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Paris
Theatre Diary
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May 2006 In the first half of the Chinese Peking Opera School's presentation, an elderly teacher stepped onto the stage. Dressed in a plain white shirt and brown trousers, he moved and sang with the virtuoso simplicity of a master. As he executed a series of crisp, stylised movements, a young boy mimicked his every gesture and sound. Centuries of learning were being passed from one generation to another. Last year the students, average age thirteen, wowed Parisians. This year they embark on an extended European tour. More than one audience member turned up with a painted face, in homage to the tradition's swirling masks. The formula for their success is quite simple: a shocking level of talent, combined with the cute-factor of a school play. The first half opened with a gymnastic display that would put most circus acrobats to shame. They twisted and somersaulted in the space of a penny. The sheer lightness, discipline and agility of their bodies took your breath away. The paucity of Western theatre training struck home in comparison. As the school president Sun Yumin explained, "One minute on the stage equals ten years of work." Ten yeras is the time it takes to complete the school. The pupils must master gymnastics, acting, singing and martial arts. Few European or American actors could claim such breadth of training. As the students presented full scenes in the second half though, one thing became clear. Technical prowess is not the same thing as acting. In the evening's final presentation, only one performer dominated the stage: the King of the Monkeys. His humanity, spirit and personality shined through the most complex of aerial and combat manoeuvres. In comparison, the others just looked like highly programmed automatons. Alain Gautré's production of Molière's L'avare (The Miser) showed, Europe can display its own empty robots. Like the students of the Peking Opera, Gautré's cast exhibited great physical technique: lovers scaled each other's bodies to escape detection, policemen metamorphosed from gorillas to neighing asses. Gautré in particular brought intricate physical detail to the role of Harpagon (the 'Miser'). In one scene, a palm reader read his hand. Keeping his arm still, he twisted his entire body around the appendage to share perspective with the fortune teller. While it was refreshing to see Western actors alive from the neck down, visual flair alone is not enough. In the end, the constant physical action and multiple on-stage happenings just lead to sensory overload. It was the same with Pascale Lecoq's dazzling costumes, a fusion of Jean-Paul Gaultier extroversion with psychedelic colour and design. They were beautiful enough for a catwalk. Unfortunately, they were far more interesting than the actors. For all the frenetic activity, it was the closing image of Gautré's Harpagon that was the most affecting. As carnival music played for the play's four united lovers, he was left alone on stage, still and broken - his tight-fisted veneer destroyed. Finally, we saw what we had been missing all night: a real human being. Writer and director Olivier Py's latest epic, Les Vainqueurs (The Victors) also frustrated. There lurks within this production a potentially beautiful show. At over nine hours though, incessant rambling and criminal excess has destroyed that possibility. In the play, Py interrogates his dream of an idealised, tender paganism, distant from the barbaric connotations the word suggests. Those who discover how to live "poetically, as an alternative to the religions and wisdoms of the past" are the victors of the title. A young boy encounters three strange individuals in the show's prologue: Florian, a deposed prince, Cythère, a renowned courtesan, and Axel, a grave-digger with a wooden leg. Infatuated by the mysterious smile that each possesses, he vows to incarnate all three, to discover the secret of their happiness. As Florian, he leads a revolution in the prince's homeland. As Cythère, he intoxicates a court with his beauty. As Axel, he understands joy only in his love for a dead boy. Playing all three characters, Christophe Maltot delivers a heroic performance, equally convincing as revolutionary, monster or whore. As his nemesis Ferrare, Nazim Bougjenah also manages an astounding feat of endurance and skill. Wracked with envy for Florian, Cythère and Axel's mysterious smile, he degenerates from a sadistic power broker to a whimpering child. At the end, he pleads with Axel for his secret. The reply explodes with revolutionary fervour, "I don't look for an answer, there is no question. To live is enough." Carved across his chest is Py's nihilistic rallying cry: "Vivre suffit." It's a powerfully simple message, but nine and a half hours? At half the length, Les Vainqueurs could have been philosophically and theatrically explosive. As it is, a deluge of never ending dialogue, constant scene changes, inane declarations and unimaginable tracts of boredom wash away anything that is good. There's a distinct feeling of what could have been. French theatre is crying out for visionaries with Py's scope and ability. It's disgraceful to see such talent wasted by indulgence. Often though not boredom, but total confusion defeats an audience. Anatoli Vassiliev's new work Iz Poutechestviya Oneguina (Onegin's Voyage) is such a case in hand. Based on Pouchkine's novel, and also Tchaikovsky's opera of Pouchkine's novel, complicated is not the word. In writing his 1879 opera, Tchaikovsky spurned traditional narrative to focus on episodic story-telling. Vassiliev takes this deconstruction one step further, with mixed results. At its best, the production juxtaposed heightened naturalism with Dali-like surrealism. In the final half hour alone the stage hosted a Western-style gun duel, a centaur decked out for pantomime, prancing ballerinas, actors disguised as birds, a village choir, a widow trapped backstage on a wheelchair and a weighty Prince attempting to sing from a tiny Japanese stool. Finally, Onegin's love interest Tatyana died at the front of the stage. Her still beating heart ripped from her chest, a communist flag waived over her body. It was a slightly ludicrous but at least interesting finale. On the whole, Vassiliev's production confused without the same levels of entertainment. Half the principals looked and acted alike, leaving distinct characterisation often non-existent. The surtitles seemed to be verbatim translations of the novel rather than the actual on-stage dialogue. Delivered by the principals in laboured and heavy pronouncements, the latter often sounded more like instructions from a television manual than poetry. The Odéon Theatre claims that this is Vassiliev's "funniest work to date". I dread to think what the laugh count was like on his previous shows! Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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