Three Plays: The Young Lady from Tacna, Kathie and the Hippopotamus, La Chunga by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B
Authors: Mario Vargas Llosa
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be inappropriate for Kathie to dress, when she’s in her little attic, in the Bohemian style of Saint-Germain in the 1950s: black turtle-neck jersey, tight-fitting trousers, stiletto-heeled boots. The costumes Ana and Juan wear need not be so precise. Unlike Kathie and Santiago, who are characters of flesh and blood, contemporaneous with the action, they only live in the minds
and the imaginations of the two protagonists. They exist in so far as they are projections of the protagonists’ memories and fantasies. Their subjective, if not to say perceptual, nature should perhaps be subtly suggested in the way they dress, but any outlandishness or exaggeration should be avoided. One possibility is that, as Ana’s and Juan’s thought-processes, gestures, speech and names fluctuate in accordance with Kathie’s and Santiago’s recollections, so might their dress, if only in small details – such as the acquisition of a hat, a cloak, a pair of spectacles, or a wig – to emphasize the metaphorical, volatile nature of their personalities. The same might happen with Kathie and Santiago when they shed their identities and assume new ones, as a projection of either their own or the other’s fantasy. But none of this should be carried beyond the bounds of credibility; the characters should never seem grotesque or like circus clowns – Kathie and the Hippopotamus is not a farce, and should not be performed as such. It is in the subtext, the inner workings of the characters’ minds lying at the root of what they say and do on stage, that we find elements of farce.
The action of the play exceeds the conventional limits of normal life: it takes place not only in the objective world but also in the subjective world of the characters themselves, as if there were no dividing line between the two, and it moves with complete freedom from one to the other. Any exaggerated speech, gesture or movement, any distortion of reality such as we find in slapstick comedy would be counterproductive and out of place here: the play’s intention is not to provoke laughter through any crude stylization of human experience, but, by using the combined techniques of humour, suspense and melodrama, to lead the audience imperceptibly to accept this integration of the visible with the invisible, of fact with fantasy, of present with past, as a separate reality. Objective life becomes suffused with subjectivity, while the subjective life of the individual acquires the physical and temporal tangibility of objective reality. Characters of flesh and blood become to a certain extent creatures of fantasy, while the phantoms that emerge from their imaginations become creatures of flesh and
blood. The deepest concerns of Kathie and the Hippopotamus are, perhaps, the nature of theatre in particular and fiction in general: not only that which is written and read, but, more importantly, that which human beings practise unwittingly in their everyday lives.
Visual effects can be helpful in the staging of the play, but it is primarily the use of music as a background presence that can evoke most effectively the different atmospheres – Paris, Black Africa, and the Arab world – that is to say the exotic appeal of a good part of the story.
It may not be superfluous to add that in this play I have tried, as I have in my novels, to create an illusion of totality – which should be understood qualitatively rather than quantitatively in this case. The play does not attempt to paint a broad panorama of human experience but seeks to illustrate that experience itself is both objective and subjective, real and imaginary, and that life is made up of both these levels. Man talks, acts, dreams and invents. Life is not just a rational catalogue of events – fantasy and ambition play their part as well. It is not the result of cold planning – but also of spontaneity. Although these two aspects of human experience are not entirely interdependent, neither could do without its
and the imaginations of the two protagonists. They exist in so far as they are projections of the protagonists’ memories and fantasies. Their subjective, if not to say perceptual, nature should perhaps be subtly suggested in the way they dress, but any outlandishness or exaggeration should be avoided. One possibility is that, as Ana’s and Juan’s thought-processes, gestures, speech and names fluctuate in accordance with Kathie’s and Santiago’s recollections, so might their dress, if only in small details – such as the acquisition of a hat, a cloak, a pair of spectacles, or a wig – to emphasize the metaphorical, volatile nature of their personalities. The same might happen with Kathie and Santiago when they shed their identities and assume new ones, as a projection of either their own or the other’s fantasy. But none of this should be carried beyond the bounds of credibility; the characters should never seem grotesque or like circus clowns – Kathie and the Hippopotamus is not a farce, and should not be performed as such. It is in the subtext, the inner workings of the characters’ minds lying at the root of what they say and do on stage, that we find elements of farce.
The action of the play exceeds the conventional limits of normal life: it takes place not only in the objective world but also in the subjective world of the characters themselves, as if there were no dividing line between the two, and it moves with complete freedom from one to the other. Any exaggerated speech, gesture or movement, any distortion of reality such as we find in slapstick comedy would be counterproductive and out of place here: the play’s intention is not to provoke laughter through any crude stylization of human experience, but, by using the combined techniques of humour, suspense and melodrama, to lead the audience imperceptibly to accept this integration of the visible with the invisible, of fact with fantasy, of present with past, as a separate reality. Objective life becomes suffused with subjectivity, while the subjective life of the individual acquires the physical and temporal tangibility of objective reality. Characters of flesh and blood become to a certain extent creatures of fantasy, while the phantoms that emerge from their imaginations become creatures of flesh and
blood. The deepest concerns of Kathie and the Hippopotamus are, perhaps, the nature of theatre in particular and fiction in general: not only that which is written and read, but, more importantly, that which human beings practise unwittingly in their everyday lives.
Visual effects can be helpful in the staging of the play, but it is primarily the use of music as a background presence that can evoke most effectively the different atmospheres – Paris, Black Africa, and the Arab world – that is to say the exotic appeal of a good part of the story.
It may not be superfluous to add that in this play I have tried, as I have in my novels, to create an illusion of totality – which should be understood qualitatively rather than quantitatively in this case. The play does not attempt to paint a broad panorama of human experience but seeks to illustrate that experience itself is both objective and subjective, real and imaginary, and that life is made up of both these levels. Man talks, acts, dreams and invents. Life is not just a rational catalogue of events – fantasy and ambition play their part as well. It is not the result of cold planning – but also of spontaneity. Although these two aspects of human experience are not entirely interdependent, neither could do without its
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