“Ça”

Henry James likened belief in a grand destiny to a beast that devours the misguided souls who are unfortunate enough to experience it. Director Jan Ritsema adapts James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) as “Ça”, trading the novelist’s concerns with self-actualization for a purely formal exercise, but one that provides an interesting complement to the story’s thematic premise. James imagined a man who wastes his life waiting for the « big something » that will reveal to him the meaning of his presence in this world, never seeing the woman who agrees to wait with him. Through a complete decontexualization of the text, Ritsema attempts to place James’ psychological action in an unspecified present: the conversations that paralyze John and May from acting in the world are shared (or meant to be) by actors Nathalie Richard and Gérard Watkins, who, in street clothes on a blank stage, smoke or move about as they feel inclined and apparently refuse the theatrical fiction.

Does it work? Ritsema provides a fascinating hour of heightened listening to James’ century old text, to find in it a sense of personal importance and power that is perhaps more relevant – and prevalent – in our individualistic societies and their virtual worlds. The actors achieve a subtle complicity between each other and the audience, where every word, look and intonation counts towards understanding who, among the characters, the actors as themselves or their staged personas, is speaking. The visual and aural set design, by video artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster, is somewhat curious: the cinematic reference ("Viridiana" by Luis Buñel) remains enigmatic here but the background noise it creates forces the audience to lend a more attentive ear to the actors’ parrying. A modern and challenging approach to James’ text, while preserving his piercing attention to the psyche in its tortured search for meaning.

To Dec. 10, Mon, Tues, Fri, Sat, 8 pm, Thurs, 7 pm, Théâtre de la Cité internationale, 17 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER B Cité universitaire, 10-21 €, tel: 01.43.13.50.50.

Photo Credit: Benoîte Fanton/WikiSpectacle