Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Sunday, 13 January 2008
Journey to the End of the Night
Journey to the End of the Night. Adapted from the novel of the same name and the life of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Created by The Flying Machine. Text by Jason Lindner. Directed by Joshua Carlebach. Sound design by Zach Williamson. Lighting design by Anjeanette Stokes. Set design by Anna Kiraly. Costume design by Brad Wilson. Performed by Richard Crawford. A presentation of The Flying Machine. Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 10 January 2008 performance. At The Gene Frankel Theater, 24 Bond Street, New York, 8-26 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania.
Richard Crawford's bravura performance as the notorious French novelist grounds a haunting examination of the anti-semitic author's life and work
Richard Crawford as Céline et al.
in Journey to the End of the Night
(Photo: Piotr Redlinski)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 Journey to the End of the Night is among the dozen or so monuments of the modernist novel. Unceasingly, mordantly comic and epic in its sweep, the book is a cry of outrage at man's inhumanity to man, from the global and the personal perspectives, macrocosmic and microcosmic. Its narrator, Bardamu, winds his picaresque path from the First World War through imperialism in Africa and life as a doctor in a small village, seeing crime, cruelty and destruction everywhere (Bardamu himself far from blameless). Céline's prose style is a broken, shattered hash of prosaic shards (which, in his later books, became little more than sentence fragments strung together with ellipses); his work has drawn praise from writers as diverse as Albert Camus, Andre Gide and Charles Bukowski.
The writer himself became just as controversial as his work in the years following its publication. Beginning in 1937, Céline began to produce a series of vicious, grossly anti-semitic pamphlets, leading to his denunciation by the French government in 1944, his arrest and imprisonment in Denmark and finally his conviction in absentia of treason. Granted amnesty a few years later, Céline returned to France where he produced a further trilogy of stark novels and several lunatic texts for ballets, working as a doctor for the poor until his death in 1961. (Céline's life was also the inspiration for Howard Barker's play The Early Hours of a Reviled Man.)
The wonder is not that his work and the story of his life have been adapted to the stage at all, though its epic range beggars spaces like the 74-seat black-box Gene Frankel Theatre. The real wonder is that it's been done so well, in The Flying Machine's new one-person adaptation of Céline's life and work. Director Joshua Carlebach and writer Jason Lindner have devised a highly stagable text that alternates between scenes from Journey and a monologue by the author himself, a genial, gregarious hermit prone to launch into foul-mouthed gross denunciations of his critics, his neighbors, the world and especially the Jews. Added to this is the recital of a text from one of Céline's late ballets ("without orchestra, without music, without anything" as the author describes it) -- a bizarre, fevered and ludicrous mishmosh set in Olympus.
The conceit of the show is that the audience has been invited to the writer's apartment towards the end of his life for a conversation-cum-casual seminar about his work: an "evening with the author." Behind a desk, the center of Anna Kiraly's hopelessly cluttered, dusty and highly realistic set (a set which spills into the audience and lit just as realistically by Anjeanette Stokes), sits the author himself, in the person of Richard Crawford, who over the 75-minute running time impersonates not only the author but also a half-dozen characters from his most important book in a dizzying, detailed, disciplined and brilliant performance, only once rising from his chair. His face details a range of expressions, from those of his fellow soldiers to that of his moronic friend Robinson to that of Robinson's coprophiliac wife Madelon (as she's in the midst of a violent ass-fucking, no less). Employing a wide range of British and American accents, Crawford's impersonations are precise and dynamic in their variety.
In all the talk that's been going on about acting and performance styles in the blogosphere lately, here's a keen example of the evolution of style and technique. Crawford received his training at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, teaches the technique at SUNY Purchase and has directed clown work for the Cirque du Soleil and appeared as the lead clown in Slava's Snowshow. Though the text itself is based in character-delineation and realism, Carlebach and Crawford have apparently based their own approach not primarily as an exercise in Stanislavskian characterisation but in the intensely physical clown work of Lecoq. The production is an incisive and instructive example of the value of these new techniques towards the evocation of the theatricality inherent in seemingly realistic texts. Crawford's face, body movements and hand gestures, even anchored and rooted in one spot over the play's duration, give rise to as varied and engaging a performance as any interior quasi-psychological approach: a performance from the physical gesture inward, instead of the mental impulse outward.
A lesson in recent literary history, then, and a lesson in great acting. Journey to the End of the Night fulfills its ambitions on both counts. The show runs through 26 January.
Posted at 10.34 am in /Notices
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