La Maladie de la Mort and The Atlantic Man, Duras, 14 Dec 1996

 

La Maladie de la Mort (L'amour) and The Atlantic Man, by Marguerite Duras

At La Mama until March 19, 1996

Reviewer: Kate Herbert, reviewed around 14 Dec 1995 for The Melbourne Times

 

Marguerite Duras' prose has a way of penetrating to the very bone by an unobtrusive and mysterious path. In Laurence Strangio's production of La Maladie de la Mort (The Malady of Death), a Man (Robert Meldrum) pays a prostitute (Margaret Mills) for several consecutive nights of sex.

 

There is a gasping pain in the sterile emotional isolation of the Man who pays for the woman's body only, for the woman as object. He is confused and terrified to discover it coming to life and perhaps love? before his previously unfeeling, unobservant eyes.  She, the potential victim, sees that he suffers from the maladie de la mort / l'amour. The French pun has a dreadful, poignant quality.  When he begins to feel, he wants to kill her.

 

It is the story of his brush with intimacy. "The marvellous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you." There is a delicacy in rendering this piece. It's beauty resides in its use of paradox: the two characters are icy but sexual, vulnerable and yet hard. It is a study in passionate passionlessness. She is vulnerable physically, he emotionally.

 

Both performers have a chilling and unpredictable quality. Meldrum is warm in his coldness, his rich, sensual, mellow tones blending with the seascape-soundscape. Mills is enigmatic and magnetic.

 

Strangio has taken the undramatised prose (which Duras herself had failed to dramatise) and has heightened the dramatic tension by treating almost as a simultaneous self-narration. Meldrum reads his text which adds to the character's detachment. The characters' physical distance and frozen communication and the cool blandness of wall-to-wall sand, all exaggerate the man's alienation.

 

The second shorter Duras, The Atlantic Man, is less successful as a dramatic text which is no fault of the director nor the actor, Brenda Palmer. It's prose is more fragmented and less clear with little intrinsic dramatic tension. It looks at both the failures of cinema to touch humanity and parallel images of the end of a romance and the detachment. The use of an empty film projector running in the background and Phil McLeod's accompanying improvised cello music are both simple and effective but the text (not the production) is unimpressive theatre.

 

KATE HERBERT