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