Ma chambre froide

Estelle is a model employee. For her coworkers, she covers their shifts, takes their blame, cleans up, stays late, opens early, asks for advances on her salary to loan them money and even lets the boss take advantage of her. In "Ma chambre froide", Joël Pommerat adds a new anti-héroine to his world of workers pitted against implacable market forces and each other, except that this time, Estelle is perhaps not the simple sum of the hours she works and the company balance sheet.

"Ma chambre froide" is also not the obvious sequel to Pommerat's trilogy on the same themes. After "Au monde" (2004) "D'une seule main" (2005) and "Les Marchands" (2006) [see this blog and parisvoice.com for reviews], which explored the pressure exerted on family and society by an unethical work "ethic" and economic crisis, "Ma chambre froide" considers what happens when colleagues and work supplant family and private life altogether, with a previously unsuspected comic vein. Common to all however is Pommerat's brutal vision of human nature in its 21st century struggles with globalization, downsizing, unemployment and their related ills, in a particularly French interpretation of the social contract.

The play imagines a certain Blocq, self-made entrepreneur and CEO of four successful businesses, whose crass and dismissive attitude towards all earns him the hatred and scorn of his staff, with the notable exception of Estelle. When he learns he has weeks to live, he leaves ownership of all his holdings to his eight "store" employees on the condition that they remember him once a year in a public display of their thanks. When Estelle has the idea to write a play about his life, her colleagues start to doubt her sincerity and even her sanity, especially when she starts imposing late-night rehearsals and animal costumes at the same time profits take a downturn and the whole staff is called upon to make enormous personal and moral sacrifices in the so-called collective good. That Estelle inadvertently refers to the store's cold chamber (chambre froid) as her own room suggests the extent to which the characters have been overtaken by the same pressures that consumed Blocq.


Like last season's "Cercles/Fictions", "Ma chambre froid" tells an episodic story that builds in suspense with each succeeding installment. But unlike that work, it does so with both feet more or less in a recognizable reality and a biting sense of humor. Less fantastical and figurative than his earlier plays, this latest piece has all the intrigue, suspense and surprises of a criminal investigation, while the exasperated insults with which the characters take each other down and Estelle's comic attempts to direct her colleagues create some very funny moments. What interests Pommerat though are the mysterious zones that theater provides to question human experience and explore alternative possibilities to what can be known and lived in real time and space. Who is Estelle in fact? What was Blocq's intention?

The actors of his Compagnie Louis Brouillard prove yet again to be invaluable guides through Pommerat's rich and strange worlds, creating with their characteristic cool precision equally familiar and monstrous characters within the close confines of the arena-like, 360-degree space, in contrasting tones of bleak neon or total darkness. They are masters of the transformative powers that Pommerat's work presupposes. His writing and direction, so exact from the timing of the scene changes to the irony of the sound track, here deserve the best of their talents,

If Estelle is right that it is always possible to change a bad situation, in "Ma chambre froide" liberation comes with a price that only the best, or the worst, are willing to pay.

To March 27, Tues-Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe/Ateliers Berthier, corner of rue Suarès and bd Berthier, 17e, Métro Porte de Clichy, 6-28 euros, tel: 01.44.85.40.40.

Photo Credit: Alain Fonteray

Please Kill Me

If you remember that Robert Hell was the father of the Mohawk as a hair statement and safety-pins as a fashion accessory, then “Please Kill Me” is right up your alley. The latest show from Mathieu Bauer and Sentimental Bourreau takes its material and its name from the collection of interviews compiled by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain with everyone who was anyone in the punk music scene that started in New York in the early Seventies: Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Joey and Dee-Dee Ramone, Johnny Thunders, Blondie, Malcolm McLaren… Subtitled “The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”, the book holds no punches but shoots off more than a few, recounting overdoses, animal defenestrations, groupies, the pogo and the sweating steamy clubs where it all went down.

From that dense and not always fascinating body of anecdotes, Bauer has assembled an intelligent show that translates the style, the sound and the stunts of CBGB’s circa 1975, without ever attempting to recreate them. Actors Kate Strong and Matthias Girbig channel more than mimic the furious energy and nihilistic personas that shot to notorious fame in New York and then London, shouting, whispering and growling with the shadow of a Sid Viscious scowl or the sinuous muscularity of an Iggy pose. Of different generations and genders, they embody the scene from blast off to burn out, its major and minor players, its crossing of sexual codes. Bauer, on percussion, aided by Sylvain Cartigny on guitars and Lazare Boghossian on synthesizer do “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Blank Generation,” not like the Stooges and the Voidoids did but rather how adolescent memory and forty-something experience have moved them, as talented musicians in their own right and certainly far more musically sophisticated than the Sex Pistols ever were. Bauer makes use of a mostly blank set and a huge back screen to subtitle the VO text, delivered with deadpan humor by Strong, and to create context and atmosphere, using original album artwork and live and prerecorded video montages.

Long before the music business became an industry, the stories retold and alluded to, as outrageous as they were, seem strangely from a more innocent time. The show doesn’t quite keep the pace of a Ramones’ song, and an unnecessary and overlong coda weights the finish, but “Please Kill Me” gets the message of the t-shirt Hell wore proclaiming that same statement: attitude is everything, just don’t take it too seriously.

To March 22, in English and French, Mon-Sat, 7:30 pm, Sun, 3:30 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, Mº Bastille, 13-22 euros, tel: 01.43.57.42.14.

Photo Credit: Romain Etienne

Une Saison chez Césaire

Living legends are rare but Aimé Césaire was one. In his lifetime (1913-2008), his name was synonymous with Black consciousness for French colonial subjects, or Négritude. One of France’s first and only colored députés, he delivered a blistering attack on French colonialism and racism in 1950, and was also the face of modern Martinican politics, as both the mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001 and the author of Martinique’s request to become a French Overseas Department. First and foremost however, Césaire was a poet who developed a personal esthetic of surrealism - astonishing even to André Breton - to evoke the unique mal-de-vivre of French West Indians caught between a calculatingly generous “motherland” and aspirations for self-actualization. He was also the author of an equally acute theatrical body of work that is unforgiving of history and the political and economic machine that dictated it in his part of the world. “Nègre fondamental” and “éveilleur de conscience”, Césaire provided the foundation and the vision for African and West Indian literatures and identities.

The play “Une Saison chez Césaire”, conceived by his daughter Michèle and Haitian director Ruddy Sylaire is an invitation to rediscover Césaire's poetico-militant preoccupations in this year of celebrations of France’s overseas territories (“2011 Année des Outre-mer”). Splicing scenes from his four plays, the piece explores his principal concern, that of “le Nègre en lutte pour des lendemains meilleurs”. From the fugitive slave who aspires to be the Inventor of oppressed desires (“Et les chiens se taisaient”) to Christophe, the liberator/dictator of Haitian history (“La tragédie du roi Christophe”); from Lumumba, visionary of African unity (“Une Saison au Congo”) to Caliban, symbol of the brutalization of African-American identity ("Une Tempête"), Césaire challenges official lip-service to human rights and France’s own cherished motto of liberty, equality and fraternity for all.

If Césaire’s metaphorical language and Sylaire’s direction feel limited by the narrow confines of the Déchargeurs, the four actors give generously to their performances as a host of idealists trapped by history and crushed by unstoppable forces. The production is a simple and direct tribute to Césaire’s writing, as minimal in its dramatic language as it is symbolic in its few concessions to set (two poteau-mitan and a hanging sculpture evoking the lianes of the Martinican rain forest, both charged with rich symbolic implications for his work). Césaire’s voice rings loud and clear in this too brief “season” of his yet too pertinent discontent.

To April 9, Tues-Sat, 9:45 pm, 2 pm Sat, Théatre les Déchargeurs, 3 rue des Déchargeurs, 1e, Mº Châtelet, tel: 0892. 70.12.28.