Useless Mouths - The Background Story
On October 29th and 30th eight members of the National Theatre Company and four from Jane Nightwork (though Sioned Jones is a member of both!) flung themselves with enormous enthusiasm and great professional skill at forty key pages of de Beauvoir’s play. The play embodies a great moral dilemma – who, at a time of crisis, can be dispensed with; sent to die, essentially, so as to ensure the continuity of society as a whole. The story was, as we expected, gripping and simply through their philosophical stance each character came out clear and vivid. What we think we need to develop, though, is the human roundedness of each personality which de Beauvoir (unlike her dramatist partner Sartre) neglects, because she is so vehemently interested in the ideas she sets out to explore. As you can imagine, there is a great pro-woman angle on her whole enterprise.
The full cast list can be found here. Please contact us if you want to know more, but the following by Anthony Curtis is of interest:
Simone de Beauvoir’s play Les Bouches Inutiles was written during the German Occupation of Paris in the exceptionally cold winter of 1942-43. Food was scarce. Beauvoir and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, teachers of philosophy, were like most Parisians perpetually hungry. He, aged 37, had begun to acquire a reputation as a writer; she, 34, was about to publish her first book, a novel based on a triangular relationship, she and Sartre had with a former pupil of hers.
In spite of the harsh tenor of wartime life in Paris the French theatre was enjoying one of its most creative periods. To everyone’s surprise the German authorities seemed to turn a blind eye to the performance of plays that resonated the notion of resistance, but were set in legendary or remote historical periods, not in the present. Thus Sartre’s Les Mouches in 1943 was a re-telling of the murder of Agamemnon, and Anouilh’s Antigone in 1944 up-dated the tragedy by Sophocles.
"Why stage declamatory Greeks… unless to disguise what one was thinking under a fascist regime? …The real drama, the drama I should have liked to write was that of the terrorist who by ambushing Germans becomes the instrument for the execution of fifty hostages," Sartre wrote later.
Useless Mouths belongs to this era of fable-drama. Beauvoir found her plot in a history of Italy in the middle ages by the Swiss historian Sismondi who wrote of a town where, to survive a siege, the women and children are to be sacrificed. Beauvoir transposed the episode from Italy to Flanders. Vaucelles, governed by a representative assembly, encircled by Burgundian forces, with the prospect of rescue by France, was an even closer parallel to the Occupation than the Argos of Aeschylus.
Embedded in the fraught and passionate drama are themes that the writer was to develop fully in her feminist and philosophical books, notably the existential creed of self-transcendence through choice and positive action, and the interdependence of all human beings, (see Pour une Morale de l’Ambiguité), and the male notion of women as the Other (see The Second Sex).
The play was directed by the Russian-born French actor Michel Vitold who had taken the lead in Sartre’s play about a sexual triangle Huis Clos (No Exit), a one-acter that made a great impact both within and outside of France. Beauvoir had had a brief affair with this handsome actor-director during one of Sartre’s absences from Paris. Both she and Sartre reserved the right to have ‘contingent’ liaisons while remaining committed to each other (see the relationship between Jean-Pierre and Clarice).
When performed Les Bouches Inutiles received mixed reviews and has never been played since. Coming on in October 1945, five months after Paris had been liberated, the Nazi pressure at last removed, old Occupation scores being viciously settled, and urgent new post-war problems emerging, it had somehow missed its moment. Only now perhaps when the problem of what to do about the ‘useless mouths’ is still very much with us is its contemporary relevance clear.
I was taught French by a remarkable woman with whom I learned to love the French classical drama, the plays of Corneille and Racine. I was fascinated to discover that living French playwrights were using their work as models, attempting in Sartre’s words "to forge myths" through drama. My enthusiasm led me to get hold of their plays and to write a small book New Developments in the French Theatre which was published by the Curtain Press in 1949.
This led to my translating Les Bouches and Anouilh’s play, Medea. I went to Paris and met Anouilh during a rehearsal at the Atelier Theatre. He was delighted by my interest as he had not yet had a play performed in English. I also had a meeting with Simone de Beauvoir. It was a pre-lunch drink in the Café Flore. She drank Dubonnet and Perrier. Like everyone I was enchanted by her charm and severe beauty; also by the ease with which she chatted to an unknown young man from England. I had sent her my translation of her play. ‘C’est bonne!’ she smilingly said to my relief. She too was over-joyed at the thought of her work being performed in England.
I then returned to Oxford to work for my degree in English (interrupted because of four years’ service in the RAF) and I showed the translation of her play to my student contemporary and friend, Tony Richardson who said he wanted to do it. He got as far as casting it and then decided to do Peer Gynt instead. Such are the whims of directors. The version then lay dormant for many years, until after retirement from a career in arts journalism, I began to work on translating neglected plays of the French theatre. The result is the present workshop production of Useless Mouths.
Anthony Curtis