There’s a theme in Marguerite Duras’ semi-autobiographical novel about the objectifying gaze. Looking back at her 15-year-old self living in what was French Indochina, when she engaged in an illicit affair with a man 12 years her senior, the author sees a girl whose sexual desirability is in her very presence. “I’m used to people looking at me,” she writes, knowing her attractiveness is not in what she says or does, but in what others see in her.
And it works two ways. Whether because of her age at the time or the passing decades since, Duras gives us the scantest details about the girl’s lover. He is Chinese and the son of a millionaire. He is prone to weeping and feels oppressed by his father. That’s about it. We don’t even learn his name. He is the love object. He asks her whether she is attracted to him only for his money; it isn’t quite her reason, but it’s as good as any.
So there is a logic to presenting this stage adaptation not as a straight play but as a dance-theatre hybrid. A collaboration between choreographer Fleur Darkin and director Jemima Levick, using the combined forces of Scottish Dance Theatre, the Stellar Quines company and the Lyceum, the production uses dancers to turn the audience into voyeurs. We look from the outside in at an affair that remains enigmatic; a fuzzy recollection of teenage impressions, intense, out of reach, unexplained.
Only Susan Vidler, as the narrator, speaks directly to the audience, her tone measured, graceful and lyrical. She is joined beneath the white drapes and cherry-blossom ink drawing of Leila Kalbassi’s set by dancers who are essentially objectified. Whether it is Amy Hollinshead, light-footed and free-spirited as the girl, Yosuke Kusano, tall, dreamy and distant as her lover, or Francesco Ferrari and Kieran Brown, boisterous and athletic as her brothers, they remain unknowable.
There are voices associated with each of these characters, but they are not their own. Rather, their speech is pre-recorded, like disembodied memories echoing around the auditorium and imposing themselves from above. It’s an intriguing technique and a fair approximation of the mix of narrative viewpoints adopted by Duras herself, even if it works only fitfully, flattening the dialogue as often as it creates mystery.
What it fails to do, in particular, is raise the emotional temperature. There’s little heat in this tale of physical desire, despite the protagonists’ feverish passions and the humidity of the Mekong. (The lighting by Emma Jones turning the girl sepia in the “muddy light of the river”.) We are kept at one remove; the presentation cool and controlled, elegant rather than wild.
Adventurous though the collision of forms is, the production is often neither dynamic enough for dance nor dramatic enough for theatre. With its lively modern-day soundtrack of stripped-back French and English-language pop (including LCD Soundsystem, Timber Timbre and Beirut), it has frequent bursts of expressive choreography, not least between the battling brothers, but also low-voltage moments that are too reflective to suggest very much is at stake. You appreciate it as a good-looking experiment, but it’s one that keeps the lid on its passions.
•At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 3 February. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
