Join us on Friday, July 25th, 6pm at the Emily Harvey Foundation on Broadway, for two hours with Marguerite Duras. The program includes a screening of Duras’s 1979 film, Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver), and a theatrical reading of her 1962 stage adaptation of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” in a new translation by Nicholas Byrne.

Program

La bête dans la jungle (The Beast in the Jungle) - A Theatrical Reading

Text by Marguerite Duras, after the eponymous Henry James story, as translated by Nicholas Byrne.

With Claire Hilton & Michael Khalid Karadsheh

Directed by Tommy Cunningham

Adapted by All Invention Theater

“1903. The beginning of autumn. John Marcher and Catherine Bertram, suspended on the cusp of a fate unnamed, wander the corridors of regret and lost chances. In the echoing hallways of Weatherend castle, amidst ancestral portraits and the whispers of inherited silence, unfolds a tale of haunted interiority. Adapted from Henry James by Marguerite Duras and translated into English by Nicholas Byrne, The Beast in the Jungle asks: What if the catastrophe was not some thunderous tragedy, but the quiet passing of one’s life? A story of time, silence, and the slow corrosion of a soul haunted by its own illusions, the play lingers not in action but in atmosphere. Its rooms echo with voices never fully heard, its walls hide more than they reveal. At its center are two people locked in an exquisite, aching stillness… Henry James writes from within the Victorian psyche; Marguerite Duras from the aftermath of the twentieth century. Post war. Post hope. His language is ornate. Her language is absence. With Duras, the ruins are not symbolic—rather, they are spatial, temporal. Empty chairs. Vast gardens. Somber rooms. The glint of love on an untouched face. More than an adaptation, what Duras offers is a haunting. In both works, the beast is not the question; we are not meant to know what it is, but how to endure what is not. The event of the non-event. The life not seized.” —Christina Tudor-Sideri

preceded by

Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver)

Dir. Marguerite Duras

1979. 48 min. Digital.

In French with English subtitles.

“After Aurélia Steiner, I can no longer write, I have lost writing. If I don’t talk to this survivor, I will lose writing completely. And, if she’s not there, present all the time, day and night, preventing me from seeing anything other than her, anything else, anything, then nothing happens. I don’t write. I stayed locked up for a month and a half with Aurélia. I’d get up, I’d see Aurélia’s sea, her eyes, I’d see Vancouver, I’d see that the sea was screaming Aurélia’s screams and sleeping Aurélia’s sleep… Next to the phenomenal power of Aurélia Steiner, cinema is nothing. Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) was an impossible film. It was made. The film is admirable because it doesn’t try to remedy its impossibility. It escorts this impossibility, walks alongside it.” —Marguerite Duras