Identité

A white rug, a beige raincoat, a few bottles of wine and one couple. Gérard Watkins, who won the Grand prix de literature dramatique (new writing prize) in 2010 with “Identité” (published by Voix navigables), places some very large preoccupations in a very small world (and a very familiar theater trope). How may an individual define himself/be defined? Getting there has many access roads, passing through culture, family, profession, nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, gender… most of which originate in realms far beyond our control.

Impatient with an immediate notion of identity (child + parents) for characters André and Marion Klein, the play opens a Petri dish of germinating ideas on identity as history (Vél d’hiv’), as politics (immigration policy) and as economics in the consumer societies of the European Union. But just as the question of who one is cannot be summed up on a census form, the larger issues Watkins tries to tackle are not easily contained in the miniature frame he uses, in the example of the Klein’s participation in an identity contest of sorts which finds them either exhuming corpses to win hypothetical prize money or engaging in a hunger fast in reaction to a general malaise. The action takes on a vaguely Orwellian atmosphere, in the play’s evident subscription to the existence of nebulous forces which inexorably manipulate us all.

Writing in reaction to the "Mariani Amendment" which proposed requiring DNA tests for immigrants to France requesting visas for their family members. Watkins seeks to transpose the Amendment's violence to society at large, as André and Marion must scour their parents' homes and even tombs for DNA residu. The question of their genetic tree is not what interests Watkins, however; André and Marion's discussions on genocide and involvement (both direct and indirect) in such mass crimes, make clear that is rather the dangerously insidious allegiances made by individuals in their daily lives that risk defining them. The work's merit lies in this extension of the debate, along with the cadences and images of Watkin's language which can, in the brutality of the context, approach the surreal. Billed as a tragedy, vaguely facetious, deliberately abstract, and with a tone vacillating between hysterical laughter and brute pessimism (from actors Anne-Lise Heimburger and Fabien Orcier, respectively), "Identité" is much less about a perception of self and much more about a society at pains to embrace the Other in its midst.

To Feb. 11, Tues-Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, 11e, Mº Bastille, tel: 01.43.57.42.14.

Photo Credit: Hervé Bellamy