A trumpet heralds the start of the play. The sound of laughter gives way to dialogue between a man (Bruno Pesenti's sad Pierre) and woman (Catriona Morrison's intense Violaine) counterpointed by choral music. Their faces are lit like apparitions emerging from blackness. The man whispers to us, and music reinforces the theme of suffering with Christ. How leprous he looks! She comes forth, mostly in grey, to introduce her family and the characters of the community.
The story, in brief, is that Violaine's father Anne (Lionnel Astier, austere in the role Jouvet created) wants her to marry Jacques (strong Herve Gaboriau). But her sister Mara (M. E. Pourtois, expert at feigning innocence) always insinuates herself sneakily into mood and action. She covets Jacques and tries to win over her mother (compliant Patrice Vereil) in gossipy sessions, punctuated comically by the choir. An instance where Anne must mete out justice prefigures the eventual "trial" of long-suffering Violaine, who contracted leprosy by -- out of compassion -- kissing Pierre. Both death and, on Christmas Eve, a miracle of life coming from death, come about after a series of scenes set by Claudel's poetry and by vocal and instrumental music.
Music helps achieve much-needed fluidity but also overextends length, along with the tendency to stop the action for near-tableaux or use spaces widely apart for scene changes. (Violaine's death seems to take, rather than lead to, an eternity.)
It was Claudel who wanted the actors in his play to be musicians, and the glory of this production is that it gives him both.
