25 1919 France: Pure performance cycle that continues through eternity !

 25 – 1919 Paris France is billed as a “performance event  ”- even a play if you wish,   by Elliot Delage . It can only be called a work in progress,  far from even  seeking some sort of  ending  (ateleological!) because although the movements are absolutely precise, the  structure flounders all over  space and time.   Barely  going beyond  brief encounters  or   fleeting dialogues between two actors  who change  their emotional interaction,  exchange each others clothes (no this is not Brechtian at all) flip from actors  to those who are pretending to be someone else or trying to be an existing being.

Or are they portraying characters who appear as various  individuals or perhaps ambiguous creatures who appear out of the dark  and then disappear.  And yet in some curious way it keeps one interested because we cant help wondering  what will pop next out of the obscure corner of this playwright’s  imagination.  .

The beginning is almost seductive!  Nothingness!  Dark acting space. A male voice calling out ‘HELLO” Then a female answers as though she cannot hear and calls out her own questions and as  the male voice paints  a terrible picture of disturbed parents  not knowing how to look after their own  children, leaving them with  twisted minds as they gave them all manner of false values by not being able to care for little  ones  before they split up and left  the children  to fend for themselves. …perhaps.!   Because maybe that is not true at all.  In fact, there is no truth! But then theatre is not about truth and no one expects the onlooker to come to such a conclusion.   The challenge  is seeing what you can make of all this!

In a sense what we see is pure theatre! Actors who are pure actors,  pure characters who don’t need any preexisting  justification to be. They just suddenly come out of the dark.  Sometimes the man is passionately  happy because he thinks he is going to become a father (there is a  motive for you!) .  The girl on the  the other  hand is sullen and frozen faced. Then suddenly she starts swinging her long mane of hair around,  dancing and feeling good while he looks out  at the audience and does not react . They barely look at each other.  These are purely theatrical characters who have no psychology, no past life, who are not at all linked to any form of  neorealistic sceanario that  predetermined their  psychology and or that set  them up for a logical sequence of events. They just ARE!  And thus they are not motivated by anything but totally free to  react in any way they think or feel . They can even break the codes of theatricality.   Suddenly, they  walk into the audience, remove all traces of theatrical illusion and start chatting with the  spectators about any subject of discussion of the day:  Cannabis, migration?. So they ARE hooked on the radio and the TV? That we know.  They might want to break the  monotony,  to create more mystery but once among the onlookers, their world becomes much more realistic. But that is short lived and it spoils the  mystery.!    How sad,

There is the thread of a pregnancy which runs through the piece and makes the young male very happy,. Will he be able to avenge the treatment received from his parents if he becomes a father?   Those are the links that we  the audience concoct  but there is absolutely no proof of that. There is the thread of parents who were killed in a  car  accident  and that the children, especially an unborn child, did not survive or maybe she did. Or perhaps we are back in the past watching the outpouring of that which preceded that horrible accident. . But what about those parents. Did they die ?  Are they all perhaps dead?  That would seem to make more sense.

And then as it draws towards the end , the players are again caught in that black nothingness  as the male calls out , as before,   “hello”,  asking  who is there, and seeming  to  be pleased he is not  alone.

However, It doesn’t matter at all because we are all  clearly trapped in a cycle of existence that will never stop repeating itself   as the nightmare unfolds, as the images return, as the characters continue to play themselves or continually change roles  and invent new situations. And I felt I didn’t really care and was quite pleased wh en it was over. Still, there was an overwhelming sense of curiosity  that grew as we left the room and waited for the playwright to come out so we could ask  him many questions,