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What About Don Juan?
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19584 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
1,448 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
It is one of those little curiosities of theatrical history that the man who first brought Don Juan to the stage was a priest. His real name is of no interest. His nom de plume was Tirso de Molina. He was a friend and follower of the great Lope de Vega. In 1630, gathering together strands of folk tradition and tales, he wrote El burlador de Sevilla y el convidado de piedra, which has been revived by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company as The Last Days of Don Juan at the Barbican.
The English title is not a translation of the Spanish. Burlador has a double meaning of joker and seducer, giving us The Joker-Seducer of Seville and the Stone Guest. This hints at the real theme of the Don Juan fable, which, in our culture, has come to be more or less synonymous with sex--the skirt-chasing sort--but, in fact, is not that at all.
The RSC program notes say rather portentously that this play "poses complex questions of gender, class, and political corruption in a brilliantly condensed theatrical form"; this may have been true in the Golden Age of Spanish drama, but it is something of a non sequitur today. Contemporary British women are not at all like the submissive creatures so casually bedded and left by Molina's Don Juan. Seventeenth-century Spain's rigid distinctions of class (royalty, nobility, lower orders) do not exist in our time, except in some parts of the Arab world. And political corruption in this play consists of nepotism in the Spanish court--not very complex.
Sex in our time is undramatic to the point of boredom; it is no longer a clear-cut matter of morality or of faith, or even necessarily of reproduction, which (as Aldous Huxley gloomily predicted in 1932) can now be accomplished in vitro. Sex has become a somewhat moot question of life-style, which is to say, arbitrary choice or taste. Any attempt to make it a judgmental case is certain to draw the sort of pressure group spite that is poured upon taboo breakers or upon those who question some cherished political idée fixe. One is tempted to agree with Shaw that "Don Juan is a century out of date for you and for me."
There are yet other possibilities in the story. In 1946 the Belgian playwright Charles Bertin truncated the myth with a cynical, rather nasty ending, stopping at the murder of Anna's father, who does not return as a statue. Instead, Don Juan simply escapes, while the bereaved Anna pleads with her friends not to raise the alarm until he is far away and safe. Understandably, this cheap and shallow treatment has never become internationally popular, nor
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