Modern voyeurism put under intense scrutiny
La Maladie De La Mort
“Idid find myself close to getting the giggles sometimes,” Tom Sutcliffe, the habitually measured and incisive host of Radio 4’s Saturday Review programme, confessed at the weekend, during the critical round-table on La Maladie de la Mort (The Malady of Death).
One of the highlights of this year’s EIF theatre programme, it’s a technologically adroit staging of a 1982 novella by Marguerite Duras, featuring much nudity. That wasn’t, for Sutcliffe, the cue for suppressed snickers. “There is a problem with solemnity, do you not think?”
“It could have done with a laugh,” a panellist agreed.
Katie Mitchell’s production is admittedly – and characteristically – intense, focused and unyielding. Yet there’s good cause for saying that the atmosphere is entirely warranted by the grim subject matter, and also that if you look hard enough you’ll detect the lurking ghost of a wintry smile.
A lonely middle-aged man hires a woman to visit him by night in his hotel room by the sea, to see whether he can learn to feel love. Using a text by Alice Birch (in French with surtitles), Mitchell has harnessed the apparatus of a (porn) film-shoot to make this encounter as much about today’s voyeuristic culture as it is about the male “gaze”.
Everything is conducted on stage with a view to its presentation above on screen. A crew bustles about a sterile hotel environment, getting equipment into position for the next round of graphic action. This requires impressive feats of timing from the actors: Laetitia Dosch and Nick Fletcher, with Irène Jacob (the Swiss-french star of the film The Double Life of Veronique) coolly, unsentimentally narrating to one side in a booth.
All that hectic technical crew activity obstructs our ability to zoom in for ourselves, look at what we want. Even if that enforces too great a measure of detachment on us, the big questions still hit home in 70 bleak minutes: is the man after love or sex? A rare breed, or emblematic of widespread emotional impotence?
After multiple degradations, the sex worker arrives at a lethal diagnosis of her client. Having commanded her often to stay quiet, the better to film her on his phone, the man asks her to repeat her assessment: it’s “la maladie de la mort”, she answers. It sounds like she’s saying “l’amour” but, no, his spirit is afflicted by a deadness that leaves him incapable of forming human connections. In that verdict lies her victory: objectified as she is, Dosch’s eyes blaze with derisive defiance, Fletcher’s are vacant, defeated. Should we despise him, pity him? C’est nous qui décidons. At the Barbican, London, Oct 3-6. Tickets: 020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk