Features Q&A and Interviews Published 28 March 2011

Gene David Kirk

Taking time off from his role as Artistic Director of Jermyn Street Theatre, Gene David Kirk talks to us about his role directing the upcoming world premiere of the 1980 Tennessee Williams play A Cavalier for Milady at the Cock Tavern, middle-American morality, and finding ways around Nijinsky.
Daniel B. Yates

So how do you present to audiences now what was shocking then, given that we are, post-In Yer Face, kind of exhausted, and there is no moral middle-America or bourgeoisie to scandalise.

Well Cavalier is not that kind of play.  It is more of a fantasy play.  I mean it’s 1980 for goodness sake.  It’s more about people buying into the theatricality and the storytelling, and the parallel lives of him and Rose, Nijinsky and his brother Stanislav.  But what it does do.  Well it does one of a couple of things.  It shows the harridans, the women in the play, all about 60, as complete sexual beasts, pests, always going out looking for young men.  And this is part of Tennessee Williams’ life, so he’s exposing himself here, through character – so this buys into your morality question –  looking for the elixir of youth.  So putting that on in America in 1980, what does that say about the people who frequented the plaza at the time. Yes, that would’ve been very shocking.  Moreover he wrote, it is argued that he wrote, the character of The Sitter as a black Southerner.  And it was another reason for the play not happening, was the problems they were having with race and the North South divide, at the time.  So that issue is in there.  But the biggest issue, for me, is that he wrote it for Nureyev to play Nijinsky, and things happened and Nureyev couldn’t do it, but that was the plan.  And the over time people became afraid of it because, y’know, how do you get someone to play Nureyev playing Nijinsky.  And my point is that you’ve taken it from the perception of the play.  What you have to do is take it from the perception of the character, because it’s her apparition.  So it ain’t Nureyev, and it ain’t Nijinsky, it’s who she sees to be Nijinsky through photographs – not trying to find a Nijinsky and not trying to find a Nureyev.  So that all got in the way of it  happening, so that is why it remains to this date, the only published, never-produced piece.

You’ve talked about recurring themes, and Nijinsky and Nureyev.  Something people don’t perhaps usually associate with Williams is dance, but there’s a dance in his first play, Blanche’s proposal dance in Streetcar, and a ballet dancer in this, a Cavalier.

And The Two-Character Play is very much metred by music as well, and that’s almost structured as a dance of death, a danse macabre, they are dancing around each other, it has that kind of movement with it.  And it’s interscored with musical episodes.  But in Cavalier he very much specifies that it’s to Arensky’s piano duet, one piece of dance, which is of course classical.  But what I want to introduce artistically later is a piece from Afternoon with the Faun, because it’s through his contemporary use of the classical training that Nijinsky became so famous, worldwide, so that very physical formula, he developed after the absolute technical supremacy he had as a ballet dancer, must to my mind be part of the journey of this play.  In addition Afternoon with the Faun is a metaphor for rape.  Now, in her apparition of Nijinsky, Nance, so called because Williams was called Nancy by his father, she wanted to have a physical contact with him, and he points out “well you can’t do that, an apparition is only in your mind, I’m not really here” so that through the metaphor of Afternoon with the Faun she realises she will never know any kind of penetrative love or activity, with an apparition.  So at that point she chooses to go to the back step – might remind you of a certain character from a certain play – with a candle and waits for a Cavalier of her own.  So through that process she has learnt something and is prepared to step outside and grow up.  But I’m inserting that, because I think we need to see both sides of Nijinsky as well; the absolute classical into the contemporary, because his journey was incredibly important.  And I think Tennessee Williams and Tom Erhardt [agent for the Williams estate] would forgive me for that if  they were in the rehearsal room, because there’s something wonderful about the expression of dance, not in a worthy way, but there’s a narrative in dance, that I think when you choose to serve a play as a “theatrical piece” in inverted comments, you can use all the elements of theatre you can, without overloading it in order to tell that piece.


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Daniel B. Yates

Educated by the state, at LSE and Goldsmiths, Daniel co-founded Exeunt in late 2010. The Guardian has characterised his work as “breaking with critical tradition” while his writing on live culture &c has appeared in TimeOut London, i-D Magazine, Vice Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and works in London E8, and is pleasant.

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