The Quebecoise director Lorraine Pintal is on a mission: raise the profile of Virginia Woolf in the francophone community. Last December I saw a piece she directed that was loosely based on Orlando, though I didn't really click with it. A few weeks ago I saw another play that she directed, Indomptable Virginia Woolf, presented in the festival Les Correspondances d'Eastman. I had some troubles with this one too, but for different reasons.
The play, written by Robert Lalonde (who also played the character of Leonard Woolf), is based on Virginia Woolf's diaries, with extracts from several of her works (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando). It works pretty well. This performance felt a little under-rehearsed and underdeveloped, something that Pintal freely admitted was the case as it was put together in a rush in order to be included in the festival, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was all mine: my French.
Firstly, Robert Lalonde doesn't enunciate very clearly. I had to concentrate hard to get 50% of what he said, and when I mentioned to my francophone wife that he was hard to follow she confirmed that he was a mumbler. But what flipped me over the edge was the scene where Virginia indulges in some fancy wordplay. I'm sure the original English text was witty but translated and adapted into French it went completely over my head. I had an extremely frustrating five or six minutes that seemed like an hour, everyone around me laughing heartily while I was baffled. That coloured my enjoyment of the rest of the piece.
My principal takeaway is that I need to watch more movies in French or perhaps listen to some audiobooks. My day-to-day comprehension is good, but I still do struggle a bit at the theatre.
To finish on a positive note, the performance by Bénedicte Décary was excellent. She played three characters: Vanessa Bell, Vita Sackville-West, and the Woolf's domestic servant, and she was delightfully convincing in each role. And she enunciated perfectly too, fair play to her.
