The Hunchback designers do not play the space for its obvious associations with a cathedral interior, but instead configure the audience around a central playing area, representing Hugo’s lovingly described Île de la Cité.
TJL’s performance space is a roughly-fitted former warehouse in Minneapolis.
The intertextual richness of the production is further enhanced by quotations from mummers’ plays, puppetry, and commedia dell’arte-creating a performance assemblage which is, on the whole, enormously successful. TJL’s latest work adapts Victor Hugo’s novel along with liberal and intelligent quotations from the 19 American film adaptations. Théâtre de la Jeune Lune is an ensemble of theatre artists known for their adaptations of classic literary texts. Esmerelda is the virtuous heroine at the novel’s center she is also the ground for fatal battles between church and state, soldier and artist, priest and suppliant. Quasimodo’s love for the gypsy girl Esmerelda pits him against his surrogate father, cathedral archdeacon Dom Frollo, whose repressed lusts for Esmerelda manifest themselves in sadomasochistic schemes that send her finally to the gallows. Quasimodo is a quintessentially Romantic figure, around whom Hugo built a sprawling critique of tyranny, philistinism, and the cruelty we visit on each other in the name of God and country.
This memory-trace of Anankh was the inspiration for the fictional Quasimodo, Hugo’s so-called “ideal of grotesqueness,” the hunchback bell-ringer of Notre-Dame in 1482.
In his 1831 preface to Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo invokes a word hand-carved in a dark recess of one of the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral: Anankh (“fatality”). Esmeralda (Sarah Agnew) and Paquette (Barbara Berlovitz Desbois) in the Théâtre de la Jeune Lune’s stage adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, directed by Robert Rosen.
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