Agatha / Savannah Bay

by Marguerite Duras

SAVANNAH BAY

Written for legendary French actress, Madeleine Renaud, this play explores questions of identity, aging, and the fugitive memory of personal tragedy. A young woman desperately desires to find out the truth about her mother. Her interrogation of an old woman (Madeleine) reveals secrets and sorrows that had been carefully stowed in the past...

AGATHA

An empty house, its walls bare, a window open on a winter sun, a deserted beach nearby, where no one will go. A brother and a sister, dressed in all variations of the color white, are tearing themselves off from the impossible, telling each other, over and over, the devastating violence of their incestuous love, remembering, remembering...

Genres: Plays

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1992

About the author

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, (4 April 1914 -3 March 1996) known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker.

Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Reviews

[Mina-Louise]

Agatha:
Only Marguerite can write so many feelings in such short, exact sentences.
The silences are palpable. The silences speak. The dialogue kills. Moves.
Fictional, but I can feel the pain as pleasure and the pleasure as pain— nearness is both, and leaving both unthinkable and the only way forward. The word sister bringing nausea. Broken- shattered- familiar. Their age seems stuck, their lives moved on without their permission almost. Limitless, personal. Re-telling, re-membering, constantly re-feeling their incestuous love.
“You have the good fortune to live an unalterable love, and one day to die from it.”
Duras’ genius is undeniable.

Savannah Bay:
Played to delirious audiences, read by this delirious young woman (in Duras’ words, between 20 and 30).

Marguerite inhabits language. Actually. She breaks down and creates language. And all we can do is observe. Try to move in where she inhabits it. The spaces created. Fail, but happily witness.
I think her plays are her most forceful. Most human. Being a play it was created to be inhabited. To take human form. To forcefully communicate, because all that is are dialogues, and silences, and song. And all you as a reader has to do is listen to the dialogue, and be moved. Listen to the silences, and hold your breath.

Read on a flight to Geneva, drinking a terrible Rioja.

[Alec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was this going to tell me about love (pain)? Sure. In one way or another. But sincerely, and without fear. Taking risks. Well I accept it. I read for a reason. Shock me. Show me that we cannot stay when we must go. It is impossible to stay. We're dying. So this is how it goes. So this is where it happens. In rooms, between silences. Incestuous. So. But I found something in this, I did. Read Agatha. I don't know if it was love. Duras, you...

Through the pain, sometimes we see in the darkness, near death, what we saw in the light.

I want to know, I think, or I want to ask questions but don't think I will.

[Kaleb Rittenhouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

agatha is a fine drama, dramatic indeed, and well suited for the stage. an inspiration, in fact, to much of my own writing, and perhaps one day i will see it staged though i'd love more to portray the role of he. twisted incestuals.

[EMO O · Rating 5 out of 5]

"After the Sea"

[Van · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read Agatha. Not Savannah Bay.