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I’ve been experiencing a lot of odd coincidences recently: what Jung termed “synchronicities” or “acausal parallelisms”. My most recent synchronicity happened last Friday, which was, you may remember, 15th April 2016. I was to watch Jean Genet’s Deathwatch that day – the day on which, thirty years earlier, Genet died at the age of 75. It felt like a striking quirk of timing (all the more striking because I had meant to see the production the evening before, but hadn’t been able to).
The ghost of Genet was therefore in my thoughts as I made my way to The Print Room in Notting Hill. He overtook me, forcing me to consider, as I watched this staging of his first play, not what I made of the production, but what he himself would have made it. (I write this despite the suggestion of Genet’s contemporary Roland Barthes that we should not “give an Author to a text”; in doing so, Barthes warns, we “impose upon that text a stop clause”, we “close the writing”.) Imagine Genet, an apologetic-looking man, his eyebrows pulled low over his eyes, the smooth expanse of his forehead creased into a frown, sitting in the theatre beside me. What would he have thought of the enormous cage in the centre of the stage, the string of bulbs and the red curtain resembling a circus or a wrestling ring? Would this hazy, smoke-filled arena, illuminated by an intricate lighting system overhead, have appealed to him as the setting of his prison-based drama, Haute Surveillance?
I suspect not. “No clever lighting,” his stage direction informs us curtly. He intended the costumes to be “in violent colours”. Here, however, we have three men clad in beige. We have a complex rotation of lights: spotlights, brilliantly lit squares, strobes. Director Geraldine Alexander may be forgiven for ignoring some of the more impractical of Genet’s stage directions. “The actors must aim for heavy gestures; or such as flash like the fastest lightning, too rapid to be taken in,” he insists. And, halfway through the play: “Starting now, these three young people will have the size, the gestures, the voice and the faces of men who are fifty or sixty years old.” Talented though the trio of actors playing Genet’s cellmates (Tom Varey as “Green-Eyes”, Joseph Quinn as Maurice and Danny Lee Wynter as “Lefranc”) are, they do not confound the rules of human biology by acting with movements “too rapid to be taken in”, or ageing several decades before our eyes.
The discomfort of Genet, observing this production, would have been exacerbated not only by the atmospheric lighting (the work of designer David Plater), or by the actors’ inability to conform to his eccentric directions, but by the play itself. Unlike The Maids, say, or The Blacks, Deathwatch contains within it several inconsistencies – inconsistencies of plot, of language, of intention – that have inhibited its recognition as a truly great piece of twentieth century drama.
Here I defer to Edmund White, who devotes a handful of pages to the creation of Deathwatch in his fascinating chronicle of Genet’s life. White writes:
This play is a confusingly transitional work. At points it appears to be a naturalistic prison drama, complete with an apt use of criminals’ argot and sociological observations on the relationship between prisoner and guard and the oral grapevine by which prisoners inform one another of their own glorious exploits. But elsewhere the characters suddenly break into unconvincing arias in which, using the narrator’s voice from Miracle of the Rose, they explain the poetic and metaphysical impact of their situation.
It is in the jarring juxtaposition of the real with the surreal that the play founders, and it is in this, too, that Alexander’s production loses its impact. The leaps between the beige, contained conversation of the prison cell and the strange unreality of the action beyond the bars feels unconvincing – or, perhaps, not unconvincing enough.
White goes on to describe Genet’s difficulty in writing the play; he drafted it four times with different titles, altered emphases and the bizarre excision of crucial scenes. He observes that, unlike Genet’s later plays, Deathwatch fails to realise its author’s many intentions. It is “unable to contain these different elements: an insider’s report on prison life; a philosophical investigation of time, volition and sexual authenticity; and a purely abstract patterning of the prisoners’ movements on stage. The plot itself is hard to follow.”
The plot is hard to follow, a curious investigation into the dynamic of three jailbirds and their respective pasts. In Genet’s deliberate confusion of reality with unreality, White reads an autobiographical intent. “Perhaps,” White suggests, “he was afraid of any clear-cut interpretations: submitted so often to psychological probing and categorization he had good reason to resist any effort to decode him or his work.”
The compelling claustrophobia of Alexander’s production, the schizophrenic leaps of the actors, the occasional lyricism of David Rudkin’s translation: none of this can salvage what is, at its heart, an unsettled play. Jean Genet, sitting in the auditorium on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, would have suffered through the performance, and not simply because the production fails to abide by his bizarre directions, not simply as a result of the indecision written into the text itself. His dissatisfaction would have been more deep-rooted, and is described with brusque poignancy in a note regarding his Complete Works, made in 1967. Of Deathwatch, he wrote:
Since I am expressing my desires, I’d like this play never to be staged again. It’s difficult for me to remember when and under what circumstances I wrote it. Probably out of boredom or unintentionally. That’s all – the facts elude me.
Genet has done Barthes’ work for him. He has toppled the image of himself as “Author-God”, undermining the idea of Sartre’s “Saint Genet” in admitting the failure of his own creation. But what does this mean for the rest of us? The theatregoers, perplexed by the play’s inconsistencies and Genet’s mixed feelings about its production. Should we condemn the staging of this part-symbolic, part-naturalistic, prickly, inconclusive text, a staging which goes against its creator’s explicit instruction? Or should we admire its bold revival? I’m inclined to argue for the latter. Not least because, a matter of months before he died, Genet was working on yet another version of Deathwatch with director Michel Dumoulin, an undertaking which seems to signify a change of heart – as well as allowing for a thrilling synchronicity of dates three decades on.
Deathwatch continues at the Print Room until May 7. Tickets are from £20 (£16 concessions).
About Xenobe Purvis
Xenobe is a writer and a literary research assistant. Her work has appeared in the Telegraph, City AM, Asian Art Newspaper and So it Goes Magazine, and her first novel is represented by Peters Fraser & Dunlop. She and her sister curate an art and culture website with a Japanese focus: nomikomu.com.
