SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE
Two plays by Edmond Rostand in English versions with a preface and introductions to each play by Sue Lloyd:
The Woman of Samaria (La Samaritaine) and The Last Night of Don Juan (La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan)
Genge Press, UK, 2015 Price £12.00
These two contrasting plays share the same message about the power of pure love.
The Woman of Samaria and The Last Night of Don Juan are also separately available on Kindle.
Sacred and Profane Love
These two contrasting plays share the same message about the power of pure love to transform human beings.
The story of The Woman of Samaria is taken directly from the St John Gospel. Sarah Bernhardt starred in this moving and poetic play, written for her and first performed earlier the same year, 1897, which later gave us Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.
In The Last Night of Don Juan, Rostand's version of the Don Juan legend, Rostand imagines that the archetypal seducer has been given ten more years of life by the devil. But now the devil has come to claim him. Can a woman's love help Don Juan avoid eternal damnation?
La Samaritaine was written in 1897 for the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. Edmond Rostand was just twenty-nine years old, but he was already displaying the talent for the theatre that ten months later would make him famous world-wide with the amazing success of Cyrano de Bergerac.
La Samaritaine, first performed at Easter 1895, was a great success with both public and critics, thanks to Rostand’s lyrical verse, Sarah’s presence and thrilling voice, and the visual beauty of the costumes and settings, enhanced by the music of Gabriel Pierné. It became a favourite part of Sarah Bernhardt’s repertoire. The eminent critic Émile Faguet described the play as a “triumph of tenderness, and of emotion full and sweet with religious sensitivity”. Apparently even the cast had tears in their eyes as the final curtain fell.
To visit our page on The Woman of Samaria, please click here
Unlike Edmond Rostand's other plays, La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan (The Last Night of Don Juan), focuses on the destruction caused to human beings and their souls by a cynical, negative attitude to life. The archetypal seducer is presented here without any admiration for his exploits. He is shown to be incapable of true love even when it is offered to him. Lacking any human worth, he will spend eternity as a puppet.
Don Juan wastes his talents and potential and lives solely for his own pleasure . He seduces women and debases human love to nothing more than the sexual act. Throughout Rostand’s work, such solely physical love is always shown as negative and destructive, a selfish distraction from creativity and duty. Pure love, on the other hand, has a redemptive quality: Rostand’s heroines are all transformed by such love. But when Don Juan is offered the chance to be redeemed by the pure love of a woman, he does not take it.
La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan is as fresh and pertinent today as when Rostand wrote it, and well worthy of being rediscovered by our own cynical and amoral times.
To visit our page on The Last Night of Don Juan, please click here
Francis Phillips warmly reviewed Sacred and Profane Love in her book review for the Catholic Herald (February 2016). She enjoyed these plays so much that she was also moved to write in her blog about “The French playwright who teaches us lessons for the soul”.
Here is part of what she wrote:
“In The Last Night of Don Juan, the eponymous hero is offered a last chance to be saved by the pure love of a woman among the thousands whom he has seduced. ... It makes for wonderful theatre and even in translation the language is eloquent and memorable. Rostand knew that before God “cuts you down” ... a human being will have rejected, as Don Juan does, every offering of grace that might have redeemed him.
“I would love to see this play more widely known, either staged or read aloud by a drama group. Sue Lloyd is to be commended for her endeavours to introduce Rostand to a modern audience. As long as human beings think they can play with their destiny, his is a subject that will never become dated”.
Read the full review here.
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