Je suis un pays by Vincent Macaigne

And so it’s been more than three years. I had planned to write more about theatre and have seen more plays, some excellent, but here I am again; it was another Vincent Macaigne season in December 2017.

"Je suis un pays – created in 2017 at the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne, seen at Nanterre-Amandiers in Paris on 30 November 2017, as part of the Paris Festival d’automne. Will be shown again at the end of May-early June 2019 at the Théâtre de la Colline (go and see it if you have a chance). Could not see the other two of VM’s plays at the Festival, hopefully, next time.

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The best thing about the play was the conversation my friend and I had in the theatre foyer during the interval, waiting for the play to resume, wondering how it would end. In the best possible way, theatre spilling over into *real* life, sort of. I love it when it happens (far too rarely, obviously). My friend said: “These young ladies over there look like typical girls studying ‘the arts’”. And I said: “No worries, soon, they’ll be looking like us [not spoken kindly: nearing middle age, (in my case:) ordinary].” And then my friend said: “I, for one, never looked like them [stylish, confident, unabashedly fabulous?].” Hey, me neither, and this could be the saddest thing.

(Or maybe not. We still have ourselves.)

Do we ever become what we thought we would become? Were we ever what we thought we were? Is the dream of what we could have been sweeter than the dream of what we would one day become? Etc. Exciting stuff.

     “Je suis un pays” made me sad in the profoundest, most delicious sense; the sadness has been lingering for days, then weeks. Despite its incredible display of artistry and (seemingly) accusatory and righteous tone (look what *they*’ve done to us!), what it boils down to (but why would anyone want to summarise is another matter) is this strange acceptance of time passing, of opportunities lost, of hidden treasures turned into buried menace that will one day come back to haunt us. The fear of blindness, the desire to feel alive – and connected (to another human being, to a cause), even at the price of losing yourself, even if it means killing something that can’t be killed. The doomed project of life.

      Everything I had loved about VM’s theatre first time round was there, and more: the props, the clever, fearless use of the stage, the megaphones (try whispering in one), the careful manipulation of the audience. The latter couldn’t have been better, actually: the crafted balance between participation and the “fourth wall” – just when you’ve lowered your guard enough you’re reminded who’s the boss (I was told by the suddenly very strict usher to stop taking pictures). I love how you wonder: how many bottles of blood will be spilled? Then you look: there’s a whole box of them. And then you wait, at the edge of your seat, for the last drop to fall.

(You know what’s going to happen, we will all bleed, we will all fail, we will all die; we relish every second).

What I appreciated most about “L’Idiot”, VM’s previous play, (- and could not quite believe it possible – and the courage of the project seemed almost unimaginable -) was the unsettling combination of the tragic and the funny - and the unbalancing of expectations. Here, I thought, although all the by now familiar elements were present, we have a messier, less perfect yet somehow more daring offering, with no classical text to serve even as a spectre of origin (or a crutch; Prince Myshkin, I now remember, arrived on stage on crutches in 2014). In “Je suis un pays” (based on VM’s own play, we are told), we are sent into a dystopian world of a near future, steeped, as a dystopian world should be, in myth and grisly fairytale, yet a world so recognisably our own.

     This time, I had a bit of a problem with the overtly satirical angle of the play - this nagging icky feeling  - but the satire could be what makes it most effective (more on this later). But then, as I was laughing and gasping with the rest of the audience I could not help thinking if, all said and done, the laughter was a symptom of some sort of fear, a reluctance to talk about difficult things directly. There is a striking scene where, upon hearing a devastating news, a character begins slowly to undress, apparently for no reason other than to express despair. The scene is so long and the movements so exaggerated that just the right mix of emotions is created; let’s try and name them: sadness, compassion, embarrassment, titillation at the sight of a beautiful body being revealed, curiosity, more embarrassment. Well, it was quite funny, actually. With the group of teenagers sitting in front of us (where did all these young people suddenly come from?), I laughed, a little uncomfortably.

      Why don’t you, as it were, just take your shirt off and tell us? Chill us to the bone as we know you can? Or just remain silent? We can take it, we are ready (I thought).

But then again, does this reluctance to dwell on despair, this refusal to admit vulnerability belong to the play – or to the audiences themselves? Wouldn’t we rather laugh and wonder than risk boredom? Or, God forbid, feeling? And if so, is it so bad?

     This same tension bothered me throughout those scenes of political and social parody that are so accomplished, so funny and exhilarating - and I suspect play the biggest role in drawing the crowds to VM’s theatre.  I couldn’t help feeling entranced and yet it was an unsettling experience. Without going into too much detail, at various points in the play, you find yourself in the middle of a party where you are a guest and yet you are the butt of a joke, you are having fun and you are the one being made fun of, your own desire to enjoy yourself, to escape the routine of your everyday life and, possibly, to gain access to something that is greater than your sad little existence are equated with the megalomania of the very media star or power-drunk politician that are being mocked. The very star and politician who had stolen your life from you.

      It is both very easy and impossible to point out the “baddies” in the story, the effortlessness with which the blame appears to be apportioned (the evil forces, the media, the politicians, the mother – and the “adults” in general) is at once depressing and revealing, as, obviously, toward the end of the story it becomes all too clear that the responsibility is, indeed, ours, that, without quite realising it, we have crossed the invisible line and become the adults we so hate, we have no one else left to blame.

     Even though all the cast were brilliant and yes, fearless, I felt most taken by Candice Bouchet, a very young (indeed!) actress who appears in different (interconnected) roles and who, for me, carried the show. During her first monologue I felt that I could have gladly spent the next three hours just listening to her story. A rare case of an almost complete surrender, an actor who could have easily taken her audience into battle (or, of course, to slaughter).

     And, indeed, whether it is to victory or downfall that the play leads you I was not sure (and this is a good thing). Although, like in “l’Idiot”, there is a scene of sacrifice towards the end (almost verbatim), this time, rather than being liberating, it felt more puzzling, but I hope the confusion was more daring and, ultimately, more productive; not settling the scores, not finding a solution, not giving up (and returning to Switzerland – and blissful numbness) but recognising and accepting the challenge of having to stay alive.

And so we left the theatre at the end, it had snowed lightly, or was it just the overspill of the artificial foam that stagehands had been clearing out?

Vincent Macaigne’s ‘L’idiot, parce que nous aurions dû nous aimer’, based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

Revival of the play first staged at the Théâtre de Chaillot, Paris, in 2009

Seen at the Amandiers theatre, Nanterre, on 5 November 2014

     Vincent Macaigne likes to compare his plays to a house on fire; he wants to make his audiences feel as if they were at once outside the house - and inside it. In a way, what he aims to achieve is an out of body experience familiar to epileptics such as the protagonist of this revival of Macaigne’s play based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. If not provoking an epileptic fit, the show is certainly doing everything to put the viewers in an altered state of consciousness, to make us more open to the outrage and excesses of the play, more compassionate to the plight of its characters and ultimately more entertained. There is something of a ritual in the way the audience is carefully manipulated, subjugated and in the end liberated through the “sacrifice” of the final scene (having said that, several people did leave at the beginning of the first act). The preparation begins in the foyer with the blaring pop music (with such hits from the director’s and the actors’ childhood as Europe’s “Final countdown”; earplugs are provided). We enter the auditorium and our senses are assaulted once again: in the dark room trance music mixed with some cheesy pop and the hymn of USSR is blaring, balloons are flying, some of the cast are already on stage and inviting the spectators to join in the party. This is a nightclub where Nastassia Filippovna’s birthday is about to be celebrated. Apparently, in the earlier performances of the play in Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville you could get free beer if you came up on stage. This goes on for a good fifteen minutes while the “guests” arrive and look for their seats in the dark before the action begins in earnest.

       In Macaigne’s plays, actors yell so much that yelling has become the director’s signature technique. Where in classical theatre it is used only occasionally (and not always effectively) to express extreme emotion, in the French director’s plays the actors yell constantly, and when they don’t, they shout in a megaphone. Macaigne claims that it is what the intensity and violence of the action requires, and anyone experiencing such strong emotions as the characters in his plays do would only be expected to scream, unable to contain their suffering and desperate to be heard. Moreover, in the case of Dostoyevsky’s novel, many scenes are indeed accompanied by side notes indicating that the characters did shout almost all of their lines. But most importantly, I believe, in Macaigne’s theatre yelling serves to both reflect and produce the effect of manipulation, to maintain the spectator in a state which is radically different from his usual disposition, to create an ultimate effect of defamiliarisation. It is a mark of theatricality in the same way masks worn by actors in Ancient Greece were. It is possible that this is why, stripped of all their theatrical contexts, scenes from ‘L’Idiot’ have none of the same effect on video. There is talk of a publication of the text of Macaigne’s version but I am wondering if the text will have lost most of its intensity and appeal on the printed page.

In the same way as it addresses the immediacy of emotion, Macaigne’s theatre unapologetically places itself in the here and now of the French culture and refuses to reproduce obsolete patterns. The French cultural policies are about the preservation of the “national cultural heritage”, and Macaigne has always had an issue with this. A character in ‘L’idiot’ makes a seemingly random remark on the topic, but viewed in the larger context of the director’s work it makes perfect sense. For Macaigne, preserving the ‘patrimoine national’ serves no purpose; an artist should be brave enough to confront classical texts, to make them relevant to the present day, the political and social context as well as contemporary sensibilities. Arguably, he has not as yet confronted the French classics, but in his ‘L’Idiot’ and in his notorious version of Shakespear’s Hamlet (‘Au moins j’aurai laissé un beau cadavre’, 2011) he is tackling classical texts which have become a part of the cultural imagination in the Western world. Macaigne says that the first version of ‘L’idiot’ (2009) was a response to the rage and despair he, along with many of his compatriots, felt during the Sarcozy years, and the revival of the play reflects the disillusionment that followed the change in government. Thus, at the opening of the second part of the play, we see the Sarcozy/Hollande presidential debate on the three tv-screens on the stage. But even more importantly, for Macaigne, Dostoyevsky’s mammoth novel captures an image of the time of uncertainty and a painful yet hopeful anticipation that is so like our own. The  new world of capitalism erupted in the second half of the 19^th century in Europe, and today we are still dealing with the massive advantages and catastrophic consequences that it brought with it. It is therefore not accidental that Lebedev, a relatively minor character in the novel, becomes such an important presence in the play. Indeed Lebedev, who likes to interpret the Apocalypse in his spare time, likes to say that the great star that fell on Earth in the Book of Revelation, is the railway network that has entangled Russia and the world, the ominous symbol of progress. This combination of optimism and anticipation of a disaster is rendered in the structure of the play with its two parts, the first representing hope, the second despair (‘la fête est finie’).

     It is clear that the yelling, the megaphones, the ingenious use of props and scenography, massive amounts of fake blood, foam, glitter and mud are there to emphasize the raw intensity of the emotion and to showcase Dostoyevsky/Macaigne’s text. In fact, even though the novel has been thoroughly reworked and stripped of a number of storylines to preserve the bare minimum, Dostoyevsky’s great monologues are given a lot of space, often placed outside of their original context or given to another character in line with the particular logic of the play. The Russian author’s obsession with creating meaning not from descriptions of internal states and personal histories of the characters but from their interactions with each other - the famous ‘scandals’ - finds its faithful expression in the play’s baroque excesses. Dostoyevsky’s writing is characterised by an ironic detachment and the so-called ‘polyphony’ which means that each monologue is pronounced with an opponent in mind, and is always, in fact, a dialogue. This awareness of the constant presence of an antagonist and the need to preserve meaning seems to be the driving force of the play. The main opponent here, not surprisingly, is boredom and the perceived staleness of the classical text. The play is constantly one step ahead of the viewers, anticipating and controlling their reactions, keeping them entertained. In one of the earlier scenes, Aglaya delivers a monologue which runs just a little too long but, just before leaving the stage, she turns to the audience and declares: “Have I bored you? I shall be leaving now.” Two of the most tragic figures of the novel, prince Myshkin and Ippolyte, are turned into a clown and a (rather comic) zombie respectively, which in no way diminishes the power of their suffering and raises their performances to a new level of tragedy. In a true carnivalesque fashion, elevation is achieved through debasement.

      Dostoyevsky’s novel is constantly keeping the readers on their toes: “What is going to happen next?” “Is he going to kill himself?” “Is he finally going to be happy with this woman?” are some of the questions that make you read on. In Macaigne’s play, this effect is first and foremost achieved by the scenography, the use of props and costumes. I kept gasping every few minutes unable to believe the new trick they have come up with to surprise the audience but also to punctuate the important points in the development of the plot. In a perverse interpretation of Chekhov’s famous maxim (‘If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off’) many scenes are prepared beforehand. In the first act, a Mickey Mouse balloon appears on stage to highlight the festive nature of the gathering. When Rogozhin arrives at the end of the party, he takes his anger with Ganya Ivolgin who is about to marry his beloved out on the balloon – and there is carnage. Similarly, Nastassia Filippovna’s death is foreshadowed by the appearance on stage of a giant knife sharpener. Props are also used to express emotions while at the same time producing a comic effect. For example, at the beginning of the second act Rogozhin pronounces a long speech in front of Nastassia Filippovna while holding a bunch of sunflowers. So expressive are his movements that by the end of the – rather long – monologue the flowers in his hand are beaten into mulch. And let’s not forget the play’s old-fashioned raisonneur Lebedev who first appears on stage in a giant rabbit costume (with an open back) and spends the rest of the play stark naked.

     Even though the play dedicates quite a lot of attention to the relationship between Myshkin and Rogozhin (the light and dark side of man in Dostoyevsky’s novel) somehow I felt that this particular plotline, effectively the real love story of the novel, has not been sufficiently explored. But this again may be part of the director’s strategy of avoiding the classical clichés and controlling (even if at the cost of disappointing) the audience’s expectations. The famous scene at the end of the novel where Rogozhin and Myshkin spend the night on the bed with Nastassia Filippovna’s body is replaced in the play by a different scene, possibly more effective in this context, a scene which could be interpreted as a sacrifice. Another famous image from the novel, the burning of Rogozhin’s money at the end of Nastassia Filippovna’s party is similarly displaced. In the play, even if the burning does happen, it is rather anticlimactic, as if it were an afterthought and not the focus of the evening.

     On the whole, ‘L’idiot’ with all its artifice and irreverence was a very satisfying, even compulsive experience which left me feeling closer to the spirit - and the letter - of Dostoyevsky’s novel and reminded me why we still should be reading it today. I only hope the two French ladies whom I overheard during interval saying that they’d never read the book because it is so long and boring and basically ‘intellectual puke’ (‘du vomi intellectuel’) will have changed their minds. And I am looking forward to Macaigne’s new endeavours, hopefully not more of same but something yet bigger, more tragic and more