Marguerite Duras's L'Amante Anglaise, under Laurence Strangio's direction, was first staged at La Mama last year as part of their Celebrating Women season. In a small village in France in the mid-1960s, a woman has been murdered, pieces of her body found in various freight train cars — except for her head. The woman's cousin, Claire Bousquet, confesses to the crime and is sent to jail. An unnamed person writing a book about the murder interviews Bousquet's husband, Pierre Lannes, then Bousquet herself.
Duras' novella is a study about insanity and reason, of loneliness, of the human capacity to compartmentalise and justify, written in a quaint, crisp prose that's at once poetic, chilling and subtly emotional. These words are meticulously voiced in the theatre's corner, the actors wearing black and sat on chairs the whole time. Robert Meldrum brings a frankness and dry, dark humour to the character of Lannes, while Jillian Murray impressively finds the delicate balance between restrained, vulnerable and explosive, ping-ponging from one of Bousquet's faces to another, and another, with natural and alarming fluidity.
In L'Amante Anglaise, mundanity, morbidity and madness all gel into one, and the poignancy of it all is captured, unembellished, in this production. Duras's words are more than enough if you care to listen — to really listen.
