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