I heard on the radio that a bartender in New York has proposed clarity & truth as 2020’s watchword. Sounds good to me. You first. Ready. Set. Go!
I am one of those people who smile all the time, even sleeping, even toting a machine gun. In spite of everything; the smile reflects my true feeling; I’m with Isadora Duncan, feeling is all that really counts.
But neither smile nor feeling reflects what I actually think about things in the round.
Once, when I cautiously let her in on one of my thinkings, my late Mother burst into tears, sobbing out, What cynicism! I was 18 then, bless me, already a soldier. My Mother was among the most fully-integrated hypocrites who ever walked Yahweh’s Stony yet Righteous path. Rightly, I believe, I took her outburst for sign and portent; a thinking is mostly better left unspoken.
Lately, my thinking has been affecting my feeling.
I’ve been darkly thinking, for instance, that life might very well be a play – a story, fairy tale, novel, opéra, musical comedy – in which I’ve failed to play my assigned role.
Don’t get me wrong. I love narrative. But narrative is just a tool of art, an interesting wart on the clitoris that is Life. Narrative just ends up; Life becomes.
That’s why the non-narrativeness of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard), an absorbing two-hour one-man show that I saw not long since at La Scala Paris has very nearly brought me around to renewed smilingkeit. La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard, a veritable feat of thespian endurance and mastery, is scenarized and performed by François de Brauer, rather new to the dramatic scene but certainly upcoming.
I am not sure how to translate La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard). I can’t decide whether the prodiges are natural wonders or human prodigies. In France, a certain fetishistic pedantism means that laws get reformed rather than changed or replaced, or even dreamt up or projected. A réforme commonly carries the name of an individual guilty of proposing it, presumably so that he or she may be punished for sticking his or her neck out later, when nobody’s looking.
So, the title’s all very dense, as they say, and so is the piece itself. But good dense: “with depth that entertains”. La Scala has the knack of good dense. As I write, I’m thinking of, last year, among others, Machine de cirque’s breathtaking acrobacy within an entirely different framework of dramatic success or Anne de Mey’s wonderful Cold Blood multimedia piece, also an absorbing meditation on theatrical technology and technique.
François de Brauer’s La loi des prodiges strikes me as a performed graphic novel. Taking on about 20 rôles – amazingly, one never once loses sight of who is who and who’s doing what – de Brauer creates complex situations such as protagonist Rémi Goutard’s birth, his Dad’s myth-scale rassle with the evil psychic twin who prevents his (Dad’s) suicide or young Rémi’s encounter with Duflou, a self-sealing blowhard and contemporary artist as well as an ambiguous friend of or to Dad.
The situations of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) swirl around a welter of life emotions. Both situations and emotions belong, and/or not, to the said Rémi Goutard, who, as it turns out, is a future former député whose réforme seeks to stamp out artistic creativity as well as artistic endeavor. All through and into the end, La loi des prodiges makes perfect sense. However, anything you might say about it is your own story.
The sense of having seen it through – rather than, say, having seen through it to some sort of (fundamentally moral) narrative structure – is why I scribbled “performed graphic novel” on my hand as I was leaving.
As in my experience of graphic novels, in La loi des prodiges de Brauer’s word is subject to his image. The image in turn has its finger on the emotion rather than the idea. And that’s how it should be, sometimes.
Wonders never cease – François de Brauer is somebody to watch for.
La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) – Performance • 2019 • François de Brauer • 110 minutes • La Scala Paris • Ω Conception & performance: François de Brauer / Artistic collaboration: Louis Arene, Joséphine Serre / Costuming: Christelle André / Lighting: François Menou / Production: Les Petites Heures – La Scala Paris
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