Royal
Lyceum Theatre
Four
stars
A
film crew sets up onstage at the beginning of writer Alice Birch and director
Katie Mitchell’s live cinema adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ late period
novella. As the black clad team stand poised beside cameras, two actors, a man
and a woman, sit motionless apart on a double bed in a hotel room set-up,
awaiting their cue. A narrator played by Irene Jacob sits in a sound booth at
the edge of the stage. A big screen hangs above them all, larger than the life
below that it projects.
When
the action begins, it is with a transaction both physical and financial, as
Nick Fletcher’s Man states his case to Laetitia Dosch’s Woman. He wants her to
visit this barren seaside hotel every day to do everything he asks so he can learn
to feel. As she comes and goes, The Woman swaps woolly hat and trainers for
heels and precious little else. Alone, he watches internet porn. Together, he
watches her in close-up through his iphone screen.
Birch
and Mitchell’s reading sees life through a lens in a way that at times
resembling a Tindersticks video, but its reclaiming of the female gaze casts
the audience for this daring co-production between the Paris-based Theatre des
Bouffes du Nord and numerous European partners as voyeurs. We can see the scars
of why these two people are here, but where there are glimpses of her life
beyond, for him, there is nothing.
As he
stares into his own void desperate to remind himself he’s alive but unable to let
go, it is she who walks away to some kind of happiness in a brilliantly played
and less elliptical reinvention of Duras that enables the Woman to seize the
power in a way that allows her to live beyond being cast in someone else’s dirty
movie.
The Herald, August 18th 2018
ends
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