The newlywed of a country doctor longs for the passionate love she knows from novels. Instead, however, he experiences the banality of everyday life and is desperately bored. The National Theater in Prague presented a new production based on the famous novel by the French writer Gustave Flaubert from the middle of the 19th century. Madame Bovary is played by Denisa Barešová.
The book, which is still on the must-read lists, has only been brought to the stage in recent years by several Czech theaters, most recently by Šimon Caban in the Horácké divadle Jihlava. In Prague, the 33-year-old playwright and director Tomáš Loužný, who has experience in the independent scene and city theaters in Ostrava and Ústí nad Labem, has now taken up the subject.
Ema Bovary is a model heroine representing the routine life of middle-class women in the countryside and small town in the 19th century with all its consequences. She tries in vain to fulfill her romantic ideas, becomes a mother, but nothing fulfills her. She throws herself into the arms of her lovers, until subsequently, dejected, in debt and at a loss, she ends her life by suicide.
Gustave Flaubert created the character based on a real event that he read about in the newspaper. He provided her with a certain amount of ambiguity, naivety, selfishness and superficiality, which is why Madame Bovary is not just a sympathetic victim. Today, she could easily be an influencer on Instagram who earns by “self-presentation”.
However, the new adaptation does not go into such consequences. He also leaves the motif of financial illiteracy, or rather the debt trap in which the heroine finds herself, without significant attention, even though the topic could resonate – hundreds of thousands of Czechs were foreclosed on in the last decade. Likewise, the new version does not develop the motif of female self-realization or emancipation more significantly.
Hard-to-fall teats
The authors don’t update the novel, they don’t interpret the main character, and without major dramas they let her float between fragments of banal events. What’s more, there is not even a clear motif of a passionate reader who builds castles in the air based on literature. She touches on it only with a single retort from her mother-in-law, when she wants Emma Bovary to cancel her book subscriptions as punishment.
At the same time, the draft caused a stir immediately after its publication. Due to the realistically depicted love adventures of the heroine, it received the label of a novel that violates good morals and offends believers. But what was outrageous in the middle of the 19th century, today leaves people completely indifferent. In the Stavovské divadl, where the production is presented, they can watch a story told in an old-fashioned way, which will probably have zero impact on them. At most, they will dream with Madame Bovary, perhaps be moved, and go home filled with similar illusory food as this doomed reader - which would be strongly contrary to Flaubert’s intentions.
The production shows an effort to prepare compulsory reading in such a way that it attracts as many viewers as possible. The first scene tried something similar, for example, by dramatizing the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, which was directed here by Daniela Špinar in 2016. The director Loužný was obviously inspired by its aesthetics – a typically empty stage and a lit horizon contrasting with the shadowy contours of the actors in the foreground.
Madame Bovary is also linked to the staging of Pride and Prejudice by the scenography consisting of a pleated curtain that surrounds the playing area on three sides. Its author, Dragan Stojčevski, has him half pulled up and then lowered from the ropeway, while the bare walls of the decoration are meant to evoke the distress the heroine feels.
Similarly, huge beads symbolizing marital commitment fall and rise again. It is a similar hyperbole for the necklace, which was used in the production of Kytice by the current heads of drama at the National Theatre, the directing duo Skutr.
Here, however, the suspended pearls have a more prominent role. Emma Bovary wears them all the time, but they suffocate her and make her impossible to fly. The protagonist wraps a realistic jewel around her neck. In one moment, he carelessly pulls it off and the pearls roll in all directions. In a metaphorical sense, even the heroine’s life or her illusory ideas are shattered. the pearls serve as a proxy for the arsenic balls that the desperate reader stuffs into her mouth.
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Denisa Barešová in the role of Emma Bovary is dressed in a distinctive timeless purple evening gown with a large bow on the back. | Photo: Petr Neubert
The most essential thing is missing
Another prominent metaphor is women’s high-heeled shoes. A larger-than-life-sized silver shoe placed on a forbin introduces the production, while Mme. Bovary experiences a love adventure in a moving carriage. In another image, other characters bring her shoes as delicacies on trays.
The high-heeled shoes, in which Ema Bovaryová later finds herself besieged in a metaphor for female vanity, among other things, played a dominant role in the production of Henrik Ibsen’s Nora, which was directed by Jan Nebeský at Prague’s Divadle pod Palmovka. There, however, they were much more specific and civil.
The scenic world of Mrs. Bovary, as designed by set designer Stojčevski and costume designer Kateřina Jirmanová with the director, is supposed to be pleasant, even dazzling, despite its minimalism.
The representative of the main role, Denisa Barešová, walks through it in a distinctive, timeless purple evening gown with a large bow on the back, which contrasts with her everyday hairstyle. In an almost three-hour production, where she practically does not leave the stage, her performance is worthy of respect. For the role of Emma, she breathes with her whole body, trying to play a figure from the past as civilly as possible, even though she didn’t exactly have an easy assignment.
With scant interpretation and heavy-handed direction, which stumbles from idea to idea, from inspiration to inspiration, fails to connect them elegantly and does not manage to give real content or meaning to situations, but the rest of the actors are also stiff. They still perform well under the circumstances.
Especially in the second part of the production, it loses its pace and gives the impression of an over-aestheticized emptiness, a kind of ornamental frame that lacks the most essential thing inside: a directorial gesture and a dramaturgical opinion on the material in question. Without them, Madame Bovary is, unfortunately, just a dazzling nothing.
Theater
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Direction and adaptation: Tomáš Loužný
Stavovské divadlo, Prague, written from the second premiere on November 15, the next reruns on November 20 and 23.
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