08.08.2011

playing Simone

Returned from an utterly (Roman)tic holiday in Italy on a Friday night about five weeks ago. On Sunday afternoon Helen Madden from the Stork Theatre texted me to ask if I was available and interested in a new play about Simone de Beauvoir. How could I resist? I met with director Justine Campbell and the deal was sealed. I was playing Simone de Beauvoir.

She is an amazing, incredible, and inspiring woman. We have had to work really hard over the last five weeks to get the play ready, to try and do justice to her, to tell a story which gives a glimpse of her life (because no play can tell it all) and which does not shut her world and life and ideas down, but instead opens them out.

We have had three performances so far, and it’s going pretty well and getting better each time, as we understand more and more what we are saying, how we are saying it, and how we are playing it. The first four or five scenes of the play happen really quickly: a memory, some philosophy, a recounted moment with Sartre (who doesn’t appear in the play), a scene with Nelson Algren, a scene with one of Simone’s young women lovers, and then a letter to Sartre. It’s fast, it’s a juggle, it’s intense, it’s demanding. And that, I think, is exactly what her life must have been. She is an inspiration to me because she so passionately believed in living life to the full, in realising one’s potential, and in living through the mind, the heart and the body. She didn’t cast off her body…that is still rare, even today.

“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.” — Simone de Beauvoir

“No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.” — Simone de Beauvoir

What an amazing woman. It is a privilege to spend time with her.