French Letters

To quote Carrie Fisher, talking to George Lucas about the script for Star Wars, “You can write this shit, but you can’t say it.”

Some of the cast, myself included, have had a bit of trouble with some of the words and names used by Our Beloved Writer/Director in the play. OK, the play is set in France, has French characters and name-checks a lot of French revolutionary history, but be fair! My line

Let me remind you of the execution of Robert-Francois Damien*, after his attempted assassination of Louis XV**

hardly trips off the tongue. Then again, one of the cast is himself French, and he doesn’t know La Marseillaise, because he was never into sport, and he managed to avoid National Service.

Ah well, it’s nothing practise won’t help. I suppose I’d best get to it…

* pron. ‘ro-bare-fran-swar dammy-on’. There’s a similar problem with L’Ami de Peuple (‘lammy duh per-pla’)

** Fifteenth. der!