INTERVIEW



Your play entitled The Sister of Zarathustra was presented during the HotINK festival in New York city (along with your play: We Were Sitting On The Shores Of The World) How did this project get started?

José Pliya: The project was put together by my two American translators: Judith Miller (The Sister) and Philipa Wheele (We Were Sitting…). They submitted my two plays to the jury of the festival and although it’s an extremely rare scenario, both texts got selected for readings.

Why write a play on the character of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche? Can you explain the meaning of the title: The Sister of Zarathoustra?

JP: It began with a commission from the former administrator of the Comédie Française, Marcel Bozonnet, for an actress, Catherine Hiégel. I was commissioned to write a “historical” part with a strong personality that this grande dame could incarnate. The project was quite developed when Marcel Bozonnet was relieved of his functions. The project was stopped but the text was already written. By seeking a strong “historical” character, I discovered the incredible story of the philosopher’s sister’s life. The title came quite naturally, as a reference to the masterpiece of the famous German thinker.

Does a “biographical” play require a particular kind of writing? How do the biographical and imaginary elements balance?

JP: As you can see, I systematically put quotation marks around “history”; I do the same for “biographical” because I eventually quickly dissociated my writing from history and biography, which are present only in a fragmentary way, as pseudo-truthful benchmarks. In theatre, truth is not very meaningful. I highlighted what seemed to me most interesting: intimate moments from the life a woman in love, as well as her torments. It is a play about a star-crossed, crazy, delirious, abnormal love, because it is incestuous. Therefore, the imaginary prevailed completely.

As an author, how do you react to the linguistic – as well as visual – adaptations of your plays? Did you work in collaboration with the translator and the director? Did you notice differences in the American theatre scene and the audience’s approach to your play?

JP: The linguistic adaptation of my plays in English or in other languages always sounds odd to me, but in a good way. It enables me to put things in perspective and to listen to the reading or the staging like a simple spectator. It gives me a disturbing feeling of innovation and rediscovery of my universe. I did not really work with my translators, only for some details. I trust them completely. The stage adaptation is also a discovery: no preliminary work with the directors, just the discovery of the bodies of the American actors inhabiting the “musical quality” that is specific to my language. It is surprising. Also surprising is the reaction of the American public. They can be moved by apparently harmless things and on the contrary remain indifferent to what causes scandal and wonder elsewhere. Interpretation does that, no doubt.

Could you say, like Flaubert speaking about Mrs Bovary: “The Sister of Zarathoustra”, it is me”?

JP: No, except perhaps in what relates to childhood. And it is the same for all my characters: drawing on my childhood, my joys and my wounds, I imagine the weaknesses of my characters, their internal conflicts. As for the rest, this woman is too “monstrous”, too theatrical, to be like me.

José Pliya was born in Cotonou, Benin, West Africa. Playwright, actor, director, and teacher, he holds a doctorate in Modern Literature from the University of Lille, where he also taught. Artistic director of Écritures Théâtrales Contemporaines en Caraibe and former director of the Alliances Françaises of Dominica and Cameroon, Pliya is the author of numerous plays, several of them published by L’Avant- Scène Théâtre, in its Quatre Vents collection. His plays have been produced in major French theaters such as La Comédie Française (Les Effracteurs, 2004); Cannibales (Théâtre National de Chaillot, 2004), Une Famille Ordinaire at the Théâtre de l’oeuvre, in 2004 and Le Complexe de Thénardier at the Théâtre du Rond-Point Champs Elysées, in 2002 and again, at the Lucernaire Theater in 2005. In 2005, José Pliya was appointed artistic director of l’Artchipel, the National Theatre of Guadeloupe, French West Indies.

• La Sœur de Zarathoustra, L’avant-scène théâtre, 2008
• Une famille ordinaire, suivi de Miserere, L’avant-scène théâtre, 2008
• Lettres à l’humanité, Lansman, 2008
• Les Effracteurs, L’avant-scène théâtre, 2004
• Fuir, Editions de Minuit, 2005
• Nous étions assis sur les rivages du monde, L’avant-scène théâtre, 2004