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A stirring of old flames
A Summer in the South
Birmingham Rep
**** RICHARD Edmonds’ love affair with Sidonie-Gabrielle
Colette started on a pedalo in the South of France. Edmonds, attending the University of
Aix-Marseilles one hot summer, was persuaded to read her works by his
pedalo companion, a French lecturer, who was passionate about his
country’s most famous, and sometimes infamous, literary daughter. It is more than 40 years since I first met
Richard, he a features writer, I a young reporter at The Birmingham Post
& Mail and over the years he has dropped Colette into conversation many
times. Edmonds can be an exquisite writer on his
passions and his reading, A Summer in the South, is at times a delight
as he mixes real life with the writer’s novels. In this he is aided by theatrical royalty, Robert
Powell and Siân Phillips. To make mere words interesting, even beautifully
written, for two hours with just the aid of a drape, two chairs and a
bistro table, is a test of the actors’ art and the pair passed with
flying colours. Powell, last seen in the Midlands as Hercule
Poirot in Black Coffee last year, always seemed to have a twinkle
in his eye reading male parts from father Jules-Joseph to characters in
her books, such as the hedonistic hero of the eponymous novel Chéri. Siân Phillips, who was Dorothy in People
which reopened the Rep at the end of 2013, delighted in both the part of
Colette and the wonderful female characters that populated her life and
her books. Colette was 81 when she died in Paris in 1954,
with a legacy of 50 novels, many with large autobiographical elements,
which is reflected in the drifting between novels and reality as
Colette’s life unfolds. We learn of the eccentric menagerie she grew up
with, such as the large garden spider which lived on the ceiling of her
mother’s bedroom. A spider which, when her mother, who suffered
from insomnia, awoke in the early hours and turned on the light to read,
would descend on a silken thread to drink its fill from a cup of
chocolate by her bed, then return to its ceiling web, climbing
laboriously with its full stomach, Or the cat who made its bed upon the canary’s
cage, while the canary charged a form of rent by pulling out strands of
its fur for nesting. We learned of Colette’s lesbian affairs and some
of her views on sexuality although perhaps the shock Colette generated
in her native France was missing. She had an affair with her stepson
from her third marriage Bertrand de Jouvenel,
for example and a hint of salacious gossip marked her life as regularly
as birthdays. She is perhaps best known for
her 1945 novel Gigi, about an apprentice courtesan, which was sanitized
by Hollywood as a musical and the world of the courtesan was central to
the novel regarded as her masterpiece, the 1920 novel Chéri,
later adapted and screened in 1973 by the BBC. It was a novel which courted controversy on its
publication, set as it was among the hedonistic world of the rich and
courtesans, with the spoiled Chéri the most hedonistic of all. I was not sure as to how a reading of Stephen
Sondheim’s lyrics Send in The Clowns from A little Night Music
or Jacques Prévert’s 1945 lyrics to Les
feuilles mortes, The Autumn Leaves, managed to make an
appearance, they seemed like guests, well mannered and elegant, but
still guests crashing someone else’s party. At the end perhaps you did not
leave knowing a great deal more about Colette than when you started but
you had visited, if only in words beautifully delivered, La Belle
Époque, entertained Parisian society and discovered the importance of
the rare flowering of a pink cactus in old age. It was a taste, it stirred an interest in one of
France’s greatest writers and perhaps, for some in the audience, it will
be their own pedalo moment. Roger Clarke
15-02-15.
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