Alliance Française will stage ‘Lover’
Print Edition
The director of the upcoming Alliance Française de Shanghai’s production of Harold Pinter’s “The Lover” (“L’amant”) says that when he first saw the play, he didn’t get it.
“The first time I saw ‘The Lover,’ I didn’t really like it. I was too young and also too focused on the main plot,” says William Bascaule, director and head of the school’s art department. “But Pinter grows on you, year after year.”
“The Lover” is a 1962 one-act play by Pinter, a Nobel Prize-winning English screenwriter, director, actor and playwright. As one of the most influential modern British dramatists, Pinter’s writing career spanned 20 years.
In “The Lover,” Richard and Sarah, a sophisticated couple, pretend to be adulterous lovers in the afternoons to spice up their marriage. The husband plays the lover for his wife, while his wife is the mistress for him. He goes off to work as a respectable businessman, only for the wife to put on her seductive outfit to welcome him back for some play-acting after lunch.
As the play goes on, the husband wishes to stop the game, but finally switches back to the role of the lover.
Bascaule says he saw the play a second time in a small theater with nothing but two chairs on the stage.
“That night, I was seduced by the text, both the ironic and the symbolic part. I hope the audience will be, too, and also, over time, they will see a part of themselves through Richard and Sarah,” he says.
Students of the school’s Art Department will perform the play in French, with Chinese subtitles.
In their version, the play takes place only in the living room. “I wanted a closed space, a symbol of the ‘no exit’ feeling. There is a lot of freedom in Pinter’s plays, so it is indeed different every time it is staged,” Bascaule says.
Bascaule, who graduated from the Conservatory of Toulouse, says there is a lot he would like to narrate on the stage about identity, love and happiness, “how it is a dynamic rather than a static stage.”
He quoted French dramatist Alfred de Musset: “The main thing is that we should love, it little matters who. The thing is to be drunk on wine, whoever made the brew.”
Date: December 7, 7:30pm; December 8, 3:45pm; December 12, 7:30pm; December 14, 7:30pm
Address: Salle Marseille, 297 Wusong Rd
Admission: Free
Tel: 6357-5388
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