Friday, February 25, 2011

Timon d'Athènes


The critic Harold Bloom is said to have credited poetry slams with the death of literature, but an adaptation of “Timon of Athens” with three stars of the underground rap scene demonstrates that slam and Shakespeare have plenty in common. Fundamentally popular arts, both relish in bringing the spoken word to the people by pushing language to heights of musicality and imagery. They’re also blisteringly human and a lot of fun to watch. Those qualities are only part of the success of the “Timon d’Athenes” directed by Razerka Ben Sadia-Lavant, who has astutely seen in Shakespeare’s last play, a work made for the slam stage.

That is to say that the play has a checkered history. Unfinished, rarely produced and with an ambiguous story allowing little comfort or a clear moral, Timon lurks in the curtains as Hamlet and Lear steal the spotlight again and again. That marginal position lies easily with the show’s performers who represent the underclass of a politically and socially engaged form of rap that is far from the genteel melodies and lyrics of MC Solaar or the marketing machine of Diam’s. French rappers of West Indian origins, Casey and D’de Kabal are joined in the project by former Nuyorican Poetry Slam (NYC) laureate Mike Ladd, along with actors Denis Lavant and Marie Payen. They form an intimidating team to tell the story of Timon, a wildly generous but equally naive idealist who goes to his grave hating mankind when wealth then friends recede into the horizon. Asking the questions of friendship’s “price” and the power of moolah to create obsequious flatterers, the play’s themes are similarly in keeping with the rap scene’s penchant for bankrolls and bling.

These connections lead to a truly inventive adaptation of Shakespeare, but one that retains a sense of measure while offering a piercing reading of the text: a quality which lifts the struts and swaggers, the gold gloves and the omnipresent mikes from mere vehicle to interpretative insight. Lavant plays Lavant, a live wire if ever there was one, and his mere presence adds a dangerous unpredictability to Timon, who literally collapses under the weight of his rage. D’de Kabal lends his impressive stature and vocal register to Alcibiades, the rebellious general, and Marie Payen fills in the supporting roles from the artist and merchant classes, as well as Flavius, Timon’s faithful servant; her casting brings the sole hint of sex to Timon’s Athens, obsessed with money at the expense of human relations. As Apemantus, the cynical philosopher who scorns Timon’s hangers-on, Casey gives the most astonishing performance. This female rapper from Seine-Saint-Denis via Fort-de-France has built on an androgynous appearance to enter the macho world of hip-hop, but her softer physicality sets Apemantus off from Alcibiades and makes for a a fascinating, insult-hurling show-down with Lavant’s tiny Timon in the play’s final act.

Those verbal jousts of which Shakespeare was a master, 400 years before Grandmaster Flash, are, in Timon, particularly well served by rap’s pulsing braggadocio. Besides commissioning a translation that has its ear to the language of the streets (by Sophie Couronne), Ben Sadia-Lavant had the excellent idea to invite American spoken word master Mike Ladd to deliver Timon’s significant monologues in a sizzling half-sung, half-rapped VO: some of the most exciting moments of the show. The production does away entirely with set and movement, leaving only the text in a poetry slam atmosphere, the performers delivering their lines from five microphone stations. The sole concession to the dramatic genre is their repeated costume changes, to signal character shifts and to mark Timon’s demise from wealthy benefactor to destitute misanthrope. Even with prodigious Doctor L. on percussion, guitar and synthesizer, the show clocks in at a mere 75 minutes. Purists be damned: it’s a slam all right, but one that does Shakespeare proud.

To March 12, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sat, 7 pm, Maison des Métallos, 94 rue Jean-Piere Timabud, 11e, Mº Couronnes, 10-14 euros, tel: 01.48.05.88.27.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Le Musée de la Mer



Author Marie Darrieussecq broke onto France's literary scene in 1996 with a Kafkaesque story about a woman who finds herself turning into a sow. Surprising transformations and ambiguous relations are not unusual to the dozen novels that followed. For her first play, « Le Musée de la mer », she dives into the murky waters of crisis and conflict to fish out dystopian anxiety along with some strange marine life.

Director Arthur Nauzyciel is drawn to intercultural collaboration as well as to Darrieussecq's themes and writing. He has directed two Koltès plays for the Emory Theater in Atlanta and a "Julius Caesar" with the American Repertory Theater of Boston. In 2009, he got Darrieussecq on board to adapt "Ordet" (1925), by the Danish writer and Lutheran minister Kaj Munk.

This background seems important in trying to understand what we see on stage at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers. Never dotting too many of her « i »’s in her unsettling fictional worlds, Darrieussecq writes for the program notes that she has relied on Nauzyciel to fill in much of the detail of “Musée”. Where the text stops and Nauzyciel's vision takes over cannot be known, but it is a wonder who of this otherwise talented duo will take responsibility for the undefinable creature from the deep
which occupies center stage for most of the performance.

"Belle" is described as possibly a lamantin (sea cow), in the program notes. She is, from what is to be gathered from the text, all that remains of the museum's marine life, decimated by the consequences (largely famine) of an ambiguously defined war which encroaches on this windswept corner of an equally unspecified country. "Her" uncensored suffering, which is communicated by unnerving moaning and even singing, is undoubtedly meant to illustrate the unstated feelings of the largely stoic characters: two couples and the two children of one of these. Dancer Damien Jalet goes to admirably painful lengths to give life to Belle, but, as insensitive to her metaphorical importance as the comment may be, the formless thing never looks like more than a lumpy orange bag with a man inside.

Another curiosity is the plastic-draped set, dominated by an enormous bubble. Characters enter it at times, ostensibly extending the narrative space, while their presence there is alternately dream-like and grotesque. There is also the matter of a kind of basin, or even a trap leading into the open sea, where the last (rubber) fish are caught. We're not sure where we are, but it certainly isn't real, with consequences for the intended message regarding wartime, concessions and survival.

The children who arrive at the museum's door, and their siamesesque contortions, provide the most interest here. If their presence is meant to underscore the characters' uncomfortable need for each other under stress, that is perhaps the most powerful message of the play.

"Musée" was created with Iceland's National Theater and a multicultural artistic team. The Icelandic connection lends a hint of wild spaces and dramatic contrasts to Darrieussecq's oblique text, but "Le Musée de la mer" remains as slippery as a fish or as taciturn as a fisherman, its intended effet never quite clear.

Seen at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Feb. 3, 2011.

Photo Credit: Frédéric Nauzyciel