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