Theatre: David Le Page
A NAKED queen scrabbles in the dirt of a filthy dungeon, fighting off rats with a crucifix and babbling her way almost deliriously through the Lord’s Prayer. This is the opening of French Gray (at the Market in Johannesburg), a story not only of Marie Antoinette’s last hours, but of her life relived.
The sole, hypnotic performer is Claire Berlein, who creates an utterly convincing queen of France, beautifully directed in this tour de force by Geoffrey Hyland. Her every motion, whether of desperate degradation or, later, of coquettishness, elegance and majesty, is perfectly weighed, and delivered with assurance.
On a stage where the most elaborate prop is a single candle, she constructs a prison, and then liberates her character. She creates, through narrative and gesture alone, a strong sense of the opulent world she comes from.
At the beginning she has been stripped of every trapping of majesty. The play details how, through careful remembering of who and what she has been, she regains it all, so we are left certain that when she dies, she will do so as much a queen as she ever was. This does not mean she becomes particularly noble; rather, it is her sense of persistent identity, her refusal to show weakness or to conspire in her own destruction, that we end up admiring.
She is utterly unrepentant about the social effects of the ancien regime in France. When she claims to have been “tireless when it comes to charity”, it is with perfect superciliousness; when she speaks of the people of France as her children, it is clear that she means they are to be ignored, patronised and required to be obedient, rather than loved and nurtured. As a queen she deemed her responsibilities to be “style and magnificence” rather than the welfare of her people.
Today, history tends to see Marie Antoinette as part of an aristocracy united to maintain its oppression of the lower classes. French Gray makes it clear that Marie Antoinette had a very different image of her position. Arriving as a child in France, she was the victim of constant whispering campaigns and slander at Versailles; she was in pomp a queen, but had none of the respect. For her, France was not a society divided by extremes of wealth and poverty; it was a whole country full of enemies intent long before the revolution on her humiliation and downfall.
Her marriage was miserable. She speaks of seven years of hell during which Louis, “that stale lump of Bourbon flesh”, forced himself on her every night; she was desperate for a child, so that the ordeal might end. Yet she was no innocent: “Debauch. The word is music to my ears.” Nor was she ignorant of the precarious state of the world she had inhabited, describing the court as corrupt and redolent with the “stench of privilege”.
The play is marvellously written by American Joseph Bush, capturing her poison and arrogance throughout. Particularly wonderful is a description of her humiliation of an aspirant courtier that is couched in the terms of a contemporary naval engagement. It is also often darkly humorous: “France is mine. It was a wedding present.”
One aspect of Berlein’s performance does jar, and that is her heavy French accent, which seems redundant for a performance that is in English. Admittedly, it does add charm to an already seductive presence. But it becomes so heavy at times that one misses words, and the writing deserves better.
Throughout the play, a bell tolls at intervals, and we hear the distant thud of the guillotine. Our French queen, convicted of “crimes unnamed”, has protested that she will die with honour. And it is clear that, in her own mind at least, she did.
French Gray runs at the Market, Newtown, until November 4