A Night at the Théâtre

Though there are many theatres in Toulouse and spectacles are well publicized, I was not motivated to track one down and buy a ticket until I saw a poster for Paroles Gelées, a stage adaptation of the works of François Rabelais playing at the Théâtre Nationale de Toulouse. You may be waiting for the rest of the information I had about this play that made it leap out as something I could not miss, but for me that was enough: you see, I spent my last semester of college working on an independent study, the subject of which was one of Rabelais's works. I was already familiar, nay enamored with Rabelais's imagination, corporal frankness, and word-level humor. So when I, amateur Rabelais scholar and lover of words, saw that a theatre in downtown Toulouse happened to be staging what they announced to be a "theatrical adventure" based on that author and called "Frozen Words," I thought I had finally found the reason for my coming to France.

I may have exaggerated in the over-excited state the poster inspired, but the sentiment was rekindled as I watched the opening of the spectacle. The director, Jean Bellorini, adapted the series of novels by extracting the central adventure and having the cast narrate it while acting out key scenes. The narrative moved the story along, but by inserting comic conversations among the characters and repetitive monologues, Bellorini managed to preserve Rabelais's light-hearted style and habit of going into absurdly colorful and precise detail.

The set design also helped to preserve Rabelais's lexical opulence by reflecting the referential abundance with an abundance of color, light, and movement. For example, in the beginning of the play when one character invited the others to a feast, the black curtain lifted to reveal a collection of women in colorful dresses and rain boots playing miss-matched accordions on top of a table, which stood in about three inches of water. The water covered the whole stage within a large sandbox-like container and turned the stage into a moving mirror of the copper-colored and blue lighting. A man in a kilt danced sensuously as he listed off foodstuffs that might have laden a dining table.

Bellorini even did a good job of preserving Rabelais's language. He represented the difficulty every reader of Rabelais has in wrangling the antiquated and liberal prose by devoting a character to translation and interpretation, like a Rabelais expert, who explained words that Rabelais made up and who gave information as needed about the context the play was written in. Because the other characters hopped in and out, sometimes a part of the action and sometimes narrating the action, the translator figure was a natural addition. He interacted with the other characters and the audience with ease and humor.

To my frustration, my brain could only absorb the French words for about two-thirds of the performance, and after two and a half hours I was confused and tired. I watched the characters arrive in the land of frozen words with very little intellectual energy left to understand how the words got there or why they were frozen. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and only wished I could see it a second time.