Tag: paris theatre

Right.

We’re going to skip the usual apologies for not being here writing about things. I was busy with the book. I’ve been writing plenty (…ish). But right now, I’m in a funny little limbo space which involves waiting for my copy editor to get back in touch with me (and maybe finalize a publication date…no I’m not silently freaking out about this, why in the world would anyone think that…?), and I need stimulation. Thus, here we are.

Bref.

The theme with theatre so far this season (so…one piece that I’ll get to in a bit plus what I saw this summer) can be summed up as follows:

Why are we putting this show on?

This question applies less to new works and more to restaging of classical pieces – and coincidentally was inspired by what I saw this summer at Epidauros.

Honestly, after the undeniable success of Aris Biniaris’ direction of Prometheus Bound in bringing Aeschylus’ text unabashedly into the 21^st century, injecting it with a timeliness and urgency that are often absent in productions of classical Greek texts, my expectations were high. Alas, the show we saw this year was Sophocles’ Ajax, and if this summer’s experience taught me anything it is “Why the fuck is anyone producing this show?”

Truly, I ask you who are reading this, a piece that centers around two men having what essentially amounts to a dick-measuring contest over who gets another warrior’s [Achilles’] armor has what, exactly, to say about our contemporary existence? Of course, the answer to that question may be some rather nuanced or complex insight into our own relationships with notions of pride, glory, militarism, etc., but given that the overall aesthetic of this piece seemed to jump around between tragedy, comedy, and – during one bizarre sequence – modern dance piece that vaguely evoked German Expressionist cinema à la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, without any discernable reason, my only take away of the whole experience was “We did this because it was on the repertoire rotation. Yay?”

(And yes, now that I don’t have to worry about maintaining an air of critical impartiality, the opinions come out).

This brings us to tonight’s production commentary:

William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, mise en scène de François Orsoni, Théâtre de la Bastille, September 13, 2022

Before I get to this, I need to acknowledge how odd this season at the Bastille is going to be. This is not only due to Jean-Marie Hordé’s retirement after 32 years as artistic director, but also to the fact that, administratively, the theatre is technically in transition mode. Up until now, it has officially been classified as independent (so, neither public nor private). While it does receive some subsidies from the City, as well as from other public and private organizations, for a good part of its history as a theatre, it existed in a state of financial precarity, with Hordé’s programming choices and directorial approach being part of the reason why it reached some state of financial stability at all.

(As an aside, this is all very brief, I know, but we don’t have time to get into the nitty-gritty of it here).

Following Hordé’s retirement, the theatre will be reclassed as a public theatre (though which classification it will receive remains unknown), joining the country’s larger network of such theatres / cultural spaces, as well as becoming eligible for more substantial State and/or Regional and Departmental funding (though given the direction public funding for basically anything has been going these last 20+ years, it remains to be seen how much that will actually change concretely). Yet, what this also means is the risk of a fundamental change in the theatre’s identity in terms of productions, namely: will a space known for being both daring/innovative and, at times, literary (these may sound like polar opposites, but I assure you, they don’t need to be) fall victim to the “exchangism” and stagnancy that has plagued other public theatre houses? At this point, who knows (a lot of this will largely depend on who the Ministry ultimately selects to take over the position – as in, will they actually pick someone with a truly daring vision and not just a surface-level air of one which will sooner or later betray an alliance with the status quo rather than an active questioning and destabilizing of it). For now, the 2022/2023 season is the last one Hordé completely designed, so I’ve made it a point to see practically everything.

But for the love of god, why in the world did we have to start with Coriolanus?

Much like with Ajax, this production, if nothing else, answered the question as to why no one really produces Coriolanus anymore. Come to think of it, I don’t think I had ever read it in any of my theatre classes prior to seeing it. A quick google search will reveal that one of the many roadblocks contemporary audiences have with this piece is how blatantly undemocratic (and, yeah, I’ll go there, fascistic) it is – though this is a complaint that stretches back to the nineteenth century as well. The titular character, despite being the center of the tragedy, is, to put it mildly, an unapologetically vain asshole. He goes off to war to fight the Volsci and, after claiming victory for Rome, is elected consul but hates it in part because he has to play the role of a politician who must endear himself to the common people (though, as it is mentioned several times, his war wounds should be proof enough of the love he has for his country), and, unfortunately, Coriolanus openly despises the common people.

By the way, these same common people are also starving due to lack of bread, but I digress…

Anyway, the long and short of it goes like this: Coriolanus becomes consul – Coriolanus is an asshole – tribunal takes advantage of this – tribunal manipulates the people (because of course, they are easy to twist about like that) into turning against Coriolanus – Coriolanus is banished – Coriolanus pledges loyalty to his former enemy and vows to help him attack Rome – Coriolanus’s mother convinces him not to attack and to draft a peace treaty – Coriolanus realizes he’s been an idiot, agrees to peace, then gets stabbed by his enemy because of his betrayal and because his enemy realizes that Coriolanus actually has the potential to gain people’s respect after all.

Also, the people are still starving in the end, but whatever. Some plot threads don’t need resolving, I suppose.

Granted, Shakespeare did write this play during a time of great duress in England. Queen Elizabeth I had just died (well…uncanny), James I had just come into power, the theatres reopening after two years of closure following a plague (also uncanny), and a series of popular uprisings in the Midlands following the enacting of new enclosure laws and privatization of access to lands that – surprise – led to a rise in hunger amongst the peasantry. 

Again, the people are starving. 

In his director’s note, Orsoni acknowledges the current as well as historical problematics around staging this piece (notably, how fascists used it to further their own agenda in the late 1930s), while stating that the key for him is striking the balance between Coriolanus and the tribunal that ultimately works to oust him from Roman society. The result is a piece that gives you no one really to root for, except, maybe, “the people”, this nebulous mass whose existence Shakespeare’s text not only questions the legitimacy of, but also reduces down to the status of object used to further the interests of others. 

At the same time, this particular staging did play a bit with aesthetic convention when it came to telegraphing the social/class status of its characters. Coriolanus, for instance, wears an adidas track suit – zipped up only halfway – and slides (at one point with socks) for the majority of the piece, and speaks with a certain affected gruffness that is otherwise often used in performance to designate someone on the lower and/or working-class end of the socioeconomic ladder. In other words, his way of being on the stage in all its “boorish-ness” goes against the codified image associated with someone of his station. A career military man (as he is) may be gruff and lack in some finesse, but not necessarily to this extent.

In contrast, the tribunal especially – and to a certain degree the people as well – speak more clearly, if not with an affected refinement in their speech, then with no discernable additional affectation to their voices that would immediately place them on a particular rung on the socioeconomic ladder. Yet, where one does get a sense of social stratification is in the question of space: Coriolanus essentially occupies the stage – as well as has the capacity to jump down to the space immediately in front of the stage in a sort of crossing of boundaries – while the tribunal + the people are (with little exception) relegated to the lower space in front of the stage (and seated on chairs for the most part). The spatial divide only further enhances the dilemma already present in the performances: those who are “lower” are, after all, seeking to depose a leader who openly despises them, yet they also do so while exploiting a supposed weakness that largely informs the leader’s hatred in the first place.

The Roman Republic, in other words, loses its legitimacy precisely because that which allows for its existence – the will and voices of the voting citizenry – is presented as unreliable because of how it is used by others with more influence.

Now, I do not want to go so far as to say that this is the ethos of this specific staging because I do not believe it is. There is a reason, I think, why the plebians are played more “nobly”, so to speak, than the patricians. But it does speak to a quandary within the text itself that, I believe, makes it incredibly difficult to translate the commentary that I think Orsoni was trying to develop (a critique on power, ambition, selfishness, and what gets lost in the struggle for influence). And again, I find myself wondering why this piece in particular was the Shakespeare piece that had to be adapted, other than the circumstantial parallels (one of them purely coincidental) between the time of its writing and ours. 

At the same time, it is getting incredibly late, and I have an early workout in the morning. 

Until the next rant review.

Technically right now I should be working on prepping a talk from my somewhat scattered notes for a conference this Friday, but the need to jot down some thoughts on the first show I saw this season has taken precedence in my already very full brain so…here we are.

And anyway, I’ve still got tomorrow (Sunday), Monday afternoon and all day Wednesday to deal with organizing my notes. 

So, with that out of the way, let’s get down to it. The return of theatre commentary / critique for the 2021 – 2022 season begins, as it should, with a return to the Théâtre de la Bastille:

Illusions perdues (d’après Honoré de Balzac) dir. Pauline Bayle. Théâtre de la Bastille, Sept. 16, 2021

Before getting into the details of this, I want to open with a conversation I was having yesterday that more or less captured one the thing that’s been nagging me about this piece since I left the theatre. In brief, the initial topic of conversation was the upcoming Spielberg remake of West Side Story, but this later evolved into a larger questioning of the ubiquity of revivals and remakes in (especially) the American theatre and film industry – that is, the use of already established IP as an assurance of returns on investment – versus the focus in France (at least in the public theatre where it is more or less mandated) on créations, new works, many of which nowadays do not even have a published text version that could then be used to produce a hypothetical “revived” version at some point in the future. In short, it is a theatre that is decidedly of its time, thus making any return to previously produced / written works subject to more direct scrutiny in its act of recall.

In short, in the choice to bring something “back to life”, so to speak, one must not only contend with the general “why”, but more precisely with “why now”. What, in other words, about the present moment makes it urgent to bring a piece / a text back again, especially when there are years if not generations of temporal distance to contend with? This is in no way to suggest that revivals are fruitless endeavors (see, especially Aris Biniaris’ truly exceptional Prometheus Bound at this year’s Athens/Epidaurus festival…which I should have written about but didn’t), but rather that the production/rehearsal phase demands a level of critical engagement that goes beyond the obvious.

Which brings us to Pauline Bayle’s Illusions perdues. I’ll start by getting this out of the way: the performances themselves were excellent, particularly Jenna Thiam as the lead Lucien. The fluidity with which the other four members of the troupe switched back and forth between multiple roles was also especially well done, as was the minimal stage design with the central, white square, flanked on all four sides by the audience evoking the crushing intimacy of a boxing ring. The energy was there. The run-time was just shy of 2.5 hours, but I never felt it particularly dragged. Even with the many cuts made to Balzac’s text in fashioning the script, the choice to focus on his dialogues did give us, for the most part, well-rounded characters, even if some were only inhabited by a performer for a moment. And yes, while I normally find the whole “oh look there is a person being rude / interrupting the performance in the audience…oh wait it’s actually another actor” thing a bit trite, the fact that it was consistent rather than an “ah-ha! Gotcha!” moment, that we could trace the actors in their various seat (and costume) shifts amongst the public, meant that the space as a whole became wrapped up in the urgency of the shifts and transformations being imposed on Lucien. There was no room for respite, for escape away from prying eyes, in other words. 

And yet, even with all this, one thing I could not help but think, and that is still itching at me now, is if this piece, and in particular the point of view that Balzac’s novel – and by extension Bayle’s adaptation and staging of it – has something to say about our current era. That Balzac’s text can be read as something of a forewarning as to the impeding dangers of capitalism (note: the novel depicts a Paris on the brink of the Industrial Revolution) is not, in itself, a new perspective, at least with regards to current discourses (well, at least in the circles I run in) about the urgency for an anti-capitalist model. What I was left wondering by this piece, in short, is what else did it bring to the conversation, other than a few easily telegraphed connections, and story beats that have become almost too familiar. Lucien, young, green, naïve, arrives in Paris from Angouleme with dreams of becoming a great writer. Lucien then realizes that the machinations of the world he’s entered into are basically in direct conflict with his desires, and suddenly finds himself tangled in a mess of power and money and influence. Lucien falls. In the end, Lucien sells out. The audience watches. 

Yet, as true as it is that the advent of capitalism and the cult of money and profits has resulted in societal and cultural shifts, especially with regards to interpersonal relationships, capitalism is not exactly unique in this. Moreover, this cannot be the only facet of capitalism that is depicted and thus placed up for public scrutiny and critique on the stage, as – like the Paris in Bayle’s production, or, hell, even more accurately, a hydra – capitalism has many (violent, exploitative, destructive) heads, and concentrating on just the one is not going to do much good when the others are snapping at you. What I am saying, in other words, is that we need different kinds of storytelling in our theatres, and in our critiques. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I made the argument for re-thinking what, in France, had historically been conceived as territorial decentralization to a decentralization of thought. We urgently need other perspectives on our stages, other ways of approaching / appropriating / interpreting text because the alternative is that discourse gets stuck and publics can only see half the picture. Do we need more stories of young folks with big dreams coming into a city only to have reality sucker-punch them in the face? Maybe we do. But maybe we should be actively making space for possibilities to approach them differently.  

I sometimes find writing introductions for a new post a bit difficult, so let’s not waste any time and get right to it.

I’m back seeing shows again (finally).

I’ve got two short commentaries to write here, but first, a note on how theatre-going in the time of COVID has felt so far:

To date, I have only revisited 2 out of my usual 4 theatres (yes, again, creature of habit / don’t much feel like changing too many things around right now / this could be good for comparative purposes). I originally wanted to make it so that I would start things off with a show at Bastille (the favorite), but performance scheduling deprived me of that symbolic moment. In any case, starting things off at Nanterre was a pretty fine substitute. 

Based on my experience at Nanterre and then at the MC93, I can say that, generally, it almost feels as though things have gotten back to normal, the most visible exceptions being that everyone is masked and that completely sold out shows with every seat filled are a thing of the past (for now). The bar/canteens in the lobbies of the respective theatres were also open when I visited (contrary to what I had originally thought might happen), as were their bookstores. As for seating, the general rule was to have one seat between each party of spectators in a given row. The result was something like this (s = spectator ; x = empty):

Row 1: s s x s x s s s x s s x s

Row 2: s x s s s s x s s x s s s

Row 3: s s s x s s x s s x s s x

As you can see, front to back spacing isn’t being factored in (because otherwise this nightmare jigsaw puzzle nonsense would only get worse). My guess is that for seated performances that adhere to a more traditional frontal dynamic, there is some sort of algorithm being used to determine how many seats could be sold to account for most possible seating configurations. At Nanterre, for instance, the ushers mentioned that the performance was sold out, so there is definitely some kind of a cap in place. I’ll also be heading back there tomorrow to see another piece whose staging/seating arrangements involve a takeover of the plateau of the main stage—similar to how Dying Together was staged a couple years ago—, and I am curious to see how seating or spatial restrictions will be applied to a piece that, based on what I know of the director, leans more towards a loosening of restrictions and a blurring of spectator/spectacle barriers.

But more on that (hopefully) later. For now, some brief thoughts on what I’ve seen so far.

Jamais labour n’est trop profond created by Thomas Scimeca, Anne-Élodie Sorlin and Maxence Tual. Nanterre-Amandiers, September 22, 2020.

It seems almost appropriate to have started things off with a comedy. 

Even more so one that touches on everything from environmentalism, climate change, collapsology, theatre in general and its former, current and perhaps future status. 

There’s quite a lot in there, but this is not necessarily to say that the piece itself was cluttered (there are some other nits I have to pick with it). In terms of plot, it’s actually quite simple. It centers on four actors living in what appears to be some kind of post-civilizational collapse commune. One of these actors apparently still gets offers for work or new projects (and the salary that comes with them), but at the start of the piece, his phone is taken and smashed by another actor, who persuades him to focus on what is more important: a machine they have invented that will help make their little community more self-sufficient.

A shit-powered generator. 

In fact, in this piece that revolves around the after-effects of the disappearance of nature, the most present “organic” element is quite literally a tub of hazardous, bacteria-ridden human waste. And yet, it is also this waste that, the staging suggests, allows for the lights to stay on, and the actors to engage in what they do best: perform. Extracts of Prométhée are interwoven with references to Hamlet (notably a reworking of the “Alas, poor Yorick” scene from Act V.1), a sequence reminiscent of the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (only this time, instead of monkeys on a beach, it’s a monkey in a dumpster playing with trash) and an extended scene involving an attempt to film (with a stage light standing in for a camera and a broom as a boom mic) a scene suggesting a period piece, only with reused costumes and the bare skeleton of a set. Through all this, a small outhouse-like structure (whose fourth wall is missing so that, when it is rotated, the audience comes face-to-face with the outhouse’s occupant relieving themselves) remains slightly up stage right, with that, plus intermittent trips up to the shit-generator as well as periodic moments in which the lights go out for want of power, serving as a reminder for why we are all able to watch this in the first place. 

Beauty in shit. 

But with this also comes one of my primary criticisms on this piece, and no, it doesn’t directly have to do with the prevalence of scatological humor. To preface this, I should note that the creators of this piece were all formerly members of the Chiens de Navarre theatre troupe, known for its light, almost improvisational style and bent of humor, and whose work I had seen before (both times at the MC93…I even almost opted on writing on Jusque dans vos bras for my dissertation). The troupe is also known for the frequency with which they make reference to the fact that they are in a theatre and/or directly (attempt to) incite an audience to act supposedly against the bounds of what it is they are supposed to be doing while in the theatre space (an example: in Jusque dans vos bras, imploring audience members to come up and pull a boat of struggling migrants to shore, sarcastically admonishing them when no one crosses the barrier onto the stage, and then finally “attacking” the helpers via two actors dressed in silly shark costumes). This performance retained many of the elements that the performers no doubt honed during their time with the Chiens…, though it’s this question of audience participation and the veneer of disobedience that I want to focus on.

I mentioned earlier that one of the primary set pieces on the stage was an outhouse. Well, this outhouse also had a bucket in which shit and the like could be collected. At one point during the opening third of the show, two of the actors made an announcement that they would repeat periodically throughout the course of the play: any audience member who wished to relieve themselves was more than welcome to come on the stage and do their business in the bucket. If nothing else, it would aid in the running of the very necessary generator, and thus of the show itself. And this wasn’t just a quick announcement. In fact, the actors spent a good amount of time either singling out individual audience members and asking them directly if they wouldn’t like to help, or otherwise posing the possibility and waiting patiently for something to happen, for someone on our side of the space to act against what its normalized codes dictate. 

(Side note: in the spirit of situational presence—and in the improv-esq spirit of Chiens…—, at one point during the initial plea, the actors went on a short tangent about how much better it would be for us as spectators, especially those of a certain age, to use the bucket since the toilets at Nanterre are located at the basement level, requiring several stairs and almost a tour of the building to get to. Despite my critics of this sequence, I will grant that they are right on this point. The toilets at Nanterre are somewhat of an inconvenience to get to). 

Here’s my critique, though (and this comes from having thought about this through my research on audience participation-based theatre, and especially some thoughts I had while writing on Re-Paradise): based on other instances of similar calls for spectator action, I am beginning to come to the conclusion that arguably one of the most direct ways to enforce a traditional spectator/spectacle dynamic is to draw attention to it via an impossible request. In other words, the only way that question could have been asked of an audience is if it was done so on the assumption that no one would actually follow through. Would it have been an interesting experiment if someone had? Yes. But it also risked destroying the theatricality of the experience by bringing in an unavoidable (stinking) reminder of the real onto the constructed/imaginary playing space. Of course we know that the actors aren’t actually sloshing around in shit when they go and examine the generator, but we can suspend our disbelief enough so that, after they step out of the tank, the mud caking their boots takes on the symbolic association with shit in our minds, hence reactions of disgust. Bringing in the possibility of real human waste into this risks breaking the illusion.

What I find still more pressing, however, is the fact that often requests like this are made with an air of potential rebellion, of upending a status quo in order to open the possibilities for something different. Yet, rather than creating possibilities, calling for action while likely anticipating the exact opposite (that is, for spectators to behave as they more or less normally do) not only draws a distinct line between actors (those who do) and spectators (those who observe), increasing the distance between the two primary bodies both spatially and temporally. In other words, it becomes an act that re-enforces a traditional dynamic rather than one that works to poke holes in it and thus imagine possibilities outside its paradigms. 

Now, this might not always be such a bad thing. In fact, one could read it in this case as a way of highlighting a return to a more “skeletal” (“primitive” is a word that popped in my head also, but it’s not quite the right term, and also I have some reservations using it in general) relationship to theatre, one that brings it back to its pre post-post-modern roots. Often, however (and I would argue that this is what is happening here), this is not the case. Instead, you get the illusion of rebellion while maintaining an already established relational structure.

And speaking of audience/spectacle relations…

Watch: “voyages diverses” created by Oliviere Fredj, Shani Diluka, Matias Aguayo and the Paris Chamber Orchestra, MC93, September 25, 2020

I feel like one of the most frustrating things about the MC93 is how much some of the programming visibly tries to be out of the box innovative and just comes up a little bit short.

Case in point: this show.

In brief: this piece is composed of loosely connected vignettes, each one centered on the theme of “Time”. Time as a linear progression, Time as notions of past/memory, present and possible futures, Time as measured, Time as a commodity (lost time, borrowed time), Time as in dual temporalities on stage and in the house. It was this last one that the show opened with, with a direct address to the audience via asking someone what time it was and then noting the time on the back wall in chalk (the show started about 15min late, which was a fun surprise…). From that point, we (as in those of us in the house) were supposedly absorbed in the “stage time”, spatial union merging with temporal union.

As to the texts, these were composed following a series of various workshops the creators held in hospitals, retirement homes and prisons in the nearby area; in other words, in spaces occupied by folks for whom time takes on a significant weight. It’s a communal effort and judging by the presence of several participants/their friends in the audience that evening, a highly successful one. Which is fine. Honestly, I have no gripes with this when it’s done well (see Ils n’avaient pas prévu qu’on allait gagner for when it’s not…), and I don’t want to discount the effort put in by the volunteer participants to collaborate and create something. 

But why, seriously why, does it still seem to be the thing to do to try and address “high concept” things in a “meaningful / deep” way that more often than not results in a mess of meh?

To get back to the beginning of the show, the asking of the hour (which happened periodically throughout the production, each time with the hour being noted on the timeline along the back wall) could have been an interesting avenue in order to explore the passage and marking of time, had it have been accompanied by conscious control of rhythm and pacing on the part of the actors (I think some of them were beginners or amateurs, but cannot say for certain). As it was, the pacing veered from the overtly artificial / theatrical, to rushed, to steady but sometimes with mumbling. Consequently, all this served to do was throw into stark relief the reality that, as spectators, one of the key elements that defines the distinction of our temporality from that on stage was almost denied us:

The liberty of being bored.

If time is constantly marked, and there is a pattern of constantly marking it, the risk is that instead of then creating a new rhythm to “bleed into” (so to speak) the one that otherwise marks the temporality in the house, the result is one in which the most present thing is the eventual possibility of an end to all this and a return to a more autonomous sense of control over one’s temporality. It becomes, in other words, a process of disengagement rather than immersion. 

Again, though, this is not to discount the collaborative work that went into this—nor the feeling in the room when the piece finally (yeah, they did one of those fake-out endings where they announce that it’s going to end and then spend another ten minutes talking about how to end things/Time and endings) came to a close. There could have been a way to tackle this subject without resorting to cliché or even documentary-style theatre. What it needs is honesty. 

But that will be for the next post. 

So, mental dilemma of the day.

 

I’m not sure if this has more to do with the fact that I’ve just not had as much time to write here as I like, or that I’ve just not been out to see as many things as usual (blame time, of course, but also maybe the fact that this fall has been more dance-heavy in terms of programming at my usual haunts compared with the last couple years), but as we head towards winter, I’m getting the impression that this fall season has not left as much of a mark on me as previous ones.

 

This isn’t necessarily to say that everything has been terrible—The Way She Dies was, as expected, a highlight of the rentrée—, but more that I haven’t been “marked” by what I’ve seen to the same degree as I have previously. Maybe I’ve just become more discerning (read: picky haha). Maybe it’s just mental fatigue from the fact that right now the finish line for my dissertation is right within my reach and I just don’t have the capacity to open myself to much more (and anyway, the rest of my mental energy goes towards dealing with my teaching).

 

 

Or maybe it’s quite simply because a number of things I’ve seen so far have just been…eh.

 

 

This isn’t to say that none of them tried to go outside the box at all. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I went out to Nanterre-Amandiers to check out Pillow Talk, an immersive experience that involved transforming the main stage of the Amandiers into a sort of futuristic lounge space, with pillowed pods set up for individuals to lay down in. The general idea was that you would talk to an AI for about an hour, the position of the microphones on the pillows designed in a way that, in order for the AI’s voice to be heard, one would have to arrange one’s body in such a way that it would mimic cuddling.

 

 

Listen, as someone who really thrives in (and ok, maybe really craves right now) that kind of intimacy, let me confirm to you that there is nothing that will shove you into the uncanny valley faster than listening to an AI whisper a joke in your ear and then “laugh”. Ok, maybe it asking you to sing “Killing Me Softly With His Song” with it comes a close second.

 

 

And yes, I get the whole thing about using this medium to question our own perspectives on interpersonal connectivity, but it’s also become such an obvious approach, I wonder if it even makes sense to do it anymore.

 

 

Anyway, enough of that. That’s not what I actually want to talk about today. No, today what I want to do is tackle a question that has been asked many times, yet nevertheless still remains relevant.

 

 

Why the hell are we still crafting redemption stories for asshole men?

 

 

Now granted, the asshole in question here is a character who, in the grand scheme of things, didn’t do anything particularly egregious other than just generally be a dick to other people (especially the women in his life). Compared to some other real-life less-than-savory individuals out there, this dude is almost inoffensive. Almost. Because at the end of the day, the everyday, small-scale nonsense of his that his friends and colleagues are convinced to forgive in order to help him have a moment of revelatory introspection is the kind of thing that, once it starts building up, contributes to the larger toxicity that not only keeps a certain hierarchical power structure in place, but also, and to varying degrees, silences those (read: anyone who is not a straight white cis-gendered man) who are not at the top of said hierarchy.

 

 

Anyway, let’s get to it.

 

Mort prématurée d’un chanteur populaire dans la force de l’âge. Written by Wajdi Mouawad with Arthur H. Dir. Wajdi Mouawad, La Colline, November 17, 2019

 

 

Of course, this also just happened to be the first show I saw as a 30-year-old. Eh, can only go up from here though, right? Right.

 

 

Actually, I almost ended up missing this show entirely as I was still…recovering…from the festivities the night before. Somehow though, I managed to shower, eat something, and make myself look just presentable enough to make it out the door in time.

 

 

It’s the small successes in life that count.

 

 

Much like the other of Mouawad’s pieces I’ve seen recently, this one (other than the aforementioned character problem…which I’ll get to in a moment) suffers from a certain imbalance. More precisely, similarly to Notre Innocence in spring 2018, its first half is much stronger than its second.

 

 

 

The piece opens at the end of a concert given by the singer mentioned in the title. Alice (yes, that is his name; no, it’s not for “Alice Cooper”) is an aging former punk rocker who, like many others before him, is contending with the discrepancy between his past and his present reality as, well, a “sell-out”. No longer outside the system, he is now part of it. And he’s sick of it. Literally. I mean the first thing he does when he enters the backstage area (the set design is such that the concert that opens the film sees Alice upstage, facing away from the audience, with the backstage area set up downstage) is shut himself in a toilet and take a very long, very vocal, shit. And then he complains about his stomach hurting and needing to shit more. And then eventually he shits himself during a photo session.

 

 

Clearly, something is rotten on his insides.

 

 

I should also mention that this first half is very clearly a satire, as based on not only the rapid-fire jokes and “second degree” humor flying around, but also because the characters themselves that are featured here can be reduced down to certain tropes:

 

-The aging, cranky rocker

 

-The overworked manager (who Alice always refers to by a nickname rather than her—yes her—actual name, at least until she has a breakdown over it in Act II)

 

-The critical journalist who, with one brutally honest article, sets our protagonist on a downward spiral that ultimately contributes to his decision to do something very stupid (though also very silly)

 

-The former manager with questionable judgement and a nostalgia for the “good old days”

 

-The girlfriend who is an established artist in her own right, but who is nevertheless still second to the whims of her partner.

 

-The newcomer who has travelled over from the other side of the world (in this case, Canada) and, though she may not know the other characters well, nevertheless becomes the key to them rebuilding their relationships (and themselves), after a crisis. Oh, and she also does this using a mysterious ritual (that, yes, is made-up, but it relies on tropes and stereotypes of First Nations culture).

 

 

And honestly, if the tone did not shift so drastically between Act I and II, this could have ended up being a decently entertaining piece. Alas.

 

 

Anyway, the short version of the story is that Alice, in a rather low point after being skewered in an article (worse still: he was replaced on the magazine’s cover by a new, up-and-coming musician), reconnects with his old manager with whom he had parted ways with after he started becoming successful. The two commiserate a bit about what their lives once were, what they used to stand for before money, marketing, and success got in the way, when the latter of the two comes up with a plan. A last “f**k you” to the system, if you will. Simply, Alice would fake his death. The moment was perfect. Yes, he was just taken down a notch in the press, but he was also in the middle of a successful tour, and there was no indication he would need to be slowing down any time soon. There would, of course, be a period of mourning. And then, after the initial grief had died down a bit, the manager would release a “recently-discovered” (in reality: recorded in his in-house studio while he was making the necessary press calls) album of unpublished recordings. People would go crazy for it: I mean, it would truly be the last new music they would ever get from Alice, and really, given how hot posthumous records sales have been in recent years following the loss of several high-profile artists, huge profits were almost a sure-thing.

 

 

In the meantime, Alice would go lie low in Ukraine (yes, Ukraine). For added security, a sham funeral/cremation ceremony would be organized so that there would be no doubt as to how really dead he was. After a year in hiding, he would return to France, triumphant, a middle finger in the face of all those who bought into the ruse, a true condemnation of our consumerist society.

 

 

So punk.

 

 

Of course, one thing that Alice and his manager did not count on was the former’s girlfriend. See, in order for the more essential part of their plan to work (read: the cremation and funeral), they would have to have had a closed-casket funeral. The girlfriend, on the other hand, insisted that the ceremony not only be open casket, but that she and those close to Alice be present up until the final closing of the casket and the final shove into the fire.

 

 

Oops.

 

 

Anyway, to get around this, some associates of Alice’s manager gave him some drugs that made him fall stone asleep as if dead. This worked to fool the doctor who came in to sign the death certificate (no autopsy though?), but the dosage needed to be upped if they wished to keep the illusion going through a full-on funeral (getting Alice out of the coffin in time would come later). As expected, however, the dosage wore off a bit early. More precisely, it was during the funeral when Alice’s girlfriend was in the middle of singing a song he loved to hear her sing.

 

 

Again, oops.

 

 

Anyway, it’s not like he got off easy. Other than terrifying literally everyone, Alice also ended up blinded by the drugs. Classic punishment.

 

 

So ends Act I.

 

 

Act II largely involves the fallout from all the above, with Alice’s girlfriend dumping him for the trauma he put her through (as well as for his general selfishness), his current manager standing up for herself and refusing to represent him any longer, the press eviscerating him even more than they had previously for his nonsense, and Alice having to attempt to navigate the world without the use of his sight (instead of going to see a doctor like literally everyone was telling him to).

 

 

It’s in this period of loneliness that Alice reconnects with a superfan of his who had come all the way from Canada to follow his tour, and who he had first met outside his stage door following the concert that opened the show. Her name was Nancy. He signed a condom wrapper for her because it was the only thing he had in his pocket.

 

 

Nancy had expressed to Alice during their first meeting how grateful she was to him for how much his music had helped her through some difficult times, and now, seeing him in this state, she decides to take it upon herself to give back some of the help he had given her. This is where this piece truly started to lose me. Nancy kind of helps Alice navigate around for a couple of days, but then she ultimately takes it upon herself to call all of Alice’s former friends together. She had a plan to help Alice rid himself of the demons, of the bad thoughts inside him, but she needed their help.

 

 

They, of course, wanted nothing to do with any of it, and with good reason. This is where I want to go back to what I mentioned earlier about why the stories some people create still feature men like Alice getting a full redemption arc in which the burden of the work is not placed on them but on those they have wronged “getting over themselves” first before banding together to pull the asshole in question back “into the light”, so to speak.

 

 

And this could have played as a satire as well, except Mouawad had written and directed it with incredibly evident sincerity that it was impossible to interpret it otherwise.

 

 

Anyway, as Nancy points out as a means of convincing the others to put aside their anger, it wasn’t like Alice had done anything incredibly terrible like kill someone, or start a call for genocide. He just happened to put his friends through a short period of an incredibly stressful Hell, and that, plus the fact that he was an artist whose music had helped others like herself, meant that he deserved a second chance.

 

 

But what she doesn’t bring up—and conversely what the other two women in the room do—is the lasting damage his regular behavior has caused. His manager has sacrificed not only time with her daughter, but also ended up suffering a miscarriage because of the constant stress he put her under, what with his steadily bad humor, his erratic behavior, and his preferred manner of addressing others by yelling at them. His girlfriend, meanwhile, brings up her feelings of not just betrayal at what he did, but also her general frustrations at their relationship, at the imbalance felt when it became clear that one of them was investing in it slightly more than the other.

 

 

But we can put that aside now.

 

 

And in any case, as a sort of Hail-Mary, Nancy mentions that she is ill, that this trip to France was a sort of last hurrah for her before she begins treatment.

 

 

 

Ultimately, what Nancy’s plan consists of is her leading Alice out into the woods under the assumption that once there, he would encounter a shaman who would perform a ritual to cleanse him. Nancy—who mentions she is part First Nation, though the actress playing her is white-passing—will of course play the shaman. Alice’s friends, meanwhile, would dress up in bird costumes (there is literally no purpose for this other than the fact that this is happening in a theatre, as Alice wouldn’t be able to see them since he is still blind), and at the appropriate moment, swoop in and “peck” at him, thereby removing all the bad things inside his spirit.

 

 

There is a lot of sage. Nancy at one point starts banging a drum.

 

 

And ultimately it works. The final scene of the piece opens on a hospital waiting room in Quebec where Alice has come to visit Nancy, after having discovered she was ill via his friends…with whom he is back in contact with.

 

 

He mentions to her during their last conversation that her ritual managed to push him not only to see a doctor (miraculously, he can see again…because “clarity”…), but also to take the difficult step in reaching out and apologizing.

 

 

And you know what, yes, that isn’t really an easy thing to do. But it’s also something that 1) only happened as a result of an initial effort of forgiveness on the part of the hurt parties and 2) occurs offstage. His act of apology, of taking the necessary steps to interrogate himself and engage in a process of self-assessment are, to a degree, secondary to his friends momentarily ignoring his bullshit to see the goodness in him. There are times when, perhaps, such a stance could be justified, but one could argue that those moments generally follow events that are out of the person’s control. This situation, on the other hand, along with everything preceding it, is, on the other hand, a direct result of Alice’s conscious behaviors.

 

 

Yeah, it’s true that he didn’t kill anyone. But to minimize his past actions for the sake of advancing the question of his supposed “goodness” (that we have had little evidence of, other than Nancy’s comments on his music) is, for lack of a better word, lazy. We can do better. Our stories can do better. No one should have felt the need to forgive him. The choice to not forgive, to step away for the sake of one’s own mental/physical health is also a justified one, yet here the sacrifices are continually made by those who have performed that gesture time and time again.

 

 

But, then again, this also all fits in with Mouawad’s greater ethos on the spirituality of theatre. It goes back to his affinity for the classics (especially the Greeks). Maybe I’ll address it here in another post.

 

 

For now though, I have a dinner to get to.

 

 

Here’s to the end of fall (and hopefully a more inspiring winter theatre season).

I think if I ever (finally…eventually…at some point maybe) found the time to write a play—something I’d been thinking about doing for a while—I’d probably start with a rewrite of the story of my namesake. It’s not that I have a personal grudge against every version of Iphigeniain existence—Euripedes, for instance, gets a bit of a pass, if only because he extended the story enough to warrant a sequel, and also because I just prefer his work over that of his classical compatriots—, it’s just that it gets a bit dull after a while to have a name that, for a certain (though not insignificant) segment of the population, is synonymous with someone who was just there to be sacrificed because her warmongering father couldn’t follow a simple directive to NOT hunt somewhere.

 

 

 

Never mind that I am also named after my grandmother. The first thing that comes to mind is a body that is there as the object of a sacrifice. Not a character with a hint of agency; an object. Even in versions of the story where she does give herself up to be taken to the sacrificial altar, her speeches preceding this moment have never quite convinced me.

 

 

 

Ah, so you’re telling me I was lured here under false pretenses (aka: a supposed wedding between myself and Achilles, who was also mysteriously unaware this was happening), then told I was going to die (surprise!) so that Artemis can bring the wind back to push your boats across the sea to go fight a war because someone’s property wife was stolen (note the passive voice), and you and your bros made a pact to defend this person’s honor after drawing lots to determine “ownership” of said property wife? Right, sounds excellent. Altar is that way? Good, good. Yes, must do what’s best for the country after all. My thoughts on this? Oh no, I haven’t any thoughts. I am merely a plot device here to enable you to carry on your phallic-driven nonsense. Shame that great-great-grandad had to go and bake his son into a pie and curse our house, but, eh, such is life. Anyway, here’s my neck.

 

 

 

This was flashing through my head last night as I sat watching the first show of the new theatre season (which might soon overthrow Christmas as the most wonderful time of the year…for me): Milo Rau’s Oreste à Mossoul. As the name suggests, this is a reworking of sorts of the Orestes myth—this time drawing from Aeschylus’s Oresteia—with the setting moved from Mycenae to Mosul, Iraq. As per the show program, originally, Rau and his creative team had gone to the city of Sinjar, near the Syrian border, in 2016 with the aim of creating a piece around the subject of migration, only this time tracing the pathway in reverse. Not long after their arrival, however, the city of Mosul, once the seat of the caliphate, was liberated from under ISIS control. The team decided to set up shop there instead.

 

 

 

The choice to bring in the Oresteiato this context is an easy one. Mosul is an old city—one of, if not the, oldest continually inhabited cities in the world—, yet for the better part of a century, it has also been a site of continued cycles of violence: the British invasion after the discovery of oil, the brief period of democracy shattered with the rise of Saddam Hussein, the American invasions in 1990 and 2003, the power vacuum when they left in 2011, and most recently, ISIS and the coordinated attacks against them. To look at it now, one would almost say the city has all but been destroyed.

 

 

 

Yet, as with the Oresteiawhich ends with Orestes facing a tribunal in Athens following his double murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, the central question being whether to execute him or to pardon him and end the cycles of violence, the notion of “justice” weighs heavily. Should the ISIS fighters be pardoned or executed, a final debate asks. Those participating in the debate—local residents who signed on to participate in the project and whose words were transmitted to us via a pre-recorded video—remained undecided. Many spoke of the hope of establishing a just, unbiased court system to hear the cases and pass judgement democratically, but when the time came to vote on execution or pardon, no one raised their hand for either option.

 

 

 

 

 

ISIS left its marks on the city. They are felt in the fact that a group of musicians has set up to play, publicly, outside the former school of Fine Arts (bombed out during the Allied attacks) when before they had to hide themselves in basements to keep up their practice. They are felt in the fact that the choice to mix live performance with filmed segments is to a degree derived from the fact that getting visas for the local performers to come tour in Europe would be next to impossible, as movement in and out of the country has become heavily restricted. And—to return back to the subject that I opened this with—they are felt in the staging, in the way that characters die.

 

 

 

 

When the piece opens, the actor who eventually goes on to play Agamemnon (one from Rau’s team) comes down center stage to speak directly to the audience about some of the background behind the performance. One thing he mentions early on was the fact that, as part of his own research, a journalist friend of his had sent him videos of executions. There was, he said, a particular style to it. A shot in the back of the neck. Some women were strangled. You never forget, he added, how long it takes to strangle someone to death.

 

 

 

The scene then shifts. A carpet is rolled out. The actor who eventually plays Cassandra—born in Belgium but of Iraqi descent—comes downstage, turns, and faces upward toward the video screen. Another woman’s face appears on screen in close-up. The fact that they are both to a degree there, on the stage, was a sort of taboo when the piece was developed and then later workshopped/performed in Mosul: women were not normally seen on stage, even before the arrival of ISIS.

 

 

But the piece needed its Iphigenia. Would she, the woman on stage asked the one whose image was on the screen, like to play the role of Iphigenia? The woman on screen said yes, she would like that.

 

 

 

The scene shifts. On the stage there is not much happening, but on the screen, we see the woman from before standing in front of a line of men dressed in grey smocks—the chorus—the actor playing Agamemnon standing beside her. The latter also wears a red and off-white striped tunic, which his onstage, physically present counterpart, has also changed into. It is another one of the early signs of bridging the temporal and geographical gap between what is physically present on stage and what once was present but now ‘preserved’ on video, not just in terms of the sets of performers, but between the varying temporal strata on the stage and the one encompassing those in the house. The visual cue of the actor seated off downstage left of the video screen dressed in the same way as his recorded counterpart (though not, as would be the case later for several of the performers, simultaneously performing the recorded one’s actions) is enough of a hint to suggest the plural, or even fragmented, nature of his presence. He both is and is not in two places at once. The change into a matching costume is a reminder of sorts that the person on the screen is him—or rather, was him. It is a version of him that is suspended within the temporal moment of the recording, yet not quite ‘present’ within our own. Suspension and preservation in time carries with it the lack of forward propulsion into the unknown and unpredictable that comes with being in the ‘now’. Time can be rewound back in a recording.

 

 

 

And then comes the strangulation.

 

 

 

Unlike in most retellings of the myth where she is essentially stabbed, here Iphigenia is strangled to death with a cord wrapped around her neck and being pulled not by a ‘priest’ but by “Agamemnon” himself. And, as he had warned, the actor was right: it does take a seemingly long while to strangle someone to death. The realism evoked by the way the scene was choreographed was striking in and of itself, but what carried this moment even further into another instance of geographical/temporal bridging was what was going on with the camera. Simply put, it did not move. Set up a few feet away so that one got a full view of everyone in the room for the scene, the camera functioned more as an eyewitness, or a window, rather than a medium through which to transmit a piece of narrative through the use of a particular—to it—kind of language. There were no close ups, no cuts or changes in visual point of view, nothing to suggest the ‘camera-ness’ of the camera other than the fact that it was set up to record the act for the purposes of transmitting it back here. As such, one sees the act played out from beginning to end: from “Iphigenia” being pushed to kneel down, to the rope being wrapped around her neck, to “Agamemnon” pulling and her sharp, then gurgled gasps for air. There is an expected end result of this—her finally collapsing down, ceasing to breath, and being declared dead—, and the fact that the anticipation of this result is shared by both those in the audience as well as by “Agamemnon” who must continue performing the act of strangulation so long as his victim still shows signs of life results in something rather unique: a momentary shared experience of a unique passage of time between those on screen, those on stage, and those in the house. Everyone, in other words, is beholden to a single temporal progression. The creeping seconds start to become almost palpable.

 

 

 

 

And then, after what seems like an eternity, Iphigenia is dead, her purpose served. The metaphorical ‘closing of the temporal gap’ is repeated several times over, arguably strengthened somewhat by the shared moment of progression early on. One could call it, in a sense, an attempt to bring those of us in the house to Mosul as much as it was to bring those in Mosul who do not have the right to travel to us into the room, into our ‘presence’.

 

 

 

At the same time, however, there is a limit to how far this can go. Despite speaking openly about the extent of the destruction under ISIS (as well as previous periods of conflict), the current state of Mosul and its inhabitants and the hopes for democracy and justice in forms of direct, plain-speaking address free of almost all metaphor, that sometimes bordered on the didactic, one thing that could not be changed was the fact that, in the end, the recordings would shut off, the actors on stage would bow, those of us in the audience would go home, and…then what? There is no predicting the extent to which a piece can affect everyone in its audience—indeed, for a piece to operate on the assumption that it will have some kind of marking, lasting, change-inducing effect is almost a set up for failure (though as with every rule, there are exceptions). And in a way, Rau’s piece acknowledges its own potential limitations when, towards the end, the actor playing “Orestes”, while seated on a bench downstage, mentions that a contact of his had sent him and the rest of the Europe-based team a video of the aftermath of a car bomb that went off near the Arts school not long after they had all left. No one involved in the project was hurt, but what was most striking was what he said while the audio of the recording played from his phone (no images were shown). He could watch these videos, see this destruction of places that he knew, places where he was, and almost become desensitized.

 

 

 

And he didn’t say this, but I’d venture to say that it has something to do with the fact that he had the power in his hands to make the recording stop. To remove the violence from his reality. To not let it affect him as constantly.

 

 

 

And that’s essentially what those of us living in places far away from these sites of violence, those of us who have the privilege to have the means and a passport that lets us move freely away from these sites of violence, possess. We can talk about and consume it as a metaphysical thing, as something that is not physically, threateningly present to the same degree as it is for many of those who appeared in the video. We can leave it.

 

 

 

And maybe that was the whole point.

 

 

 

 

 

A note before going: this blog is likely going to transition soon from a dissertation-related blog (though at this point, given how I still have yet to get any feedback after…a very long while…who knows) to a more theatre-critique focused blog. Hilariously, my choice in theatres that I will visit has not changed. Old habits die hard, I suppose. In any case, I am excited about this, to write more freely without the pressure of making something “look good” for an academic setting.

 

 

 

It feels good to be able to acknowledge that I am at this point.