theatre/ensemble: Compagnie Louis Brouillard, Paris
seen 19th June in Wiesbaden during the New Plays From Europe Festival
plot: One marriage fails because there is not enough love, another because love alone is not enough. In the registry office, a bride learns that her groom used to go out with her sisters. A caring teacher is suspected of being in love with a pupil. In twenty episodes, ‘twenty-seven women and twenty¬four men’ try to address the undoubtedly most important topic of theatre and life: love. Joël Pommerat and his actors fathom love in their very individual way and allow their characters to dive right into everyday decisions that carry enormous repercussions and are often of astonishing banality. The range of emotional entanglements is great and Pommerat serves them with large amounts of humour and some satire.
imho: The audience sat on the completely darkened stage in two blocks facing each other (North and South Korea?). The actors together with the accurate lighting control seemed to appear out of nowhere which was quite impressive and gave the whole evening fluidity. The scenes itself could have originated in every decent soap opera - loads of fighting, loads of talking, high-speed French talking.
Without the translation on my right ear I would have been hopelessy lost.
The evening certainly had an athmospheric, sometimes even eerie quality (for example the strange ghostly appearances of the bony actress wearing the Elvis suit) but the scenes itself were trivial and too long.
As often when I have seen French plays in the past - much ado about (nearly) nothing.
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