In 1925 the Russian poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky spent some months in New York as correspondent for Izvestia. He met and fell in love with an American woman, by whom he had a daughter, born after his return to Russia. For 60 years her existence remained secret, unmentioned in the official biographies. She grew up and still lives in New York where, under the name of Patricia Thompson, she teaches feminist philosophy.
One of her neighbours in Manhattan is the French playwright Daniel Besnehard. On her first visit to his apartment, she was delighted to walk through the door and find herself face to face with a portrait of her father. Besnehard had known nothing of the connection, but had a deep admiration for Mayakovsky's work: it was an infallible basis for friendship.
Now Besnehard has made her one of the characters in his new play Hudson River-Un D?sir d'Exil, which had its premi?re at the Nouveau Th??tre in Angers on 4th March. The director, Claude Yersin, wanted the part of Pat Thompson to be played by an actress whose first language was English, although clearly she had to be reasonably fluent in French too. He offered it to the British actress Sheila Mitchell, who accepted with some apprehension.
She says: "It meant being in France for five months-seven weeks of rehearsal, three weeks playing in Angers, then ten weeks on tour. It's a long time be away from home." Home is her house in London; her husband, the crime writer DRF Keating; and various children and grandchildren. "But professionally, the challenge was irresistible. So here I am."
We were in Angers, halfway through the rehearsal period, walking around the formidable ramparts of the castle built in the 13th century to guard the junction between the Maine and the Loire. She told me about the play. The central character is a gay French academic, living in Manhattan with his lover, a black saxophone player, but still enmeshed in the mutually destructive conflict between three generations of women-his mother, his sister, his niece-all trapped in the past by unresolved relationships, with men and places. Pat, his neighbour, seems by contrast to have achieved a kind of liberation, to have become herself; but perhaps she too is a prisoner of her passionate feelings about Mayakovsky and Russia-the father she never met and the country she did not grow up in.
The theme of the play is exile-the dispossession of the heart from the place it perceives as home. I wondered whether Sheila herself felt like an exile in Angers. "Yes, at first, though everyone was friendly and welcoming. Until I got used to talking French all the time, I felt completely isolated, but it's much better now. And the working relationships are excellent. Professional standards are very high here-everyone is dedicated to doing things in the best way possible."
I asked her whether working in the French theatre was very different from working in England. "Oh yes-much better in some ways. The French seem to take theatre far more seriously-you'd never get the funding in England for seven weeks of rehearsal. The pay is nearly double what it would be at a similar theatre in England and the allowance for living expenses is infinitely more. Mind you, we work pretty hard for it and the hours take some getting used to-afternoon rehearsals are from 3pm until 7pm and evening rehearsals from 8.30pm until 11.30pm or midnight, sometimes even 1am."
"The pattern of working is different too. Instead of running straight through the play to establish the overall picture, you begin right away with working through the scenes in minute detail, spending an hour or more on one page of the script. It has advantages, but the danger is that there is a long delay between one rehearsal of a scene and the next. And the French start rehearsing with props much sooner-you find you're having to carry a tray while you still need your script in your hand. Conversely, they also start having word runs much sooner-they call them 'Italians'-just going through the words without any of the action. The idea is to make the words come instinctively-I find it very strange to do it while I'm still using the script."
Is it a problem acting in a foreign language? "Well, yes, but there's a bit more to it than that. I had to begin by trying to immerse myself in the language, talking and reading French until I was thinking in French-I didn't think I could even learn my lines if I was mentally translating from English the whole time. But although Daniel has made Pat speak good French, she's still supposed to be thinking in English, and both he and Claude wanted her to have an American accent. So I have to think of myself as American."
And you're playing someone who exists in real life-does that create special problems? "Well, you have to decide whether you're playing the person or the character in the play. Here I'm playing the character. Daniel intends the character to be a truthful picture of the person he knows in New York, but if there is some question about her motivation or her reaction to something, I don't try to find out what Pat Thompson would feel or do in real life. I talk about it with Claude and try to resolve it in the same way that one would with a fictional character. Claude didn't want me even to see a photograph of Pat. As it happens, though, I did come across one in something I was reading about her. We're not at all alike physically."
Does the character Besneshard has created resemble you at all? "No, there are a lot of differences between us. She is an academic and my background isn't academic at all. So there are a lot of things that she's read and been influenced by that I have barely heard of. But that is the kind of problem an actor has with almost any part."
So there isn't anything that worries you? "Well," said Sheila, "there is one thing." She finished her glass of wine and looked out of the window at the rain. "They didn't tell me until I got to Angers-Pat's going to be at the first night. Oh Lord, Sarah-suppose she simply hates it?"
But when I talked to Pat Thompson after the first night, it was clear that she had found watching Hudson River an exhilarating experience, although emotionally exhausting. "By the end of it my nerves were absolutely raw, but that's a Mayakovsky trait-we have very sensitive nerve-endings. It's a tour de force. And Sheila is marvellous-simply magnificent."
Hudson river-un desir d'exil
Daniel Besnehard
Nouveau Th??tre, Angers
