. Unlike
Mallarmé, Wilde highlights the incest of the Herod-Herodias-Salomé legend and creates a figure too active for
Mallarmé, too caught up in the 'fait divers mythique'. Yet both authors locate the essential drama (inspired by
Heine and the Song of Solomon) in narcissism, in a world of mirrors reflecting only masks, where to gaze on
others is to transgress, and to gaze, finally, into the dead eyes of John the Baptist is to seek only a reflection of
the self. This production is effective in staging that solipsism in the Nourrice's shrouded head, in Hérodiade's
distracted eyes, in the immaterial mirror in which Hérodiade, though untouched, is transfigured, her virginal
form gradually and fleetingly transformed as Danae Stefanou's graceful gestures allow her sensuality to fill the
pool/mirror of light that she finally crosses. Like planets, each character (r)evolves within its own orbit, the
audience perceiving them as interlocked, not interacting, occupying a space simultaneously, not sharing it. For
the drama resides elsewhere, in the inner conflict of a passionate virgin reflected in the mirror of her own
desires, 'the nakedness of (her) scattered dreams'.
This is an ambitious production in which self-imposed paucity of means–strongly reminiscent of a number of
Beckett productions–seeks to enhance depth of experience, successfully avoiding the distraction of movement,
anecdote and anything simply (grossly) material, in order to give dramatic form to the symbolism of Mallarmé's
verse. Re-emerging after the performance, the venue itself is coloured by the interplay of death, desire and
stasis unfolding on stage: in the emptiness and tedium of a North London street or the nineteenth-century park
nearby, filled only by long-forgotten mausoleums, bordering on one of the city’s major redevelopment zones,
and a former red light district; and, above all, in the looming brick wall that frames the theatre’s entrance, stark
memorial to absence, Hiroshima.
 Peter Dunwoodie is Emeritus Professor of French Literature, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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