Director Sarah Giles reflects on Violetta in LA TRAVIATA

 Director Sarah Giles reflects on Violetta in LA TRAVIATA

There’s a famous 1950s Kurosawa film called Rashomon. The story itself is fairly straightforward. Set in the woods, the plot follows the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband. The same story is told four times, each from the perspective of a different witness: first the bandit, then the woman, then the samurai, and finally the woodcutter.

Each version of the story is remarkably different, and yet all recount the same events. Perspective changes everything. It’s why we revisit the classics over and over.

La traviata is based on The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, a novel loosely inspired by Dumas’s real-life relationship with the Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis. The novel tells the story of the fictional courtesan Marguerite and her lover Armand, framed through Armand’s perspective as he recounts their relationship to an unnamed narrator. Verdi and his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, based La traviata not directly on the novel, but on a stage adaptation of it that they attended together.

Our Violetta and Alfredo sit within this lineage: another Marie and Dumas, another Marguerite and Armand. Across novel, play, and opera, we encounter the same woman three times over — her story repeatedly retold, each time shaped by the perspective of the man who loved her.

It struck me as obvious that the only person we never truly hear from is the woman at the centre of the story herself. So what happens to the story when it is told from her point of view?

Prompted by this question, I turned to a rare first-hand account of a Parisian courtesan’s life in the nineteenth century, discovering an extraordinary memoir by a renowned figure known simply as Mogador. That she was able to publish her diaries at all was an almost unparalleled achievement for her time.

Mogador’s story is not dissimilar to that of Violetta Valéry, Marie Duplessis, or Marguerite - the crucial difference being that she survived, against all odds.

Her accounts are chilling. Women of a certain class were left with a choice between abuse and abject poverty, or selling their bodies for money.

“For the woman who has fallen so low, there is no family. Your parents disown you and try to forget you… Marriage is out of the question. The man who would want to unite his fate with yours hesitates before the prospect of asking the police prefect for your hand. Motherhood? Your child’s first kiss is torture, its first word a reproach, because you cannot identify the father… If it is a boy, when he becomes a man he will scorn you. If it is a girl, you are afraid to keep her near you. Sometimes, tired of self-reproach, I would blame society. I would tell myself that it is barbaric to allow a sixteen-year-old child to enter into such a despicable contract… The law, which does not allow her to manage her property until she is twenty-one, lets a sixteen-year-old girl sell her body.”

The men who visited these brothels had families, wives, high positions in society, and respected jobs. They were able to enter and exit these worlds without consequence or “staining” their character. For the women, however, these places were prisons. Once your name was registered, it could never be removed; once a prostitute, always a prostitute.

Mogador writes of her first weeks in the brothel:

“It is difficult to believe that human beings could become accustomed to these dreadful prisons. I had not been there a week when I had only one thought: getting out. The visitors were so distinguished and so rich that, deluded, I imagined that I would quickly find someone who would help me escape. But time passed, and this unknown protector did not come. On the contrary, each day my chains grew heavier.”

The double standards and hypocrisy of the time are breathtaking - and incredibly familiar. Roe v. Wade is a case in point. La traviata has much to say to us about contemporary gender politics: about which women we believe are worthy of “redemption” and happiness, and how we expect them to behave.

Examining the present through the prism of another era remains a profoundly useful exercise. It is why we continue to re-stage the classics: we can learn so much about ourselves by looking to our collective past.

Written by Sarah Giles