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Zola's Nana: A Metaphor for Our Age?
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14572 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1988 |
2,847 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
The books of some nineteenth-century writers have transferred well from the page to the stage. Recent London seasons have seen a fine adaptation of Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, a brilliantly original treatment of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment by the Russian director Yuri Lyubimov, and the Royal Shakespeare Company's popular musical version of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Now a London fringe (equivalent to off-off Broadway) company has produced Émile Zola's Nana in a rather Brechtian treatment by the expatriate American playwright Olwen Wymark. The original fringe production did so well last autumn that the American producers Frank and Woji Gero have brought it to a major London venue, the Mermaid Theatre at Blackfriars.
The contrast between this show and the others is stark, partly because of the source material. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Hugo all wrote novels that were intensely dramatic--even melodramatic--with characters that engaged the sympathies of the reader and continued to do so after the necessary boiling down of the novel into a stage play. Even in Lyubimov's fragmented, neo-Expressionistic version, Crime and Punishment combined an exploration of Dostoyevsky's tortured moral universe with a gripping theatrical experience.
Corrupt Demimonde
Morality is also at stake in Nana, or it is treated by implication, but Zola's method is not like that of the others. Instead of a carefully plotted story with character development, suspense, and the rest of a popular novelist's tricks, he employs a quasi-journalistic technique of exposure, holding his characters and their society--the corrupt demimonde of France's second Empire--up to contempt. The narrative is loose, rambling through a series of episodes that explore the baleful influence of a remarkable courtesan-cum-actress upon various aspects of French high society. She ruins a count, a financier, and a teenager whose infatuation for her drives him to suicide (also destroying his older brother), as well as pillaging various and sundry lesser victims. There are descriptions of the awful shows of the period, of parties, of a horse race, and a bit of sordid street life, but behind all this, the action is predominantly sexual. The settings include theatrical dressing rooms (the theater was a kind of supermarket for high-class prostitution), Nana's flat and country house, and a grotty love nest that she shares with an actor for a while. Zola uses this improbable episode to force Nana back onto the street, pointing up the brutal hypocrisy of the Parisian morals police, who harass miserable prostitutes while upper classes indulge in untrammeled sexual excesses. Once
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