A young woman is describing a drive up through the mountains to attend the funeral of a stranger. She seems tense but determined to recall the exact details of the trip, to tell us what happened - even down to that overly friendly guy at the gas station who said he'd drive her if he had the time.
He'd wanted to pump the tyres as well, but she couldn't wait and drove on, watching through the rear-view mirror as he waved to her. It's as real as if it were happening before our eyes. She knows the road has begun to climb, the altitude is testing her ears. And there's a green pick-up truck. It drives behind her long enough to begin to bother her, but then it finally passes and is gone - only to drive back to where she has pulled in at the edge of the dirt track.
Welcome to Raymond Carver country, the bleakly human place in which the American writer, who died 13 years ago on Thursday, carefully arranged his troubled characters, people left behind by life. As with Claire in this famous story, So Much Water So Close to Home, they usually speak directly to us in near-monologue form, often by either the light of the refrigerator or the glow of the television. The black-haired woman in the black sweater continues telling us the story, her face mapped by emotions: the horror, the hurt and the fear. The driver of the pick-up truck, "a crew-cut man in a blue workshirt in his early 30s",walks up to the by now locked car, raps on the glass, asks if she's OK, tells her to "roll down the window, open the door" . . . She is terrified; his concern is ambiguous and soon becomes sinister.
Claire goes back to the beginning of the sequence. The car radio announcer tells us it's hot and getting hotter. Music begins and Claire sings along to Don't Fence Me In. Simple but symbolic, this woman is trapped by many things, including the shocking events of her husband's recent fishing trip.
Wednesday morning and what could be a small town somewhere in Oregon or Washington State is, in fact, a traditional country dining-room in a 200-year-old house on a narrow, steeply sloping road in a French village.
Mericourt is about 90 minutes by road north-west of Paris. The woman telling her story is an actress in the early stages of rehearsal of Judith Burnett's stage adaptation of Carver's story, due to premiΦre at the Kilkenny Arts Festival later this month. Gare St Lazare Players, an international theatre company based in Paris, has performed in Ireland before. Its founder and artistic director, Bob Meyer, a visual artist as well as an actor, is involved with the Allihes International Centre in West Cork.
The players are sitting at the table working through the script. Burnett's directing style is relaxed, if deceptively relentless. She is funny and fast-talking, easing everyone along, and is enthusiastic about the various TV commercial voiceovers and weather reports that actor Christian Erickson has devised to superimpose upon the main narrative, cleverly adding texture. The voiceovers are part of Meyer's concept, that of creating a sense of the murky, mindless, TV-watching, beer-can-popping society Carver's hapless characters inhabit.
So we are watching a bunch of expatriate Americans recreate blue-collar America in a room in France. The atmosphere is informal, yet also competitive, Erickson and Lee Delong are natural wits, sharing an inventive, original flair in humour. They are quick, trading one-liners and facial expressions, taking direction but also adding a few laughs of their own.
They know each other well and how each works. They are also aware it is very early in rehearsal, the play is still evolving, the script is still pliable, and here they are being watched by someone from a newspaper who has already slid the notebook back into her pocket. An overly earnest reporter could really get in the way. The play will begin with either Meyers or Delong (a West Virginian and still just about Southern with a great voice) singing a Tom Waits song, Georgia Lee.
To an outsider, it seems glamorous, an independent American artistic commune with an idealistic belief in the magic and imagination of theatre. But independence is expensive. English-language theatre is limited in France. Most of these actors make their living from voiceover work. "I'm the English-language voice of Air France," Burnett later remarks.
Energy and ideas, vocal music and sound effects are traded back and forth across the table. While Carver's story is being respected by a group whose approach to theatre is textually based, it is clear that these are actors with a text, not a group of Carver fans gathered for a celebration. It is about the business of transferring the written form to living gestures and spoken words. As Burnett points out: "It's not easy. Carver is such a great writer, but he doesn't write dialogue. To adapt this story for the stage, its structure must change." There is also the question of additional writing.
"Where do you add little bits of dialogue, without compromising Carver?" she says. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Corbett - a Californian who arrived in Paris about 10 years ago to complete her studies in French literature, and stayed - is living the character of Claire. Corbett's open, vulnerable face is perfect Carver.
She is not yet script-perfect, frequently calls "line please", but she has quite brilliantly entered the mind and emotions of Claire, a woman with an already shaky grasp on stability. A wife and mother of one, Claire has had her problems, a kind of breakdown, and is aware of her mother-in-law's silent judgments. Corbett's gentle edginess is ideal for conveying her despair at the moral confusion surrounding her husband's non-committal attitude to what happened during his fishing trip.
Carver's stories explore relationships and the small mistakes that destroy lives. So Much Water So Close to Home possesses an added dimension. Although Carver is a most moral writer, this story revolves around a moral dilemma created less by action than by apparent disregard. Claire is more distressed by husband Stuart's not having told her on his return that he and his buddies arrived at their fishing spot, discovered a dead girl floating in the river and decided, as she was dead, to fish. Stuart's blatant lack of concern for the dead girl horrifies and disgusts Claire, who knows she must attend the girl's funeral service.
"Bob told me to read the story it must be, what, four or five years ago," says Burnett. "Both of us were so struck by it we wanted to do something with it."
It is the horror of what the men don't do - the fact that they stay, pitch camp and fish the river, even washing their plates in the water only feet from where the floating body has been secured (possibly by Stuart) to a tree - that unsettles a reader or a theatre audience more than if the men had raped and killed the girl.
Stuart is convinced he has done nothing wrong - "She was dead, dead, dead, do you hear?" he argues. Claire's shock angers him, and actor Steve Croce is working hard at conveying the cocky Stuart's crude bewilderment. Across the tension of the domestic scenes, Burnett wants to draw in the voices of the fishermen, trading jokes. Stuart moves between rage and confusion. Eventually the dead girl acquires a name when a news bulletin cuts across the couple's bickering with news of her identification. Just as Stuart can't understand what all the fuss is about, Claire can't accept that Stuart and his friends just left her there.
"People tend to be divided in their reactions as to the moral implications of the story," says Burnett, adding that the heart of the story is Claire's turmoil, her withdrawal from her husband.
Is Burnett aware that this group of American actors is bringing an American short story to the stage for an Irish audience and that Carver never wrote for the theatre? "Yes, that's a part of it. I feel most strongly that we have to be true to Carver. It is difficult, this cultural thing, and I feel it is often overlooked."
But as to Gare St Lazare Players, founded by Meyer in Chicago in 1983 (its name inspired by a Chicago bistro, not the famous Paris station), how intensively do the company members work together? While the Carver rehearsal continues, another member, Irish actor and Beckett performer Conor Lovett, whose Molloy and Malone Dies have helped establish the company with Irish theatre audiences, is working on the final part of the trilogy, The Unnameable, in a garden shed away from this house and down several flights of stone steps.
During an intensive rehearsal period such as this, company members do seem to walk in and out of each other's houses. Meyer and Erickson live in Mericourt, Delong has just purchased a house here, while Lovett and his director wife, Judith Hegarty-Lovett, are currently renting across the road. Burnett, the daughter of a professor of French, came to France many years ago. She laughs and says: "I am the same age now Raymond Carver was, when." The members eat together. It is summer and people keep arriving. It's like a long-running party, except it's not. They all have other projects. Burnett lives in central Paris, as does Corbett, who also has a full-time office job and a small baby. Erickson has recently completed filming Born Identity with Matt Damon. Last year he featured in Luc Besson's The Messenger. They all speak good French, though not good enough to fool the natives, and in French projects are invariably cast as foreigners. The atmosphere may seem casual, thanks to the small pool, the communal trampoline, the badminton breaks and the long, misty views of the Seine, but it is far more deliberate than the smiling surface and the gags imply. Corbett and Croce have spent many hours rehearsing under Burnett in Paris.
The community setting and the use of "players" seems idealistic and evokes romantic images of medieval troubadours able to laugh, cry, sing and dance.
"There are no members," says Burnett. "Everyone can join. I guess we are people who choose not to fit in in order to be able to create the sort of theatre we want to do. I hope that doesn't make us sound like loose, anarchic, hippy, neo-Wobblies - I believe theatre is a holy thing. It is."
The Gare St Lazare Players' production of So Much Water So Close to Home is at Nero's, Kilkenny, from August 14th to 18th. The Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from August 10th to 19th (056-52175 or www.kilkennyarts.ie)