Pierre Marivaux, an 18th-century Parisian playwright who was largely underappreciated and misunderstood in his own time, is experiencing a renaissance of sorts on campus, thanks to the inspired efforts of directors Laura MacDonald and Paul Babiak.
The decision to resurrect and remount the now classic one-act plays Harlequin Enlightened by Love and La Dispute came easily to MacDonald after she completed an intensive course on Marivaux at U of T’s Graduate Centre for Study of Drama.
Her dedication to reviving Marivaux’s work was significantly heightened last March when she learned that her instructor at GCSD, professor David Alfred Trott, a life-long devotee of French drama, had died suddenly. With a new determination to honour both the work of Trott and Pierre Marivaux, MacDonald enlisted fellow classmate Paul Babiak to share directing and translation duties on what became the ambitious Marivaux Project.
Now considered the most influential French playwright of his time, Pierre Carlet de Chamblin de Marivaux was generally overlooked for many years and has only recently been rediscovered by historians and directors alike.
“It’s only in the last ten years that people have actually made an effort to translate his plays for performance,” says MacDonald, who was at the helm of the Grad Centre’s superb production of Flora The Red Menace last year.
One of the many challenges she and Babiak faced was translating the text of Harlequin Enlightened from French to English. Disappointed with the dated, miscalculated, and overly academic translations available, the bilingual duo set out to translate the piece themselves.
“The whole point about Marivaux is that his language is so beautiful and he uses it so subtly,” explains MacDonald. “What got lost in translation were the subtle, complex meanings that are hidden between the lines.”
Babiak (who directed Harlequin) and MacDonald (in charge of La Dispute) both agree that a purely mechanical approach to translation rarely succeeds in conveying the buried nuances that can be essential to the essence of any theatrical production. In that sense, traditional translations of Marivaux tended to be penny-wise yet pound-foolish.
Babiak and MacDonald spent six weeks sweating the details to ensure that their translation of Harlequin Enlightened was both faithful to the text and consistent with the vision that Marivaux had created. At times, it was essential to compromise, as each director had a slightly different approach to anglicizing Marivaux’s work.
“I tend as a translator to be much more fanciful than Laura,” admits the production-oriented Babiak. “I had a very strong tendency to depart from the strictly literal translation and sometimes even to write my own jokes. Fortunately, I had Laura there to slap me on the knuckles.”
MacDonald, who was more interested in maintaining textual fidelity, was more conservative in her approach.
“We had to convey exactly what Marivaux was intending,” she notes.
In the end, both share the view that the collaboration was more successful due to their different priorities than if either one had tackled the task alone.
With the mammoth chore of translating and bringing the plays to the stage behind them, the two directors now have a chance to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their creative labour. The first of the 2 one-act plays, Harlequin Enlightened by Love, is Marivaux’s social experiment in stretching the emotional boundaries of clown (a type of comedic theatre).
“Harlequin is a stereotypical clown role-he’s usually a servant kind of character, and one of the really revolutionary things about this play is that he becomes a lover,” explains MacDonald. “Marivaux was socially advancing the clown character.”
Harlequin is followed by La Dispute, a play Marivaux wrote 20 years later, but one that still touches on many similar themes. La Dispute tells the tale of a royal experiment in which four children are raised in complete isolation. Now teenagers, the four are thrust into an observation environment, where they are monitored to settle questions about how different genders deal with love.
In addition to the theatrical performances, the project also features a one-day academic symposium on Marivaux’s life and works, taking place October 1st at the Robert Gill Theatre from 2-6 pm.
The Marivaux Project (La Dispute and Harlequin Enlightened by Love) runs September 29 to October 2 at the Robert Gill Theatre (214 College St.). Tickets are $5 for students.
