"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