Ionesco : La cantatrice chauve
Théâtre National de Toulouse
Directed by Laurent Pelly
The Bald Prima Donna was born of frustrated attempts to learn English from self-help textbooks, stuffed with the kind of anodyne and vaguely ridiculous phrases that the English, in the reverse process, recognise as "La plume de ma tante" etc. Eugène Ionesco, Romanian-born, childhood spent in France, adolescence and early working years back in Romania before returning definitively to France during WWII, was already working steadily in a foreign language, having chosen to study French and qualify as a teacher in that language. The result was a very particular relationship with the language, and an ability to manipulate it in ways that would not come readily to a native speaker. This second degree relationship with the language also influenced his themes - the concepts of alienation and the futility of life that infuse most of his writing are fuelled by the way in which he couched the language, sense and non-sense in a constant struggle towards ultimately fruitless ends.
The Bald Prima Donna, therefore, despite the obsessively repeated, ludicrous references to "English" things in the long stage instructions with which it opens, and which were projected on a screen at the start of tonight's performance, has very little to do with being English. As I was reminded after the show, if Ionesco had really wanted to depict anything resembling the authentic English middle-class, he missed a major trick; in the long, awkward silences that intermittently settle on the stage, somebody would have started a conversation about the weather!
At any rate, director and designer Laurent Pelly did not let himself become bogged down in fake Englishness. Instead of an overstuffed, overdecorated bourgeois sitting-room in some London suburb, we were presented with a vast open space, a long, broad stripe of a (rather hideous) yellow and red tartan print delimiting a carpet and wall area, and four groups of three large, cubical, club armchairs set around the space. The image was rather that of an executive airport lounge. Around the edges of the patterned area, small red LEDs indicated an omnipresent security system and, indeed, every time the door (set in the wall at the rear and centre) was opened or closed, a code had to be entered into a keypad to its right. The few glimpses we got of the outside world, through the open door, suggested piles of bin-bags and discarded tyres. As in most Ionesco, there is the impression that behind the comedy there is a terrible tragedy. It's something that is stronger in the later plays, but it was here too, the elaborate security system and the disorder outside suggesting some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario behind the civil inanities of the characters.
This is a play in which, famously, nothing actually happens. Six characters trapped in an ersatz world, of whom four are themselves wholly artificial, the Smiths and the Martins. Only the maid (exuberant Alexandra Castellon) and the Fire Chief (written as a kind of early Chippendale, confidently played by Mounir Margoum, who earned a well-deserved round of applause for the "Un rhume" monologue) might be 'real' people. The latter lives in the outside world, the former is ejected into it when her connection with the Fire Chief becomes more than the Smiths can tolerate.
Meanwhile, the other four circle around each other, bitchy and polite, with that vague awareness of something profoundly unsettling shadowing every word and every gesture. Delivery and timing from each of them was pitch-perfect, each with one, maybe two traits to define them, held just at the edge of outright caricature. Charlotte Clemens, self-conscious and self-absorbed as Mrs. Smith, Christine Brücher, falsely demure as Mrs. Martin, Georges Bigot, the over-eager yes-man Mr. Martin, and Régis Lux, smug and sly as Mr. Smith, were a faultless quartet, funny and terrible, winding up with beautifully calculated pacing to the collapse of coherent language and any possible hope of honest communication, before the cycle starts all over again, the Martins becoming the Smiths, in an inexorable loop.
La cantatrice chauve is undeniably funny - consistently absurd, yet completely engaging - but Pelly and his troupe also caught and projected the deep unease behind the laughter, allowing the experience to last well beyond the moment, as the unspoken, and mostly unanswered questions linger on in the mind. This sort of performance makes it quite clear just how it is that the play still holds the stage effortlessly sixty-six years after its creation, and can be played every day in a small Paris theatre, without interruption, since 1957.
[Next: 6th April]
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