"Phantasmagoria" by Philippe Quesne

Seen at Centre Pompidou Paris on 6 November 2022

One of my greatest regrets ever is not to have seen Philippe Quesne's "La nuit des taupes" on stage. It is also one of the few plays I ever watched online and the only one I truly enjoyed even without being present in the audience. But what impressed me most was the curtain call when the enormous fluffy moles (animals, not skin grows...) who had been living their weird and wonderful lives on stage for an hour and a half came to the front and took their mole heads off to reveal exhausted sweaty actors inside.

Yesterday I finally saw a Philippe Quesne play live for the first time, Phantasmagoria at the Centre Pompidou. Of course it was in no way a "play" in any conventional sense of the world, but the French 'spectacle' describes it perfectly. It was about spirits inhabiting a desolate and magical place, a sort of cemetery of forgotten pianos (take it or leave it, that's what it was). 60 straight minutes of wonder, a sort of meditation exercise that takes you out of your ordinary life without necessarily placing you in a concrete or defined narrative or story. And, of course, where in "La nuit des taupes" there were real life people hidden inside the fabulous yet anonymous figures, here there were plenty of characters but not a single actor. And at the end, the spirits came to the curtain call.

 

“Le Passé/The Past” by Julien Gosselin and “Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur”

Seen at Théâtre de l’Odéon, Paris, on 5 December 2021. 

A major thrill of engaging with texts from the past comes from our ability to recognise their alterity while at the same time adapting ourselves to the “rules of the game” they impose in order to experience their power. Here, wonder is at work: how can something so radically different, irrelevant to our experience of the world as we know it, still have such an impact? how can something so obviously dead at once be so unmistakably alive?

I remember this feeling, as a teenaged reader, when discovering the plays by the 17^th-century French playwright Pierre Corneille for the first time. I was excited to be able to separate what I perceived as the artificiality of the Conellian dilemma (love or honour? really?) and the effect that the text was still able to produce more than three centuries after its composition. There was, however, also a keen sense of loss of the world that operated on such constraints and motivations that will never fully be graspable by contemporary readers such as myself. Had “Le Cid” been set in my own world, the solution, I felt, would have been easily found, and the play – with its tensions and extasies - would have no reason to exist.

Joseph Drouet, Carine Goron and Achille Reggiani in “Le Passé” 

 

In all of the promotional materials for his “Le Passé/The Past”, Julien Gosselin stresses that the starting point for this play, based on a series of texts by a Russian author Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919), was a desire to engage with texts written a long time ago to show not so much their relevance to today’s world but a certain nostalgia for the unrecoverable or, simply put, dead, past. The fascination with the past, understood as a tension between “dead” and “live” matter, is translated in the way Gosselin approaches recreation of interiors and costumes, which feel definitely and consistently period;* yet in “Le Passé” clothes are often shed, and vulnerable bodies of the actors are revealed (at other points, puppets and puppet-like costumes are used to blend the distinction between what is truly alive and what is only masquerading as animate). More importantly still, Gosselin’s trademark use of video, too, engages in the dialectics of the dead and living. In this four and a half hour play almost all of the scenes take place inside an almost fully enclosed space on the stage, and the action is projected onto a giant screen above. In the interviews, the director himself points out that the delay - however small - between the live action (that can only be glimpsed from the windows or other apertures in the pavilions onstage) and the projection on the screen figures the gap between life and death; what we observe on the screen is indeed really happening at the present moment, while also simultaneously being out of grasp, already belonging to an unrecoverable past.

“Le Passé” follows Leonid Andreyev’s play “Ekaterina Ivanovna” (1912) with a number of other texts incorporated at important points of the plot. These include novellas “Abyss”, “In the Fog” and “Resurrection”: some performed, some read out, some displayed as text on the screen. This selection, too, reflects Gosselin’s preoccupation with the unbridgeable distance from the past. The overarching theme, it appears, is the taboo on sex, especially female sexuality, and the doomed romantic dream of a pure virtuous life.  Ekaterina Ivanovna goes slowly mad with guilt and self-rejection when, tortured by her husband’s jealousy, she commits adultery as an act of spite and rebellion. The adolescent protagonists of the “Abyss” and “In the Fog”, on the other hand, identify with a romantic vision of love and purity to the point that a confrontation with the reality of desire leads to the worst transgressions.

More than a hundred years after these texts were written, after the sexual revolutions of the 20^th century, these topics may appear completely irrelevant, or indeed foreign, to contemporary audiences; yet the existential dread they illicit in the characters and the – albeit fleeting - extasy triggered by transgression remain present and ring true in the play. It is as if the constraints and taboos of the past were channels through which emotions and meanings were best communicated, and by recognising the fact of the texts’ obsolescence we can allow our own humanity and compassion to extend so far beyond our immediate present as to connect with them.

I was not unfortunately lucky enough to have seen Julien Gosselin and his company “Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur”’s first major plays that brought them fame, “Les particules élémentaires” (2013) and “2666” (2016). I did, however, see their “Joueurs, Mao II, Les Noms” (2018) just over three years ago and was really impressed by this long play based on three of Don De Lillo’s novels. It was very moving, this time, to see Gosselin’s actors again, together, at a different stage of their lives and careers, and rediscover their truly collegial approach to theatre making. I am really looking forward to more of their work to come.

“Le Passé” is on tour in France and Switzerland until the end of May 2022

 

*I could not help noticing, however that the window frames in the “Saint Petersburg” scenes were distinctly Parisian, Haussmannian –  not so much a chronological but a geographical error! the past may, indeed, not be such a foreign country after all!