2013 · Gates to India Song (EN)

"Marguerite Duras never went to India. This is the first time, on the eve of the centenary of the author’s birth on 4 April 1914, that the India of her dreams - the dreams of the author of HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR - encounters the real India embodied by an ensemble of Indian actors."
ÉRIC VIGNER

"The characters of INDIA SONG are homeless, expelled from the novel LE VICE-CONSUL and thrown into new regions of narration."[1]

"I think Marguerite Duras was no more and no less than a visionary in the original meaning of the term. She had visions of India and described these visions. She dreamt of its sounds, its names, and associated the names and the elements. She conjures up Lahore, the Great Depression, the darkness of night... in contrast to the possible renascence through love that her character is to experience in Calcutta. The travel from Lahore to Calcutta in her book is not at all real, there is no geographical logic, but to her it is a fact. She chooses words, fills them with content and creates a story. It is her literary craftsmanship that inspires."
ÉRIC VIGNER

"Calcutta, Tuesday, 26 February
The house of RABINDRANATH TAGORE, hidden in a narrow lane in Calcutta.  An impressive dark red building, sombre, snuggling in the hollow of a garden. Night has fallen. Beyond, a white inner courtyard, a colonnaded façade, galleries, balustrades, roof garden. Italy in Calcutta. A starry sky. A stage, rows of seats, seats swaddled in white fitted sheets. Onstage, a table and four chairs. I’m listening to LE VICE-CONSUL in English - for the first time. The story of a heart-breaking love in Calcutta in the nineteen thirties. All of a sudden, the Vice Consul shouts out his love, screaming, roaring. With a voice of almost inhuman strength, expressive of feelings that exceed, and destroy, what is human. SUHAAS AHUJA's rendering is exact to a T, implacably so. His voice becomes even stronger. What a volume! Anne-Marie Stretter's name is hurled out into the night of Calcutta, the place DURAS has never seen, that she wished for, imagined without knowing it, but which she has clearly enriched with these cries, these names. Then, everything stops. Calcutta becomes eternity. DURAS is eternity. The combination of these two works in the deep of night opens an abyss that cannot be closed nor will it close of its own accord. Neither will ÉRIC VIGNER close anything, or open anything, he just leaves everything open - which makes up the charm of it all."
DOMINIQUE SIGAUD

"Ever since I discovered this singular text which turns about the unfathomable question of love, from book to book, from film to film, from play to play, I have never been able to break away from it. Duras has presented me with the vocabulary and the fundamentals of the kind of theatre I have always wanted to create. In her only text devoted to the theatre that has been published La Vie matÉrielle, she writes:

The enigma which makes the difference between the art of speech on the stage and everyday parlance gives rise to the question of what theater actually is, and what makes it special as regards its sound. Now the sound is what all actors around the world who are passionately involved in the art of theatre have in common. Beyond semantic understanding, which has to do with the particular culture and language in question, there may well be an understanding, a universal agreement, on the sound. The real condition of the Vice-Consul is expressed, over and above the words he utters, by his breathless voice, then by his outcry against the violence done to the lepers of Calcutta and at the same time the hopelessness of his love for Anne-Marie Stretter. The discovery of this text and my work with the actors on this literary material made me realise what I want to achieve on stage: give voice to essence of literature on the stage.

Ainsi s’exprime le vice-consul à propos d’Anne-Marie Stretter. How can the theatre do justice to this aspiration ?"
ÉRIC VIGNER

"The last writer [who has invented a lyrical language ], with admirable courage and even at the risk of touching on the ridiculous, is Marguerite Duras: precipitate, using extremely modern language, a far cry from lyricism. An incorporeal chant."
FrÉdÉric Boyer