When Adrian Hornsby moved to Paris in 2001, he had a couple of problems. First, he wanted to write. Second, he needed a place to sleep. If the latter dilemma proved more urgent, leading the aspiring author to seek shelter in the genial confusion of the historic Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, it nevertheless helped solve the former: two of Hornsby’s plays — “Three Parts” and “Marion Davies and the Moon” — will premiere in June, produced by George Whitman’s landmark shop/library and the Paris-based artists collective known as Kilometer Zero.
For this transplanted Englishman following in the footsteps of a century of writers from James Joyce to Allen Ginsberg, whose publishing careers and creative energies were nourished first by Sylvia Beach at the original Shakespeare & Co. and later by Whitman at the shop he opened near Notre-Dame cathedral, what Hornsby calls the “fiction” of the expatriate Paris moment is very real indeed.
What attracts artists today to the capital Hemingway romanticized in “A Moveable Feast” and Henry Miller fantasized in “Tropic of Cancer”? While dismissing as “rubbish” those writers’ “Paris” — as a comfortable place where it was easy to feed both their artistic wells and their bellies — this 26-year-old Oxford graduate unconsciously cites in his own response the same qualities that enchanted the “Lost Generation”: its small size, beauty and reasonable cost of living. Convinced however that a writer writes, period, no matter where he might live, Hornsby sees himself rather in the tradition of the British poet W.H. Auden, who believed that the poet must leave the world of men to live in the world of words and there live in men through words.
Auden’s credo comes to mind when listening to what Hornsby terms the “abstract landscapes” and “tone poems” of his two plays; one marvels how this boyish waif of a man is able to conceive the wealth of experience and the complexity of emotion displayed by his characters. Both pieces explore love’s mysterious budding followed by its painful, equally puzzling demise, through a series of dialogues, monologues and further monological dialogues in “Three Parts” and through sequences of filmed images and their onstage echoes in “Marion Davies and the Moon.” If Hornsby’s experiments with the intimate relationship of knowledge and memory flirt with the theories of another expatriate, Gertrude Stein, this is less a nod to the monsters in his closet than a compliment to the rich and subtly stirring writing of this newest Parisian talent.
“Marion Davies and the Moon” June 10-15, “Three Parts,” June 17-22, Tue-Sat 7pm, Sudden Théâtre, 14bis rue Ste-Isaure, 18e, M° Simplon, tel: 01 42 62 35 00
