Coleridge's Ancient Mariner crosses the Channel
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 18th century poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, has made it across the Channel. British actress Fiona Shaw has gone from Harry Potter to the Paris stage to bring a playful approach to the Romantic verse.
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Performed by Fiona Shaw and Daniel Hay-Gordon at the Bouffes du Nord theatre in the French capital, it’s directed by Phyllida Lloyd.
Known for her leading heroine roles on stage, as Harry Potter's film aunt and lately on HBO TV's True Blood, actress Shaw picks young and less young people from the audience to find her on-stage partner for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with a true sense of play.
The words of the 143-verse poem will be familiar to many from English lessons (or punishment) at school.
Shaw has the art of picking rich and challenging poems and has previously performed TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
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“It’s a bit like driving a car very fast," she says. "You have to be really concentrated. You’re in the middle of it, it’s moving, it’s shifting. You now the path but not exactly. The preparation for it is huge. Every piece of it is in reply to what you’ve done earlier. They are marathons. I do sit-ups a lot when I’m doing The Ancient Mariner.”
She knows about the potency of the spoken word and says the power of this poem is clear in the way expressions from it have crept into English usage, giving everyone the impression that they know it.
“We actually only know ‘Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink…’ What’s amazing is how many famous lines it has. Written in 1789 it has really sunk into the general usage of poetics as much as Shakespeare. But nobody knows the end of it. I never really knew the end of it, but I know it now.”
The mariner tells his cautionary tale to a wedding guest on his way to the party.
Shaw takes on the mariner, the guest as well as the few verses spoken by a narrator.
The old sailor is the sole survivor after the ship comes a cropper on the high seas. He is convinced that the disaster was his doing because he killed a friendly albatross following in the ship's wake.
The decor, by Chloe Obolensky, is sparing, props are few.
A vast sail sewn in 18th-century style hanging from the flies sets the scene as a backdrop amid the perennial studied decadence of the Bouffes du Nord theatre established by director Peter Brook.
Phyllida Lloyd's staging and Shaw's acting are complemented by dancer Daniel Hay-Gordon's interpretation of the images conjured by the poem's 143 verses.
His dance movements project his shadow on the sail and turn it into the ill-fated albatross.
His facial expressions convey the pain of the agonising crew.
The lighting suitably reinforces Shaw's shifts with the mood and with the poem's evocation of times of day and climate.
“This is a rhyme, it has a child-like movement in it," Shaw says. "So it lends itself to movement. Sometimes Daniel is very still, the language is so quick.”
For less than an hour French and English-speakers alike keep up with Shaw’s words, Hay-Gordon’s gestures and their shadow play, convey a sensation of volatility, of winds and evaporating sea-mist, of time. They move the spectators, just like the haggard wedding-guest, to reflect on the Ancient Mariner's act of destruction.
While this performance was not a world première - it was first staged at the Epidaurus Festival in Greece in 2012 - it is a first in Paris.
This Ancient Mariner made it across the sea thanks to a new bridge-building theatre initiative called Shore to Shore which aims to have more English-language stage productions from the UK or the US performed in theatres in France.
The Bouffes du Nord is a sound place to start.
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