El Hombre que...?

Theater and film have made a not effortless marriage since video technology began being used on stage, offering new possibilities for set design and narration. The aptly named company Teatrocinema from Chili puts that relationship at the center of its preoccupations, but after a well-received visit to Paris in 2009, with “Sin Sangre”, the exercise proves perilous in its latest endeavor, “El Hombre que daba de beber a las mariposas”. The show is challenged on various levels, although its technical sophistication is not one of them: the animated film which forms the backdrop for the characters’ movements smartly switches planes from medieval castles to cityscapes, and from towering forests to film sets, with dizzying perspectives, rich hues and sweeping movement. The three-tiered story overlapping lovers past and present revolves around the magico-realist story of a man who learns the ancient art of nourishing Monarch butterflies as they begin their annual migration, and who is bequeathed life-sustaining secrets in return. The ambitions of the tale do not live up however to their enactment on stage: the repeated story lines become redundant, the intended lyricism falls flat (despite a necessary distancing effect wherein the medieval tale proves to be a film in the process of being made), and the message finally seems, unlike the butterflies’ journey, not to take us very far. But if the company means to touch on something strange indeed in the juxtaposition of animated sequences and live acting they succeed: there was an odd anti-climax in seeing the actors take their bow, in medieval get-up and masks (the necessity of these also unclear) against the empty blue screen. Without the filmed decors, they looked fantastically... out of place.

To Dec. 30, Théâtre des Abbesses, www.theatredelaville-paris.com/aux-abbesses

Le Mariage

Marriage is a topic of conversation this month (see parisvoice.com posting of “Dämnone”) but Lilo Baur looks at its more farcical expressions à la Gogol in “Le Mariage”. A civil servant concerned with appearances in his ripening years, a conniving marriage broker after making an advantageous match, and the daughter of a wealthy merchant with a promising dowry are all it takes to make light of the venerable institution that nevertheless weighs unbearably on the couple that “should”, would?, but never gets together. Standing in the way of their betrothal are at least three obstacles in the form of a trio of aspiring grooms (a retired sailor, a paunchy bailiff and an effeminate soldier, played to perfect pitch by Alain Lenglet, Nicolas Lormeau and Jean-Baptiste Malartre), each more fatuous than the next. No hurdle is greater however than Kapilotadov’s own fear of committing to the irreparable (Gogol lived long before drive-through divorces), not to mention Agafia Agatanovna’s “embarrassment” at the mere idea of adding “Missus” to her name. Gogol’s text takes the ceremony out of the romantic exercise with malicious glee, reducing marriage to a burlesque bargain made to the satisfaction of everyone but the bride and groom.

Lilo Baur and her cast excel at breathing a fine-tuned wit into Gogol’s satire, jumping into physical gags as surely as they opine tellingly on the risks and perils of conjugal bliss. Baur has a highly developed sense of humor and timing, from her theater training with Peter Brook and Simon McBurney’s Complicité company, and she uses it to great effect here, allowing silences and expressions to speak louder than words. The courtship scene between Kapilotadov and Agafia Agatanovna writes volumes about the characters’ hesitations in their mute exchanges. What woman wants, God provides, the adage goes, but nothing beats instinct, in the form of (at last one) man’s fight or flight response. No wedding bells ring in Gogol’s text but Baur’s “Mariage” is a no less joyful assembly.

To Jan. 2., Tues, 7 pm, Wed-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, 6e, M° St. Sulpice, 8€-29€, tel: 01.44.39.87.00, www.comedie-francaise.fr

Photo Credit: Cosimo Mirco Magliocca

“Ça”

Henry James likened belief in a grand destiny to a beast that devours the misguided souls who are unfortunate enough to experience it. Director Jan Ritsema adapts James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) as “Ça”, trading the novelist’s concerns with self-actualization for a purely formal exercise, but one that provides an interesting complement to the story’s thematic premise. James imagined a man who wastes his life waiting for the « big something » that will reveal to him the meaning of his presence in this world, never seeing the woman who agrees to wait with him. Through a complete decontexualization of the text, Ritsema attempts to place James’ psychological action in an unspecified present: the conversations that paralyze John and May from acting in the world are shared (or meant to be) by actors Nathalie Richard and Gérard Watkins, who, in street clothes on a blank stage, smoke or move about as they feel inclined and apparently refuse the theatrical fiction.

Does it work? Ritsema provides a fascinating hour of heightened listening to James’ century old text, to find in it a sense of personal importance and power that is perhaps more relevant – and prevalent – in our individualistic societies and their virtual worlds. The actors achieve a subtle complicity between each other and the audience, where every word, look and intonation counts towards understanding who, among the characters, the actors as themselves or their staged personas, is speaking. The visual and aural set design, by video artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster, is somewhat curious: the cinematic reference ("Viridiana" by Luis Buñel) remains enigmatic here but the background noise it creates forces the audience to lend a more attentive ear to the actors’ parrying. A modern and challenging approach to James’ text, while preserving his piercing attention to the psyche in its tortured search for meaning.

To Dec. 10, Mon, Tues, Fri, Sat, 8 pm, Thurs, 7 pm, Théâtre de la Cité internationale, 17 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER B Cité universitaire, 10-21 €, tel: 01.43.13.50.50.

Photo Credit: Benoîte Fanton/WikiSpectacle

Shun-kin

It isn’t often that a writer achieves national honors by writing about sexual deviancy, but such was the destiny of Jun’ichirô Tanizaki. In the middle of his prolific career in 1933, the iconoclastic Japanese writer produced two works: “A Portrait of Shunkin”, a film script imagining a life-long sado-masochistic relationship between a blind woman and her servant, and “In Praise of Shadows”, an essay on contrasting aesthetics in the West and Japan. His preoccupation with eroticism, in all its manifestations, as well as his stylistic novelties left a lasting mark on Japanese literature and society.

British director Simon McBurney begins his new show, “Shun-kin” with a narrator who similarly recalls the strong sensations he felt reading the text as a boy. Not surprisingly: the enigmatic Shun-kin, disfigured in her childhood and put into the care of Sasuke, a young apprentice to her family’s pharmacy, provides a fascinating psychological study and a thoroughly unconventional love story. What to make of it is explored by McBurney’s choice to pair the tale with Tanizaki’s essay: a challenge to examine the figurative shadow zones of the human psyche and, even in its socially vilified perversions, to find beauty there.

The second project to bring together McBurney, his company known as Complicité and Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theater, “Shun-kin” is a more complex showcase of the two troupes’ talents than the earlier “Elephant Vanishes” (2003). While Complicité’s flare for technological thrills and Tokyo’s neon brilliance disputed the spotlight in the older piece, based on three short stories by Muraki Hurakami, Tanizaki’s “Shun-kin” provides a meditative meeting of East and West, in its exploration of their dimly let intersections.

The show is an noteworthy demonstration of hybridity, both creative and intercultural. Complicité’s signature physical vocabulary and imaginative recuperating of everyday materials prove excellent companions to Japanese minimalism and traditional theater forms. The development of the title character Shun-kin from girl to womanhood is evoked with bunraku (the Japanese art of marionettes), but is achieved with such precision that it is easy to not notice when the doll changes places with an actress. The company also makes the most of the "sotoba", or offertory sticks placed on graves in Japan, with which the show begins: these are employed by the actors to evoke trees, steps, doors, rooms and musical instruments. Paper is similarly stretched to create kaleidoscopic projected images and nightingales taking flight, like origami birds. In a fitting touch, the story is narrated by Yoshi Oida, a longtime actor in Peter Brook’s theater laboratory in Paris, and his presence creates a living bridge between European and Japanese cultures.

Like the shadows Tanizaki praises for their closer approximation to the unknown, the fullness of the relationship between Shunkin and Sasuke remains a mystery, somewhere between passion, power, jealousy, self-hatred and even love. McBurney offers help again to unraveling it, imagining a contemporary framing device about an actress hired to read their story for Japanese radio and who decides, upon finishing her performance, to rekindle a relationship she had been ready to let go. By a multitude of nuances in the sepia-toned set, Judeo-Christian symbolism which equates light with beauty and goodness is challenged throughout by a Japanese connectedness with a spirituality and aesthetic manifested in silence and darkness.

McBurney and company(ies) have fashioned a rare piece of art, in the example of Shun-kin’s puppet: fragmented, multi-faceted and amazingly life-like, to shine a different quality of “light” on life itself.

To Nov. 23, Théâtre de la Ville, www.theatredelaville.com / www.festival-automne.com

Photo Credit: Tsukasa Aoka

Lulu: A Monstrous Tragedy

Frank Wedekind’s Lulu is a ravishing beauty who drives men mad. They just can’t help themselves from obsessing over their mistress, dancer, muse, high-class call girl and destitute prostitute. If she is certainly a temptress, Lulu was first a horribly mistreated young girl, at the hands of her father to begin with, creating ambiguous sympathies for audiences.

Symbol of feminist freedom, sexual liberation or the second sex’s victimization? The larger than life character – performance artist of her own life, in a world that wants her for its own pleasure and which she is often more than willing to oblige - has been recuperated in the 20th century by all three perspectives on women. Director Stéphan Braunschweig chooses to see her rather more as men’s prey than their dominatrix, in “Lulu: une tragédie-monstre”. Like most treatments of Wedekind’s anti-heroine, the production revisits two of his works, "Erdgeist" (Earth Spirit, 1895), and "Die Büsche der Pandora" (Pandora’s Box, 1904), which were recreated after the writer’s death as the opera “Lulu” in 1937.

In the lead role, the diminutive, gravelly voiced Chloé Réjon is a woman-child who may fail to always grasp the strength of her power over the male sex, yet is just as capable of using it for the darkest of intentions. The progressively sordid scenes of her life whirl by like a merry-go-round on a rotating set of interlocking rooms, hinting that the past is never far behind and that the future can never hold anything new. If Lulu walks literally in circles, the contemporary costumes (and much is to be made of Réjon’s numerous wardrobe changes, from a painter’s Pierrot to a Lido butterfly and a rock and roll vamp) beg interpretations for women’s unshakeable objectification some 150 years later.

Carnal love was nevertheless Wedekind’s overwhelming concern. The young German who had previously dabbled with careers in advertising and the circus made his European tour, not to visit monuments, but to rid himself of the values of his bourgeois milieu. Paris’ brothels proved helpful to his goals; “Lulu” was born. Wedekind may have celebrated eroticism as a counterbalance to and escape from the stultifying social and moral codes of his day, the erotic power that Lulu conjures leads inevitably to her demise. Male fantasy and women’s reality intersect, leaving no clear-cut conclusions and lending the work its own power to fascinate.

From frying pans to Ferraris, everything sells better with a pretty woman in the photo. We don’t need Wedekind to tell us that but it is interesting to remember, through a 19th century lens, that the far from innocuous relations between beauty, sex and economics have always been with us and are unlikely to soon fade.

Continuing the initiative begun last season by the Théâtre national de la Colline to provide English subtitles and program notes for one or more performances of selected shows, the performances of “Lulu” on Dec. 4 and 14 will be similarly subtitled for English-speaking audiences. Note that the early times for all shows reflect the performance length (4 hours).

To Dec. 23, Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre national de la Colline, 15 rue Malte-Brun, 20e, M° Gambetta, 13-27 euros, tel : 01.44.62.52.52.

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Carecchio

Le Tangible

One of the original founders of the Belgian theater collective tg STAN, Franck Vercruyssen is the group’s political conscience, behind shows like “One 2 Life”, treating capital punishment, “The Monkey Trial” from a transcription of the Scopes Trial, and “JDX – A Public Enemy”, an adaptation of Ibsen’s play about one man’s struggle to stand up to political and social hypocrisy. He is also drawn to dialogue between the spoken word and dance and has signed several pieces exploring their interfaces: “Nusch”, “Quartett” and now “L’intangible”. This equally ambitious and poetic piece builds on the choreography of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to treat the Middle East conflict, with a text derived from writings by poets Etel Adnan (Lebanon), Mourid Barghouti, Mahmoud Darwich and Samih al-Qasim (Palestine), and the British novelist and essayist John Berger.

The principle story comes from Berger’s From A to X, in which A’ida writes to her lover, imprisoned for his political positions, of her struggle outside with military aggression, political injustice, loss and fear. To dramatize her story, Vercruyssen has chosen an empty stage onto which a series of photographic images unfolds, of buildings and streets in anonymous locales of apparently Middle Eastern origin (taken in Beyrouth and Palestine). Beneath their changing façade, three dancers echo and amplify A’ida’s struggle to hold on to hope, with a corporal language that gains in force with the evocation of her daily existence while embodying its unspeakable silences as well. The layers of spoken, visual and gestual narrative, not to mention written (in simultaneous Arabic and French translations), explore the range of A’ida’s emotional response as well as the mutism of her lover, who writes onto her letters but never sends any of his own. The show’s title comes from a line in Berger’s text where, commenting on the loss of physical property in the wake of a bombing, the narrator is led to consider the “amnesia of the tangible world”, where homes and possessions are unable to resist artillery to bear lasting witness to lifelong struggles to exist, a theme underscored tellingly by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Yazan Al Khalili’s photography.

Vercruyssen has found a richly multiple language to explore a conflict not often the subject of contemporary theater and the resultant loss of cultural wealth and resources, among the debris of human lives. In a booklet accompanying the show, he relates in detail STAN’s efforts to create the show with actors from Naplouse and Damas, the courage and patience of these drama students caught between Belgian immigration policy and university regulations at home, and the ultimate, final-hour failure of the project. The planned cast is replaced in the show now running by Franco-Egyptian actress Eve-Chems de Brouwer and the Iraki actor Modhallad Rasem. Its own lived testament to the conflicts that mine and undermine past and present history in the Middle East, “Le Tangible” blends esthetic and political concerns in a surprising but highly intelligent and thoughtful approach to the question, an approach STAN, as always, does best.

To Nov. 13, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, matinees Nov. 13, 14, 5 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, 11e, Mº Bastille, 13€-22€, tel: 01.43.57.42.14, Festival d’Automne, tel: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Lore Baeten

Interiors

After the dark, the silence. Scottish director Matthew Lenton has a gift for giving Maurice Maeterlinck’s works their literal due. “The Sightless” (1999), an adaptation in total darkness of “Les Aveugles” (1890) is followed by “Interiors”, a largely mute recreation of “Intérieur” (1894), liberally transforming the Belgian writer’s play about tragic destiny into a contemporary study of voyeurism and tensions between outward appearances and secret desires.

This "Interiors" is performed in an enclosed space behind a glass wall : a dining room seen from outside its large windows. An important evening is evidently in store, and characters fix their makeup and study the table settings before guests begin arriving, in winter parkas and carrying shotguns. The nature of the dinner and the relationships between these individuals, ranging from adolescence to late middle age –not to mention the reason for their attire and accoutrements - is unclear until a voice-over kicks in to connect the dots. The owner of the voice is later revealed to be a dead girl who now spies in upon scenes of the life to which she can never return and who underscores the beauty of their quintessentially human moment of shared food and laughter before concluding the play with dire predictions of their impending deaths.

Where silent films physically exaggerated the situational drama or humor of their plots, Lenton’s play looks merely like television with the sound turned off, whence the need for narrative assistance. The strength of “Interiors” lies in the quality of the performances given by the seven actors of Lenton’s Vanishing Point company, remarkable for the precision of their gestures and expressions which bring life and authenticity to this dinner viewed from the cold outside but in whose presence the dead girl’s elegiac commentary strikes the ear as superfluous, invasive even and unnecessarily didactic. The set combines naturalism and expressionism in the minutely furnished dining room and cold celestial heights of a projected night sky.

If the point of "Interiors" is to blend these two interpretative fields, to understand better what the assembled friends truly think to themselves about themselves and each other, and so to explore a deeper level of human relations than that which is more usually on display at the average dinner party, the general nature of the characters' reflections, revolving mostly around sex and food, surprises in its lack of inspiration. Although the project seeks otherwise, the “exterior” voice of “Interiors” leaves too little of the imaginative space that would have pushed the exercise to a more challenging engagement with its themes.

In English with French subtitles. Nov. 2-6, 8:30 pm (Sat. 3 pm/8:30 pm), Théâtre des Abbesses, 31 rue des Abbesses, 18e, M° Abbesses, 13€-24€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo Credit: Tim Morozzo

Aftermath

As US troops withdraw from Irak, the play “Aftermath” is a timely reminder of the long-lasting consequences of American intervention there. Based on testimony provided by Iraqi refugees interviewed in Jordan, the piece intertwines the experiences of eight individuals, but their nightmare is collective and speaks for the horrors and privations endured by the population at large. Bombings, mercenaries, death threats, incarcerations, interrogations and the inevitable road to exile and refugee status: from Fallujah to Abu Ghraib the story is one of American arrogance and might and Iraki fear and mourning. A cross-section of citizens - housewives, translators, imams, doctors, artists, pharmacists, cooks - put a face on Iraqi losses that have nothing to do with military strategy or political maneuvering but rather with wrecked homes, families and dreams. After a critically acclaimed play devised from conversations with pardoned death row inmates, “The Exonerated” (2002), Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen have created a simple and moving piece of theater - sober, restrained with humor and honesty – that gives voice to the stories that CNN doesn’t cover and which risk being forgotten once the US presence is gone completely. Seen October 8 at the Maison des Arts de Créteil.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

Forced Entertainment's Cheap Thrills

The latest show by the British collective Forced Entertainment is a particularly clear example of the company’s explorations of the performance act. That is to say that “forced entertainment” is what the nine actors deliver in sequined go-go dresses and lounge-act attire, awkwardly throwing themselves across the set of plastic palm trees and red carpets. “The Thrill of It All”, as the show is named, is an ironic enterprise on all counts, so wide is the gap between the excitement promised in the title and frequently referred to by the cast, and the deliberately trite spectacle given. The company takes down indiscriminately the familiar codes of performed representations of human experience: there is the declaration of love, the fisticuffs, the emotional breakdown, the holiday gathering around the hearth, the agonized death rattle (also the subject of “Spectacular” in 2008)… The artificiality of these displays is reinforced by the distorting miking of the actors’ voices, while their ubiquity in TV and cinema is emphasized by the cast’s homogenizing get-ups: gents in red dress shirts, black pants, cream jackets and stringy black wigs; ladies in white dresses, red boots and long platinum hair. A reflection on popular entertainment, which still seems to believe that a buxom blonde in a short skirt is worth any intelligent discussion? A send-up of performance codes, as a challenge to the public’s indulgence of these? Forced Entertainment founder Tim Etchells leaves the door open to interpretation while eluding richer discussion of the meaning and effects for society of its performed selves.

“The Thrill of It All”, October 6-9, Wed-Sat, 8:30 pm, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou, 4e, Mº Les Halles/Rambuteau, 10/14 euros, tel: 01.44.78.12.33 / Festival d’Automne, tel: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Hugo Glendinnin

Cubist theater?

After cubist painting (Picasso and Braque) and cubist writing (Gertrude Stein), does a thirty-something Japanese playwright and director hold the key to cubist theater? Toshiki Okada does not claim to be under the influence of any artistic revolutionaries, but his deliberate separation of the spoken word and body language opens up new ways of imagining theater’s representational possibilities.

If Stein believed that cubism was more real than reality, Okada agrees that the repetitious, disarticulated movements his actors make are a heightened form of naturalism. This is particularly true in his trilogy of short plays, “Hot Pepper”, “Air Conditioner” and “The Farewell Speech”, which finishes a brief run at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers as part of the Festival d’Automne. While engaging in utterly banal and codified conversations about the workplace (a theme familiar from Okada’s “Freetime” in 2008), the trilogy’s characters inexplicably engage in unexpected, socially “inappropriate” gestures that find them shaking their legs at uncomfortable angles, jumping stiffly, holding fans on their heads and wiping their mouths with their ties, among many other surprises.

That their actions bear no relationship to their words is visibly jarring, and the most recognizable feature of the work of Okada and his company known as “chelfitsch” (“selfish” pronounced with a Japanese accent). Repeated over time, however, their gestures and words are imbued with new meaning, in the same way a cubist portrait proposes nearly indistinguishable cubes of color that demand careful attention to perceive the subject, or much like Stein’s prose experimentations create “insistencies” that require closer reading at every encounter. Emotions and impressions, however fleeting or imperceptible, are given liberty to express themselves in these awkward stretches, steps and struts, and a more complete understanding of the speaker is arrived at as he or she comes to inhabit a larger space and time than that of the discourse required in the environment of an office break-room or reception area.

Okada’s preoccupations also involve the use of a Japanese slang spoken in Tokyo, an argot he attempts to de-ghettoize by bringing it into the theater. While this aspect of his work is regrettably lost in translation, to the extent that his physical work is an extension of these concerns, the vitality of this slang seems to take on tangible, visible strength. In the even more abstract second play Okada presents this month, “We Are the Undamaged Others”, he explores how to break with the “nearly irresistible representative power of language” and the “meaningful processes” it shares with gesture.

Stein argued in favor of art that existed free from the business of living and representations of these, a vision that Okada seems to further, with the style and concerns of contemporary Japan.

“We Are the Undamaged Others”, Oct. 7-10, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Mº Gabriel Péri, 11-22 euros, tel: 01.41.32.26.26, or Festival d'Automne: 01.53.45.17.17.


Photo Credit: Dieter Hartwig

La Cerisaie

How directors choose to represent the cherry orchard of Chekov’s last play can be a reliable measure of the production’s overall treatment of theme. Imagined as a comedy by the playwright, first directed as a tragedy by Stanislavski (a decision with a lasting influence on the play’s production history), “The Cherry Orchard” tends to stand or fall (no pun intended) on the strength of that wood’s perceived presence in the character’s memories and the urgency of its metaphorical reality for the audience. If directors need not show a mass of budding branches for the production to be a success, to the extent that Chekov was himself profoundly moved by the beauty of a tree in flower – and sufficiently so to write the story of an aristocratic family’s wrenching separation from the orchard that witnessed generations of joys and pains – that stand of trees must manage to cast its shadow across the production.

Director Julie Brochen has imagined a “Cherry Orchard” all in glass and metal, evoking a kind of enclosed terrace from which the family might look upon its beloved landscape. In this way however, the orchard, and all its affective implications, is consequently placed very much outside the scope of the show’s preoccupations. These appear to revolve around the character of Lyubov, played by Jeanne Balibar as a kind of neurasthenic: weak, articulating with difficulty, and slow to react, all of which help explain her obliviousness to the pressing sale of the family estate but fail to develop its significance for her. The production places its emphasis on structure and system rather than metaphor, in the weighty, mechanical set built upon rotating disks and the 1930s era costumes. A final touch of sensitivity comes with the parting lines of Firs, the Ranevskaya’s former serf accidentally locked into the empty house, but it arrives too late. Lopakhin can chop the whole orchard down; its absence is only symptomatic of a general lack of feeling and depth.

To October 24, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Place de l’Odéon, 6e, Mº Odéon, 10-24 euros, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo credit: Franck Beloncle

Wajdi Mouawad’s Trilogy

“Littoral”, “Forêts”, “Incendies”: Wajdi Mouawad’s trilogy is a triple punch of elemental and human forces: water/air/fire, birth/death/war, childhood/maternity/paternity, to name just a few. As a fragmented tableau depicting the search for self among a Montreal youth bred in conflict and displacement, its numerous pieces fall into place with the presence of all three plays at the Théâtre national de Chaillot, after a run at the 2009 Festival d’Avignon. While the plays have been performed individually in France over the last four years, seen together, they tell a compelling story of the paths love can take when buffered by the competing trajectories of the individual, family, society and country. (See reviews of earlier productions here and at www.parisvoice.com).

If the Greeks considered "agape" (self-sacrifice), the highest form of affection, it is the filial bonds which tightly crisscross the Trilogy that also form its emotional center; when they meet personal, social, political and even global aspirations, they beget notable acts of love in all its dimensions.

In the triptych’s middle, “Incendies” returns to the themes of “Littoral”, Mouawad’s first play, marked by the concerns of a struggling post-university young writer/actor, while prefiguring those of the epical “Forêts”, in particular the idea of broken promises. If the theme lends tragic weight to all of the characters' struggles, it figures most prominently in the story of Nawal, whose abandoning of her newborn son in the midst of civil war, sparks violent consequences for future generations. The question of culturally foreign origins and unknown genitors, which provides the trilogy's obvious intrigue, takes a monstrous turn in "Incendies"...

Under Mouawad’s inspired and imaginative direction, all the works impress by his simple and lucid use of space, color and music. A tendency to overstate concerns does not mar the force of his message. The Trilogy is the consecration of a necessary and ambitiously poetic vision of personal destiny writ in universal language.

To Sept. 19, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, (all three shows Sept. 11 and 18, beginning 11 am), Théâtre national de Chaillot, 1 place du Trocadéro, 16e, 8-32 euros single production, 30 euros /55 euros entire trilogy, tel: 01.53.65.30.00.

Photo Credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez

Un certain Songe, une nuit d'été

Richard Demarcy has been rolling his “world theater” around the globe for 35 years in an effort to break down national and cultural barriers. His appropriately named Théâtre Naïf is utterly unpretentious in its art, one in which this multi-ethnic company also takes very sincere pleasure. Inspired by the craft of storytelling as much as by contemporary issues of identity, in a country currently racked by the question, Demarcy and friends create a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” of racial harmony and cultural understanding that makes a joyous pillow-fight of differences and national pride. The cast, which hails from eight countries across Asia, Africa, North America and Europe, tells “Un certain Songe, une nuit d’été” with humor, fantasy and grace, with a bric-a-brac set and costumes in which Venetian carnival meets les puces de Clignancourt just up the road. Buffoonery and measure hold hands in Demarcy’s direction and revisited text, which comments freely on current cultural politics and funding but keeps Shakespeare’s dream and spirit as its guiding star throughout. Proof that la France multiculturelle is not ignored by contemporary directors, even if Demarcy (unlike his more famous son, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, director of the Théâtre de la Ville, and more faithful to the soixante-huitard vistion of his neighbor Peter Brook) sticks close to its margins.

To May 23, Fri-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Le Grand Parquet, 20 bis rue du Département, 18e, Mº La Chapelle, 3 euros – 13 euros, tel: 01.40.05.01.50.

Photo Credit: Axe Sud

Needcompany in "La Maison des Cerfs"

After “La Chambre d’Isabella” and “Le Bazar du Homard”, it's into the forest – that twilight zone of primordial fears and altered states - with the Needcompany, in a new show “La Maison des cerfs”. In this final piece of the Sad Face/Happy Face trilogy, director Jan Lauwers explores the former side of the coin in a work which takes as its point of departure the death of the brother of a company member: the journalist Kerem Lawton, in Kosovo. Ethical questions of responsibility and involvement in situations of war prompt the story of a mother’s fight to save her family from civil turmoil by retreating to the country. In the style of the Needcompany, however, these preoccupations are mostly deflated by ironic distance, beginning with the sexual play of the show’s opening dressing room scene, which at the same time seeks to approach these very serious issues through the fictional journal of a war photographer.

As in "La Chambre d'Isabella", the set is strewn with an almost inconceivable quantity of objects, here mostly fake deer and their various parts (antlers, countless sets of them). In their pale rubber state, they appear more like formaldehyde specimens than creatures or even hunting trophies, though they also serve in this way as a metaphor for the corpses of the tale, especially in their piling up at show’s end in a kind of anticipated funeral pyre. A certain amount of cliché (a murderous, feuding family) and banality (the mediatized sufferings of war victims), not to mention histrionics, are nevertheless not avoided in the attempted discussion and fictional framing.

For a too brief moment, however, the Needcompany soars as only it can, in the joyous final dance sequence to the music of Hans Petter Dahl and Maarten Seghers. Some of the choreography and movement is riveting, particularly by Eléonore Valère, as the sister searching for her dead brother, while the pair created by Viviane De Muynck, as the mother, and Grace Ellen Barkey as her mentally retarded daughter, is genuinely moving. It seems however that world-weariness is not the Needcompany’s forté and it is to be hoped that they can put the evidently difficult task of remembering a loved one behind them and find a little more joy in their art, which they do so well. Show seen at Théâtre de la Ville.

Photo Credit: Maarten Vanden Abeele

"Moby Dick" by Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland

Irish actor Conor Lovett has so successfully played the protagonists of Samuel Beckett’s fictional world as to seem the incarnation of these wandering dispossessed. But with the first lines of Gare Saint Lazare Players Ireland’s “Moby Dick”, we are ready to call him Ishmael indeed and set sail for uncharted waters under his sure steering. Lovett and his collaborator in life and art, Judy Hegarty, who directs him in all of the company’s Beckett repertory, which includes the acclaimed trilogy “Molloy”, “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable”, have created from Herman Melville’s masterpiece, a quiet tour de force for a single actor.

While reducing the 700-odd page text to a swift two-hour crossing of Melville’s whirling, eddying tale, Lovett and Hegarty have kept the original language intact throughout. As delivered by Lovett, whose Ishmael is a comically introspective, even squeamish old salt, Melville’s unique idiom keeps us hanging on every word, from the wryly wary description of Ishmael’s insalubrious lodgings (and roommate Queequeg) in New Bedford, Mass., to his awed tableau of the maelstrom with which the cursed Pequod is sucked to its watery grave. Martin Lewis’ musical accompaniment (voice and flute) provides a mariner’s complaint and poetic counterpoint to Ahab’s raving, fanatical quest. You can almost feel the spray break across the bow…

Performed at the Irish Cultural Center, May 7-8. For more information about Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland, visit the company’s website: www.garestlazareplayersireland.com.

"Invasion!"

Words can kill, the saying goes, but language is in constant flux, through ordinary usage and more institutionalized “spin”. If it is no longer possible to use the word “terror”, for example, without evoking George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, it is equally true that language once used to objectify groups is sometimes recuperated by these and used to their advantage. Like “nigga”, now ubiquitous in hip-hop music with both negative and positive connotations, “Abulkasem” is just such a word for Jonas Hassen Khemiri. In “Invasion!” (whose title is loaded with imagery going back to the Crusades), this young playwright of Tunisian and Swedish descent considers how language can color identity, particularly in the case of visible “immigrants” in European societies living in the shadow of 9/11.

From the mists of history to the tough realities of the streets, “Invasion!” imagines how the name of an 18th century corsair could lastingly enter the vocabulary of a group of middle-schoolers, grow with them to become a code word for coolness and from there leap into the media’s projectors when a love-struck, would-be gigolo who has adopted the name, repeatedly leaves it on the voice mail of a political refugee/harvest-picker (whose number he was given by a girl trying to avoid his advances in a bar). Seen and felt on stage in the form of a red ball that swells from the size of a child’s toy to a crushing globe, the snowballing associations of the name develop visibly from a boy’s imaginings to planetary dimensions, but always in the absence of any rhyme or reason. “Abulkasem” becomes Public Enemy #1, hunted by Interpol and the press, without ever managing to settle convincingly on an identifiable individual, except for the harvest-picker: when his “story” is finally unraveled by a translator, he becomes the unwitting victim of ethnocentric fears and anti-terror hysteria.

Director Michel Didym translates effectively to the stage Khemiri’s multi-layered, meta-theatrical text, exploiting video and live music to develop the writing’s different registers, from comedy to satire to psychological horror, and building on an able cast in a variety of quick-changing, cross-dressing roles. Khemiri asks questions from his own experiences, as the “Turk” in the eyes of Swedish society whom he imagines in the bar scene. But he pertinently expands on these to comment on wider perceptions of otherness in our particular historical moment. The much-decried government-defined debate on national identity in France has yet to provoke reactions in French theater but Khemiri’s text, seen at Nanterre, fills for the time being at least a lingering silence.

To April 17, Wed-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttlebus, 12€-25€, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo Credit: Eric Didym

"No Dice"

German has its angst, French its beauty, Italian its romance and Spanish its passion. The American language may not even possess the stiff upper lip of its British cousin, but it now has its own play. Thanks to the nutty folks at the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the lingua franca of business, entertainment and the Internet is the unwilling star of “No Dice”, a four-hour foray into the bowels of banality. But not quite. A devised show created from 100 hours of recorded telephone conversations and employing its own language of codified gestures, this Unidentified Theater Object, recently seen at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, explores the strange registers, disabused tones and resigned pragmatism of the uniquely American idiom.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma has nothing whatsoever to do with the state made famous by dust bowls and cowboy folklore . Located in New York City, NTO was created by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, who were inspired by the deceptively utopian company of the same name in Franz Kafka’s Amerika. Unlike that enterprise, which drives the final nail into already frustrated immigrant dreams, the folks at NTO seem to have a genuinely inclusive philosophy, which shows in its treatment of audiences (free sandwiches and soda) as well as its approach to the raw matter of drama, which is here the flotsam and jetsam in the flow of everyday life. The show is the second of two works by the company using chance as its guiding principle. The first, “Poetics: A Ballet Brut”, was constructed from silent, random choreography, the movements of which were determined by rolling dice. “No Dice” applies the same chance theory, this time using cards to apply physical punctuation to the mini-dramas (the company calls them “mellowdramas”) recounted in the phone conversations.

Taken as a whole, these exchanges on subjects ranging from diets to dinner-theater, office gossip to auditions, share a common leitmotif revealing their origins in the inherently ego-rocking world of actors looking for work in New York City and paying the bills with day jobs in mind-numbing clerical positions. The show presents five sketchily drawn “characters” in exaggerated get-ups: a grouchy chorus girl in rehearsal attire, a struggling writer sporting pirate booty and Hasidic ringlets dangling from his heavy-rimmed glasses, a non-plussed, paper-pushing cowboy, and the silent presence of a caped rabbit in red basketball shorts and an even more mysterious woman in black jeans, sweatshirt and sunglasses, wearing a Marie Antoinette wig and responsible for some eerie musical accompaniment on electric keyboard. Those who talk also engage in a magnified hand language whose significance grows (somewhat), over time and with each use, not unlike the “insistencies” of Gertrude Stein.

Indeed, with its mundane, repetitive dialogue (riddled with, among other fillers: “yeah”, “u-huh”, “um”, “that’s good”, “anyway”, and its facetious flip-side “anyhoo”), vaguely sketched set and character types, “No Dice” reveals an unacknowledged affinity with the techniques and preoccupations of the “Mother Goose of Montparnasse”, as Stein was known. In other words, what “No Dice” shows, at first glance, is a world of unintelligible codes and equally ambiguous responses to these. If its meaning remains an open question, it clearly develops a meta-commentary on the acting game itself, from theory to daily survival, and is genuinely funny. It also features a fine cast, whose sense of humor carries off the deliberately amateurish acting style and lends a deliciously cruel tone to the events described.

In the absence of more familiar life-buoys, however, it is the language itself that the audience grabs on to: disconcerting in its lack of depth, reassuring in its matter-of-factness, and all the more moving for the failures it describes. “No Dice” is shorthand, of course, for “sorry and too bad for you”, and that kind of outright refusal seems to lie at the core of the exercise: “shit happens” (to use a more recognizable bit of American-ese) and what of it? Life and the show must go on.

Photo Credit: Peter Nigrini

Warning to “Streetcar” passengers…

If you were looking to pick up Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar” at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, you’ll be surprised by the “Tramway” that takes you, not to any Elysian Fields, but to director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s fragmented, stylized and vaguely nightmarish adaptation of Williams’ masterpiece. While any return to the legendary “Streetcar Named Desire”, which earned Williams a Pulitzer (1948) and launched the career of a prowling, virile animal named Marlon Brando, has to contend with those legends and a lingering iconography (one reviewer of this production got excited over actor Andrzej Chyra’s “tee-shirt à la Marlon Brando”), Warlikowski’s freestyle make-over of such a finely constructed text as this gives cause for wonder, especially when the results are as dissatisfying as these.

Not content to merely truncate the original, Warlikowski goes boldly in the opposite direction, adding close to an hour of “reflections” on Williams’ themes, drawing from texts as disparate as letters written by Gustav Flaubert, an interview with jazz singer Eartha Kitt, Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” and St. Matthew’s Gospel, not to mention four utterly didactic musical selections, including Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” (1975). Letting a great work speak for itself seems impossible for Warlikowski here.

Moreover, the interpretation he brings is a gross simplification of William’s preoccupations with illusion/reality/disillusion and the replacement of romantic antebellum codes of conduct by a self-made proletarian individualism. Sex is the only point of reference here, beginning with Blanche’s clear depiction as a whore: seated on a stool, legs spread, in a black negligee, facing a glass wall. Played by Isabelle Huppert as a washed-out party girl (and whose gorgeous wardrobe, furnished by Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, is a too tempting, over-exaggeration of the faded ball gowns Blanche desperately recycles into service), she begs nor earns neither our pity nor our sympathy. Stella (Florence Thomassin) is a trash calendar pin-up to Chyra’s merely cruel Stanley (an incongruous casting error, given Warlikowski’s chosen emphasis). The cast is rounded out by a skinheaded, kick-boxing Mitch and the neighbor lady Eunice (Renate Jett) who doubles as the lounge act, on a slick and shiny, retractable set that is simultaneously bowling alley, bathroom and bedroom, filmed in real-time and projected behind the action.

In short, too much going on and not enough of what matters. For a production that cost as much as this one obviously did, the only thing Warlikowski gets right is the excess that finally burned Williams out.

"Un Tramway", to April 3, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Place de l’Odéon, 6e, Mº Odéon, 18€-32€, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo Credit: Pascal Victor/ArtComArt

Tori no tobu takasa

The defective brakes recall that has torpedoed Toyota Corporation delivers an ironic punch line to “Tori no tobu takasa”, the tale of a family-owned toilet seat manufacturer’s struggle to join the global economy. Trading a merely model product for sexy marketing, the Saruwatari company aspires to pamper the derrieres of all of Asia, but loses its integrity in the process. This Sino-French production of Michel Vinaver’s landmark play about France’s collision with free enterprise in the 1960s, “Par-dessus bord”, is adapted by the Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata and directed by a passionate reader of both, Arnaud Meunier. The largely satisfying results show however, in the parlance of Vinaver’s play, that “extending the product” may require eliminating some “clutter” for “profit potential” to be “maximized”.

“Par-dessus bord” is a detailed study (in four versions of varying lengths) of how French business was transformed in the 1960s by American corporate practices, written by someone who lived these changes from the inside (Vinaver was the CEO of Gillette France at the time) and who saw in these the makings of Aristophanic dramatic structure and comedy. “Tori no tobu takasa” follows faithfully the six movements of Vinaver’s text, changing only toilet paper for toilet seats and Yankee ad men for Parisian “consultants marketing”. A third modification, concerning a subplot around a “mixed” couple, replaces the young Jewish lover with a Rwandan exile.

Despite the incongruousness of this latter change (unlike French Jews, assimilated Africans are an exception in Japanese society) and the didacticism it generates, as well as the lengthy parallel between mythological and modern Japan (the nuances of which are difficult to capture for the uninitiated to Japanese origin stories, who also have to read subtitles), this contemporary ride on the roller coaster of the market economy remains fast and funny. The multicultural project marshals the resources of an abundant crew and cast, who, like so many legions of Tokyo commuters, crisscross the stage in perpetual motion: moving the set, singing and dancing for the glory of toilet seats, and, most of all, incarnating with wry humor Saruwatari’s furiously busy employees and their smoothly clever French associates.

Oriza Hirata is the leading playwright of his generation in Japan, the founder of the Seinendan company and the theory behind the “quiet theater” movement of the 1990s, which seeks inspiration in contemporary Japanese society and carries a meticulous acting methodology. Somewhat like Vinaver’s straddling of business and theater, Hirata is developing the field of “communication design”, meant to facilitate through architecture and interior clues, the exchange of information between doctors and lawyers on the one hand, and their patients and clients, on the other. As the set sheds its bare wooden walls and patriotic red offices in favor of modular spaces and the shimmering blues of computer screens, Hirata’s interests appear fully connected to the subject at hand. The Japanese are the uncontested world experts when it comes to toilet technology and comfort, but that it would take French marketing savvy in the areas of beauty and bien-être to sell seats in 2009 satisfyingly explains the cultural transfers from the original. As Saruwatari makes room for French investors by pushing faithful employees out the door, the future looks a little too bright and the promises made about ensuring “Japanese” quality above all sound deliberately hollow. A lesson that Toyota is learning the hard way, as are the clients of global markets all around the world, every day.

In French and Japanese, with French subtitles. To Feb. 20, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, Théâtre des Abbessess, 31 rue des Abbesses, 18e, M° Abbesses, 12€-23€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.

Photo credit: Théâtre de la Ville

Littoral

Burying a father is never a painless affair but in Wajdi Mouawad’s “Littoral”, the task takes on epic proportions, intersecting family secrets and civil war to lend universal dimensions to a personal tragedy. The play, written in 1991, and its new production, recounts a homecoming of sorts, for its protagonist as well as for this Montreal-based, Lebanese playwright and director; Mouawad returns to this early piece, 15 years after writing it as an unemployed theater post-grad, rehearsing simultaneously, in his living room, with props borrowed from the kitchen. “Littoral” is the first work of the tetralogy composed also of “Incendies”, “Forêts” and “Ciels”, and exploits themes common to all of these: missing parents, lost family histories, war and (re)constructed identities, but from a lightly juvenile point of view that translates into physical humor and poetic flights that can teeter between funny and crude or slow down the action, but beg an irresistible sympathy.

The story centers on a rather immature Wilfrid, who juts out his lower lip and stamps his foot when he is contradicted, and his gradual weaning from two powerful father figures. For the genitor he never knew, he must first piece together the story of his parents’ relationship before he can finally bury the man who abandoned him as an infant. In the absence of his biological father, Wilfrid has also created an imaginary hero to save him from his personal bogeymen: the Chevalier Guiromelan, with whom he must at last also part company to finally integrate the adult world. This voyage of self-discovery leads all three men/phantoms to the father’s birthplace and a rude confrontation with greater problems yet: the strife and upheaval caused by civil war there. The grieving Wilfrid finds comfort on the way in the other adult children he meets, also seeking catharsis with dead parents; when his quest to bury his father is shouldered by all, it brings closure to the sufferings of many more than he could ever have imagined.


Despite certain challenges with which the young writer evidently struggled (primarily, how to finally dispose of the father’s corpse on stage), this new production is easily carried by its multicultural cast which exuded an infectious energy on a recent night, led by the opposing comic touches brought by Patrick Le Mauff as the self-effacing father and Jean Alibert as the combative Guiromelan. The simple yet inventive set of wooden walls draped in black plastic can be body bags and coffin liners, but, turned over, becomes sand dunes and the seaside horizon of the play’s title. Mouawad also makes striking use of a painter's palette to underscore in dripping strokes of white, red and blue the play's themes of death, sacrifice and redemption. “Littoral” is a place of new beginnings and a return to old ones as well, and in this way an interesting complement to last season’s autobiographic “Seuls”, which Mouawad wrote, directed and acted. After presiding over the 2009 Festival d’Avignon, Mouawad’s writing brings a welcome current of multicultural self-exploration to French theater.

To Feb. 21, Wed, Thurs, 7:30 pm, Fri, Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre 71, 3 place du 11 Novembre, Malkoff (92), M° Malakoff-Plateau de Vanves, 11€ -23€, tel: 01.55.48.91.00.

Photo Credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez

Cercles/Fictions

Inspired by storytelling traditions from Africa to India, Peter Brook has used for many years an arc-shaped performance space that extends into the audience at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Joël Pommerat rounds off that arc in the newest production by his Compagnie Louis Brouillard, which enters the final year of a 36-month residency here; in “Cercles/Fictions”, Pommerat takes another step in his exploration of how power relations in contemporary society can blur the boundaries between truths and their distortion, and uses the ceremonial resonances of the circle to invite us into a world where the tectonic plates of norms and fantasy silently run into each other, with consequences as enormous as they are underestimated by these characters.

The play is composed in fact of concentric circles: seven serial stories whose overlapping episodes unfold like onion peels, with each new layer slightly closer to a common center. These tales revolve around: the waiting staff of an aristocratic home and their masters, two couples lost in a forest, a young executive who finds himself the object of the attentions of a sibylline bag lady, a knight, a mind-reader, a door-to-door salesman of his own self-help book, an entrepreneur and the homeless and unemployed he instrumentalizes. Pommerat writes in the program notes that all the stories told here are true, even personal, with one exception. Yet none of the scenarios is ordinary. If truth is stranger than fiction, we are certainly left guessing.

Several threads run throughout: the purported desire of some to improve the lot of the less fortunate, the hidden motivations of these alleged altruists, and the effects of their actions on those they would help. The means that these power-brokers have are many although three are the most common: wealth, confidence and supposed supernatural powers. The question of happiness is central, however, and seems to raise the following questions: to what extent can well-being be defined by money, comfort, success? Does self-fulfillment have any place in relationships founded on market values? And has consumer society fundamentally altered how and where happiness can be found (indeed, is it possible at all)?

“Cercles/Fictions” builds on similar preoccupations in previous shows “Les Marchands” and “Au monde”, which examined the inevitable tensions driving the relationship between the ruling classes and the working classes, and where the question of happiness was measured in terms of productivity. Here, Pommerat digs deeper at the motivations of both groups while introducing a new problematic: if you could change your life and finally achieve equality, happiness, freedom… , would you? If you had everything you could want, would that make you happy? He is joined as always by the formidable Compagnie Louis Brouillard, which performs another tour-de-force here, attaining a precision of tone, gesture, voice and rhythm that proves them masters of their art in France. With little more than a table and chairs to work with, they are assisted by Eric Soyer's magisterial lighting which displaces the action between interiors and exteriors, all equally atmospheric, from parking garages, and drawing rooms to dance halls and primeval forests

As a magical space of exchange, movement and transcendence since time immemorial, the circle(s) Pommerat develops here are indeed sites of liminality, where characters teeter on the edges of transformative changes. In so doing, he stirs up the dionysian (in the Nietzschian sense) powers of this configuration, tapping its creative and intuitive potential in the face of critical and rational forces. And while the imaginary, even the paranormal, has accompanied his earlier work, in “Cercles/Fictions”, it lies at the center of these chimerical stories.

To March 6, Tues-Sat, 8:30 pm, matinees (3:30 pm), Feb. 6 & 20 and March 6, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 37 bis boulevard de la Chapelle, 10e, M° La Chapelle, 18/26 euros, tel: 01.46.07.34.50.

Photo Credit: Elisabeth Carecchio

« Paroles/pas de rôles…vaudeville »

Its far from a fairytale and yet this story bears a few resemblances to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. That most prestigious of French cultural institutions, the Comédie-Française, has invited the avant-garde of Flemish/Dutch theater, in the persons of Damiaan De Schrijver, Peter Van den Eede and Matthias de Koning, to teach their craft to its noble players, or, to work the metaphor, to dress up a centuries old majesty in the latest and coolest threads. The result is “Paroles/pas de roles… vaudeville”, a piece conceived around the notion of repertoire and the preservation of theatrical history (the primary mission of the Théâtre-Français), on the one hand, and the anti-theatrical preoccupations of the project’s guest artists, on the other.

It should be said that the companies from which this trio hail, tg STAN (Antwerp), De Koe (Antwerp) and Discordia (Amsterdam), have come to occupy the vanguard of contemporary European theater in Paris, sharing a similar interest in laying bare all theatrical conceit to explore the motivations and role of the actor in the dramatic moment, while displaying formidable acting skills themselves, finely tuned textual readings and a post-modern look at it all. While STAN is the best known in Paris, enjoying regular invitations from the Festival d’Automne and long-standing support from the Théâtre de la Bastille, members of all three, which operate as collectives, collaborate freely with each other. One such project, by the same De Schrijver/Van den Eede/de Koning threesome, was a condensation of the companies’ commonly held preoccupations and a revelation of the 2003 Festival d’Automne: “Du serment de l’écrivain du roi et de Diderot” (“vandeneedevandeschrijvervandekoninganddiderot”, in Dutch), based on Denis Diderot’s essay, “The Paradox of Acting,” took to heart the French philosopher’s much debated thesis that to move the audience to engage emotionally with the action of the play, the actor must himself remain emotionally neutral.

Suffice it to say that Diderot’s ideas on the subject of acting have not been much implemented at the Comédie-Française. The decision by the theater’s current administrator, Muriel Mayette, to expose its sociétaires and pensionnaires (the two grades of troupe members) to the zero-actor approach of their colleagues in the Low Countries falls under the Théâtre-Français’ more recently assumed objective to venture beyond the classic repertoire produced at its Salle Richelieu venue, by interacting with modern texts and contemporary European directors. Increasingly imitated in France (the company known as “Les Possédés” are obvious admirers), as yet never duplicated, the particular theater equation arrived at by STAN, De Koe and Discordia nevertheless remains, after two months of exchanges and rehearsals, a conundrum for the cast of "Paroles..."

The problem was clearly foreseen, however, by the three directors. As they wrote presciently in the production notes, “With so little time to prepare the actors, the risk is that they will latch onto an appearance of what they want to express, that they show us the form while failing to anchor the project’s subject in their own experience.” (“En si peu de temps de preparation pour les comédiens, le piège serait de s’accrocher à l’extériorité de ce qu’il veulent exprimer, qu’ils montrent la forme sans que le propos vienne de l’intérieur.”). This is precisely the point at which the quintet of actors arrived, but could not surpass, on the opening night.

On a bare space strewn with backstage debris (props, ladders, coats…) and tied up in literal knots by wires and ropes operating curtains and sets, the three actresses and two actors play an ever-repeating, familiar scenario of characters assembling for an anticipated event, and parting when it is over. While the situation they attempt to enact is made deliberately difficult by stage lights that abruptly extinguish, props that are maddeningly missing and direction to talk over each other (so to better destabilize the normative jeu d’acteur in which they were trained), the obviously energized and invested troupe never seemed to find sufficient motivation in the exercise. It may be unfair to hold their efforts up to a standard achieved from decades of reflection, experimentation and improvisation, but a recent STAN performance such as “Le chemin solitaire” (in December), demonstrated to what extent understanding and meaning issue organically in performances by the Dutch and Flemish companies, despite and indeed because of such obstacles to role playing. The temptation to act generally got the better of good intentions in "Paroles...", although Laurent Natrella and Léonie Simaga just as often achieved a necessary humility and distance from character.

As the Emperor found to his dismay, the gorgeous attire he thought he was putting on only exposed his true nature. This latest initiative by the Comédie-Française will be truly splendid if it can shake some of the dust off an art in need of renewal and inject new practices into a venerable institution, to help it do better the repertoire it does best.

To February 28, Tues, 7 pm, Wed-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, 6e, M° St. Sulpice, 8 euros-28 euros, tel: 01.44.39.87.00.

Photo credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

"Je t'appelle de Paris"

City of lights, city of dreams: Paris ever fascinates its 45 million annual visitors who probably remember those first sights, sounds, and of course, tastes of the French capital, even many years later. Café and croissants at a bustling zinc, the Eiffel Tower shimmering against the evening sky, the winding streets and precipitous staircases of Montmartre….: Paris is a feast for the senses as well as the imagination, as Hemingway was neither the first nor the last to note. For visitors coming from far away, in both geography and references, the novelty can begin before even touching Paris soil, in the plane or airport for example, where scales of technology, architecture and services characteristic of a world metropolis can mystify, long before getting to the Mona Lisa. Such was the experience of Moussa Sanou, a Burkinabé playwright/actor who came to France in 2002. Eight years and many Ouagadougou-Paris flights later, Sanou relates those indelibly engraved, first impressions in “Je t’appelle de Paris” (emphasis on the last word): more proof, if needed, that the city continues to exercise its charm, though the effects on visitors hailing from a former French colony can be mixed...

Developed from improvisations around Sanou’s encounters and discoveries, this engaging and lively two-hander, performed with Sanou’s fellow countryman Mamadou Koussé, works safe “fish out of water” comic ground while raising the familiar specter of the Banania Negro (whose “Y’a bon” becomes “Il n’y a pas de problème”) to scratch more sensitive zones of French colonial history and its residue. Sanou and the other members of his company Traces Théâtre, invited by director Jean-Louis Martinelli to create and perform “Voyage en Afrique” at Nanterre-Amandiers in 2002, deal with suspicious neighbors and condescending pedestrians with unflappable aplomb and perfect manners, not to mention exquisite consideration (walking barefoot the five flights to their apartment so as not to disturb the elderly couple next door), but do so always with a wry interior smile. In its sources of both wonder (the Métro…) and bemusement (concerns with propriety and appearances…), and its treatment of both, “Je t’appelle de Paris” is certainly indebted to a classic of African literature, Bernard Dadié’s Un Nègre à Paris (1959), where a young Ivorian author and journalist undertakes a reverse anthropological study of the “Parisians” and the city they built. As Sanou says, taking in everything he sees, “Dieu est bon mais le Blanc est grand!”

Have times changed? Much of West Africa celebrates this year the 50th anniversary of decolonization. Globalization and fifty more years of French coopération obliging, French and Africans are no longer the almost total strangers they were when Dadié gazed upon the Arc de Triomphe. As Moussa Sanou shows, however, more differences remain than there are bridges over the Seine, though most of these are what generally translates into “local color”: surprising, hair-tearing even, but harmless, on the whole. Of course, some opposing views will take more time to reconcile: whereas Sanou and his companions, in sketches that take place back in Burkina Faso, feel a sense of community and take time to appreciate the people they meet, their French guests see only crushing poverty and rudimentary hygiene. It is with these reflections that Sanou offers food for thought: Why must aid be a one-way street? Can Africans contribute nothing to their fellow world citizens? If another canicule strikes France, Sanou has a few ideas he’d like to share with us…

“Je t’appelle de Paris”, to February 14, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, Sun, 4 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttle, 12 euros-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo credit: Pascal Béjean

"Deux Voix"

In June 2009, Royal Dutch Shell agreed to pay over $15 million to the families of the nine Ogoni activists, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, who were executed by the Nigerian government in 1995, with the oil company’s alleged consent. Although neither Shell nor the Ogoni are mentioned in “Deux Voix”, their 40-year conflict looms in the shadows of this one-man tour-de-force by the Dutch company ZT Hollandia, created from statements by Shell’s former Chairman Cor Herkströter, and texts by the Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Created in 1997, the play has its own long history that includes extensive international touring and numerous prizes. After a French premier at the 2004 Festival d’Avignon, the piece arrives in Paris less than a year after the Shell-Ogoni settlement, a landmark that may herald the end of an era of impunity for multinationals who fail to respect human rights and the environment. It certainly opposes a hopeful coda to a work that scours the gloss off the smooth operators of the political and business establishments.

Around a dinner table littered with the dregs of wine carafes, champagne bottles and whisky glasses, an almost interchangeable foursome of government officials, captains of industry and their cohorts peel back the layers of their toxic involvement in each other’s affairs, in a muscular and cruelly comic exposition of how political, business, intellectual and religious institutions and actors feed on and corrupt one another, with the help (this is Pasolini’s Italy, after all) of organized crime and the media. The quartet’s crude posturing and violent outbursts are abruptly deflated, however, by the coolly objective and ostensibly reasoned arguments offered by a fifth dinner guest, for whom business is business/has no business having a moral conscience. Taken from published articles and statements by Herkströter defending Shell’s operations in Nigeria (which included gas flaring and the de facto support of Nigeria’s military rulers), this monologue marks an immediate shift in tone and a chilling end to the play.

In its use of Herkströter’s arguments, its theme of political and industrial bed partners and its partial source in the activities of oil multinationals in Africa, “Deux Voix” (which was created in Dutch, as “Twee Stemmen”) is a forbearer of a similarly preoccupied French play, “ELF, la pompe Afrique”, based on the verbatim testimony of the defendants in the massive ELF-Aquitaine corruption trial (2003) that exposed decades of influence abuse by the French government in its former African colonies. “Deux Voix” issues, however, from ZT Hollandia’s long-standing interest in power relations within society, from its most marginal members to its supposed “movers and shakers”. The show is also the third by the Eindhoven-based company derived from the work and theories of Pasolini, who, diametrically opposed to ideas such as those espoused by Herkstroter, believed that economics pose the greatest threat to human development. By juxtaposing Herkströter’s frank attitude and emotionless language with Pasolini’s dissembling, hyperbolic characters and the bombast of their discourse, “Deux Voix” underscores both the differing opinions of the board chariman and the writer as well as the different approaches (resulting in similar results) by those in power to the mechanisms and structures at their disposal.

Playing all five roles, Jeroen Willems offers a fascinating performance, sliding in and out of the skin of these slippery characters with the same ease a chameleon changes colors, while underscoring a certain uniformity in their activities and views. The play gives much reason to question the nature of the institutions which directly govern and inadvertently rule us and to demand of them, as the Ogoni have done with Shell, that they begin to put human beings back where they belong.

To February 10, Tues-Wed, Fri-Sat, 8:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, 7 avenue Pablo Picasso, Nanterre (92), RER A Nanterre-Préfecture + shuttle, 12 euros-25 euros, tel: 01.46.14.70.00.

Photo credit: Ben van Duin