Closing the Omnibus Theatre’s 96 Festival, this play is a semi-fictional story looking at the story of French writer Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, better known as George Sand.
A hugely popular writer in her day, surpassing even Victor Hugo, George finds the novelist dealing with a bit of writer’s block and irritated by the piano playing of her (off-screen) amor Frederic Chopin.
Léa des Garets has created a ‘faction’ that both celebrates the real Sands and finds parallels with current discussions about gender identity. What makes a man a man, or a woman a woman?
She also plays the lead and really reaches deep into the conflict of a woman who sees herself as a man in a world in which her estranged husband hounds her for money and her fluttery agent dismisses her work as “little lady stories.”
While spending time with another (supposed)Â lover, celebrated actress Marie Dorval, Sands is persuaded to pen her most personal play yet, Gabriel, in which a young Italian prince, a gentleman with the best education, discovers he was born a woman.
Directed by Rute Costa, George is sparsely but imaginatively staged. As well as playing Sands, des Garets plays Gabriel and gives both a strutting bravado and assured centre. In a jacket and waistcoat, all is well with the world in their eyes.
On the soundtrack (designed by Jamie Lu), we hear dissenting views of Sands being ‘hermaphrodite’ or ‘the worst of women’. Making the story of George Sands in 1839 relevant to 21st century discourse proves little has changed.
Delyth Evans’s set has a desk and chair, moved as required as Sands assembles her play and imagines scenes from it, while sheer curtains allow for costume changes and some shadow play (lighting designed by Marie Colahan) to conjure up controlling male characters.
Iniki Mariano’s Marie is all femininity, with dresses and a soft heart, although she still freely spars with a George who sometimes bewilders her. Their relationship is characterised by cute code (“kisses on your beautiful paws”).
Conor Dumbrell is the only man in the whole cast/creative team and plays all the required male parts from the fey editor and the freeloading husband to Gabriel’s tutor and cousin. He’s funny but also revels in his position as a man in a man’s world.
Each man seeks change and control. For them, George/Gabriel is impossible, strange, a freak, and eventually, in the eyes of literature, a character to be annihilated. Even Marie finds George’s male attire ‘an obsession’.
George is an interesting play, using Sands’s autobiography and correspondence between her and Dorval to reinvent a vibrant 19th century woman who defied convention.
You can see George at the Omnibus Theatre until 14 Jul with tickets here.
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Image credit: Marie Campain