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On Parisian stages this spring, dark, American melodramas abound.French director Daniel Colas has no special fondness for American plays and movies. But this season, he felt the time was right to bring a dash of film noir to the Parisian stage.
He pulled out a script that had been lying in his pile for 10 years -- a staged adaptation of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Now, it is just one of the hot theatre tickets in Paris this spring that peers at the seamy side of American life in the 1930s and 40s.
"I'm not generally very keen on titles which have made a big splash at the cinema and then are put on stage," said Colas. "But then someone proposed this project to me (again). The times had changed. I realised it had strong dramatic potential."
A recent survey of the top-selling modern plays in Paris by theatre tracking site Theatreonline.com showed five out of the top nine shows in early March were plays or adaptations of work by American writers.
The Postman came in third, behind Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll -- a similar Depression-era tale of sex and violence in the sweltering southern United States where a teenage bride, seduced by a sexy foreigner, tries to escape from her abusive husband.
"It seems that nowadays people are fed up of little kitchen-sink dramas ... (or) mainstream traditional comedies which have had their day," said Colas, in his office perched above the upper balconies at the Theatre des Mathurins. "So now what are we after? Something a bit more spectacular ... a show that's about American history."
Filmic familiarity
Jean-Pierre Han, a drama critic who edits the quarterly arts review Frictions, says French audiences feel familiar with plays covering the dark years of the Depression -- in the case of Williams' work -- thanks largely to the well-known film versions.
"The feeling people have about American theatre is of a very gloomy, dark, violent theatre," he said.
Colas's staging of The Postman -- the story of a vagabond in remote southern California who seduces the wife of a diner owner with murderous consequences -- depicts a wild and lawless country.
Visually, his production recalls classic films: trilby hats, period suits; even gas pumps and an old-fashioned motorcar wheeled on stage.
Colas admitted adding an element to Cain's story, borrowed from the 1981 film version -- a violent bout of table-top lovemaking, with French screen actor Olivier Sitruk in place of Jack Nicholson.
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