My first meeting with MD

 

 I first came across MD's writing in the late 70s, when I was an actor in one of her plays called L’Amante Anglaise, at the PramFactory, a famous/infamous collective run theatre in Melbourne. I belonged to one of the Pram’s sub-groups called Nightshift. We championed the dark side, the avant garde, and Duras was one of our heroes. Like us, she loved to experiment, to challenge the artistic conventions of the time, and long before sampling, remixing and hybridity became the done thing, she was deconstructing theatre, film and new prose forms to create her panoramas of melancholic intensity. 

L'Amante Anglaise ( The English Lover - a misspelling by one of the characters of le menthe Anglaise) was based on a newspaper article MD read about a real murder that shocked the entire population of France. The dismembered body parts of the victim were found on trains throughout the country. They had been thrown there from a railway bridge by a married woman, Claire Lannes, who confessed to the murder. In the Duras play an interviewer interrogates Claire and her husband to try to uncover a motive. " At the end we are only left to ask how love, silence and murder can concoct a potent and dangerous combination that can send some of us to jail, others to death and others to a new life." From the publicity blurb of a 2009 production by Met Theater in California.

In our production in 1978 in Melbourne, I played the interviewer, Lindzee Smith was the husband, Betsy Sussler, the wife and James Shuv'us was our director. We had no set, only stark lighting on a central rostrum as we sat on chairs facing one another speaking our lines into microphones on stands. Each night I entered fully into the spirit of the interrogation, adopting the steely indifference of the observer trying to unravel the motivation for the crime. It was a different acting experience to any other. The words spoke themselves, there was no need for motivation or characterisation,  I was a servant of the text, I was doing it for MD, that was all that mattered.

But it was seeing her film India Song (based on the play, published in 1976 and shown at the Pram Factory in 1978), that reinforced my ambition to follow MD to the ends of the earth. 

View the opening of India Song here. 

 A blood-orange sun hangs above a dusty blue-green horizon. A high-pitched female voice sings a song of Laos, laughs and chatters. The camera doesn't move, stays until the last sliver of gold is gone, stays even after that. There's nothing else to see and yet you can smell the heat, the monsoon rains; the jungle rotting into mud. Off screen, two young women begin to speak in French; they are telling of a beggar woman who has walked all the way to the Ganges from Savannakhet in Laos — to lose herself they say. Nearly four minutes in and the camera finally cuts to another scene. No people, just a slow pan of a colonial interior; a French embassy in Calcutta as day turns to night; fringed lamps on a piano, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, French doors open to the gardens outside— the beggar woman's song wafting in on the hint of a tropical breeze.  The commentary of the young women is slow and reflective, wistful, even. They are piecing together memories as they talk about the characters who appear on the screen; handsome young men and women in evening dress. A haunting piano tune begins to play, a man and a woman dance. There is beauty, grace, but the air is thick with a hopeless torpor. At this point in the screening, some people in the audience walk out, bored with this French New Wave experimental stuff, but I am captivated, I want to hear/see more, want to enter completely into this sad, scent-laden world.

 

 

The intensity of L'Amante Anglaise and the slow, cinematic scenarios of missed and impossible moments in her play India Song, drew me in like a hungry animal. Like the Buddhist teachings her writing spelled out the first noble truth - Suffering Exists. As a young woman Duras spoke to me long before I found Suzuki Zen Roshi or Chogyam Trungpa. Articulating a field of feeling I sensed but couldn’t yet express, she transformed it into truth, art, beauty, introducing me to the rhythms and perfumes of an Asian terrain I longed to experience one day for myself. It was another 27 years before I did.


Jan Cornall began writing in the 70s. She has written plays, musicals, screenplays, a novel, short stories, and three CDs of songs.  Since 2004 she has led writer's retreats in inspirational international locations including Bali, Laos, Burma, Cambodia, Morocco and Fiji. In 2014 she is planning a Vietnam trip following the footsteps of M.Duras in Vietnam. More info here.

(c) Jan Cornall 2013