PERFORMANCE
Half a year ago German director Florian von Hoermann together with set designer Rudolf Bekic brought to the New Theatre Institute of Latvia the idea to stage Froth on the Daydream, a novel by Boris Vian, in collaboration with Latvian actors. On the 6th of August they started rehearsals with actors of Valmiera Theatre on the script made by Hoermann. The co-production of NTIL and Valmiera Theatre Froth on the Daydream will open the festival Homo Novus 2007, and afterwards will be on the repertory of Valmiera Theatre at the Round Stage.
Five heroes from Boris Vian's novel, Froth on the Daydream find themselves in a kind of waiting room with no exit. Balancing on the edge of reality and fantasy, they try to recreate their life stories to make sense of their death (or life?). How to revive a once-strong love that slowly dies, becoming abstract drudgery?
FROTH ON THE DAYDREAM (L'Ecume des jours)
“The soul of the book is about the nature of life disappearing and loving things intensely as if one was making love on a live grenade!” – says Australian writer Robert Whyte in his web page dedicated to Boris Vian.
In the conclusion of the book investigating Froth on the Daydream David Meakin writes: "Throughout all the inversions, devaluations and ambiguities, "L'Ecume des jours" still contrives to be a touching love story. [...] As a novel it is both unusually simple and remarkably complex, combining an impression of naive and tragic spontaneity with a richly ironic sophistication.”
First there is the young, rich and carefree Colin. He, above all, "longs to be in love". (…) The most important thing for him is his small circle of friends: Chick, Alise, Nicolas, Isis ...and Chloe. During a party of close friends, he falls madly in love with her. Everything is great. Colin and Chloe get married and the world belongs to them. But then this beautiful fury of life is broken clean. Chloe becomes sick with a poetic disease (even though Boris Vian doesn't want it). A water lily grows in the lungs of the beauty and pushes out all the oxygen. Colin becomes responsible and works but Chloe wilts away incurably. On their side, Chick and Alise had everything to be happy... if Chick didn't have the filthy mania of bankrupting himself by buying the works and clothes of a certain Jean Sol Partre, (a little dig from Vian to the famous existentialist of Saint-Germain-des-Prés). This "partrophagy" pushes Alise to kill Partre. Only Nicolas and Isis escape a tragic destiny and accompany their friends to the end. (Catherine Combet (Terminale), cited from www.toadshow.com.au/rob/01_cms/)
Vian has structured the novel with the mathematical precision. The airy froth and hedonistic bubbles of the first half of the book cannot last. They decay and sinks into the swamp as youthful exuberances are consumed by adult responsibilities. The material world described by Vian is entirely responsive to the novel's action. Where the characters delight in their youth, so is the world delightful. Where their lives darken with misfortune, so does the world. The full title of the Ellington’s song mentioned in the novel is Chloe, or the song of the swamp (Chloe – is the name of the woman beloved by the main character Colin). “It seems that Vian's novel follows the song's structure. Out of the fictive urban jungle emerges Chloe, sinuously perfect like a Ben Webster saxophone solo, only to descend once again into the primal jungle swamp.” (David Meakin)
L'Écume des Jours was made into a movie, directed by Charles Belmont, released in 1968. English title: Spray of the Days. It was also made into an opera under the same title by the Russian composer Edison Denisov in 1981. It was also adapted into a Japanese movie Chloe directed by Go Riju, and was selected in the competition of 2001 Berlin Film Festival. Nothing is heard about theatre productions…
BORIS VIAN (1920-1959)
“In Paris in the 1950s Boris Vian was everything - poet, fiction writer, singer, subversive, actor, musician, and jazz critic. He was my friend and I admired him passionately for his eclecticism, devastating irony, and taste for provocation" – said Louis Malle about the author of Froth on the Daydream.
Over the course of his thirty-nine years, Boris Vian managed to live not just one but several existences. A prolific writer, Vian authored plays, poetry, novels, philosophical treatises, songs, magazine articles and reviews, and “translations” of non-existent American pulp novels (actually he was the author of these novels using the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan). Trained as an engineer at the prestigious École Centrale in Paris, he was twice employed in this capacity, though by the end of his life he was more likely to lend his technical expertise to whimsical projects like the invention of an elastic wheel. At the same time, Vian played trumpet in Claude Abadie’s orchestra, one of the most successful amateur dance bands in postwar Paris. Vian has created around 450 songs and in 1958 collaborated with Darius Milhaud on the opera Fiesta. His most famous song was Le déserteur, a pacifist song written during the Indochina War (you can listen to Vian’s songs on www.borisvian.fr/sommaire.php?to=chansons). Serge Gainsbourg said that seeing Boris Vian on stage inspired him to try his hand at songwriting. Duke Ellington was the godfather of his daughter Carole.
Vian was an individualist. He never gave up (for any cause or any other reason) his right to be inappropriate, playful, maverick. His uncompromising nature were proven in his sharp and merciless jazz critics and his uncomparable prose, which is characterized by jazz like structures. J.K.L. Scott says: "...that Vian's novels form a coherent group, and that ultimately they come to a remorselessly pessimistic conclusion, that life has nothing to offer which will not be taken away. From the fantastic world of childhood imagination and delight the individual moves into a realm of conflict, violence and predation." He names Vian as "one of the great iconoclasts, and more than that, one of the great comic iconoclasts” and adds: “…if anything could be said to sum up Vian, it is the final scene of L'Ecume des jours, which, significantly, is simultaneously comic and horrible."
The story about Vian’s death is as extraordinary, as all his life. On the morning of June 23, 1959, Boris Vian was at the Cinema Marbeuf for the screening of the film version of his controversial Vernon Sullivan" novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Shall Spit On Your Graves). He had already fought with the producers over their interpretation of his work and he publicly denounced the film stating that he wished to have his name removed from the credits. A few minutes after the film began, he reportedly blurted out: "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!" He then collapsed into his seat and died of a on the way to the hospital.
Source: www.toadshow.com.au/rob/
More about Vian:
www.toadshow.com.au/rob/ (in English)
www.borisvian.com (in French)