Marguerite Duras occupies the rarefied ether of 20th-century French arts, as a multivalent force in literature, theatre, film and feminism. Because hers is not exactly a household name in India, we welcomed the opportunity to see a French director’s interpretation of her work for the Bonjour India Festival, presented by the French Embassy, Institut Français and Alliance Française. Moreover, the director, Eric Vigner of Theatre de Lorient, has a deep admiration for and professional engagement with her theatrical style. Thus, he devised Gates to India Song intertextually, just as she composed her books, plays and movies (for example, the classic Hiroshima Mon Amour), which feature the same character or variations of one situation. He melded her novel, The Vice-Consul, with her drama-turned-film, India Song, into one tale of the vice-consul’s agonized passion for the wife of the French ambassador in colonial Calcutta.

Too much artistic respect, however, can act counter-productively. Vigner makes a virtue out of Duras’s comment late in life that “Theatre must be read out, not acted. Performance erases the text and does not bring anything to it.” Taken out of context — she suffered a particularly bad stage experience in 1985, aged 70, which caused this outburst, perhaps even justified by French theatre’s spectacular excesses — it sounds totally contradictory coming from a renowned playwright-director. In fact, Duras often made such contrary statements. Once, she said she wanted to “murder the writer” in cinema; later, she felt like “killing the image”. To the New York Times in 1991, she declared her wish “to kill the writer that I was”. Artists do erupt in this manner, but to construct one such remark into a credo surely misleads. Angry at some artwork, we may shout that the artist should be shot. Do we mean it literally, or remember it subsequently?

By applying Duras’s utterance in practice, Vigner shot his production in the head at point-blank range — a little like the vice-consul’s own act. It never recovered from the preliminary reading out from books in hand and redundant repetition of lines (as if Indians cannot follow English clearly). When Duras directed the film of India Song (1975), she did not allow the actors to talk, but recorded disembodied and unrelated voiceovers for a surreal effect. This is perfectly acceptable, but not Vigner’s self-consciously intellectual method.

The choice of the Tagore courtyard in Jorasanko proved meaningless, for it had nothing to do with historical colonialism, unlike such appropriate imperial buildings as the National Library, Victoria Memorial or Raj Bhavan. One inevitably compared Vigner unfavourably with Sasha Waltz’s recent performance in the Jorasanko Rajbari, where she had taken considerable time to “dialogue” with the architecture and resurrect its ghosts. Here, Frank Thevenon’s coloured and twinkling lights, John Kaced’s ambient sound and Rajesh Pratap Singh’s white costumes embroidered by Maximiliano Modesti ornamented but could never rescue the deadpan acting enforced by Vigner. Duras always questioned the conventional patriarchal dramatic representation of text, identity and voice, especially female, but I could not glean anything radical in Nandita Das’s portrayal. She appeared unshackled only when freed in song — melodiously, in French. Analogously, Suhaas Ahuja (the vice-consul) finally let go in his primal scream.

On to Bengali theatre’s premiere encounter with Duras, Nandikar’s Anta Adi Anta. Rudraprasad Sengupta naturalized her 1965 play, La Musica, by setting it in Darjeeling, where a just-divorced Bengali couple meet at the same hotel where they spent their first married days. In the ensuing conversation, we overhear their bitterness, fury, incompatibilities, infidelities, and also the love that characterize this typically Durasian amour fou, the “crazed love” that destroys.

Debsankar Halder and Sohini Sengupta (picture) thrust and parry their rapiers in hurt and frustration, internalized yet exposing the depth of their mutual feelings. In these intimate circumstances, therefore, it jars to find them resorting to lapel mikes. Halder directs the pas de deux understanding the implications of Duras’s title, consequently sensitive to rhythms like a conductor of chamber music. Appreciating this dimension, Swatilekha Sengupta composes a score that almost takes on the part of a third actor, and contains a good dose of Rabindrasangeet rearranged. The fourth actor, however, goes missing — Halder avoids silences, though these could create much greater tension. Indeed, he partially captures that at the beginning, when for nearly ten minutes nobody on stage speaks, though we hear some exchanges off. But the conclusion gravitates perilously close to that bane of Bengali theatre: sentimentalism.

Nandikar should take the next step and convert this to full-length by adding Duras’s sequel, La Musica Deuxième, written in 1985.