Remix

Disturbing monodrama …

The poet Sylvia Plath is an American poet who committed suicide at the age of 30 by poisoning herself in the gas. The author describes in her poems and novels the distress which animates her, the despair which haunts her, the madness which watches for her such a chronicle of the suicide announced, in a society and in a period when the feminine genius was crushed by the male dominion. The young lady had been marked in life by the rough death of her father while she was only eight years old (the fervent need to write took her at this age) and suffered from mental disorders having already driven her to a first attempt of suicide (thinking that the suicide was the best means to annihilate the world).

She met in 1956 Ted Hugues, English poet, whom she married very fast and of whom she had two children, forgetting herself completely for the benefit of Ted’s work which she supported and defended ardently. To her confides the connection of this last one and betrayed, decided to leave him, the anger and the despair caused by the death of her love making her take back the road of the writing, the pain exciting her poetic eloquence in the neo-feminist consonances, even special ( her poem  » Lesbos  » ). Her poem « Daddy » is symbolic of her relationship to the father, her hatred for her father having abandoned her so early and for the father of her children, this Nazi who betrayed her. The voices of the solitude, the voices of the pain / Bang in my back indefatigably, she writes in « three women », haunted by the idea of the death of the imagination. The winter of 1962-1963 was Rough and she fell ill, to the point that the fever seized her body and to the point that she wrote her last poem  » The edge « , lucid on her mental disorders.

The creation

The show, presented on the condition of silks, by the troop Of Shakespeare Wild Sisters Group, entitled the monodrama of Hsu Yen Ling, is a rewriting inspired by the poem « Fever 103 ° », telling her last night before she committed suicide. The Taiwanese troop presents only a part of the show, where Yenling interprets with ardour and sensuality Sylvia Plath. Also, the scenography constituted by a bathtub filled with water – On which are thrown subtitles of this creation said in Chinese, in front-stage side garden- and a chair – in bottom of stage side- course is not the original one. This last one is constituted by an inclined plane curved, cut by a base line (wide opening was bounded in bottom of stage by a door and on sides by the inclined plane, was replaced here by the chair) and a gaping hole (replaced here by the bathtub). Highly more symbolic and suggestive …

Projections videos flood the wall of the bottom of images in the well realized graphics and the shots of Yenling on stage, like vjaying, the dark, fragmented and collected images, following the example of the Sylvia Plath’s disturbing poetry, drowning itself in the stream of words, belched words, shouted, thrown in feed to our ears, by Yenling, heart-rending and torn by this disturbing character, oscillating between roarings and whispers, between apathy and ecstasy, between love and hatred, attraction and refusal of the love, the fascinating death. The sound track as for her is not without reminding David Lynch’s universe.

The realization

The show was specially conceived to bring to the foreground the unmistakable talent of Yenling, Taiwanese actress and director, recognized in her country and taken on an aura numerous duly deserved prizes. Yenling – who in this piece really puts herself in nude and in danger- is striking of truth so much her play is animated of one internal strength, of a fire consuming her being, until the forgetting of one … The actress merges with the woman whom she interprets, whom she becomes the time of the show. With humility and talent. Even a point of humor which does not leave us indifferent, in particular when dressed in a red dress, she welcomes us, calling to the spectators with amusement and a feigned innocence … Such a wrongly unsuspicious woman-child asking us softly « draw me a sheep »!

The stage setting is not in rest: it seems to have been conceived in the style of a poetic breath, through the rhythm of the words, the silences of the language and the body, letting burst the power of the sentences joining the space, resounding in the ears of the spectators moved by this long poem which distils with subtlety the purity and the violence of the feelings. The stage setting plays on the complementarity / opposition of both characters on the stage: the figure of the male (the father/the husband/the lover) and the figure of the woman (the daughter, the wife, the mother and the mistress) without falling into Manicheanism. The flexibility of the play of the comedian, his placidity and his quiet strength contrast harmoniously with the violence, the heat, the madness of the play of Yenling, all in break and whom gestures are nevertheless precise and not muddled. She shows a big master’s degree of her art and it is difficult at times not to hold one’s breath. Not to be moved by this alliance so successful between the writing, the realization and the performance because even in the hardest passages of the piece, nothing is free, either the indefatigable repetition of the same words, or the dangerous game of Yenling / Sylvia with the razor. And a mixture of fear and fascination seizes us at the conclusion of this highly symbolic creation where the cruelty of the world, the life, the love burst out… Disorder, confusion, seizes us. At the end of the piece, we wonder about the place of the woman in the society, the always existing dominion (unfortunately!) of the male on the woman, the symbolic violence exercised on the so called weak sex, the patriarchy… But also on the sense of the life, the death, that is what to be, to exist, to live, to love, to create? And why? For whom?

In fine
Except the love, there are very few things, said Sylvia Plath who dedicated her life to her love and the poetry which bursts out of the suffering of her lover’s loss. Love, this universal and eternal subject which inspired so many poets.

I would finish with this shakespeare’s sonnet :
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Diane Vandermolina