 |
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||
|
Paris
Theatre Diary
|
|||||||
|
News |
November 2005 A new arrival in Paris quickly discovers the French passion for making things difficult. To a Gallic soul, red wine and red tape come equal as priorities, and the capital's theatre scene is no different.
Try to make sense for instance of the season programme at Théâtre de la Ville. Tucked away inside are shows by Pina Bausch, Martin Crimp, Akram Khan… but you'll end up with a nasty headache before finding them. Meanwhile at the Paris Opéra, every production has its own unique ticket release date. Booking a good seat in advance is like parking your car in the suburbs for the evening. A gamble. If you're willing to take some time though, Paris can offer a quite endless array of choice. Many Brits progress little further than Brook's Bouffes du Nord (currently closed for renovation), but that is just a tiny drop in the water. Far more so than London, Paris is an international capital of opera, music, theatre, circus, and dance. Hopping on the Eurostar can offer some great rewards.
One such event this month was Robert Lepage's revival of his 1985 production The Dragon Trilogy. Part of the Festival d'Automne á Paris, it's an enthralling, if imperfect, piece. Throughout, story-telling on a grand scale is constantly interrupted by overhashed displays of raw emotion and crass symbolism. In the final part, for example, we watch the Canadian Pierre and Japanese Yukali nervously woo each other. Pierre's spectacular light installation of the universe covers the entire stage. At the centre of this, Yukali places her green, white and red dragon paintings - symbols of the destructive capabilities within each of us. It's an exquisite moment. The forces of stress that have driven the play, between East and West, man and women, ying and yang finally reach harmony in the two lovers. Straight after though the entire cast fills the stage with two huge pieces of rope, their ends suggestively shaped. For the next five minutes we're subjected to a crass fertility ritual that is both unnecessary and quite ridiculous.
On the other side of town, Flemish collective TG Stan have taken over the Bastille Theatre for two months. The first of four plays, My Dinner with Andre is a disappointing offering. Those who saw the group's 2004 show Lucia Melts at the Edinburgh International Festival will know what to expect. Their performances, created anew every night, eschew polish for a relaxed intimacy with the text and audience. The piece, based on the 1991 film of the same name, follows the philosophical give-and-take between two old friends (André and Wallace) as they work through a four-course meal. In keeping with the group's philosopy, there is no attempt to create an artificial locality. Videos show the actors entering the theatre via the main foyer. They then walk through the audience to a meal prepared (on-stage) by a different chef each night. In constant breaks from the play, the actors engage with the audience, discuss how the performance is going, check the script for details, or harangue a group of latecomers. It's like watching a stand-up version of Brecht. The double act does pull in the audience like a third guest at the table, but it's a routine that soon begins to run thin. The first half of the show, dominated by André's madcap tales of Growtowski workshops, Tibetan spiritualists and the Scottish Findhorn commune, is highly entertaining. In the second half though, we're left with smug intellectual to-and-fro. Tucking into their feast, they treatise on the meaning of life and the responsibilities of the artist within it. It's often amusing, but at three-and-a-half-hours with no interval, the show just goes on. Ironically, the happiest people on stage are the ever present cook and his assistant, quietly getting on with life. As André espouses some nonsense about higher spiritual plains, the grinning waiter calmly brushes crumbs off the table.
A Night at the Library, written by Italian Jean-Christophe Baily, is another show that spends long periods in cerebral wallowing. Performed in the Bibliotèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the premise is that the books themselves come alive. One complains of having few readers, another longs to know its own ending, yet another wonders about the world beyond the dusty bookshelves. Contrary to their reputation as the haunts of lonely scholars, libraries are posited as the eternal repositories of our dreams, our journeys, our emotions and our errors. As one neglected tome remarks, "Each book is like a river, always the same, always different." If we stop reading books where will we go? After sitting through this plodding play of ideas, though, my answer would be anywhere but the nearest bookshop. Trying to spice things up, director Gilberte Tsaï engineers some awfully naff moments. Two nineteenth century volumes, complete with frills and all, get down to a half-hearted approximation of badminton. Another strips down to his waist so that his final chapter, written on his back, can be recited. Slightly lower down and there might have been something to get excited about!
A similarly ludicrous production came in the shape of Spaniard Jorge Lavelli's take on Tankred Dorst's Merlin or the Devastated Earth. The evening opens with an idiot mother giving birth to a fully grown, bearded and spectacled Merlin. Meanwhile an incredibly not-funny clown bores the hell out of both her and the audience. Incredibly enough, for the next five unfocused, rambling hours, we are continually plummeted through the same abyss of awfulness. Most of the cast look like they've been taking workshops with Monty Python, and Lavelli's awful direction strangles any interest in either the characters or plot. At one point, for example, Lancelot and Guinivere are in imminent danger of discovery. For some inexplicable reason they begin flopping up and down like mannequins manipulated by an epileptic. What little eroticism and focus there was is completely destroyed. Lavelli's desire for this awful play-acting and his total inability to build a moment of tension is inexcusable. To watch him crow-bar his concept onto the show is a truly ugly sight.
Yukio Mishima's Hanjo however gives an evening of sincere and tender beauty. In this production by Théâtre de l'Aquariam, the tale of Hanako, a young girl deserted by her lover, maintains an entrancing delicacy throughout. Thrice-nominated for the Nobel prize, Mishima was fascinated by pre-modern forms of literature. Hanjo is a modern Noh, the madness of Hanako a staple of the ancient Japanse stage. Set in the present day, director Julie Brochen's company dispenses with the tradition's incredible rigidity. What remains though is an elegiac sense of calm permeating even the most traumatic scenes. Repeated motifs of actions, words and music also evoke the ritualistic nature of Noh. Hanako obstinately tries to stop the world's spinning by lying on her back and staring at the stars. A white-faced mime unrolls a newspaper over the stage, wraps it around him like a dress, and then rips everything off. A second women, Jutsiko, in love with Hanako, drops a suitcase full of newspaper cuttings over the stage, collects them back into the case and throws it into the sea. Each time though, unable to divorce herself from these token remembrances, she rescues the suitcase and its contents. As Brochen admits, "Noh is a remote setting and a loss of reference for Westerners". There is nothing distant though about Hanako's pain. Nor could Brochen's exquisite union of tradition and modernity be lost on any audience. In fact, Hanjo beautifully exemplifies the search, in every theatre tradition, for a shared human experience. Details:
Reporter: John Cardale Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
|
||||||
|
|
