CONFUSION QUICKLY LEADS TO LAUGHTER AT FTA OPENER
Christoph Marthaler presents delightful deconstruction of French farce
The Festival TransAmériques opened on Thursday night with a challenge thrown out to an audience that fancies itself as being up for anything. As the lines from a designedly fast-moving French farce were delivered in flat, emotionless voices with interminable pauses between, the packed house responded with awkward throat-clearing and the occasional embarrassed titter. By the end of it, however, renowned Swiss director Christoph Marthaler and his eight-strong cast had most of the audience guffawing in wild appreciation.
As the title indicates, Une île flottante / Das Weisse vom Ei is a bilingual piece, presented with surtitles, which reflects the Swiss divide between French and German speakers. (Strictly speaking, it’s trilingual, with Graham Forbes Valentine’s wonderfully surly Scots servant reciting Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky and breaking into a gloriously silly song about an old sow who winds up on the breakfast table.)
It’s based, not so much loosely as with impudent disdain, on an 1861 play by Eugène Labiche called La Poudre aux yeux, which has two impeccably bourgeois families throwing dust into one another’s eyes over how much wealth they have.
The source material looks like
great fun, a precursor to Feydeau that takes broad swipes at the pretensions of the middle classes as they go to ever more absurd lengths to keep up appearances. Marthaler’s method is to take apart everything that makes French farce work as a laughtermaking machine and reassemble it as a bizarre Dadaist contraption. So instead of the steady buildup of farce’s inescapable logic, we get sudden bursts of
slapstick, grotesque facial expressions coming out of nowhere, characters crossing the stage carrying stuffed animals, and out-ofthe-blue musical interludes (at one point, the whole cast breaks into Petula Clark’s Downtown).
Once you’ve acclimatized yourself to Marthaler’s weirdly rarefied atmosphere, there’s an awful lot to enjoy — not least because of the first-rate cast members, who each get to deliver
a wealth of astonishing physical comedy routines. Marc Bodnar, for instance, as the supposedly dignified paterfamilias, starts out tentatively trying comedy double-takes and somehow winds up as a farting, snoring, pants-around-the-ankles mess tangled up in a broken chair.
Anna Viebrock’s set design is a joy, too — a riot of bourgeois bad taste that, with its glowering family portraits, grotesque ornaments
and incongruous harp, is as weirdly disconcerting in its way as Poe’s House of Usher. The fact that it’s occasionally illuminated by warehouse-style strip lighting only goes to make it all the more disconcerting.
But is there more to Marthaler’s vision than outrageous Monty Python-esque silliness by way of Ionesco-style absurdism? There’s a hint that he’s exploring farce’s underlying Freudian psychology in the way, for instance, that Raphael Clamer’s hilariously oily and lovestruck son frequently discovers a wriggling snake in his pocket. Maybe Marthaler is exploring farce’s physical realities, too, in the way that the pratfalls end up with alarmingly bloody consequences. I would have looked into such matters more deeply, had not the tears been streaming from my eyes with helpless laughter.
The theatrical strand of FTA continues this weekend with what looks to be far more serious fare. Italian artists Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini bring their harrowing and tragic take on the Greek financial crisis, We Decided to Go Because We Don’t Want to Be a Burden to You, to Espace Go (4890 St-Laurent Blvd.; Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m.; $34 to $40). Their show Reality — an interpretation of a woman’s 748 notebooks, which were written as a way of coping with her husband’s arrest by the Gestapo — also plays at Espace Go (Saturday and Sunday at 4 p.m.; $34 to $40).