STAGE REVIEW : Jean Cocteau Centenary Festival : UCI’s ‘Orphee’ Well-Intended but Muddled

Despite his extraordinary precocity, Jean Cocteau considered himself a late starter who didn’t find himself as an artist until he was well past 30. In his diaries, looking at his career through hindsight, Cocteau singled out “Orphee” as the first of several key works “in which I had found my way.”

Cocteau was justly proud of the play. Written in 1925 and produced a year later when he was 37, it announced themes that obsessed him as no other work had done. It also contained what would become some of his best-known lines: “I’m giving you the secret of secrets. Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes and goes. . . . And if you look at yourself in a mirror all your life, you’ll see her at work, like bees in a glass hive.”

“Orphee” was, moreover, a seminal influence on younger French playwrights, such as Jean Anouilh. And, despite being reviled by Andre Breton and the Surrealists because of its homosexual conceits and religious overtones, it was much admired by the writers later grouped under the rubric of “the theater of the absurd.”

Unfortunately, the liberating impulse behind Cocteau’s treatment of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is rarely felt in the solemn “Orphee” production that opened over the weekend at UC Irvine. It just doesn’t connect. The student cast is play-acting. The multimedia techniques are ponderous and distracting. The direction is flat, the mood forced. You have the sensation of listening to hearsay testimony.

When an unfriendly review of the original Paris production appeared in T. S. Eliot’s literary magazine, the New Criterion, and seemed to Cocteau to miss the point, he wrote a concerned letter to Eliot: “Of my tremendous effort, of the long agony, the emergency surgery that my work is, nothing is seen or even glimpsed.” The same remark might apply to this muddled, though well-intended, resurrection.

The play opens with Orphee, feeling burned out by his success as Paris’ most famous poet. To get away from all that and find new inspiration, he has moved to the countryside with his wife, Eurydice. As luck would have it, a talking horse has followed him home. And now he spends all his days taking dictation from the horse, which taps out peculiar messages with its hoof.

This development has left Eurydice less than thrilled. Orphee is not only lavishing more attention on the horse than on her but, as far as she can tell, the horse’s poetic communiques are bogus. Frustrated and angry, Eurydice resorts to smashing windows for good luck. This brings her friend Heurtebise, an angelic glazier, over to the house every day to repair them.

Despite obvious changes in the Greek story--notably the updating of the period, the additions of the horse and Heurtebise, the depiction of Death as a beautiful woman with red gloves--Cocteau essentially retells the ancient myth. Eurydice dies. Orphee descends into Hades and is allowed to bring her back with the proviso that he may never again look directly at her or she will disappear forever.

The fate Cocteau reserves for them also coincides with the myth, though for reasons that he invents. Orphee looks at Eurydice. She disappears. Ultimately, a Dionysian cult of women to whom Eurydice once belonged tears Orphee to pieces over a poetic transgression instigated by the horse.

UCI drama professor Stephen Barker has staged the play in the campus Fine Arts Gallery instead of in a theater to suggest authenticity. By situating the drama among various Cocteau artworks on loan from Irvine’s Severin Wunderman Museum, he hoped that the artist’s ambiance would be brought to bear. But, in fact, the setting is counterproductive. The artworks, having nothing to do with the play, diffuse attention.

Anyway, the best props--Heurtebise’s beautiful wings of glass and the wonderfully crafted sculpture of the horse from corrugated cardboard--are not by Cocteau, but by students. Other homemade touches are less effective. A pretentious bank of TV monitors is pointless. The videotaped doves shown during Eurydice’s death scene have no impact. That goes double for the disembodied slide show of Greek statuary intended to communicate Orphee’s decapitation.

As for the harpy chorus of live mummy dancers, better they should have stayed in their coffins. And why is the chief of police who arrives from the village to investigate Orphee’s death wearing a tuxedo? No apparent reason. Similarly, why does Death’s assistant borrow a watch from a dummy planted in the audience to replace the missing “chronometer” in Death’s killing machine?

Cocteau’s original text indicates that the watch should be borrowed from a live actor planted in the audience, the implication being that the audience itself becomes an accomplice in Eurydice’s death. The use of a dummy obviates the very meaning of the gesture.

Barker also makes a bad choice at another crucial point in his otherwise fluent translation. Early in the play, the horse dictates a portentous line that prefigures the plot: “Martyred Eloquence Redeems Dear Eurydice.” Orphee takes it for sublime poetry. But unless you already know the Orpheus myth, the words are opaque.

In the original, the line is a simple declaration: “Madame Eurydice reviendra des enfers “ (“Madame Eurydice will return from Hell”). Cocteau, who was given to puns, used the acrostic from the first letter of each word as an ingenious plot device. By opting to keep the acrostic in English, Barker strains for effect and confuses the issue.

Compounding the problem, he makes up some fussy, self-conscious lines of his own to explain his literary devices and puts them in Orphee’s mouth: “Is eloquence to be martyred, or is it used here, itself, as a metaphor, a personification? And the shape of the whole line, which comes to rest on that beautiful, dear name. . . .”

The words are no less opaque, however, except that Orphee’s self-congratulation as he condescends to explicate the horse’s poetry to Eurydice seems to have spilled over to the translator.

There is some good news, though: This overproduced, generally lifeless staging lasts only about 90 minutes.

‘ORPHEE’

A play by Jean Cocteau produced by the UC Irvine School of Fine Arts with the Severin Wunderman Museum for the Cocteau Centenary Festival. Translated, directed and choreographed by Stephen Barker. With Mark Nash, Sonya Sweeney, Stephen Cox, Bob Feeney, Caryn Morse, Adam Mencken, Stephen Jacob, Scott Hayes, Rex Slate, Nancy Rosa, Daniel Brosco and Jeremie Basmajian. Art direction by Douglas-Scott Goheen. Lighting by John Martin. Composition by Paul Hodgins. Sound by Paul Hodgins and Eric Wright. Tonight through Friday in the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery at 8. Saturday at 6 and 8:30 p.m. Tickets: $8. Information: (714) 856-5000.