Miss Jairus

When Michel de Ghelderode was a child, his mother told him of a little girl who died and was about to be buried. just as the lid lowered over the girl's coffin, she opened her eyes. She had been in a trance. By awaking in time, she saved herself for another death.

The idea of postponed death, of several deaths marking the same life, transfixed de Ghelderode's imagination and animated what de Ghelderode called "my climatic work,"Miss Jairus, A Mystery in Four Tableaux.

Who is this Michel de Ghelderode? And why, if he wrote Miss Jairus in 1934, did it receive its American premiere only last Friday?

De Ghelderode (1898-1962) could justly be called an excellent obscure Flemish playwright if his works had not become so highly regarded in French, Belgian, and German theatre in the last decade. This year George Hauger completed two paperback volumes of translations of his plays, and Tufts apparently adopted Miss Jairus as soon as the English text became available.

De Ghelderod's plays have come to the stage slowly partly because the element of Mystery, common to them, makes them difficult, and partly because of their author's refusal to explain or promote them.

De Ghelderode sets Miss Jairus, for example, in the house of a merchant in medieval Bruges. As the merchant Jairus and three old hags who are professional mourners keep a drunken vigil over his dead daughter, the daughter's finance suddenly brings in a sorcerer who has been confounding the local clerics and physicians. The finance, Jacquelin, cannot stand to lose Miss Jairus and demands that the sorcerer awake her.

When the sorcerer does, Blandine objects to being awakened; she no longer knows her mother, father, or fiance. Neither truly alive nor truly dead, she begins the long, sleepless wait for another death.

The ringing of distant bells, the coming of Death, as Lazarus, the whining and howling of mourners and a premonitory dog are all techniques of mystery and horror de Ghelderode has used in other plays. They combine in Miss Jairus with a plot-skeleton which is parable. In the final act, on Easter, as Miss Jairus dies, the townfolk commemorate the Holy Day by taking the sorcerer to a hill outside the town and crucifying him.

De Ghelderode thus denies ordinary logic on his stage. He thereby enables himself to play on his audience's emotions in ways that ordinary logic would forbid. By expanding the range of responses which he can try for, however, he also creates difficulties for the players: When the action lacks logic, the actors lose one guide to interpreting their lines.

Among the horrible and the melodramatic episodes, for example, de Ghelderode intercalates what he calls "comic and burlesque corrective potentialities"; a coffin maker, for example, consoles Jairus on Blandine's death before Blandine has, died and insists that she must be dead because he heard is rumored. Without some consistent guide, these corrective potentialities may be abused; when Jairus laments, "What ludicious mishaps around the most dramatic of happenings," they may seem indeed ludicrous, instead of strangely horrible.

The text of the play fails to make clear just how seriously or lightly one should take a line such as Jairus's: "In these distressing moments-so distressing that in one's heart of hearts one becomes sublime because of them-one would like to find soaring sentences, well-turned phrases, with an eternal meaning, that prop up the spirits." In a Mystery like Miss Jairus, such a line strikes me as more an ironic comment than a Gilbert-and-Sullivan sally; it is over such lines that I would take issue with the performance at Tufts University.

De Ghelderode showed little inclination to co-operate in settling these questions. "You are free to reject a poetical work of this kind," he said of Miss Jairus in 1951, "which proceeds from the irrational, from clairvoyance-but you haven't the right to ask me to justify it. I didn't ask what you call the public to go to see this undesirable play which I didn't ask anyone to put on."

I would only disagree with de Ghelderode that Miss jairus is an undesirable play-it is a difficult play. Instead of commenting in detail on the performance, I simply rejoice that at last a competent director, Donald C. Mullin, and cast and staff are giving the play a careful and imaginative production in this country.