A one-man show charting the creation of Victor Hugo’s great Guernsey novel is being re-staged on the island to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the book’s publication.
Les Travailleurs De La Mer (The Toilers Of The Sea) was published to great acclaim in 1866, telling Hugo’s worldwide audience the tale of Guernseyman Gilliatt’s Herculean efforts to rescue a stricken ship, for love.
Guernsey-born actor Patrick Dickson has devised a two-hour, solo production, first seen here in 2019, which puts the novel’s development into the turbulent context of Hugo’s life of exile at the time.
‘The premise is that Hugo’s been walking the cliffs and walking the beaches and talking to people, as he usually does, and picking up ideas like a magpie,’ says Patrick.
‘So he’s got all these ideas stored in his head, and during the play we see him in his lookout on top of Hauteville House, where all these ideas begin to coalesce to form the story of Les Travailleurs De La Mer. He acts out some scenes, he experiments with characterisation and he explores the science necessary for poor old Gilliatt to get the steam engine out of the wrecked Durande and bring it home to St Sampson’s to win the hand of Deruchette, who he’s obsessively in love with.’
The titan of French literature is obviously at the centre of Patrick’s production but he brings in several other figures as well.
‘It’s just me performing but I play – Jeez, I’ve never actually counted – about a dozen characters, about half of whom are key, distinguishable figures in the story,’ he says.
‘There’s a chorus as well and sections where he’s writing letters to Juliette – his mistress/secretary – his publisher Lacroix and his very good friend Matthew de Putron.’
Patrick brings together the novel’s plot and Hugo’s own experiences in the months leading up to its publication. Already having lost two of his own children – Leopold in infancy and Leopoldine through drowning – the Hugo family was in mourning again when, shortly before they were due to marry, his son Francois-Victor lost his local fiance Emily du Putron to tuberculosis in 1865.
‘Her father Matthew, Hugo’s friend, was a ship-owner like Mess Lethierry in the novel,’ Patrick explains.
‘I try to draw parallels between Hugo’s personal life – his struggles being stuck on a rock in the Norman Archipelago – and his writing process and the actual story that he writes.’
Patrick draws my attention to the death symbolism Hugo employs at the conclusion of the novel, which I won’t spell out here for fear of spoilers, even though the novel’s now been around for 160 years.
He also points out a curious parallel between his own Guernsey experience and that of the literary giant.
‘I lived here exactly 100 years after Victor,’ he says, ‘because I came here in 1955 – he came here in 1855 – and then I went away to be a student in 1970, where he left in 1870. But of course he kept coming back and so have I. I’ve still got friends here and here I am again.’
He explains that his mother died at the age of 99 last year and his sister has taken on the house, meaning he still has ‘a foothold’.
‘It’s lovely to be here,’ he says.
‘My grandson just arrived on the ferry from St Malo and it’s just so beautiful. I fall in love with the place every time I come back here.’
Patrick had been living in Australia for several years when he first picked up a copy of The Toilers Of The Sea and read it.
‘I’d heard other people telling me it had really spoken to them because it was about where they came from,’ he tells me, ‘and I had that same visceral experience when I read the book because I recognised the geography, the people, and living in Australia made it all the more intense because I wasn’t home.’
None of his Guernsey friends had read it ‘because it’s bloody hard going’.
(I resist the temptation to interrupt – but I’ll do so here – and remark that it’s only ‘hard going’ because most translations are prosaic and fail to convey Hugo’s brilliant observations and conceits, and that if only people would try the James Hogarth translation, they’d be fine.)
‘He’s a writer who didn’t have any editors,’ says Patrick, ‘but people in those days wanted as much as they could get – there wasn’t a Gaumont or an Odeon, or Netflix, so they were happy to read these long, rambling stories. For a modern audience, that’s hard work, so I set about abridging the novel down to about 50% of its full length. I keep his style and his indulgences but I cut to the chase and keep the story going.’
Patrick published this abridged version in book form first, because that was a prerequisite for having the rights to produce the audiobook, which comes in at nine hours.
‘But I always had this idea in the back of my head of turning it into a play,’ he says. That took years of visiting the house, chatting to Dr Gregory Stevens-Cox in pubs and picking up bits about Hugo’s backstory – which I knew nothing about, as we were never taught anything about him at school – before I was able to take up the challenge of writing a one-man play.’
The play, which Patrick called The Brainstorm, was first performed in 2019 in ‘a small wooden community hall in the bush close to where I live’ and was quickly brought ‘home’ to Guernsey, where it was well received.
However, further plans to take it on tour around New South Wales were scuppered by the travel restrictions put in place during the Covid pandemic, and the project went into storage until a recent invitation from Victor Hugo Centre operations manager Laura Harrison just after Christmas last year.
The result will be a series of three performances at the Princess Royal Centre for Performing Arts from 2-4 October.
How easily or otherwise, I wondered, did the lines for a two-hour show come back into Patrick’s head after that seven-year hiatus?
‘Some of the words came back very quickly,’ he says.
‘It’s very well written because it’s a collaboration between Patrick Dickson and Victor Hugo! As a writer, if you keep coming across a line that you keep stumbling over, you can change it and probably solve the problem. It’s a bit like a neglected garden – you have to prune everything back, rediscover the pathways, clean it all up and get a fresh perspective on it.’
And what are the theatrical demands of putting on a solo show?
‘In an ordinary play, you respond to what you’re being fed by the other performers,’ Patrick says.
‘In a one-man play, it’s more like knowing your way from the Torteval Church to St Andrew’s Church via the back lanes. When you’re sitting backstage on your own, terrified, about to go out, you can’t imagine that you’ve got it all in your head, but you just need to take the first step, and then the next follows.’
The Brainstorm, written and performed by Patrick Dickson, is showing at the PRCPA from 2-4 October. Tickets can be purchased from www.prcpa.gg for £20 or £12 for concessions, plus booking fee. The event is sponsored by Schroders Wealth Management/Cazenove Capital, and a portion of the revenue from every ticket sold will help support the creation of the Victor Hugo Centre.
