Seen
25 November 2018 at Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Paris (as part of the “Festival
d’Automne 2018”; performed until 2 December)
The
young French director Julien Gosselin is known for his long plays; he is not daunted
by modern classics, wordy doorstoppers written by important contemporary male
writers and is eager to make his audiences sit through hours and hours of (multimedia)
performance. After directing Houellebecq’s Particules
élémentaires (2013) and Bolaño’s 2666
(2016), Gosselin and his theatre company “Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur” have now presented a nine-and-a-half-hour play based
not on one but three novels by the American Don DeLillo, first shown at the
Avignon Festival in the summer 2018, at Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.
For
Gosselin, the experience of a performance has to be integrated into everyday
life; the play should, as far as possible, form part of the viewer’s day in the
same way as reading a book would. This is why his shows are so long and the spectators
are allowed to leave the auditorium at any point - and come back if they wish
(despite the discomfort it may cause other members of the audience). Although
there are intervals between the three stories, those are also filled with
shorter performances; in this way, however one may try, it becomes impossible
not to miss at least some of the action that is taking place on stage. Ironically,
my own experience of “Joueurs, Mao II, Les Noms” fits quite well with Gosselin’s
principle of integrating performance into life. I did somehow miss the email
alerting the audiences that the play would start an hour earlier than indicated
on my ticket and arrived very late. The usher, surprised at my distress, told
me not to worry as the “play will continue all day”. Luckily enough, I had just
read around a half of Don DeLillo’s “Players” on which the first part of the
play is based and, when I came to the auditorium, the action on stage neatly
picked up where I had left off. Arriving late, I was probably also better
prepared to sit through to the end of the final piece, based on DeLillo’s “The
Names” that I had read earlier and loved, even though many of fellow members of
the audience, visibly shattered, left the auditorium throughout the third part.
By the final curtain call, only about two thirds of us remained to applaud the
exhausted actors. Perhaps predictably, it was the second part, “Mao II”, based
on the novel I haven’t yet read, that I enjoyed most. At the end, after nearly
nine hours in the theatre, I felt that I wanted to go back and see it all
again.
The
thread that connects the three DeLillo novels, we are told in the play’s
description, is terrorism, most importantly the emergence of violence as a way
of dealing with social problems in 1970s US and Europe, and beyond. Needless to
say, read now, these texts (first published, respectively, in 1977, 1982 and 1991)
have a prophetic, almost sinister quality. In the modern world, we are told in
the second part of the play, “Mao II”, terrorists are supplanting writers as
opinion makers; they can influence and transform people’s minds quicker and
more effectively. More importantly still, DeLillo’s novels and, indeed,
Gosselin’s enormous “objet théâtral”, are obsessed with the idea of (dis)connection;
violence, motivated by political purpose or senseless, directed at oneself or a
randomly or, indeed, carefully selected other, provides a shortcut to some form
of connection – to oneself, people around us or even a divine presence. More
than twenty or even thirty years on, when the Western world has been
transformed by banalisation of acts of terrorist violence, Gosselin’s play stresses
this metaphoric meaning of terror as an expression of a human need to connect to
some sort of truer existence, a need that requires a sacrifice. Interestingly
enough, this acute awareness of isolation and loss of purpose in contemporary
world, in Gosselin as it is in DeLillo, is still primarily a masculine
affliction, accompanied as it is by a need to break out of a glass cage (in the
play quite literally) of ordinary existence, to set oneself free. Needless to
say, this project will always be doomed to failure, and the experience of
sharing it with others, with the actors and audiences during an all-day theatre
ritual appears to offer the only hope of some form of connection.
The
need to stay connected is reflected in small obsessions. In “Players”, the
first part, the characters are constantly clutching old-fashioned corded
phones, waiting to receive a call from a mysterious stranger; this recurrent
image is often used to comic effect and yet it testifies to a basic need to
stay in touch, a hope to be reached out to, to be connected to a wide if
dangerous network. In “Mao II” there is a fascination with a mystical union
with a stranger, promised by reverend Moon to his followers. In “The Names” of
course, it is the language itself and the broken promise it gives of a
connection to the world, to meaning, that play a key role.
In
this context, the way the play is structured, its obsession with video
projection and multimedia in general is no mere nod to current theatrical
fashions. The first part, “Players” takes place almost entirely behind thick
panels or, at best, opaque curtains that obscure the interiors where the action
is taking place. What we see is the projection, supposedly, of the action being
filmed live by an ever-present camera person, often onto several enormous
screens, directing and fixing the spectator’s gaze as if it were a film. Only
once this illusion of simultaneity is broken and erupts into what is definitely
a sequence filmed in advance when two characters run out of the “building” and
find themselves, briefly, outside. You keep pinching yourself, trying to
convince yourself it may be true, only to surrender to the obvious in the face
of evidence: outside, it is raining, and (a quick glance on the watch) it must already be dark; on the screen, the sun is shining.
The
second part, “Mao II”, plays extensively with text, displaying some enigmatic
description of a torture sequence on the big screen at several points in the
story until its connection with the larger narrative, that unfolds mostly in
small and secret rooms and is equally projected onto screens, becomes clear. In
the third part, “The Names”, it is one of the characters, the protagonist’s
precocious nine-year-old son Tap, who is transformed into a device, a phone, a
computer, as his words, addressed to his parents, are rendered, text-message
style, on the screen. The boy *taps* into the mind of Owen, the archaeologist
and a kind of father figure if not double to the protagonist. In the novel, as
in the play, it is through Tap’s eyes and spectacularly badly spelled writing
that we discover Owen’s past.
For
those spectators who have the stamina to wait until the end, the purpose of all
this playing with space and media becomes clear in “The Names”, the third part,
based on the obsession of three men (one of them, fittingly, a filmmaker) with
a mysterious cult that chooses its victims solely on the basis of a random
“linguistic” coincidence (the victim’s initials have to be the same as the first
letters of the name of the village where the gruesome ritual will take place). As
the play progresses, the barriers start to fall away and some of the more complex
and visceral final scenes take place on a bare stage, by that point a disturbing
unfamiliar sight, where we witness a naked figure twisting in a pool of blood
or a scene of glossolalia in a Texan church that affected Owen, the old
archaeologist, when he was a little boy and sent him on a doomed quest for
connection through language. More disturbingly still, in the penultimate scene,
when all screens and theatrical artifice disappear, we are compelled to sit
through a long, seemingly interminable, monologue, delivered by a semi-naked
older man (Owen). In a masterful gesture, Gosselin allows his audiences a
simple, unencumbered theatrical experience. But this scene comes at the end,
and is risking rejection as the exhausted spectators may not have the energy to
focus or even the care. All hope of effective communication, once again, finds
itself undermined. The final scene of speaking in tongues, long and incantatory,
albeit almost silent (text is projected onscreen) figures the play itself, the
ultimate solitude in the face of all this talking.
Albeit
at times genuinely entertaining and easy to identify with, « Joueurs. Mao II. Les noms » is a daunting experience that requires
the viewer to take a certain leap of faith. Ironically yet reassuringly, even
the failure of this experience is precious, as it communicates the message of impossible
connection even more dramatically.
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