Paris or Die

A single brilliant red bentwood chair sits centre stage.  Jayne Tuttle descends the stairs, a willowy figure all in black.  She seems at first just a little uncertain – as if she doesn’t quite understand the story that she is about to tell us – or that we won’t understand it.  She’s not her yet; she’s unformed; she’s pretending to be the eponymous Betty Blue, who’s sexy and burns down buildings.  It’s a touching picture and it engages our sympathy straight away. 

Jayne’s story spans eight or more years, from her first hapless arrival in Paris, lugging a backpack, overdressed for the unexpected heat, with very little French and nowhere to stay – and then through her years at Lecoq Theatre School, to a very French love affair, to the death of her beloved mother – and to an horrific injury. 

What is it about Paris that there is such a plethora of memoirs about living there?  Jayne Tuttle’s memoir, Paris or Die, is often funny but it doesn’t set out to be funny – like How To Be Parisian. Or caustic like Edmund White’s Inside a Pearl or laconically self-important like Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast.  It’s not rhapsodic or a travel book.  Paris or Die is honest and is essentially about transformation – or, more prosaically, growing up.

The show is an adaptation of the memoir.  It demonstrates the difficulty of giving dramatic shape or form to a memoir.  A memoir can be, of course, inherently interesting, moving, funny, or revealing, but an adaptation for theatre (or film) creates different expectations in the audience.  Unfairly perhaps, all too conventionally perhaps, we expect cause and effect, we expect development, the pursuit of a goal and a climax or pay-off.  No matter how fine the prose, a memoir all too easily slips into ‘this happened and then that happened and then this happened…’

The program notes, by co-creator and director John Bolton, tell us that here Tuttle is ‘playing herself, as well as the character of herself from [her] book, plus the writer of the book, and the person within the story, [and that] Jayne transforms and is transformed by the events that come her way.’  This is perhaps an overcomplicated way to describe Tuttle’s storytelling, but it is true that events transform her – or we have to infer that they do.  By the end she is no longer that naïve twenty-two-year-old sweltering outside the Palais Royale metro station.

What is lovely and so enjoyable about this show is that Tuttle vividly brings to life those transforming events and the people she meets.  And not just with words: her time at Lecoq was not wasted.  Using mime, she makes us see how heavy her backpack is, especially when she must haul it up six flights of those stairs that wind around and around.  She creates the nasty woman in the boulangerie – and she learns how to be nasty right back.  She takes us into her classes at Lecoq where we meet her teachers and her classmates, and she yearns for what amounts to high praise, ‘Pas mal.’  She listens and learns so that she can burst into rapid French.  We see the dream lover boyfriend, Adrien (a very frank description), but we also meet his sceptical chain-smoking mother – a superb, economic impersonation that gives us the woman in a second.  She creates her parents too – again with two or three precisely chosen details.  And then there are her nightmares as well…

Nevertheless, one could describe the show as a summary of the book; the text of the show is pretty much word for word extracted – albeit enhanced enormously by Tuttle’s performance both oral and physical.  But following the book is unfortunately where the show falters into ‘one damn thing after another’.  Yes, that’s how memory works, but we expect more.

Despite Tuttle’s charm and skill, we realise the show isn’t going anywhere – and we disengage – just a bit.  It is brought to an end with an accident – beautifully told and performed in itself – but it is an accident.  Arbitrary, fate – not brought about by ‘Jayne’ herself.  And then the coda is that she hopes that all this – this story – will not be lost, will remain meaningful.  But much as we have enjoyed the telling, it remains more meaningful for the teller than for us.  Interestingly, the book begins with the accident and perhaps if the show did the same there might be a greater sense of shape to the tale.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill