An Unexpected 'Marie-Antoinette'

« Mais qu’est-ce donc, ce vie? »

In English, “But what is it then, this life?”—these sensitive words of a young Marie-Antoinette are a far cry from the callous “Let them eat cake!” that historians say posterity has incorrectly attributed to her. So much of our fascination has been with the reputation, not the person, of this infamous queen. But the play “Marie-Antoinette, In Her Own Words,” which ran until Oct. 20 at the Modern Theatre, attempted to give us just the real person. From a script by French historian Évelyne Lever based on the diary entries and letters of the queen, director Katherine Adamov cast the celebrated French actress Barbara Schulz as the title role. Though it lacks some traditional theatrical elements, which makes it feel incomplete as a dramatic presentation, the play does succeed in filling its primarily educational goals by delivering an engaging, multifaceted portrait of a woman that pop culture has too often trivialized.

The most commendable virtues of the play were its characterization of the queen and its conceptual simplicity. It is a one-act play with no changes in scenery, only one actress speaking French with English supertitles, and a few occasional sounds from the background to signal shifts in chronology. The play begins in the Conciergerie Prison in October 1793. At left there is a bed with a wooden icon of Christ; next to that is a writing table with chair, and then at far right near the edge of the stage another chair. Thirty-seven-year-old Marie, sentenced to the guillotine and writing to her sister for the last time, begins having a prolonged series of flashbacks that spans her whole life from the time of her arranged marriage at age 14 to her ruin and imprisonment. Then at the end of the play, the sound of a gate opening calls her back to the present, and she leaves prepared for her execution.

This simplicity is a welcome directorial move on Adamov’s part, because it is precisely the opposite of what most people expect from a play about Marie-Antoinette—we envision the glamour of the rococo rooms, the elegant elevator-hair, and extravagant court life. But, as the play suggests, none of that courtly fluff was the real Marie anyway. “I prefer the company of a few nice people rather than all this court that flatters me,” Marie declared at one point in the play. Rather, the spirit of the real Marie, the “Widow Capet” as Marie was called following her husband’s execution, sat for years in a dank cell writing to her loved ones and praying as a devout Catholic for the forgiveness of all her sins. Hence, in this play, Schulz’s hair is arranged in a simple braided bun of white hair. Schulz herself is quite convincingly clad in only an ordinary woman’s black dress and shift.

The play was helpfully directed in its course by occasional strains of distant courtly music that brought a smile to Schulz’s face, sound effects of bells ominously tolling outside the prison to occasionally wake her from her reveries, and various changes in lighting orchestrated by Chris Fournier—growing brighter when she slipped into memories of the past, and fading out when she returns again to the last hours of her life.

However, Schulz’s performance had mixed success. Most of the time the characterization was artfully done, with Schulz proving her character to be an energetic and intelligent young woman, an anxious daughter wishing to please a cold mother, a good wife and tender mother, and later a dignified, politically astute woman. But while she succeeded in expressing these roles of the young, pre-imprisonment Marie, Schulz was less convincing as the Widow Capet. Her tone of voice underwent no change between conveying the younger and older Maries, and instead sounded high-pitched and youthful throughout.

Likewise, the decision of Schulz to weep and bewail her bad fortunes, as she does while portraying young and old Marie alike, is unrealistic. While the real Widow Capet was said to seem greatly aged and grown old prematurely, Schulz ultimately does not portray an imprisoned Marie that is sufficiently changed or matured from the Marie of the court life. The result is that Schulz’s Marie Antoinette feels completely a victim of history and a poor intelligent woman, but not the dignified Widow Capet.

Overall it was a performance that succeeded as much as a theatrical piece whose primary goal is educational can expect to. The design of the play, with its incorporation of the historical Marie through flashbacks “in her own words,” creates a more compelling view of the real woman. But its commitment to such historical fidelity confined the play to logistical constraints. Furthermore, a lack of character development in the actress’s performance prevented it from being a fully rewarding dramatic experience

—Staff writer Victoria Zhuang can be reached at  victoria.zhuang@thecrimson.com.