Translated from French by Jonathan Griffin, Susannah York, David Furlong & John Naughton.
Published 2021. Paperback, 124pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617551 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In 1900, Paul Claudel, then a young 32-year-old diplomat, had an affair with a married woman, named Rosalie Vetch, while he was French consul in China. This love affair had a huge impact on him, and he wrote Partage de midi , a semi-autobiographical play, as a catharsis. Because he was both a devout Catholic, and a diplomat representing France abroad, he was warned by his confessor at the time not to publish his play, nor reveal any part of the true story. So, from the moment he finished writing Partage de midi in 1905, Claudel immediately banned it from being published or staged. He’d already had several of his plays published but this one was to remain generally secret for 42 years – until his friend Jean-Louis Barrault made him change his mind in 1948. By this time, Claudel had become a member of the Académie Française, and he was such an important figure as a diplomat that he’d even been on the cover of Time magazine when French ambassador in the USA. After his retirement, his plays were successfully produced year after year in France. Barrault had done some of the productions, and convinced Claudel to allow him to produce the play. Claudel agreed but revisited it and completely rewrote the end. From then on, there were two versions of the play.

This translation of Claudel's verse play is a mixture: Jonathan Griffin's original, dating back several decades, followed by Susannah York's intervention and her attempt to fashion a "1906 version" – previous translations having been confined to the 1948 text. Closer to the present day, director David Furlong and translator and academic John Naughton have brought the text to completion and the whole is now performable in this guise.

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