Did you know that on his deathbed Paul Gauguin traded his soul for immortality and the ability to “inhabit” and influence future artists? Not many do know that, and neither did English theatre artist Tony Stowers, who migrated to France in 2006 to live, work and re-invent himself. Stowers only found out about Gauguin’s trade with the Marquesan witchdoctor Tioka, when he and Gauguin crossed paths in Pont-Aven and started chatting. Stowers then wrote, equipped, designed, publicised and performed his one-man show Le Fantôme de Gauguin in Brittany in 2009 – all with Gauguin’s help. This is a sampling from their story.

Excerpt from the novel and play by Tony Stowers artes fine arts magazine

Chapter Seven

 “I‘m on the seacoast in a fishermen’s inn near a village of one hundred and fifty. I live like a peasant and I work. I spend one franc a day on food and two sous for tobacco. I accept De Haan’s money because I can do little else but when I look at the money I made hand over fist on the Stock Exchange. I produced nothing and was paid handsomely. Here I produce something beautiful but am ignored. What a world! My paintings and sculpture terrify everyone – they make a great sensation but are terribly difficult to sell.”

“Writing to your wife, Mister Gauguin?”

I turn to see her standing at the door watching me. The wind and rain spit and howl outside. A log fire crackles in the grate. Around us the walls, window, ceilings and doors twist and turn with their golden images – the windows with studies of Breton life, the swan on the ceiling, below the window a quotation from Wagner condemning the artist who works for money, on the mantelpiece a bust of De Haan carved from oak flanked by decorated pots and on shelves each side statuettes of a Javanese dancer and a Negress. The top half of the door is covered with a copy of “Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin” and on the bottom half a portrait. The doors of a cupboard bear my self-portrait and a portrait of De Haan and in the centre of the wall is her large portrait – Mam’selle Henry by De Haan – with a frame I painted but its existence, I fear, has swelled her head.

“This inclement weather lacks inspiration, Mam’selle Henry.”

I stub out my rolled cigarette and she holds the spoon over my glass, drops two sugar lumps onto it and expertly pours the absinthe, dissolving them. I swill it around once and knock it back in three. My gut shudders. She clumps across the wooden floor to the window and blocks it with her portly size. Wiping her hands on her apron she casts left and right.

“Jacob has gone down to the beach to look for crab and, Messieurs Seguin, Filiger and Chamaillard have gone to Quimperle for supplies.”

Sharing Madamoiselle Henry’s bed, Jacob is luckier than most – her girth keeps him warm at night. Serusier, Laval and Seguin are also lodging here but more fluid with their money supplies than I. So long as they pay their bills, I’m lumped in with them and safe as we all share the same heat from the fire and eat from the same pot. Seguin will never amount to much as a painter though – he’s half-hearted. His only brave act in life was throwing in the towel on his job in law to bask in the shadows of the full-timers. He’s a young man but I wouldn’t count on him in a fight. I sense Seguin, Chamaillard and Filiger will all end their days paupers after sacrificing all and gaining no great insights. Chamaillard and Seguin have local friends, Laval and Serusier has enough to keep them and De Haan has a pension. I have zero. Poverty has to be experienced. It’s a gradual, slow physical destruction through poor diet and cold and a psychological cancer in the constant guilt, an embarrassment, avoided by all but the desperate and the poor. King of the Penny Jugglers, I must wait like a servant until I’m offered a smoke, invited to a table to eat, passed down some old clothes. “I’m descended from the Borgias you know?” used to sound so impressive but now it only invites sarcastic jokes.

“Ah!” exclaims Mam’selle Henry, as the sun pokes through the clouds and sends a shadow of the hotel across the road outside.

We live a frugal life. We swim in the sea but it’s usually cold. We talk endlessly, drink and smoke heavily and decorate everything we can lay hands on, from sticks to clogs, plates to chairs. In the evenings we play cards and draughts or work at the easel or we carve wood washed up on the beach. I play the guitar, adequately, the piano badly but then it’s a bad piano.

“Mr Bernard has proposed I write letters to newspapers, articles. He says they pay well. Would you care to hear my efforts, Mam’selle Henry?”

“Why not?”

“Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. Like music it acts on the soul through the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmony of sounds, but a unity is possible in painting that one cannot obtain in music. Like literature, the art of painting says what it wants but says it all at once. When you listen to music or look at a painting you are free to dream. When you read a book you are the slave of the author’s mind. Yet critics are always men of letters, who spend their time defending their own work as if a truly good work does not defend itself. To judge painting and music one must be a born artist.”

“I think I’d prefer the letter to your wife,” she says, looking me full in the eyes. I smile, see the challenge, realize what it is that attracted Jacob to her and why I admire her, having abandoned the life of a servant in Paris to run her own business out here on the edge of the world. It was her experience of city life that enabled her to cope with the notions of art and artists, for in Paris she knew they were important. Out here on the edge of the world, we are suspicious aliens to a Breton people carved from granite that only the relentlessly pounding ocean can wear away. And I’d fuck her – if she’d let me.

“Very well. “My dear, I will not give up my art. My business is art; my capital is the future of my children. The honour of the name I’ve given them will be of enormous value to them one day. My art is nothing at present but will stand out eventually.”

“What kind of a man can abandon his wife and children to live as you do, Monsieur Gauguin?”

“What kind of a person can go through their entire life convinced they have nothing beautiful to offer the world, Mam’selle Henry?”

She looks at me for a few moments and says nothing.

“A letter came for you – Paris,”

She hands me the creased envelope. I open it. It’s from Theo Van Gogh. Vincent has shot himself. Oh Vincent, now you’ve gone and done it . . .

* * *

Back in January 2009 he’d pictured the months ahead vaguely unrolling like a picnic tablecloth: an easy job as a teacher, a stress-free life in his small apartment in quiet Angers, weekend visits to the countryside with friends and the only challenge being the lines once a day.

An balmy Anjou summer arrived in early May but only in June did it ratchet up the heat and turn life into a semi-permanent hothouse for at least three full months of days slender and lean with light, summer shadows, full moons and dawns following sunsets with scarcely a break between, soothed by crickets, cuckoos and owls.

He continued to recite daily, with a little pushing from me of course. Last Sunday in June, for example, made it to Page 6 and then driven out to meet someone and, while waiting, I tickled his temporal and got him from 6 to 8 and one hour later, once he’d returned home, Page 8 to the end – staggered and disturbed but done.

C came up with an interesting idea for the framed pictures: up until then we’d envisioned them hung from the walls and the audience up close, a kind of open space where he could perform. She suggested, instead of mounting selected copies in frames on gallery walls, an easel was set up so each painting could be mounted as the story developed. It was an interesting idea but the “canvasses” had to look like real paintings or as close as possible as anything that lacks authenticity stunts the ability to believe. That evening, about 9 pm and after an afternoon teaching English, we managed a good recital of the lines from very first to very last.

The search, meanwhile, went on for a venue in Angers that would take the show after Pont-Aven. A list obtained from the Town Hall as a guide, for two days he cycled around town looking at various spaces but finding the right one was only a small portion of the battle and it is a battle. By nature, people will always go with what they do know rather than what they don’t know and under the hot, white sun of June, maintaining that philosophy was debilitating. We saw at least six spaces but couldn’t just dive in and say: “Can you give me your space?” we first had to establish if it was the right size and then if it could be rented and then have to prove anything to anybody but could do what he wanted.

With choosing the right paintings, the initial line of approach had been to go through the script and make a list of all the works mentioned, as well as characters that featured in my life and, if the characters that featured in my life were also painted by me, better still. It seemed logical to include only my paintings but how many people knew about Impressionism generally, to place “me” in a context they could relate to? How much of the show had to explain the fundamentals of Impressionism and how the movement started and how much had to simply mention my place in it all? So Edgar Degas’ “Self Portrait”, Georges Seurat’s “Sunday afternoon“ and Louis Anquetin’s “Café de Clichy” suddenly seemed useful paintings to have in the set as they were contrasts from other Impressionist artists. Degas bought a lot of my work and kept me floating for many years, Seurat’s “pointillism” – or The School of Dots as I unkindly referred to it – turned art into a science that made a painting look like a picture in a newspaper but I still had to appreciate the novelty. Anquetin turned up in Pont-Aven a few times, a big fan of Japanese stuff, and it showed.

Stowers’ brain would suddenly go off at tangents and produce ideas but being tucked away in the folds of his grey matter, I could only glimpse their origins. Who are you onstage? Where are you in that context? What is this collection representative of: Tony’s tastes or mine? Or is it simply a random trick? Thoughts and ideas constantly moving into shadow and then light, as we think we glimpse the final finished set and then doubt and see an alternative. Sometimes I could control what he thought and how he transformed his pictures and sometimes I couldn’t. It was infuriating. It is infuriating!

An easel with fifteen mock canvasses would open up the freedom to choose non-art gallery venues and make the show open to just about any room anywhere capable of holding between 20 and 30 people. The downside was the images or the frames wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. As framed images they’d be set at a distance from the audience to such a degree the outlines would be blurred.

“It’s essential that I play in art galleries after Pont-Aven!”

I know that and you know that, but try telling people that who think theatre is playing in a dark room with a stage at one end and everybody facing the same way sitting down – I had the same problems trying to get people to see art in a different way.

As each day went by and each new possibility entered, some instigated by me and some instigated against me, we tumbled between them all knowing that as we rolled, somewhere near the bottom the elements would come together and together we’d be able to make a joint decision to change from the imagined theory into the practical reality. Not having any spare budget for errors caused the stress.

I look into his memory banks to when he first arrived in France almost three years ago at the time of writing this, to his first weeks here: how he had hours rolling away in front of him, like a route-map waiting to be marked. Three years later he was neck-deep in the life – balancing trips to the dentists, teaching 30 irregular hours, having new hours added, visits to the photocopy shop to source images for Gauguin, shopping, teaching privately and spending hours at the computer sending out emails galore and co-ordinating rehearsals for the Shakespeare at the chateau – he’d created. But it was a job we both understood.

He wanted to recreate a short scene in Henry VI reproduced exactly as Shakespeare wrote it: set in front of the gate of the chateau and ramparts of Angers. He met up with the organisers of the event on 27th June. The scene (Act 5, Scene 3) features the Earl of Suffolk, Margaret d’Anjou and her father King Rene – Suffolk negotiates marriage to Henry VI in return for peace across Anjou and Rene retaining his title. Shakespeare had written it as happening before the walls of the chateau of Angers so that probably meant one party on the road and the other party on the ramparts across the moat. Suffolk was English who probably spoke a smattering of bad French, which was why he was sent to negotiate. King René would have been the reverse: pure French with a smattering of bad English. Reduced down to a slow pace the language would have to be shouted almost word for word in order to be audible so this meant rather than performing an entire scene they just performed the minimum of lines.

T found two amateur French actors to help and looked at a way to use porte-voix (megaphones) to shout exchanges across the 50’ of space between the drawbridge and the ramparts. When he tried to communicate these developments to the director of the event he was stonewalled yet again.

As regards trying to find a space in Angers to perform Gauguin after Pont-Aven, he’d managed to get his hands on a list of possible venues: a shop that sold pictures but not really an art gallery, another that didn’t exist at the address on the list, one – a room in a community centre near a language school was ideal but they didn’t rent it and would only buy the show if they could see it – and unless they wanted to travel all the way to Pont-Aven, that was going to be difficult. Two other community centres: one big space, way too big – couldn’t leave the set unattended – and the final space was only approachable by contacting by email. Saw a nice art gallery connected to the University but it was about then we started to think we needed something more than just a flyer – needed photographs, reviews, proof the show worked. That’d take months and then have to wait months more for possible performances.

“I couldn’t. I had to be performing the show fresh from Pont-Aven in September – you might as well have two for the price of one.”

He returned to the Town Hall and through them met a collective of artists who hired a rough and ready old garage near the river. It looked promising and but the sole male opposed him.

“I expect if I’d had long blonde hair and big tits, he’d have fallen over himself to help.”

So would I. Finally, he was directed towards a tiny café/restaurant in the centre of the city – 20’ x 20’ – enough for maybe 15 chairs, some material to cover up the long mirror that filled one wall and re-arrange the furniture taking out the dining tables and replacing them again every night. There was no room to hang all the paintings, unless he spent a day hanging them permanently and the restaurant owner allowed them to hang there day-in, day-out for the four weeks he wanted the show to run, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. Why were you so obsessed with running the show for four weeks? It’s unheard of.

“It’s exactly because it’s unheard of that I wanted to do it. Every performance would get better, people would have less excuse not to see it, I could maximise my earnings and offer something nobody else in town was offering.”

He found a Salle des Fetes in Angers to hire but it was expensive. In Pont-Aven, if he lived there, the Salle Des Fetes would cost him nothing to hire but as he didn’t, it was costing 85€ a day. That meant 9 people a day through the doors at 10€ each – just to pay the hire fee. In Angers, it was 85€ a day but seating was limited and only one show a day because few would want to see the show at any other time than the traditional 8.30 pm slot.

I had it easy by comparison – my work was done in days or weeks and then set on a wall and people wandered by day or night, not having to pay even a low entrance fee but being asked to pay ten or a hundred times one instead to walk away with the product. The images and words of a theatre play are no more than fading memories over cocktails, unlike the painting that was mounted and real.

We went out and bought three frames for three of the photocopied images of my work: “Mette Gauguin”, “Study of a nude: Suzanne sewing” and “The Vision” just to test how they looked. I have to say, through his eyes, they looked passable. I had a few pangs seeing Mette again. I remember that day when I painted her – the light in the room, the kids running in and out asking for things, Mette trying to keep them happy and stay still at the same time. We laughed a lot that day. But when later on I asked Suzanne the servant to strip off and pose, Mette went barmy. So, petulant child I sometimes was, I shagged Suzanne anyway when Mette was out and just as she plonked herself down on the edge of the bed with those little jubblies I said “Hold it there!” and the rest is history.

France is full of painters and art shops to cater for them. Ready-made canvasses are in most art shops – linen or cotton stretched over wooden frames. It would have been great to see the copied images stretched across real canvasses but almost impossible to achieve as they’d have to be painted on as imitations and that would have to have been done by an expert and T couldn’t afford an expert. It was frustrating not being able to operate hands and arms or I would have repainted them myself. He bought frames adequately sized to match the copied images but the “Vision after the Sermon” needed a bigger frame because they weren’t tailor-made to fit the size of the prints and he had to trim all the prints to get them to fit into the frames. In some cases this was okay but he had to cut off about 3 cm on the left and right sides of the “Vision” and 2 cm off the top and bottom, to get it into the frame. On the one hand it reminded me the paintings were representatives needed to get the story moving along and didn’t have to have exactly the same dimensions as the originals, but on the other I felt sick about his trimming them. It would have been like me cutting out opening lines from the starts and finishes of your plays.

“I welcome all input!”

Is that so? Well, did you consider this?

Whisper, whisper

“You – you topped yourself at Hiva Oa?”

Did I say that?

“Only three people saw you those last few days – Vernier gave you the last of the morphine, a storm cut off supplies – you tried to top yourself in ’97 – Vincent and you talked about martyrdom and he’d done it – a gauntlet for you? You were sinking fast. Have I missed something?”

Tioka!

I didn’t need to say anymore. We never spoke about it again. Meanwhile, he spent 100€ on the frames and about 30€ on copies. He still had an easel to buy, a comfy armchair to find and some clean carpet 6m x 4m to source, but 4m would never fit into his old Renault so it was time to kick around the idea of hiring a van to transport everything and, if needed, occasionally sleep in.

We caught a glimpse of the eventual costume in a French magazine in a dentist’s waiting room: a pair of cool white trainers (or “baskets” as they call them here), dark blue jeans, a white open-necked shirt and a loose and casual summer jacket. I have to say this wasn’t my style: I loved outlandish outfits and liked to mix things up – clogs were great ‘cause they lasted forever – but also double-breasted jackets with brass buttons and cravats or a safari hat.

“I’m not wearing fucking clogs!”

Instead, he wanted to dress me up like a peacock, an ass on the catwalk, a sideshow clown.

A few years ago in London when he performed Space Jockey, another Company was on the bill the same night as he performed and the young (and precocious) director had his cast learn all their lines but never did any blocking – he just let them do their own blocking with each live performance. Stowers had thought that was admirable and wanted to emulate it. Him being me was the nearest so far I got to actually being me again and I never quite understood the mindset of the actor until I moved into his head. With no director, he had to strive for a familiarity with the dialogue in a play with no fixed blocking.

As for getting to Pont-Aven and sustenance once there the easiest was to hire a van and in could go the 6m x 4m carpet, the armchair and easel (all yet to be bought) and the fifteen or so paintings, as well as luggage for one week, but this sort of thinking is theatre on a shoestring, theatre from the bottom end of the scale.

Looking for a pleasant colour-combination for the set, but unsure if the carpet should be blue or red or the armchair blue or red? The price of the carpet and availability of the colour would determine that, though I personally thought blue might be better for the carpet, as it’d also absorb the dust of feet.

About one hour’s drive from Pont-Aven is the deep-in-Brittany home of his French friends Jacques and Sandrine and their daughter, Emily. Under the house they lived in (built on stilts of stone and fixed to the side of a hill) was a small studio. He’d already asked if they could either stay there for the duration of the shows or at least visit occasionally. There was a shower, so he saw no problem sleeping in the van near Pont-Aven alternate nights and then every other night driving back to their house and using the shower. C didn’t like that idea very much and who could blame her – she spent half her working life in her car on the road between jobs and hated spending more time in vehicles than she had to. Instead, she opted for a hotel – if for some reason the run of shows didn’t work out, at least they’d have a nice place to stay that’d cushion them through the worst.

Stowers re-sent publicity out to a list of 12 destinations around Brittany responsible for promoting events through magazines and flyers, just to make sure they’d not forgotten the show the first time around.

Saturday 27th June 2009 finally saw Shakespeare on the battlements of the chateau of Angers. Despite a long period of hot weather, we sauntered up to the chateau to perform the very abridged snippet of “Henry VI, Part 1”, reproducing what even Shakespeare couldn’t when writing the play in 1591. About an hour before the agreed rendezvous at his flat in town, he received a call from the Chateau telling him they’d heard he was going to perform Shakespeare despite being told we couldn’t. It was Shakespeare for God’s sake! This was the first time it had ever been done – ever! Nonetheless, you couldn’t be sure that they mightn’t inform the local police or gendarmerie?

“The last thing I wanted – when just about to step forward from below the battlements and shout boldly up in a booming voice: “Do you speak English, your Majesty?” was a cop stepping in. I had visions of being led away in handcuffs, a martyr to the Shakespearian cause!”

The road in front of the battlements had been cleared of traffic, so he hung around in the shade while C distributed flyers. The other actor F a cameraman (DB) went into the chateau and took up positions on the battlements. With the help of the mobile phones, we negotiated the start.

“René of Anjou, René of Anjou, are – you – there?”

The transitional audience of background tourists suddenly stopped to watch as my voice boomed out. Anyway, after the first performance, three local police on mountain bikes appeared, circled a couple of times and then left, so T sent “GO” again and performed again though this time medieval music nearby started up halfway through.

Then two cops on motorbikes arrived!

“It wasn’t that I was worried about getting arrested – for the sake of the film we had to get through without interruption.”

Luckily they remounted and disappeared and were no sooner out of the sight than he sent the third “GO”. It was a job well done but felt sure we hadn’t heard the last of it.

Managed a nice read-through of Gauguin in the late evening of that same day but none at all on the Sunday.

Tuesday 30th June, we went out and bought the easel. It was a hot day, reducing everybody to traipsing around slowly from section-of-shade to section-of-shade. We first went to the Internet café and had a trawl and eventually found a showroom on the old road to Paris and despite the heat of the day wandered very slowly along and finally found the shop. Two types of easel: 23€ and 42€. Trying to keep budget down though not wishing to compromise on quality, he bought the cheapest and it was a relief to get it home, set it up and mount each of the three framed paintings onto it one by one. I felt a little charge when I took a peek through his eyes and saw my very own Mette languishing there on an easel. I remember the expanse of her white flesh, soft and yielding, and I became both nostalgic and horny but I’m not sure if ghosts can get horny.

Since early June he’d the idea he’d need carpet measuring 6m x 4m but it’d never fit into a transit van without being folded over and folded-over carpet looked naff. The other alternative was to cut two strips 6m x 2m but the 6m strip would be the long-ways strip, which would mean the join between the two pieces would be right down the middle of the floor space, probably passing under my chair and under the easel, more naff-ness. If he’d wanted to move around the carpet with any freedom, he’d need a one-piece, not two-piece but he become fixed on 6m x 4m because it’d fitted neatly into the rectangle between one corner of Salle Gauguin and a white pillar that joined the ceiling to the floor. So he measured out one, two and then three metres on the floor of his apartment and realised 3m x 3m would be much better – adequate to move around in and easier to get into or onto a car to transport. This suddenly meant we’d not need van hire and anyway van rental costs were more expensive than in England apparently. Along with kilometrage (mileage) and fuel, it would be a hefty bill to get the kit to Pont-Aven. The alternative was a roof rack, the easel, paintings, a comfy chair and suitcases for costumes and other clothes needed for the week that would all fit into or onto his car.

One Friday night I managed to persuade him to do the first four pages walking from his flat to the cybercafé at about 9 and then, after the cybercafé, return home. But sleep got the better and body said: “Bed!” and he was almost asleep when I gave the thalamus a good kick, he dragged himself out, propped up the script and read until snoring. But he did it. With at least two line-run’s we made real progress, the others mere memory-boosters. I understood 90% of what he said, enough to know there were some sections he didn’t understand at all. He’d learnt them from memory and knew that they vaguely meant what he thought they meant. So he checked again and again until later on, we managed a cracker of a read-through in the natural rhythm, a rushed 25-minute reading suddenly padding out to a 40-minute stroll. I was dead pleased. I put my feet up and watched the world roll by . . .

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Tony Stowers entire book, Gauguin’s Ghost Story, is available for purchase on line. To download a virtual copy of the fascinating narrative on Kindle, go to /www.amazon.fr/Gauguins-Ghost-Story-ebook/dp/B0093N2Y90/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_3