Plays by contemporary Australian dramatist
Daniel Keene have been mounted in
France for the last twelve years, and his work
is relatively popular with French directors.
The latest production is ‘Cinq Hommes’ (Five
Men), directed in French translation by Robert
Bouvier, running at the Théâtre de la Tempête
at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes until May
25. The play’s theme is that of illegal
immigrant workers, a theme that has been
dealt with in the cinema, notably by Ken
Loach in ‘It’s a Free World’, from the point of
view of the exploiter. But ‘Cinq Hommes’ is
the story of the workers themselves, and how
they manage to survive in a world that has
become devoid of meaning.
It is difficult to stick a label on Daniel
Keene’s style. It is realistic, in that he deals on
the surface with an everyday issue, and the
setting is the building site where the men both
work and are lodged, but it would be wrong to
call it a sociological drama. The five men, all
of different origins, exist in a kind of noman’s-
land that could be anywhere in the socalled
free world. There is little plot or
conventional tension, and the play unfolds in a
sequence of short episodic scenes that give
fleeting impressions of who each man is.
There is little psychological motivation, and
each character defines himself by the words he
speaks. The overall impression is of poetic
drama, vaguely related to Beckett and Brecht,
where human solitude, hope, despair, and the
possibility of redemption are the issues that
emerge from the play’s structure. The five
men live and work together for a time, and
during that time reveal something of
themselves, but the mystery of their lives
remains in the audience’s imagination.
Robert Bouvier’s production emphasises
the play’s overwhelming humanity, its
relevance to today’s society and the
universality of the themes. The five actors,
Polish, African, Roumanian, Hispanic and
Moroccan, have the same origins as the
characters in the play. They are directed, and
relate to each other as a group, in a way that
could be described as generous and caring –
rather like the style of Peter Brook. This
allows each character to establish his past,
hopes, doubts and despair as an individual and
as part of a group. What we learn about each
man is woven together like a piece of chamber
music: Janusz defines himself as a doubting
seeker of God, Diatta as a story teller, Paco as
a soldier, Louca as a drunk and Larbi as a
peasant whose ideal is to return to his village
and his wife and son. There is no star
performance, although each character is given
intense moments, and Bartek Sozanski,
Boubacar Semb, Antonio Bull, Dorin Dragos
and Abder Ouldhaddi support each other as a
seamless team. Emphasis is given to the
poetry of the word as the actors pray, speak
their thoughts, tell stories, chat or write letters.
There are some poignant moments when,
chorus-like, the characters speak together in
their own languages.
Xavier Hool’s set, using scaffolding,
plastic sheeting, canvas and wooden palettes,
(the play opens with Luca and Diatta
sheltering from pouring rain), establishes the
social context. But at the same time it is an
apparatus that transforms space, from the
work place to the sleeping spaces to an
anonymous bar. Rather than being realistic, it
becomes a metaphor of the bleakness and
sordidness of the men’s lives, and their
ultimate isolation and solitude.
Also at the Cartoucherie, Ariane
Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil will host the
itinerant Petit Théâtre du Pain from May 22
until June 7. The director Georges Bigot, once
an actor with Ariane Mnouchkine, brings his
company’s production of Tim Robbins’s
‘Embedded’ back to Paris from the Basque
country. The play is a cruel and darkly comic
docu-fiction about American journalists in
the Iraq war, a theatrical show with masks
and music.
Sophie Lagier directs a French version of
Sarah Kane’s ‘Crave’, a work that lays bare
the nerves, will run at the Théâtre du
Chaudron from May 8-24.
Théâtre de la Tempête: 01 43 28 36 36
Embedded: 06 30 89 39 82 / 05 59 49 10 09
Théâtre du Chaudron : 01 43 28 97 04
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