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