Existential questions and the art of the novel
Susie Mesure talks to author Yasmina Reza about Anne-marie the Beauty, the latest of her books to be translated
Yasmina Reza is one of the world’s most successful playwrights, best known for her smash hit Art, which ran for eight years in the West End from 1996, conquering the world with its “Emperor’s New Clothes” take on contemporary art. But she is also a deft novelist, skewering the same sort of middle-class foibles on the page as on the stage. In the mid-2000s, she spent a year shadowing Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French presidential candidate, for her book L’aube, Le Soir ou La Nuit (“Dawn, Dusk or Night”).
Her latest book to be translated (by Alison L Strayer) from her native French into English, Anne-marie the Beauty, straddles both written worlds. Reza calls it a “long short story” but says she always knew she would adapt it for the stage. And indeed, it opened in March 2020 at La Colline, one of France’s five state-supported theatres, close to Père Lachaise cemetery in the east of Paris – but lockdown forced it to close after just four performances.
The premise for this exhalation of a story, over in 64 pages, is simple but its themes are deep and universal. “Destiny, time running out, loneliness,” says Reza. “Existential questions remain my point of entry.” Anne-marie, an ageing also-ran actor, is in reflective mood after the recent death of a friend, recounting the story of her life to an unnamed interviewer. “My life was a near miss,” she says.
Despite being thrilled with stage version, Reza says it “bothered” her that people might only think of Annemarie as a play; novels are more widely read – even when your previous plays include God of Carnage and Life x 3. Deciding which to write depends on how she feels, she says. “Do I want to be alone or to see people? Am I planning social activities to accompany the work, or not? If I want to have fun, travel, and hear my texts in different languages, I would be more inclined to write a play.”
The success of Art – which Business Week magazine estimated to have taken more than $300 million on its global travels – elevated Reza to rockstar status in theatrical circles. The late Sir Sean Connery tried to buy the movie rights after his French wife Micheline saw the play in Paris but Reza refused. Instead, Connery helped her to bring the play to London, sparking a long relationship with director Matthew Warchus and setting her up to add an Olivier award in Britain and a Tony award in the US to the four Molière awards she won in France.
Despite all her achievements, I ask if she minds never having had a play performed at the prestigious Comédiefrançaise, the world’s longestestablished national theatre. “That’s a question that only interests journalists!”
The trouble with writing things people want to read or see is people tend to want to know more about the person behind them – and Reza, who was born in Paris in 1959 to Jewish parents, isn’t a fan of getting too personal in interviews. In fact, she has admitted to giving false impressions about her background, claiming it was much grander than it really was. (Eventually, in 2005, she told the French literary magazine Lire she had lied: “I reinvented my life… I hated the intrusion into my life and the questions about my privacy, my parents, the place where I was born, or where I grew up.”)
She answered my questions over email, via her publisher, Seven Stories, and her translathe
tor, Strayer. Reza, who hates to relinquish control, then checked what Strayer had written before I saw it. Language will always be a barrier for anyone writing in a different tongue and Reza has said before that she isn’t one for blindly trusting translators. For her English plays, she insists on Sir Christopher Hampton, a masterful playwright in his own right who translated Art and others, but she has less say over who translates her novels. “I’m even more afraid of translations,” she says of her anxiety about new releases.
Do translators get enough acknowledgement, I wonder. “It’s very delicate, this question of translators… When they do a good job, they certainly deserve more recognition,” she replies. (The ellipses are Reza’s; I’m left imagining her… biting her tongue?) Her last novel to be translated into English, by Linda Asher in 2019, was Babylon, which is about a casual evening party that winds up a tragedy-cum-farce. (The protagonist, Elizabeth, worries about getting older; so at 62, she buys anti-ageing products recommended by Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett while hating herself for doing so.)
Female lead characters have been a later-life departure for Reza, who initially stuck to men. “I felt more protected speaking through male characters whom I could feed with personal elements that no-one would recognise,” she admits. “And then I freed myself of this fear. I can also say, because it’s fashionable, that I freed myself from gender.”
English-speaking fans will be hoping her latest novel Serge, about a Hungarian Jewish family retracing their past to Auschwitz, which came out in France in January, appears in translation soon. Getting the title role is a promotion for Serge, a character who has popped up in all of Reza’s fictional work, ever since her real friend Serge bought a contemporary painting that inspired Art – which features, yes, a main character called Serge who buys an apparently white canvas for 200,000 francs to the bewilderment of his friends.
Blink and you’ll miss him in Anne-marie, where he crops up in a throwaway line about an old lover who drove a Matra-simca, a 70s sports car, and hated to be contradicted. “The literary Serge has an independent life,” she points out.
As does Reza, all thanks to the immense success of that first hit.