Thankfully for us, that's also exactly how most modern stage directors and actors see Racine (though Racine isn't played all that often anymore). Racine himself sought to strip theater down of its artifices. The fashion of his time was to bigger and bigger shows (with orchestral music, ballets, lots of machinery, pyrotechnical effects etc. - that literally exploded with Louis XIV), sort of proto-Broadway or even anticipating golden era Hollywood. Listening to the stage music by Lully for Molière's plays from the Versailles era (for eg. the overture for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obp7zVNILdo&feature=related) is very illuminating. It's the 17th century version of catchy John Williams movie themes. You've just read Petifils's biography, you must know exactly what I'm talking of. Racine used the classical themes, characters and settings - it was de rigueur for any playwright writing tragedies in his time, but he tried to develop the characters as archetypes for situations or even emotions that would transcend the classical referrents, and he stripped action on stage to the bare minimum so the text and the acting became the focus (what you described in your answer to Larry is dead on the money. Some like this, some don't, but it's Racine). He was an early "minimalist" in an age that was anything but, so in many ways he's the easiest writer from the Baroque age to modernize, without removing even a comma from the text. Most stage directors adopt this minimalist vision for their productions of Racine, and seek to remove or downplay the classical setting, as they see it as a barrier between the text and the audience (even cultured ones, for instance with comparisons to genuine Greek tragedies). Costumes are either very stylized, barely evoking ancient Greece, or absent altogether. Sets are often minimalist too. It's fairly static (though the acting is often fairly physical), but the star are the text and the virtuosity of the actors with the text, the rest is artifice that would only distance the audience from the play.

Productions in France are a little less modern, but most don't go "Greek" very far anymore either.

You can see a little of that in a clip from TV on the latest production of Andromaque in Montréal (retitled Projet Andromaque for honesty's sake. It's the text, all the text and only the text, but the idea behind the production was to start around a table, as if the actors were repeating, and then gradually it becomes a more traditional stage rendition, a very minimalist one, with only some suggestions of a classical setting, mostly through lighting and a few elements in the costumes. As one of the actors points out (and it's not a very original opinion), when the text is so powerful, what need is there for theatrical artifices?

For having seen it, the clip gives you kind of a poor idea of what the production was like, though (and I'm not a big fan of filmed plays... the camera gets way too close, that always feels overplayed). You don't see much of Anne Dorval, and the young actor who played Oreste - and they were the two that really stood out in that production.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC-yzmdhtzY





Which is kind of refreshing, as Vian, Queneau and co. didn't even need drugs to be that imaginative and wild in the absurd.



It's very difficult. The emphasis often rests on the written words themselves (on spelling for instance, like when Vian chooses to spell Finance as Phynance, which refers to Jarry's Ubu Roi and to Rabelais, and thus gives the financial circles an implied negative/oppressive connotation. It's pronounced the same way, so verbally it's hard to render. They do it by exaggerating the F and S sounds so it sounds like a snake, but it's not the same).

From what I've seen of Gondry so far, it seems he will multiply the use of written words in his movie adaption of L'Écume des Jours. Store fronts, flyers, banners, books, street signs, ads etc. so Vian's language remains present. He also chose to alter the tone of the story - tone down the naive aspects a bit, age the main characters, so the transition from surreal comedy to surreal tragedy is smoother. He seems to have included tons of Vian's more visual oddities, pillaging other works. We'll see.

On stage Vian can be very powerful, if the director is very imaginative and knows his Vian inside and out. In Vian's plays, Vian himself translated his written imagery into a visual one. The language is very similar, but does rely exclusively on play-on-words that work verbally.

His plays were pretty short, though, so it's more common to merge the play with other material on the same theme(s). They pushed that to the extreme in the last production of Vian we had here (last year), which was the best I've ever seen. The play was interrupted after most scenes for bridge numbers made of other stuff. The play itself (Le Goûter des Générau is a darkly funny denunciation of war in the absurd mode (written as the cold war had barely begun). The worldwide economy sucks - Industry and Finance wish a new war to boost it, citizens are more and more disappointed with the post-WWII world and the politicians wish to distract their attention, generals (who are adults but infantilized to the point they demonstrate in the play the intellect, interests and behavior of 10 years old boys) are completely bored. But the president come up with an idea to manipulate opinion to create a pretext to invade a third world country (they settled on invented threat of hidden atomic bombs...), and asks his general to call his friends and organize that. The general's mom organize a little afternoon tea party (yeah, it's a reference to Alice, and about as absurd if in a different register) for his little "friends" the other generals from the US, China, Russia etc. and between childish games, bikering and conversations, the American general (a texan) suggests the best idea is to invade a middle east country to steal its oil, the others approve and they launch WWIII, deciding how they'll fight one another without harm. It's over in a matter of days as they flattened all the arabs who barely resisted the Russian-American double invasion, and once more the generals are so bored they decide to play russian roulette, and they all die.

That got mixed up with tons of other Vian anti-war writings: poems, songs, excerpts from novellas, reinforcing or completing the themes of each scene. And they added all sort of Vian-like visual stuff too, for instance the play opens with an absurd musical number, with all the actors dancing in body bags, singing a Vian classic anti-war song, la Marche Arrière (the music evokes a military march):

C'est la marche des p'tits gars qui veulent pas la faire
La marche de ceux qui croient qu'on est bien mieux chez soi
Un coussin sous le derrière
Par-devant un feu de bois
Avec une belle fille qui prépare le rata
C'est la marche des assis, la bonne marche arrière
Celle des civilisés, la marche de la joie
Un soldat sans uniforme
C'est d'une bien plus jolie forme
Car ça a la gueul' d'un homme et c'est bien mieux comm' ça.

Ceux qui sont partis se battre un flingue en bandoulière
Et qui dorment quelque part sous une croix de bois
S'ils sortaient du cimetière
Chanteraient à pleine voix
Que l'on était mieux sur terre et qu'il faisait moins froid
Ils regrettent le soleil le dimanche et les filles
Et tous les plaisirs légers qu'ils ont perdus là-bas
Faut passer sa vie entière
A chanter la marche arrière
Marche de ceux qui s'arrêtent et qui ne marchent pas

And they had a swing/jazz orchestra on stage, and a jazz singer constantly interrupted. Actors sometimes switched roles between scenes, or the gender of their characters changed. The whole novella Les Fourmis was dramatized (it's written as the diary of a soldier, and it for Vian the tone is fairly serious. It's a soldier who goes through his war experiences as he stands over a landmine, and when his leg tires, he will die. Thus the title, from the rough French equivalent of being antsy).

It all worked really well, was an extremely entertaining controlled pandemonium and was very faithful to Vian's spirit and in the strong tradition of the French théâtre de l'absurde. Vian didn't especially targeted the Americans in that play beside his caricatural rich texan general (its mocks the inept French military the most - and caricatured De Gaulle whom Vian hated. Mocks strongly Russia too as unlike many of his existentialist friends Vian was staunchly anti-communist) though of course in 2011, the whole show rather felt by default like a denunciation of the GWB years. It was mostly Le Goûter des Généraux, though the show rather had the very Vian-like title "Et Vian! Dans la gueule" (a play on Et vlan dans la gueule).

Again here's a TV clip discussing it with a few excerpts, but it gives a very very poor idea of how superb that show was. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJS4mpHHxnU

There's also long excerpts from the show on You Tube, but it's another production by students, and it's really, really bad.

Still, Vian is best in the media he worked in... his novels as novels, his plays on stage, his songs sung etc.

That show was a success (it was put together by a company specializing in Jarry, Ionesco, Vian, Oulipo and featured some of the best stage actors in the city - that helped!), but most often attempts to recreate Vian's universe in other media end up being failures.



Reading the four main novels in order would be best to feel the progression. Vian's tone evolves a lot, his humour becoming darker and more cynical with each book. He has returning characters too.

The early works and the Sullivan novels are best kept for after. The first Sullivan is a fake-pulp novel, the others are parodies (my favourite is Et on tuera tous les affreux, I don't care much for the others). Some of the novellas are also terrific. What's sadly missing from the Pleiade edition (but I have those in another complete works edition that's no longer in print, and which was paperback ), IRRC, are the plays, the poetry and the songs.