Jacques Huisman

Towards the end of Timebends, Arthur Miller casts a backward glance at his 1978 encounter in grey-weathered Brussels with the American consul-general who obligingly got him a new passport to replace the original forgotten in Paris. The diplomat then swapped stories with the playwright about his own former problems with the State Department in the McCarthy era. The anecdote smacks of the author's justified glee in view of another 'bending of time' that makes him 'feel good to have lived this long'. The occasion of the visit was the twenty-fifth anniversary production of The Crucible in Brussels, a commemoration that triggered recollections of more somber days but also provided the opportunity of the first meeting of Miller with Jacques Huisman who had been at the head of the Théâtre National de Belgique for thirty years by then. During that period he had championed Miller's work so that only Molière's had been seen more often on the National's stage. He could claim credit for the French speaking world premières of Death of a Salesman in 1952, The Crucible in 1954, The Price in 1968 and The Creation of the World and Other Business in 1974. Jacques Huisman answered my questions in his home on the outskirts of the Forêt de Soignes in Brussels. On the table I had put my copy of Timebends. HUISMAN

I like the book for its balance and serenity. It is not a settling of accounts except perhaps with Elia Kazan who deserved what he gets and, then, most of all with Lee Strasberg. I saw him in New York at work on Marilyn Monroe. He was directing her in a scene from Anouilh's Colombe. His sole aim was to reduce her to tears in front of forty or fifty voyeurs who attended the course. It was scandalous and totally useless: he was not a teacher but a guru and the attendants were disciples not pupils. I have known many of these acting instructors who entertain very intimate relationships with their pupils; they are part priest and part doctor, dominating and doping those who come to them for advice or instruction.

DEBUSSCHER

From Arthur Miller's description of her, Marilyn Monroe emerges as a considerable actress. Did you have that impression?

225HUISMAN

There are no miracles in this field. Marilyn Monroe had a stunning figure but also an enormous sensitivity which probably destroyed her in the end. Careers like hers are never to be ascribed to chance alone; an international reputation, and a lasting one at that, is never achieved without tremendous talent and she had it.

DEBUSSCHER

It is symptomatic that starting with Timebends we should immediately focus on Marilyn Monroe. You expressly forbade any question about his private life at the press conference in 1974 when The Creation of the World and Other Business premièred in Brussels.

HUISMAN

Yes, out of respect for the artist and the man I wanted the newspaper people to stick to enquiries about the play at hand or his work and artistic views in general. But they got around to it obliquely. I was struck then by the equanimity with which Miller answered the questions. The initial embarrassment was mine rather than his and it evaporated altogether in view of the simplicity with which he faced the press. His wife Inge Morath confirmed that the subject was strictly unavoidable. It still is, obviously.

DEBUSSCHER

Your acquaintance with Miller's work starts much earlier, in 1952.

HUISMAN

I had secured the rights from his agent in Paris, a Mr Rothschild I believe, to produce Death of a Salesman which I had read and for which I shared Raymond Gerôme's enthusiasm. Gerome was perfectly bilingual and familiar with the English-speaking theatre. He was in part responsible for the National's long tradition of English and American plays. The production of Salesman was a passionately interesting piece of work and went very well until, one day, the agent called with the shattering news that Mr Miller did not want us to do the play. At least, not unless Peter Brook agreed to supervise it. I had every reason to welcome this suggestion having had an opportunity to see his work on Romeo and Juliet the year before at the Old Vic. I had met him after the performance to express my admiration and ask what is probably the most stupid question on earth 'How do you manage? What is your method?' to which he replied 'Trial and error', a lesson I have always cherished for its pragmatism. Peter Brook came to Brussels in the final stages, for the last four or five rehearsals, and made useful and important suggestions. We have remained very good friends ever since that time.

DEBUSSCHER

Do you remember what his suggestions were about?

226HUISMAN

Not with any degree of precision but I know that they all went in the direction of greater naturalness. He had not directed Death of a Salesman before but offered advice that the actors could immediately integrate and feel comfortable with because it tended to do away with mannerisms or artifice.

DEBUSSCHER

Did Death of a Salesman appear to you as difficult to describe in terms of genre?

HUISMAN

No. As far as I was concerned it was one of the first in a long series that I did at the National of contemporary works that reflect the problems of the public for which they are produced. In 1952 the problems of Willy Loman, who loses his grip on reality and is subsequently thrown out of his job, were real enough for any member of our audience.

DEBUSSCHER

Were you aware then, as we are now, that the play was not strictly naturalistic, that it had overtones that took it well beyond the anecdotal?

HUISMAN

I produced it as a strictly contemporary play. But I became aware gradually that it was a poetic play, a work for all times. It is indeed a classic drama. And our almost two-month long run in Paris, which was greeted enthusiastically by the French critics, helped to convince me of this. Had it been experienced by the French as a strictly American tale they would have reacted negatively, as they always do; worse still, had it struck them as a specifically Belgian production, they would have rejected it with hostility, as is often the case. Our success in Paris indicated that the play transcended its geographical location to become an exemplary story. The relationships between husband and wife, or father and sons, and between Willy and his brother were immediately perceived as those within a very ordinary family and therefore to be found in all societies under all latitudes.

DEBUSSCHER

This appears clearly from the reviews both in Brussels and Paris. The critics indulged in considerations about 'modern tragedy' or 'the tragedy of the ordinary man' wondering if the genre could exist without a hero of traditional 'tragic stature'. But all seem to have discerned immediately that beyond his American-ness, this 'commis-voyageur' was rather the archetypal Voyageur, the existential traveller, a modern version of Everyman.

HUISMAN

It is often the case with major works that they grow out of apparently limited, anecdotal material to reach a wider, even universal applicability. Most classics are that way. The play is neither 227place- nor time-bound. It exemplifies, among other things, the moment in life, which comes sooner or later for everybody, when existential strength is flagging, when readjustment to changing realities, inside and outside the self, becomes imperative. That it should take place in the United States, at a time when the American Dream is devitalised to the point of being reduced to a frantic search for success or material possessions, is unimportant. One could easily find equivalent pressures bearing on the protagonists in different cultural or geographical contexts. The atmosphere in 1952 in Brussels as well as Paris was basically anti-American yet the reviewers of the conservative Le Figaro as well as the communist L'Humanité found reason to praise the play which further suggests that it also transcends ideologies of right and left.

DEBUSSCHER

The critics unanimously praised your work on Death of a Salesman but all seem to have been surprised, not necessarily pleasantly, by what they call the cinematographic structure of the play by which they mean the oscillation in time, the flexibility of space and the simultaneousness of several locations, the apparent close-ups on characters or groups, the movement from one plane of reality to another. Was all this so innovative?

HUISMAN

The reviewers may have found this revolutionary. It was not. And the audience had no difficulty adjusting to the shifts. We had an outsize calendar in Loman's living room that allowed for swift changes in time and as to the scenes with Ben, changes in light - we had an intense white-blue light instead of the then customary orange-yellow for those scenes - sufficiently indicated that the action was midway between dream or reminiscence and reality. In those matters the audience can be trusted to adapt more readily than reviewers.

DEBUSSCHER

In January 1954 you followed suit with La chasse aux sorcières this time adapted by Herman Closson. At the very end of that year it opened in Paris under the title of Les sorcières de Salem. Neither of these tides were faithful to the original: The Crucible.

HUISMAN

To this day I am puzzled by the tide Miller chose for this play and I have never had an opportunity to ask him what he really meant with that crucible. But I myself gave it its Brussels tide: it seemed quite obvious to me that a witchhunt was its central theme. In a country like ours which had to suffer from the Spanish Inquisition the parallels were immediately apparent; the contemporary relevance was as blinding as was Tyl Uilenspiegels's 228under the Nazi occupation. Here was a play recognisably about the freedom of conscience and the dark forces that attempt to repress that fundamental right. But nobody could suspect that by making explicit the originally mysterious title I was about to create trouble for Miller. He had been invited to attend the opening in Brussels and was refused a passport to leave the United States. Miller himself did not expect this and the incident created quite a stir in Brussels. Two years later, as I was preparing for my first trip to the States, I was made to wait until the very last minute to get a visa: the witches were still haunting us. And yet it had been an evening full of irony: the première was a gala organised by the Belgo-American Association to which the Ambassador came with a number of officials. Ours was after all a 'National' theatre and accredited diplomats usually attended our gala evenings. In fact the Ambassador's absence would have created an even greater scandal to which must be added that not all Americans present in Brussels were in favour of McCarthy, whose days were numbered by then anyway. The success of the play in Brussels confirmed a number of them in their feeling that the nightmare was almost over.

DEBUSSCHER

The newspapers devoted a good deal of space in their political columns to the 'passport affair', which was good publicity for the play, and the drama critics unanimously praised your production. Once again, the Parisian reviewers came to Brussels.

HUISMAN

Yes, and they were followed quickly by Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and Raymond Rouleau who liked the play well enough to decide to do it in Paris. They opened in December that same year.

DEBUSSCHER

A number of critics also went to Berlin to see Karl Heinz Stroux's version which seems, more than yours, to have laid the stress on historical, almost documentary accuracy.

HUISMAN

I was never interested by the folkloric, the local colour aspect of a play. I have always considered that a director's task was to make evident, even in plays of or about the past, the contemporary relevance of a drama for the audience. That is what I would call its 'classical resonance'. That was not very hard in this case; the antiquarian's preoccupation with surface accuracy would here only obscure the central concern of the play by diverting attention to the unimportant historical details to the detriment of the fundamental truths.

229DEBUSSCHER

Some of the revievers suggested that by comparison with Tennessee Williams's plays, which Brussels had been discovering alongside those of Miller, this work lacked 'poetry'.

huisman

It is difficult to say exactly what they meant. To me its poetry resides in the unspoken as much as in what is expressed, in the depth of its human sympathy, in its rejection of realism and its universal applicability.

DEBUSSCHER

You were so attached to the play that you decided to do it again almost twenty-five years later in 1978. Was your conception of the play fundamentally different in the altered circumstances of the seventies?

HUISMAN

Unfortunately it was not and I blamed myself for it. Another director could have done a better job of recreating the play. I was merely copying myself at so many years' distance. I have often regretted that Miller should finally have seen this version rather than the first. I had a similar experience only one other time, with Romeo

and Juliet

theatre is an art of the moment, eminently non-repeatable and you should never look back.

DEBUSSCHER

Did the play at first appear to you as illustrative of a specific ideology?

HUISMAN

Neither of the left nor of the right. It is not an anti-American play, any more than Death of a Salesman can be reduced to an anti-capitalist tract. It is, as I said, a plea for freedom of conscience and maybe that is more highly respected on the left than on the right. But then, dictatorships can be found at both ends of the political spectrum.

DEBUSSCHER

With The Price, which you directed in 1968, one gets the feeling that it is a less socially - or politically - oriented play.

HUISMAN

I have never considered Miller's plays as belonging to one ideology or another. What attracted me to them first was their profound humanity. They may afterwards appear as revealing Miller's special social consciousness. In The Price existential pain, the sheer emotional misery of the two brothers and the wife of one of them an important character by the way - implies a harsh assessment of the society in which they live. By the end of the sixties it had become abundantly clear that the left had no model to offer, no doctrine that would reduce social inequalities. That is why Solomon, the used furniture dealer who is also the philosopher of the play, casts a derisive eye on the brothers' aborted reconciliation. As he listens to the laughing record, which he has purchased with the rest of the 230family possessions, he breaks into uncontrollable laughter himself, a 'pure' laughter, prompted not by immediate circumstances, but by a deeper sense of tragic ridicule, of the senselessness of our petty quarrels and their unending repetition. Timebends reveals that the play is rooted in autobiography, Walter and Victor hardly disguised versions of the Miller brothers, but all plays spring from the personal experience of their author and, by that token, albeit for different reasons and to different degrees, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible would qualify equally well as autobiographical documents.

DEBUSSCHER

The play attracted the Paris reviewers to Brussels again. J. J. Gautier in Le Figaro praised your work and that of the actors but found the stage too large for the play.

HUISMAN

That was probably a well founded criticism. Although the set by Denis Martin representing the attic was full of superb details, it was entirely too big for a drama as intimate as this; also when you have that much space at your disposal, you tend to have your actors fill it and their movements contribute to dissipating the tension which is integral to this family confrontation.

DEBUSSCHER

Claude Olivier in Les Lettres Francaises talks of a 'flattened out' direction by which he means a deliberate refusal on your part to break away from the 'psychological rut'.

HUISMAN

Yes, he is absolutely right. My first concern has always been with the psychological truth of the characters. And I still believe that this approach works best with Miller's plays and should precede any other consideration.

DEBUSSCHER

Did this psychological preconception influence your decision not to direct The Creation of the World and Other Business yourself and entrust it to Walter Tillemans in 1974.

HUISMAN

Yes, this new play was written in an apparently mythical or mythological vein and such a referential work required a man of greater fantasy and inventiveness. A 'flattened out' production would have been detrimental to a play of this kind. Not that it is a purely comic play: it starts on a funny note but as it progresses the tone changes and the colours darken. The final scene with Adam asking for pity - that is for man in general, for mankind - reveals the seriousness of Miller's message. Creation is as dark in its existential intent as any of its predecessors. It bears re-reading and has not yet found, I am afraid, a production that does it justice. He did it as a medieval play: the set designer John Bogaerts had imagined a series of mansions simultaneously present on the stage. We were all 231anxiously waiting for Miller's reaction since this was his first visit ever to the Théâtre National. This is one of my fondest memories: he seemed genuinely pleased with our work and said so during the press conference at which he appeared perfectly happy and relaxed in spite of the embarrassingly personal questions of the newspaper people.

DEBUSSCHER

He also expressed his gratitude on that occasion to you personally for having championed his work all those years. Was that an oblique comment on the way he had fared in Paris?

HUISMAN

Maybe. You see, Paris tends to Parisianise whatever they lay hands on. Some plays, particularly English and American, are too idiosyncratic for such a treatment and as a result look strangely hybrid when submitted to it. That explains, to a large extent, their lack of success in Paris.

DEBUSSCHER

Miller says somewhere that in the theatre the devil always plays an important role. On the stage, he always gets the best lines. And God, the last word ...

HUISMAN

Who could add anything to that?

DEBUSSCHER

Over the years, Miller's physique has changed, not only with age.

HUISMAN

Yes, with time his face has mellowed and his voice deepened. They are now the face and voice, someone said, of a modern Abraham Lincoln, a revered kind of a sage, a recorder of the tribulations of his period and his nation. In times of trouble, personal I mean, intimate even, I have turned to him for counsel or services and I have never been disappointed. Over the years our professional relationship has evolved into a personal friendship.