Confusing, chilling political theater
Here’s a line that could have been irredeemably cheesy. A mysterious Plague, one that’s both biological and political and that’s personified as a dictator (Serge Maggiani), has taken over a town. One resident, whose apt name is Nada (Philippe Demarle), keeps asserting to the face of doom that he believes in nothing. Assessing him, the Plague’s Secretary (Valérie Dashwood) says, “This one seems to be the kind that believes in nothing, and that kind always proved very useful to us.”
You can imagine a dun-dundun sound effect coming next. But that’s not at all how the line feels in Théâtre de la VilleParis’ “State of Siege,” presented Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 21-22, by Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall. The Parisian company’s production of Albert Camus’ play, performed in French with English supertitles, is that rare achievement in political theater: It surprises.
What makes the Secretary’s line about Nada so chilling is that, in previous scenes, the show establishes Nada as a
radical clairvoyant, a maverick in a place where, as the Governor (Pascal Vuillemot) puts it, “routine” is prized above all else. Dangling from scaffolding when the town first panics, his hair sticking out as if charged with static electricity, Nada has the outsider status to see the coming Plague for what it is: “We are in it, and we are going to be in it, more and more. Mind you, we’ve been in it for quite a while.”
When the Plague and his minions start banning lovemaking, or obscuring all their edicts in legalese, or requiring townspeople to have “a certificate of existence” or physically bludgeoning them with their bureaucratic rubber stamps, the townspeople don’t revolt because they themselves are the plague, or at least they’ve allowed it to fester. Their eagerness to conform and comply is the petri dish in which contagion flourished.
That Nada quickly and emphatically fails to become the hero his first lines suggest is just the first in a succession of red herrings. Taken cumulatively, these storytelling coups leave you with nothing to hold onto. All that’s left is senseless evil, reaching fathomlessly high, far and deep, never fully leaving us, even after a plague outbreak has subsided; it only lodges itself more firmly within us, lying dormant and gathering strength to strike again.
“State of Siege” is perhaps best thought of as a succession of scenes, rather than a continually developing story, because director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota doesn’t spend much effort defining concrete realities of situation and character. Are lovers Victoria (Hannah Levin Siderman) and Diego (Matthieu Dessertine) outside of a scene, or part of it? Why is a play-within-a-play announced and then abandoned? Who is the Child (Shiva Demarle) who treads ghoulishly through scene after scene but whom no one seems to see? The placement of supertitles only exacerbated the confusion; translations were so far away from the action that, whirling your neck back and forth, you might have been at a tennis match.
Demarcy-Mota’s tension never relents, though. As the Plague, Maggiani speaks in a gentle purr and with a twinkly smile, like he’s reading you a bedtime story instead of praising “orderly” deaths. You’re even on his side at times, when he praises the town’s one “madman” willing to sacrifice himself and his wants for the sake of freedom.
As unsettling, as hopeless as “State of Siege” can seem, it’s also a paean to the madmen of the world, to their courage, their perceptiveness, their generosity. For the rest of us, it’s a spur to be madder.
The townspeople don’t revolt because they themselves are the plague . ... The townspeople’s eagerness to conform and comply is the petri dish in which contagion flourished.