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Valérie Parisot and Frédéric Gray are locked in a game of love in “Jean et Béatrice.” |
A woman with long black hair is swinging around the stage as the audience crowds into the Folie Théâtre for Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette’s Jean et Beatrice. Piles of apples are heaped …
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Valérie Parisot and Frédéric Gray are locked in a game of love in “Jean et Béatrice.” |
A woman with long black hair is swinging around the stage as the audience crowds into the A La Folie Théâtre for Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette’s Jean et Beatrice. Piles of apples are heaped in one corner of the stage, and plastic glasses – half full or half empty? – are scattered around it to quench her enormous thirst. This is Béatrice, or so she claims.
Jean, the other character, is a bounty hunter. He’ll do anything to be able to caress €20 bills in his pocket: find lost dogs, save people’s lives, help lost souls. He goes to Beatrice’s nest on the 33rd floor in response to her advertisement: “Rich heiress looking for a man who will interest her, move her, and seduce her. Substantial reward.” He walks in wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt and carrying a suitcase, ready to play the contracted game of love.
Trouble arises when the rules cease to apply to this game of love. As Jean and Béatrice desperately hang on to the idea of love as a way of getting through their lives, their encounter pushes them to confront their solitude and brings them into a violent confrontation that is perhaps the beginning of desire.
This adaptation by the La Clique company, directed by Hélène Lebarbier and starring Valérie Parisot and Frédéric Gray, explores the intermingling of stories and lies, imagination and deception, and theater and reality — which of the latter came first?
The first part of the play is enjoyable. Like Beatrice, we want to be interested, moved, seduced or just diverted from our everyday life, and we are, to a certain extent, even though it is impossible to love or identify with these characters. The role of Beatrice is deliberately overacted to underline the fact that she is a constructed character hiding away from herself through lies and fantasies.
Jean exists through the stories he tells and the situations he embodies, which objectively prove that he is a good actor. These directions follow the theatrical recipe, like the game of love, but however justified they may be, they aren’t enough to conquer the spectator who, beyond wanting to be interested, moved, etc. is looking for something new.
Things improve in the second part, when the play ceases to be a show and starts confronting theatrical issues that have to do with love, death and desire unconstrained by any rules. The actors trap themselves in confusion between the boredom of the characters and their need to invent or to “love.” Their talent isn’t enough to fill the emptiness they embody.
Carole Fréchette often writes about the end of illusion, but she also allows for fantasy in life. In her last play, Les Quatre Morts de Marie, a little girl declares that she never will die and then dies four times. At each stage of her life she has to die in order to start anew, as if dying were the condition for fulfilling her first wish.
This interpretation of Jean et Béatrice, which La Clique calls a “black comedy,” conveys a lingering feeling of cynicism. Perhaps it is deliberate, but the production lets the mediocrity of reality invade the open space of theater. Nevertheless, the performance is worth seeing. It helps the spectator recognize the mechanisms of deception, confront what is unbearable, laugh a bit and step out pleased that life also has a social and political aim to it.
A la Folie Théâtre: 6 rue de la Folie Méricourt, 75011 Paris. Performances Thursday-Saturday at 10pm; Sunday at 6pm. Through January 9. Tickets: €20. www.folietheatre.com
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