Translating the language of love

Director Wayne Jordan's translation of an 18th-century Pierre Marivaux play as 'Everybody Loves Sylvia,' replete with references to 1980s pop songs, is about love in all its cliches and disguises; but it's not all froth and frisson, he tells SARA KEATING

'I THINK WE'RE alone now. There doesn't see to be anyone around." If that doesn't quite sound like the language of love in 18th-century France, director Wayne Jordan will convince you otherwise.

It is the afternoon before his new translation of Pierre Marivaux's 1723 romantic comedy The Double Inconstancy, renamed Everybody Loves Sylvia, opens to the public, and Jordan is pacing around the pink balloon-littered maze of a set that sprawls across the floor of Project's Cube theatre. The bright blue linoleum reflects the sheen of four coloured party bulbs that hang from the ceiling, and as Jordan elaborates on his translation of the play, replete with references to popular 1980s love songs, there isn't the slightest musty hint of period drama in the room.

"I'm not going to say the plays are about now," Jordan says, wading knee deep through the sea of balloons. "Because they're not. But they are about things that still matter to us now. Love, and all its cliches, conventions and disguises. Even though the actors are dressed in contemporary clothes, even if some of the language that they woo each other with is familiar, if our production is set anywhere it is in fairy-tale time, or, if it doesn't sound too silly, in a magical time.

"I've always been interested in the idea that a play is set in a theatre, and this play is set in this room, where we have brought Sylvia to watch her fall in love. I've always been interested as a director in showing that plays are plays, playing with performance as a game, and Everybody Loves Sylviais about all these characters playing the game of love, and that's recognisable across time."

THE PLAY FOLLOWS the fortune of six characters, including the eponymous heroine, a harlequin and a prince, who are trapped in a classic fairy tale conundrum. Faced with the conventional frustrations of flattery, true love and mistaken identities, the characters battle a series of misunderstandings before settling into the inevitable happy-ever-after. The plot is typical marivaudage - a word coined to reflect the labyrinthine language of veiled flirtation and witty wordplay that Marivaux made popular on the 18th-century stage.

However, Everybody Loves Sylviais not all froth and frisson. As Jordan is keen to elaborate, "the twinkling language and the romantic pursuit is really only the beginning of what's happening in the play. Marivaux is really writing about change. His work predated the French revolution by a couple of decades, but the shifting power dynamic is emerging in the plays in a human way. Marivaux was writing to a particular genre, but at the intersection of two traditions - the elegant French comedy and the Italian commedia style - and so he also gives us a darker version of love. So yes, the plays are about love, but they are also about power and class and morality."

For Jordan, the act of translating Marivaux's play from the original French was a particular challenge. "It was gruelling, literally a blood, sweat and tears, job," he confesses, as he takes out a well-worn, blood-stained copy of the play ("I cut my finger one day when I was working"). I actually only have school French, and poor school French, but I got some help with the first three scenes to get a feel for the play and then sat there with my dictionary. Finally I produced a literal translation, and then set about putting my own flavour on it. Sometimes I made mistakes - and sometimes I kept my mistakes because that's fun too - but in part the adaptation is about how to translate something when you don't have the language, when you are forced to use a sort of archaic language that you are not familiar with."

However, the link between translating and directing gave him an extra layer of understanding from which to begin conceptualising the production. "The job of the director is an interpretative one," he says, "and so is the act of translation. The question is how to move from one language to another, and with a play that is all about language - the language of love - the act of translation is fascinating. Any changes that I made came with the understanding of the play as a blueprint for a production - just as Marivaux would have presented his company of actors with the play as a proposal for performance."

That Marivaux worked consistently with a core ensemble of actors at the Comédie-Italienne and later the Comédie-Française in Paris was particularly interesting to Jordan, as it is the way in which he, through his theatre company Randolf SD, also prefers to operate. Founded in 2003 by Jordan and several fellow graduates of Trinity College Dublin's Samuel Beckett Centre, Randolf SD has worked with the same actors for nearly all of their shows, and Everybody Loves Sylviais no exception.

"The idea of the ensemble that Marivaux worked with is probably not all that different from the way that the writers of Friends would have approached their work, where you have a certain idea of what someone will do with a line. Jokes, humour, is often personality based: it is how a line or language or gesture plays with how a character says or embodies it, so you can have a clearer vision of what will emerge in rehearsals. And to be performing the play in the Project Cube - which you could call our home, because we've done every single one of our shows, except our last one, here - means we can come as close to that idea of a company as we can."

Before Everybody Loves Sylviafinishes its two-week run, however, Jordan will begin rehearsals for his Abbey Theatre debut with a second Marivaux rom-com, La Dispute. "It was neither by coincidence nor by design that the productions are happening back to back," Jordan says. "I had been attached to the Abbey as a trainee director for a little over a year and we had been discussing Marivaux, and the Abbey asked if I would be interested in doing Neil Bartlett's translation of La Dispute. I had always been planning on doing a Marivaux play with Randolf SD and when the two happened to fall close together I decided not to change my plans. Anyway, La Disputeis a show that will work much better in the Abbey, and I don't think I could do it with Randolf SD.

'THERE ARE CERTAIN things - even casting choices - which I couldn't make happen without the financial and institutional support that the Abbey can give. With Randolf SD I usually design the work myself - and as much as I enjoy that whole process it began from financial necessity as much as anything else - but at the Abbey I will be working with a professional designer and with new actors, like Karen Ardiff and Barry Ward, as well as some I've worked with before, so it will be a whole new challenge. La Disputeis also a much darker piece - about sex and slavery in this sort of Big Brother-esque landscape - but I suppose in a way translating Everybody Loves Sylviamyself has helped me to make sure that I'm not repeating myself, that they are two different shows."

And in an ideal world - a world that Marivaux himself might concieve of - Jordan's work with the forgotten French playwright will set its own small theatrical revolution in motion, opening up a conversation between the two plays and all those concerns with love and sex and class and power that still resonate with us today.

Everybody Loves Sylviaruns at the Project Arts Centre until December 6th. La Dispute runs at the Abbey Theatre from Jan 9 until Feb 7