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.