Postcards from Paris: 4. L’Île de la Grande Jatte – Sunday In The Park With George

In recent years, I’ve been a member of my local theatre – the Abbey Theatre in St. Albans – and go to about half of the plays each season. The night before my trip to Paris, I checked out Ever After Productions’ staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George, which is, of course, set in Paris, although I didn’t know that when I booked it. Indeed, other than the title, I knew pretty much nothing about it, as in my younger years, I was not overly fond of Sondheim, but I’d enjoyed a recent production of Merrily We Roll Along, so I went along to see what it was like. Well…

A play about a painting. A musical, no less, about a painting. Sondheim, my lad, you’re out of your mind. How on earth can you make a musical about a painting? As it turns out, you can… especially if the painting is Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte.

Without giving the plot away, what Sondheim and his creative partner, James Lapine do is give life not just to Seurat but to the characters he paints, allowing them all a backstory that makes them real people, and something more than just anonymous images on a (famous) canvas. All very clever, and very well done indeed, and the production was superb. I loved it. I laughed, I cried, and for days afterward, I couldn’t get the play out of my head (I could even remember some of the the tunes – Sondheim’s tunes are very clever, but they rarely grab me… never mind, they did this time). And so… on a sunny day in Paris, I set off to find L’Île de la Grande Jatte, out of the north-western edge of the city, where, despite dozens of trips to Paris, I have never been before.

Suffice to say, it isn’t the same. Back then, it was a refuge from the summer heat, accessible only by boat, and a fashionable place for the bourgeois (and the working classes – Seurat’s canvas scandalously depicted both) to go. It was also something of a haven for the Impressionists, and Seurat was not the only one to paint there. Since then, it’s been used as an industrial wasteland before being converted for housing – around 4,000 live there today – as well as offices, cafes and sports facilities, with two bridges connecting it to the rest of the city. Pretty densely packed for an island only around 4km around.

But Paris being Paris, there is space to remember the Impressionists too. A tourist trail around the shores offers memorials not just to Seurat but to Van Gogh and Monet, among others, although it’s Seurat who draws in the crowds. I could even – just about – make out where the famous canvas is set, looking north, over on the north-west shore, near the end of the island, although there are more (and bigger) trees there today and far less lawn, and a path cutting through the eastern edge of the area that wasn’t there before. And even in October, with autumn on the way, I can still see what drew him to the area. The light through the trees is pretty special indeed.