THE MAN WHO SKIRTED THE ISSUE
By: Paul Taylor

Given his very full score-card, it's a good job Don Juan wasn't prone to
post-coital depression. Not that there would have been that much time 
for it. As an archetype, too, Juan has been able to keep it up (so to
speak) through nearly four centuries. From Moliere and Mozart to Shaw 
and John Berger, the myth of the insatiable, heartless libertine has
undergone many permutations. What "Juanism" is supposed to signify also
changes. A man who, flatly to some, might seem a prize candidate for
castration, becomes, to the Romantic sensibility, a heroic quester after
the ideal - not a compulsive skirt-merchant but God-defying energy in 
action.

At Stratford now, in a delightfully witty, atmospheric production by
Danny Boyle, you can see the play which established this myth. "The 
Last Days of Don Juan" is a free adaption of Nick Dear of "El Burlador 
de Sevilla" written in the early seventeenth century by the Spanish 
monk Tirso de Molina. Though unrestrainably randy, the Juan who surfaces
here , above all, a cunningly devious trickster. He takes intellectual
delight in sick-joke sexual conquests that maximise the moral bad taste:
betraying a best friend in the lodgings of the King, or gatecrashing
a peasant wedding and bedding the bride. He shows about as much respect
for the supernatural. God may be spying on his hanky-panky, but that
merely makes Him a boring gooseberry. Repentance will have to wait until
he is old and past it.

With eyes that can immobilise people in their arrogant headlight-glare
and his long, thin faintly El Grego face, Linus Roache makes a dashing,
charismatic Juan - always provokingly self-amused and parodying, with
a wonderfully false, lanquishing ardour, the love he cannot in reality
feel. But Roache also shows you Juan, the absolutist. In moments of
heightened emotion, his face seems to glow with an inverted sanctity.
Rigid with stubborn 'noblesse oblige', he would rather die than betray
revulsion when forced to eat, at the Statue's black anti-banquet, such
tempting delicacies as dead men's fingernails. Poker-faced, he crunches
up every last bit.

The most striking modification which Dear has made (and not just to this
play, but to the whole tradition) is changing the sex of Juan's servant.
Here, the Leporello-Sganarelle figure is a woman, Cataline the cook
(hilariously played by Sally Dexter), who traipses after her master,
bruised and battered-looking and wearing men's clothes. This gender-swap
creates problems. You would have thought that a woman's virtue would be
lucky to last five minutes in this job. But it turns out that Juan is
only too capable of resisting his servant, which is pretty deflating
for her. The trouble, though, is that, in Dear's version, Catalina is
called upon to fulfil two functions: to be the disgusted, reluctant 
sidekick who periodically reminds her master of the hellish wages of sin
and, on the other hand, to be the homely, lovelorn woman who is, deep
down, besotted by him. This feels less like a conflict in her character
than a contradiction in her characterisation. Her sex also puts her into
an awkward relation with Juan's victims. Is it heightened outrage or
covert jealousy she feels?

Boyle's production evokes the settings with a lovely economy. The
shadows of ornamental grilles fall on the swan stage making the Alcazar
at Seville look likea tenebrious cage paced by the wheeler-dealing
royals and noblemen. A sly irrevence of mood continually undercuts the
claims to seriousness of the injured. Ranting and tearing off her 
garments, vengeful Dona Anna is upstaged by a pair of workmen chiselling
the feet of her father's statue who stare at one another with a "We've
got a right onehere" expression on their slow-witted faces.

Cheesy incidental music laps cheekily at the edges of solemn scenes. In
fact, you could argue that the balance tips too far in the direction of 
easy comedy. A production which begins with the sound of a couple
reaching a deafening orgasm ends, after Juan's descent into hell, with
the babling of frightened prayers. But it is hard here to treat this
last-minute swerve into piety with due respect.

(Thanks to Rosaleen, who sent this to me! Mari)