On the Paris Stage, Plays Get Personal and Political
|
Version 0 of 1. PARIS — On Nov. 16, 2015, three days after a terrorist attack that killed 90 at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, an open letter by Antoine Leiris, whose wife Hélène was among the victims, went viral on Facebook. “You Will Not Have My Hate,” as it became known, was pithy and defiant; in 2016, Mr. Leiris expanded upon it in a book of the same name. This fall, on the two-year anniversary of the attack, a stage adaptation was presented here in the city where it took place. If it all seems fast, that’s because, as theatrical treatments of real events go, it is. There is a good chance many of the Parisians at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, where “You Will Not Have My Hate” had its premiere, still remember the panicked messages they received from friends and relatives as news of the attack broke. In the first scene, Mr. Leiris mentions the ones he got, too, as his 17-month-old son Melvil slept in the next room — the prelude to a desperate night spent dashing from hospital to hospital in the hope of finding his wife. “You Will Not Have My Hate,” through Dec. 10, is a bone-chilling monologue, but problematic as a dramatic proposition. The stage version was commissioned by a production company, 984 Productions, and director Benjamin Guillard admits in the program notes that he hesitated before signing on. His adaptation is as tasteful and discreet as can be, but practically disappears under the weight of Mr. Leiris’s story. The unassuming sets, by Jean Haas, consist of gauze curtains, seven scattered chairs and some origami models. A pianist, Lucrèce Sassella, appears in silhouette behind a scrim, and provides delicate interludes (composed by Antoine Sahler). The rest of the 80-minute production rests squarely on the shoulders of Raphaël Personnaz, the experienced stage and screen actor who delivers the text, alone. Looking clean-cut in a blue sweater and jeans, Mr. Personnaz does his utmost to carry the emotional charge of “You Will Not Have My Hate.” The extremely close relationship between Mr. Leiris and his son, who is too young to understand what is happening, comes across well. Mr. Personnaz strikes a lighter tone when absurd situations arise as reality intrudes on grief, whether it’s the electricity company calling to read the meter or the mothers at Melvil’s school sending gargantuan amounts of food to help the pair cope. Ultimately, however, Mr. Leiris’s terse chronological retelling of the days and weeks that followed the attack speaks for itself better than theater can. Of his lack of resentment, he writes: “You don’t wipe tears on the sleeves of anger.” Said aloud, the words felt heavy with the kind of fresh pain that even the finest actor can’t quite replicate. The line between real and fictional anguish disappears in “C’est la vie” (“That’s Life”), the second of three productions the director Mohamed El Khatib is presenting in Paris this fall. It deals with bereavement, too, albeit unmoored from the public attention a national tragedy commands. Its two actors, Fanny Catel and Daniel Kenigsberg, have both lost a child: Ms. Catel’s daughter Joséphine died at age 5 of complications from Zellweger syndrome, a rare genetic disease, while Mr. Kenigsberg’s 25-year-old son Sam committed suicide in 2014. Mr. El Khatib has been prominently featured at this year’s Festival d’Automne à Paris, a large-scale, multidisciplinary event founded in 1972 that brings performances and exhibitions to a range of Paris venues every fall. In “Stadium,” shown at La Colline Théâtre National in October, the 37-year-old director invited 53 supporters of the RC Lens football club on stage to deconstruct stereotypes about the sport’s fans. “C’est la vie,” performed at the tiny Théâtre Ouvert before a transfer to the Espace Cardin, where it ran through Wednesday, stretches his brand of documentary fiction to breaking point; it asks valuable questions along the way, but provides few answers. Like “You Will Not Have My Hate,” “C’est la vie” attempts to make theater out of private tragedy. And like the other play, it sticks to its protagonists’ stories. At various points, Ms. Catel and Mr. Kenigsberg talk about their children’s deaths in prerecorded videos to avoid reliving the experience; they watch their testimony with the audience. The audience is repeatedly asked to refer to a booklet provided at the start of the performance in addition to the playbill, which includes email exchanges between Mr. El Khatib, Ms. Catel and Mr. Kenigsberg about the production, as well as family trees and a double page devoted to “fact-checking.” The latter records Mr. Kenigsberg’s objections to the way Mr. El Khatib shaped his story during the creation process, which suggests “C’est la vie” took some liberties with the truth. Was the duo acting after all? Were we witnessing a form of catharsis, or merely a staged form of confessional writing? When the bereaved parents didn’t return for curtain calls, the relief was palpable: Catharsis and confession are both admirable, as are Ms. Catel and Mr. Kenigsberg, but much of what they shared seemed ultimately to belong to the private sphere. Meanwhile, some of French theater’s best-known jokesters are tackling questions of public importance. Les Chiens de Navarre, a collective founded in 2005 by the director Jean-Christophe Meurisse, has become identified with the riotous absurdity and scatological stunts of productions like “Les danseurs ont apprécié la qualité du parquet” (“The Dancers Enjoyed the Quality of the Floor”) or “Une raclette” (named after a popular cheese dish). Their latest work marked a departure by focusing instead on a political lightning rod: the notion of national identity. The gamble paid off. “Jusque dans vos bras,” (“All the Way Into Your Arms”) which had its premiere at Lyon’s Nuits de Fourvière festival in June before traveling to the company’s usual Paris residence, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, feels at once familiar and new. The episodic structure the Chiens favor, with an independent story in every scene, remains, and a group of longtime members, among them the superlative Céline Fuhrer and Maxence Tual, continue to set a high bar. On the other hand, some of the collective’s most recognizable faces (Thomas Scimeca, Anne-Elodie Sorlin) have been replaced for the occasion by new performers — including, for the first time, nonwhite actors, for a production that examines questions of racism in France. Making the audience uncomfortable is part of the Chiens’ playbook, and much of “Jusque dans vos bras,” through Dec. 2, is a wry exercise in privilege-checking. A ringmaster of sorts opened the performance by thanking the audience for “slumming it in this neighborhood,” namely La Chapelle, a neighborhood near the busy Gare du Nord train station with a significant migrant population. In another scene, some of the cast climbed into a boat and broke the fourth wall, asking the audience to intervene and rescue them by pulling a rope: An awkward moment of silence ensued before someone stood up to help. Les Chiens de Navarre’s comic timing is often delectably cruel: The actors took turns embodying the kind of narrow-mindedness that poses as common sense, and perhaps the audience recognized these attitudes in themselves. “I can’t be racist,” Mr. Tual announced at one point. “I spend New Year’s Eve in Marrakesh!” From the idea of “speaking Muslim” to urban myths about nannies of African descent, the dialogue was horrifyingly, hilariously politically incorrect, and peppered with pauses that allowed its fallacies to resonate. Some scenes proved less effective — sketches featuring Joan of Arc and Marie-Antoinette didn’t feel as urgent — but “Jusque dans vos bras” is razor-sharp when it excoriates everyday bigotry. In France especially, petty instincts butt heads with the lofty ideals of democracy and human rights that the nation defines itself by. The mirror the Chiens de Navarre hold up is all too faithful: As the theater audience stepped out into the neglected neighborhood of La Chapelle, the gap between them and the clusters of street peddlers across the street was plain to see. |