• ”Simply Sitting in a Chair”: Questioning Representational Practice and Dramatic Convention in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante anglaise and The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise
• Shelley Orr (bio)

One doesn’t know in life when things are there. They escape you . . . You want to know what it would take for it to be so. For me to be on stage saying nothing, to let myself see, without especially thinking about something. That’s right.

Marguerite Duras, La Vie matérielle, translated by Carol Barko (1987)

It is difficult to create a believable, sympathetic character while simply sitting in a chair answering questions for an hour, but Ms. Zabriskie pulls it off. As the actress stares off into space, wrings her hands in her lap, or clutches the hem of her skirt, we see the bleakness of Claire’s life as clearly as if she had been a neighbor.

Wilborn Hampton, review of Duras’s English Mint/L’Amante Anglaise (1988)

For both French novelist Marguerite Duras and American theatre critic Wilborn Hampton, the theatre is a place to see, an understanding in line with the Greek théatron (the seeing place, “a place for ‘looking at’ something”), from which the theatre takes its name. ¹ However, what one sees in the theatre and how one sees it are quite different for writer and critic. Hampton expects to see characters and dramatic action in accordance with the conventions of mimetic realism and, in the case of the production of Duras’s 1968 work L’Amante Anglaise that he reviewed, [End Page 312] in accordance with the more specific conventions of the crime drama or drame policier. In her play, however, Duras questions the former and only appears to adhere to the latter as she challenges what is among the oldest of theatrical forms: the murder mystery. Ever since Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex laid a foundation for the genre (thanks in part to framing provided by Aristotle’s Poetics), with its cause-and-effect, linear plotline, in which each clue builds the emotional intensity until the climax reveals all, the murder mystery has been a favorite of playwrights and novelists. In her L’Amante anglaise, however, Duras mimics the form to question and undermine theatrical realism’s ability to engage in a project of uncovering the truth.

We can get a sense of Duras’s project of mimicry, subversion, and critique in L’Amante Anglaise—as well as Hampton’s inability or unwillingness to understand it—in Hampton’s review of Stages Trilingual Theater’s English-language production of the play, which was performed in 1988 at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater under the title English Mint/L’Amante anglaise. At the start of the performance, the audience members hear the report of a murder in recorded voice-over, a clear convention of the crime drama. Nearly the entire dialogue of the play consists of the questioning of the main suspect, Claire, and her husband, Pierre, by a character aptly and simply called “the Interrogator.” In his review, Hampton notes that Grace Zabriskie, who played Claire, faced difficulty in her effort “to create a believable, sympathetic character.” ² For Hampton, this difficulty has largely to do with the (playwright’s) restriction placed on her that she sit in a chair during her interrogation. He goes on to describe the ways in which the actor worked to overcome this limitation of static staging, pointing to the gestures that gave him the mimetic illusion of knowing “Claire.” Yet Hampton is clearly disappointed that the overall experience of L’Amante anglaise does not sustain the kind of illusion that is common to the crime drama of revealing the truth. Although he acknowledges late in his review that “Ms. Duras has always eschewed such things as plot and narrative in her work,” he regards this as an error or a demonstration of poor judgment. He does not consider the goals or effects of not employing “such things,” nor does he address the idea that L’Amante anglaise might be deliberately mimicking and then subverting the expectations associated with particular theatrical conventions to critique them. He spends his review describing the little information that [End Page...

• 
  “只是坐在椅子上”：质疑玛格丽特·杜拉斯的《英国人》和《塞纳-瓦兹高架桥》中的再现实践和戏剧惯例
•  雪莱·奥尔（个人简介）

在生活中，人们不知道事物什么时候就在那里。他们逃离了你。 。 。你想知道需要什么才能做到这一点。对我来说，在舞台上什么也不说，让自己看到，而不需要特别考虑什么。这是正确的。

玛格丽特·杜拉斯， 《物质生活》 ，卡罗尔·巴科译（1987）

仅仅坐在椅子上回答问题一个小时很难塑造一个可信、富有同情心的角色，但扎布里斯基女士做到了。当女演员凝视着太空，将双手绞在腿上，或者抓住裙子的下摆时，我们清楚地看到克莱尔生活的凄凉，就好像她是邻居一样。

威尔伯恩·汉普顿 (Wilborn Hampton)，杜拉斯英国造币厂/L'Amante Anglaise评论 (1988)

对于法国小说家玛格丽特·杜拉斯和美国戏剧评论家威尔伯恩·汉普顿来说，剧院是一个观看的地方，一种与希腊语théatron （观看的地方，“观看”某物的地方）一致的理解，从这里，剧院由此得名。 ¹然而，对于作家和评论家来说，在剧院中看到的东西和如何看待它是完全不同的。汉普顿希望看到角色和戏剧动作符合模仿现实主义的惯例，并且在他评论的杜拉斯 1968 年作品《英国爱情》的制作中， [第 312 页结束]符合更具体的惯例。犯罪剧或警察剧。然而，在她的戏剧中，杜拉斯质疑前者，并且在挑战最古老的戏剧形式：谋杀之谜时，似乎只坚持后者。自从索福克勒斯的《俄狄浦斯王》为这一类型奠定了基础（部分归功于亚里士多德《诗学》提供的框架）以来，其因果关系、线性情节，每条线索都建立了情感强度，直到高潮揭示了一切，谋杀之谜一直是剧作家和小说家的最爱。然而，在她的《英国爱情》中，杜拉斯模仿这种形式来质疑和破坏戏剧现实主义参与揭露真相的项目的能力。

我们可以从杜拉斯在《英国爱情》中的模仿、颠覆和批评的项目中感受到，以及汉普顿无法或不愿意理解它的感觉——在汉普顿对舞台三语剧院英语制作的该剧的评论中，该剧已上演。 1988 年在纽约 Cherry Lane 剧院以“English Mint/L'Amante anglaise”为题演出。演出开始时，观众会听到录音画外音中的谋杀报告，这是犯罪剧的明显惯例。该剧的几乎整个对话都是由一个被恰当地简称为“审讯者”的角色对主要嫌疑人克莱尔和她的丈夫皮埃尔的审问组成的。汉普顿在评论中指出，扮演克莱尔的格蕾丝·扎布里斯基在“塑造一个可信的、富有同情心的角色”的努力中遇到了困难。 ²对于汉普顿来说，这种困难很大程度上与（剧作家）对她在审讯期间坐在椅子上的限制有关。他接着描述了演员如何努力克服静态舞台的局限性，并指出那些让他产生认识“克莱尔”的模仿错觉的手势。然而，汉普顿显然感到失望，因为《英国爱情》的整体体验并没有维持揭露真相的犯罪剧中常见的那种幻觉。尽管他在评论后期承认“女士。杜拉斯在她的作品中一直回避诸如情节和叙事之类的东西，”他认为这是一个错误或判断力不佳的表现。 他没有考虑不使用“这样的东西”的目标或效果，也没有提到《英国人》可能故意模仿然后颠覆与特定戏剧惯例相关的期望来批评它们。他在评论中描述了[页尾...