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