Paris, at Five Minutes to Midnight

The best free performance in Paris took place in a large bookshop just off the Place Saint-Michel. On the first floor, near the history books, a young African queen gives a performance worth considering for a French Molière. In the crowded bookshop his job seems to be directing traffic and dealing with book queries. He is in total control of his captive, browsing audience and plays broadly with a voice that can be heard in every part of the store.

As we enter he is languidly berating several young scarf-covered women who have sought his assistance. “Mademoiselles,” he scolds, “I adooore exactitude.” They giggle uneasily as they try to remember more details of the book they are looking for. Having disposed of them he regally farewells several “Mesdames” who have found and paid for what they sought: “… and now”, with a wave of his hand, “I suggest you head home, and have a good rest.” To our admiring and suitably submissive farewells he returns the compliment, “Goodbye, the young ones.” Over the river, not very far away, another not bad performance is taking place.

Marivaux’s La Double Inconstance (The Double Inconstancy) is playing at the Comédie Française. Before the 8.30 p.m. performance there is time to find the chair on which Molière fell ill while performing in February 1673. The tattered, sainted object turns out to be a seventeenth-century recliner chair.

On this Wednesday night in October the Salle Richelieu is packed with an audience that cuts across ages. This new production of La Double Inconstance (first performed in 1723) entered the company’s repertoire in November 2014. Village lovers Sylvia and Arlequin are torn apart when a prince, out hunting, sees and falls in love with Sylvia. She is kidnapped and taken away to his palace, and later Arlequin joins her there. Both lovers are tempted and find new loves—Sylvia with the prince, in the disguise of an officer, and Arlequin with a lady of the court, Flamina. The simple country lovers have not been able to withstand the sophisticated wiles of their aristocratic admirers. The play is as light, slight and elegant as a Fragonard.

The stage set is a copy of a real rehearsal room inside the theatre. Glass doors at the back open onto a balcony and a representation of buildings opposite the theatre. The Paris sky changes colour, lights in the buildings go on and off as time passes and the play seems to move from first rehearsal to final staging. Piece by piece the actors’ rehearsal clothes are gradually replaced with stage costumes, and the set itself changes to suggest a fully developed staging. There are some modern musical intrusions: “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell and a 1950s musical theatre dance number. There is a comic bath routine with the prince involving steam, bubbles and a sound-effect-maker sitting on the stage.

Although the modern bits could suggest that the director is not confident of the play’s own strength, the text is treated with affection and respect. Australian theatres are generally text-phobic and prefer rewriting and demolition.

The actors, mostly young, are disciplined and talented. The eighteenth-century language is delivered naturally and with precision, even when delivered at high speed. In the comfortably-sized auditorium the actors are unmiked and the clarity and volume are maintained even as they turn away from us.

My excellent dress circle seat has cost me less than a ticket to our subsidised theatres. For those who want to queue there are much cheaper seats sold before the curtain rises. The audience concentrates and enjoys. There are tourists like myself, no doubt, and first-time visitors to the theatre. At the end of the play the generous and warm-hearted applause goes on and on and on. It lasts far longer than even an enthusiastic evening in an Australian theatre.

The onstage set had reproduced a heavy downpour, and coming out of the theatre it is raining. Sheltering a moment under the famous colonnade is like wandering into the opening scene of Pygmalion or My Fair Lady. A short dash to the Metro and we find ourselves among a pleasant chattering crush of theatre audience still with that friendly glow from having actually enjoyed being present in a theatre.

We go underground at Place Colette and come above ground in Boulevard Barbès. The short Metro ride takes us from Right Bank traditional culture and cultivated glamour into African prostitution. Not much further on, in outer Paris, are suburbs where anti-white racism is a reality.

In French bookshops this autumn is Lucien Rebatet’s Les Décombres (The Ruins). It was hastily reprinted after the initial 5000-copy print run sold out on publication day. It was also a best-seller during the occupation and this is the first uncensored post-war edition. The fascist and anti-Semitic must-read of 1942 now comes with a modern prophylactic introduction by a left-wing historian—strange when you think that the Left is now the home of anti-Semitism. A new translation of another wartime best-seller, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, will be in the bookstores in January 2016, after the author’s copyright expires.

Before then Paris will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 2005 banlieue riots. A nostalgic rock-throwing, car-burning veteran has been quoted as saying that next time it won’t be a riot, it will be civil war. A civil war suggests two sides but in France there might not be another side to take to the battlefield. Just in the last few weeks there have been major incidents with gypsy bands attacking gendarmes, burning cars and closing down some of the country’s main road arteries. With Holland appearing more and more like a Louis XVI bis there were few, if any, arrests. The Parisian banlieues already seem like a foreign concession—Dogs and Frenchmen Not Admitted. France does grand defeats on a grand scale—1870, almost happened in 1914, 1940, 1962, and possibly sometime very soon. When ISIS flags flutter along the Rue de Rivoli and Marais gays flap from the top of the Arc de Triomphe survivors may talk not of civil war but the War of Conversion circa 2016.

The Legend of King Arthur, directed by Dove Attia, is playing at the Palais des Congrès. It’s one of the large-scale musical theatre productions I’ve so far only seen on film. The auditorium is in a shopping mall and conference centre complex and seats about 3700. As with all French theatres the ticketing is confusing. A line runs through the middle of the auditorium. Odd numbered seats are on one side, even on the other, so that seats 5 and 7 in any row are actually side by side. Before the performance an announcement that photography with flash is not allowed is the signal for the wholesale turning on of cameras and phones. The stage is large and is filled with giant projections, stage props, performers, dancers, puppets. A large burning, besieged castle fills the entire stage—nineteenth-century audiences would have loved the spectacular conception. This really is modern, popular musical theatre.

Some of what I see I don’t quite get, but that doesn’t really matter, it’s the spectacle that counts. When we meet Guinevere she is accompanied by a retinue of female dancers in white dresses but I’m not sure why they are all pregnant. Later the women in red dresses who whirl across the stage are revealed to be men. I lose count at somewhere between fifty and sixty performers onstage. Though it is very enjoyable, the father in front of me gets bored and begins chatting on Facebook, until an elbow from his son beside him suggests he extinguish the screen.

These modern musicals are a way forward, a way to attract large popular audiences. This production will travel France and then to Belgium and Switzerland. It’s using many performers who have made their names in popular French televised musical programs. The young audience are probably their television fans and Facebook friends. The story line is easy to follow. The songs, to me bland and uninteresting, are modern pop familiar to young audiences. The staging is grand in conception, active, and always interesting. The sound is loud enough to drown out chatting audiences, and the stage effects so captivating that you don’t always focus on the camera-clicking pests in the audience. Australia could make these sorts of shows and export them.

Nowhere in Paris is far from possible danger. The theatres and museums operate under strict security. Armed soldiers punctuate the street outside the Shoah Memorial, as they do outside Sacré Cœur. To visit the Memorial you need to press a button to attract a response from a security control room. You wait until a green light glows and you push the button to enter—a small cell-like entry room where we are confined until the door locks shut behind us. Now, if permitted, you press more buttons to be approved for entry into the main part of the building.

On Sunday afternoon a free bus takes people to the new museum opposite the Drancy internment camp site in the outer suburbs of Paris. During the occupation an uncompleted housing estate in Drancy was used for holding Jews until they were transferred to Auschwitz or other camps. Over 67,000 people passed through it. After the war the building was completed and today it is a regular housing estate. The free bus is a short walk away from the Shoah Memorial. In the street nervous people stand about waiting. A bus without a destination mark arrives and parks further up the street. A plain-clothed security man boards and checks it out. He smiles and waves to people who board for the trip to Drancy. When we arrive we are met by another security man who shows us into the museum building opened by President Hollande in 2012. There are only a few of us. One old man, an American Jew living in Miami, passed through Drancy when young and has the Auschwitz numbers on his arm.

We skip the guided tour and go straight upstairs to the permanent exhibition. Big glass windows look across the street to the housing estate. The buildings are laid as in a U shape. At the open end an old SNCF railway van used in the deportations stands on rails, and nearby is a memorial statue. The railway van has been vandalised before. Drancy has an important Muslim population. As we look down, the people from our bus cross the street and stand about listening to the tour guide. A security man stands at their back, his eyes travelling about. When later we go down to visit the site, the present tensions are stronger than the historical message.

The Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin has produced the best 1956 French musical to be staged in Paris in 2015. Wisely they made it a hit by avoiding tampering. Irma la Douce, with music by Marguerite Monnot, who wrote for Piaf, is gloriously nostalgic, with Parisian love for a Paris that no longer exists. The theatre, rebuilt after burning down in the Commune, was played in by Sarah Bernhardt and saw the first production of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. It’s a pleasure to be in. As with some other French theatres, English sub­titles are projected above the stage. English-speakers can book tickets that offer a pre-performance talk and special seating in the dress circle from where the titles are easily read. From the comfortable seats in the stalls the titles are visible, with some neck straining.

In the Gallic Damon Runyon world of Montmartre, prostitute Irma loves Nestor, and he loves her. Jealous of her many work-day customers he agrees that she may have a single wealthy customer, Oscar—who he becomes beneath a thin disguise. Then he becomes jealous of Oscar—himself. When he makes his rival disappear he is arrested and convicted of killing Oscar. Sent to an overseas prison he returns, all is explained, and there is a happy ending with Irma giving birth to twin boys—Nestor and Oscar. The story is told by the owner of the Montmartre bar where the tale begins. The part is played by a crowd-teasing, crowd-pleasing seventy-nine-year-old Nicole Croisille. It’s a pleasure of a musical, and also a sadness. The world it celebrates no longer exists. The place names now summon up visions of very different inhabitants. The audience is very French—but you are not allowed to mention things like that in France.

Also appearing in Paris at the same time was the great Fabrice Luchini—performing a one-man show of selections from some of his favoured writers. As his political opinions are well known, many right-wing politicians headed for his dressing room after the performance to congratulate the great man and receive his blessing. With elections in the air French politicians have more important things to think about than migration, unemployment, the “jungle” outside Calais, or approaching civil war. C’est la vie.