National Arts Centre - Centre national des Arts

Ottawa, Ontario – Make way for the anonymous, the misunderstood, the marginal! From March 10 to 13, the National Arts Centre (NAC) French Theatre presents—for the first time in its 35-year history—a play by French author Robert Pinget (1919–1997): Abel et Bela, written in 1971. Directed by a lover of words, Jean-Marie Papapietro, and “starring” two outstanding actors, Gaétan Nadeau and Denis Gravereaux, this Théâtre de Fortune creation is the first Quebec production of a work by Pinget, the retiring personality with a supremely ironic outlook who was quite happy to “live in his books” and whose reputation was overshadowed by that of his esteemed colleague and friend, Samuel Beckett. The premiere of this extraordinary production of Abel et Bela (at Montreal’s Salle Fred-Barry in December 2002) caused quite a stir: as Hervé Guay wrote in Le Devoir, “Not only does it provide a vehicle for Pinget’s expressive humour: this hour and fifteen minutes may well open doors for these two underrated actors who are nevertheless capable of unsuspected precision. The same goes for Jean-Marie Papapietro, who possesses a gift that is all too rare these days: he trusts words.”

On stage, a table, two chairs, and two actors: Abel (Gaétan Nadeau) and Bela (Denis Gravereaux)—two actors who, by throwing words around, are trying to come up with a play they’d like to perform. Drawing on incredibly trite recipes for popular success, they attempt to cobble together a new form of theatre. They don’t lack for ideas: pre-war ladies, a wealthy socialite in exile with her lover and her Pekingese, a hunchbacked orphan girl (“Why hunchbacked?” “It’s more theatrical.”), debauchery on a Persian rug, true recollections of childhood and false memories of the orphanage… Then: “How do we bring up the subject of death?” How about Shakespeare? “Shakespeare is good,” they agree. They cover every theatrical cliché (“We must aim for the essential.”), and every truth as well (“We must aim for the essential.”). Abel invents and proposes; Bela objects and disposes. Needless to say, their project is a failure… and therein lies the success of the play. In fact, Abel the visionary and Bela the sceptic—and their grotesquely self-centred efforts—become the protagonists of their very own irresistibly absurd comedy, where humour arises from the distance between them. Yes, they are mirror images of each other… but what if the two of them together made up a single creator?

“Abel and Bela (A bel and bel A) constitute a single character, “A,” and their dialogue can easily be taken as the self-questioning of an author during the creative process. All the tensions inherent in writing take shape on stage, and the play becomes a metaphor for the act of writing.”

Robert Pinget: A restrained, imaginative and profound writer

“You will soon see that it is a mistake to let Pinget languish in Beckett’s shadow. Pay no heed to fame: focus on precision. Even when Picasso and Braque painted the same subject in the same style—a young woman with a mandolin, for example— it is easy to tell the Braque from the Picasso. The same principle applies to Samuel and Robert.”

– Robert Lévesque, Ici (Montreal) (transl.)

Robert Pinget was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1919 and moved to Paris in 1946 after completing studies in law. He published his first book, Entre Fantoine et Agapa (Between Fantoine and Agapa), a collection of short stories, in 1951. Two years later, Albert Camus, then a reader for Gallimard, welcomed him to the Gallimard stable with Le Renard et la Boussole. In 1956, at Samuel Beckett’s recommendation, Les Éditions de Minuit published Graal Flibuste, the first in a long series of works that includes dramatic texts such as the radio play La Manivelle, translated into English (as The Old Tune) by Beckett himself. Pinget found himself swept into the Nouveau Roman (“New Novel”) literary movement (which also included Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Claude Ollier) and into the circle of the Éditions de Minuit, which reissued his early works. However, unlike the rest of the “new novelists,” Pinget considered himself “an entertainer, a modest juggler of words, astonished by their power. He was quite the opposite of a bitter man: the sense of amusement required to endure our harsh and hardened world was too strong in him.” (Patrick Kechician, Le Monde [transl.])

Author of some thirty plays, essays and novels, Pinget wrote that he wanted “to inhabit every pronouncement in order to invest it with meaning,” for “words survive long after corpses.” In 1965 he won the prestigious Prix Femina for Quelqu’un (Someone), and in 1970, American novelist John Updike hailed him in the The New Yorker as “an outstanding figure in world literature.” He was the guest of honour at the 1987 Festival d’Avignon, at which the Comédie-Française performed, among others, Abel et Bela. Robert Pinget died of the aftereffects of a stroke in hospital in Tours, France, on August 25, 1997.

Jean-Marie Papapietro and the Théâtre de Fortune: On the trail of lost words

Before moving to Quebec in the 1990s, Jean-Marie Papapietro divided his time between France and Italy, working as a teacher, workshop leader for numerous cultural centres, and director. From 1972 to 1984 he was the artistic director of the Théâtre de la Limite, where he directed plays by such masters as Gombrowicz, Wietkiewicz, Buzzatti, Beckett, Ionesco, Marivaux, Vitrac, and Sophocles, and twice attended the Festival Off d’Avignon, where in 1986 he presented the premiere of a new stage adaptation of Pierre Jean Jouve’s novel Paulina 1880. Until 1989 he was associated with the Microthéâtre company in Umbria, Italy. He founded the Théâtre de Fortune in Montreal in 2000 in order to concentrate on stage directing and on promoting leading contemporary dramatists—Marguerite Duras (L’Amante anglaise), Thomas Bernhard (Match)—and writers who are not particularly well-known in North America, including Robert Walser (La Promenade) and Robert Pinget (Abel et Bela). His current and future projects include stagings of works by Franz Kafka, Joseph Delteil and Jean-Claude Carrière.

The National Arts Centre French Theatre gratefully acknowledges the support of Radio‑Canada (La Première Chaîne and La Chaîne culturelle).

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Information:
Guy Warin, Communications Officer
NAC French Theatre
(613) 947-7000 or 1 866 850-2787, ext. 759
gwarin@nac-cna.ca