MATTHEW KROUSE met up with the cast of Indiscretions during rehearsals this week
`ARE real tears wrong?” asks actress Fiona Ramsay of director Robert Whitehead during a break in rehearsals. Eyes all red and puffy, she’s just been emoting heavily in the maddened climax of Indiscretions, which began previewing last night.
Real tears, it transpires, are not inappropriate to the play. But it’s the manner in which the actors arrive at the tears which will prove correct, instructs Whitehead. Performance is governed by such nuances — it’s not always the end result, but the process which is most important.
The cast of Indiscretions is nearing the end of the rehearsal process, and they look washed out. It strikes me that real tears are not difficult to achieve in a play so deceptively complex and relentlessly swift.
Written by Jean Cocteau, and premiered in 1938, Indiscretions (or Les Parents Terribles) was described by critics as a work about the Jocasta complex. What, you may ask, is that?
Jocasta, it transpires, was Oedipus’s mum — and the complex in question implies a morbid attachment of a mother to her son. That’s Cocteau for you, the combination of classicism and Freudianism, adapted to contemporary drama. His obsession with these subjects cuts across all his works — novels, films, plays and paintings. He was a queer modern master, who drew on mythology to make great art. And he made great art so that he could mythologise his friends and lovers.
Les Parents Terribles was written almost exclusively as a showcase for the world to admire the beauty of actor Jean Marais, who became a gay icon — the European James Dean of the 1930s.
Whitehead, however, has decided to set the play in the 1950s, and to show it for what it really is — a bizarre family drama within a twisted comedy. But, as Whitehead observes, the play’s history is fascinating: “With this play — as opposed to Cocteau’s other plays, which were very avant-garde — he set out to write a traditional family tragedy. But a strange thing occurred, everybody shrieked with laughter at the most tragic moments – — Cocteau freaked out. It became a traditional boulevard farce!
“It’s like a year’s worth of a family soap opera crammed into two hours,” concludes Whitehead.
The current text of Indiscretions is a new translation by Jeremy Sams, one that has won international acclaim. The play stars Fiona Ramsay, just back from London where she most recently played the villainess in a forthcoming television series. Also cast are Vanessa Cooke, co-director of the Market Theatre Laboratory; John Whiteley, recently seen in the film Cry, The Beloved Country; Leila Henriques; and new boy Langley Kirkwood.
Another feature of the play’s history concerns Cocteau’s casting of his favorite actress, Yvonne de Bray. In the film version she played the diabetic matriarch — a character based upon the mother of Cocteau’s idol, Marais.
Whiteley tells of the debacle: “The part was written with De Bray in mind. But I’m not sure if she actually opened in it, because she was a renowned alcoholic who locked herself away in the dressing room during the play. So they replaced her.”
Such antics pertaining to the play’s origins are almost as hysterical as the play itself. But beyond the hysteria is a serious angle which speaks directly to us today.
Ramsay sums up: “Indiscretions is about the crumbling middle class .. It’s about a family clinging to traditional values. I think this is of particular relevance to our society at the moment.”
It is a long, arduous process towards relevance and meaning in performance. With Indiscretions the process should deliver real tears. Which will in turn, no doubt, deliver real laughter.
Indiscretions opens at the Tesson Theatre, Johannesburg Civic, on July 2 and runs until August 17