Clôture de l’amour
Samuel Beckett Theatre
***
Cloture de l'amour, or the end of love, is not so much a depiction of a break-up as a scene of annihilation: two lovers facing mutually assured destruction.
They walk briskly on to the chilly expanse of a bare stage, a man holding a script followed by a woman with a handbag, then halt in confrontation. He launches into a venomous formal dispute. "This is going to stop," begins Pascal, played by writer and director Pascal Rambert, at the beginning of an uninterrupted hour-long monologue of sheer contempt. It's not me, it's you.
You don’t doubt the passion of his invective, a near-demonic incantation in TG2’s ascetic production, which Rambert, a choreographer, gives the emphatic jabs and occasional bounce of a boxer. But his argument is conducted almost entirely in abstract terms. Their love is a mausoleum, he says; a fiction. He is a prisoner. He no longer desires her. They loved loving each other, but did they love each other? Soon he is imaginatively destroying her, in jets of blood and breast milk and tears, describing the thrust of a bayonet. <
Commanded to stand and listen, Audrey Bonnet’s character is initially a mystery to us, her face turned upstage, her reactions muted: wiping away tears, laughing at his words, crumpling in distress. It’s an artificiality the performance enjoys underscoring: “Nobody – nobody – speaks for this long,” Pascal says, during a show that invokes the theatre, their “work” together, the construct of language, an audience response and, by way of an interlude, even features a double booking from a local children’s choir. The theatre is almost the only context the couple are afforded, in fact; glancing references to some personal possessions notwithstanding (a pink embroidered chair, three children), they seem more like ciphers than human beings.
When Audrey is finally able to remonstrate, she does so with a telling reference: “In theatre one person speaks, another advances and says ‘I do not agree.’ ” The lacerating rebukes of Bonnet’s fine performance, given equal prominence, might come as reassurance to those who saw her as a punch bag, but they merely follow the terms Pascal has set, a symmetrical counter argument.
For all the talk about blood, described by each in jets and pools, the characters themselves seem bloodless. “We believed there was no difference between art and life,” Audrey scoffs. If this is an exhausting encounter, without being an affecting one, it’s because all you can see is that difference.
Ends Sep 29
