Les Deux Camilles
Cloud 42 at Body Politic Theatre
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Daly means to strip Dumas’ story, based on his own ill-fated affair with a famous courtesan, of its unearned romance, exposing the true-life liaison as obsessive and one-sided. No languid martyr, the flesh-and-blood Marie Duplessis was a self-made woman who prostituted herself up the ranks till she met Dumas (love child of the author of The Three Musketeers). Their affair lasted less than a year, foundering on Dumas’ jealousy and his rage at having to depend on a woman for money as well as love. He left to travel abroad; Marie died. Five months later, Dumas had finished the opportunistic, guilt-driven novel, renaming the heroine Marguerite, that launched the legend, including Verdi’s 1853 La Traviata.
Though Daly obviously respects the power of the play and the opera to move us, and draws heavily on both works, Camille (Deflowered) bitterly questions Camille’s sacrifice and our adulation of it. Christiaan Pretorius’s elegant set is appropriately dominated by a huge canopy bed that seems to suck the character into its maw. Much of Daly’s play is a strangely faithful enactment of Dumas’ script (minus the deathbed reconciliation), but she adds stiff, stylized depictions of an 1847 auction of Marie’s effects and sardonic scenes in which Dumas/Armand and his sexist friends put down women. The self-pitying, hypocritical Armand calls Marguerite an “angel on the scrap heap” and “a slave to her senses,” and calls himself a “moral influence”!
Camille: A Tearjerker both undermines and elevates the original, radically altering the casting but perfectly preserving the play’s spirit of sublime renunciation. Ludlam’s travesty is a mine field of physical gags–shameless mugging, slow burns, anachronistic props (Chinese take-out), grand melodramatic gestures. And then there’s the verbal tomfoolery: awful puns (“Get your aspidistra out of here!”), stolen and filthy jokes, torch-song lyrics, parodies of purple passion (“I would rather die for your love than pay 50 francs for it”), B-movie cliches (including pungent allusions to The Women), and dishy, bitchy girl talk too self-parodying to be misogynistic. Combination gold digger, dominatrix, and dying diva, Ludlam’s Camille is a delicious study in excess (“I’m traveling light–no heart”)–and by the end, almost as touching as Violetta in Traviata.
Marguerite’s coterie are among the nastiest grotesques ever to crawl out from under a Parisian rock, and Trettenero’s merry crew scrunch themselves into leering Daumier caricatures, whether cavorting to a zany “Freres Jacques” or stretching their rubber faces into human cartoons. Among the standouts are Matt McDonald’s bilious Baron, a suitor who salivates on Marguerite’s crinoline; Teria Gartelos, playing Marguerite’s chief confidante like a Victorian valley girl; Robin Baber, a gossip-mad milliner ferociously frilled and furbelowed; and Amelia Barrett, a mincing tragedienne of a chambermaid who affects a weird Clouseau-like French accent.
