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Written by Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862 – 1949)
Created and directed by Denis Marleau
The setting:
As the audience (50 or 60 people only) are led together into a darkened
space, the ‘characters’ are already in place. Twelve faces (6 of them
Céline’s, 6 belonging to Paul Savoie) seem to hang in the blackness at one
end of the room. They appear to be individual holographic images – they all
have their eyes closed.
The plot:
As the performance begins, the faces (‘masks’, as Marleau calls them), begin
to speak the lines. They are 12 blind people from a hospice who have been
taken on a long walk by a priest. They have been resting, and now time is
getting on but they can’t find the priest to lead them home. (He has in fact
died in their midst while they’ve been resting.) The 45 minute performance
consists of them discussing their plight, listening to the sounds around
them, and ends with them still in this unresolved situation. They all close
their eyes, and enough lights go up to enable the audience to leave.
The performance:
You will be interested in Céline’s performance, but this is first and
foremost a performance of technique. It is every bit as much (actually,
probably more) an art installation as it is theatre. Think about it – only
the faces of the actors appear onstage. Their heads are motionless – only
their eyes and mouths move. Because it’s done by video, each actor can play
six characters, who are distinguishable only by their voices. In the English
version presented at Edinburgh these voices were dubbed, so even that aspect
of the performance is attributable to someone else. Paul Savoie had 6 well
delineated characters. The female parts consisted of 3 old women who, from
time to time, chanted prayers in unison, a middle-aged and a young character
who between them spoke the majority of the female lines, and a mad woman who
occasionally smiled manically or whimpered.
The actors are simply one of
the tools used by the director. In fact, Céline and Paul Savoie never
performed together; even the interaction (or lack of it) between the
characters was choreographed by the technicians.
The work:
Don’t get me wrong, this was a compelling show to watch, and worth the price
of the ticket. However, the way in which Maeterlinck’s words and concepts
were presented did seem a bit too contrived. You kept thinking, “How did
they do that?” An admirable reaction to a conjuring act – but “is it art?”
Maeterlinck had this vision in
1890 – “The living being must, perhaps, be removed completely from the
stage…….the absence of the human being seems to me to be essential.” In 1890
that might have been very brave and ground-breaking. But in these days of
cinema, TV and video, when we can create Lara Croft from pixels or resurrect
Humphrey Bogart to do a commercial, hasn’t this idea been overtaken by 99.9%
of our entertainment? Industrial Light + Magic can give us floating heads so
convincing that we don’t even think about how it’s done. Denis Marleau’s
production was like watching someone tying their shoelace while standing on
their head – why make a useful concept so unnecessarily difficult?
And to end on a banal note – if
we’re keen (and we are, aren’t we?) on seeing Roy return to the stage, don’t
we want to see him in the flesh? Good enough reason for preserving the
uniqueness of the live stage performance. |
