La nuit juste avant les forêts: Brigitte Haentjens returns with a powerful performance of Bernard-Marie Koltès

Photo: Angelo Barsetti

Sébastien  Ricard.

French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès died at the age of 41, but not before leaving a body of dramatic work that cut deeply into contemporary theatre.  Although La Nuit juste avant les forêts is his first play, (1977), it seems even more relevant to us today than it might have when it was created over 30 years ago.

We are in a garage in Gatineau. The space was the director’s choice. It could have been anywhere as long as it appeared run down and shabby. This garage has parged walls and dirty cement floors. The small audience is sitting on chairs in a slight U shape that literally encloses the actor stuck in one corner of the garage. He is like a caged rat.  He can’t get out. The text starts pouring out of his mouth as one single long sentence that will continue for almost an hour…barely giving him moments to gasp for air. This is a feat of acting energy, but it is also an extraordinary moment of transformation where actor Sébastien Ricard, slowly and powerfully, becomes the incarnation of everything that Western society represses, hides, does not admit: those who are excluded, those who don’t  fit in, the foreigner, the immigrant, the one who does not belong, who is different, who can’t find his way in our big cities, a human being who is reduced to something less that human, who is lost and terrified, and eventually filled with rage, rage that boils over and takes possession of his performing body that somatises all the anger, impotence, hate and indignation incarnated by the filth built up in the fragile remains of a putrefying body. And there he is. And we cannot take our eyes off him because we know that he is the product of what we have made him.

In 1999, Brigitte Haentjens brought her first staging of this play to the Ottawa /Hull area with Montreal actor James Hyndman. At that time, she set it in a small dilapidated room in a rundown rooming house on a main street in Hull, (the house has since disappeared). That room, like the garage, suggested a place where the dregs of humanity found refuge for a night, which is the first sentence in the play. This man has been wandering around in the rain, soaked to the bone, always moving, incapable of staying anywhere because he has never had a space of his own. In fact he doesn’t exist because he has no space. His instinct is to survive, perhaps to become invisible like a tree in the forest so they will just leave him alone, so they won’t come after him. That first production with Hyndman was much less powerful than the performance by Ricard because this time, the text was allowed to breathe! And that made all the difference.

Hyndman portrayed a traumatized human being literally foaming at the mouth, a creature who was allowed to forget that this was theatre and that there was an audience in front of him. The rhythm didn’t vary, the tonality was monotonous, the text became a litany and I found myself focussing on that white foam oozing out of his mouth to the point where the words became a blur. It didn’t work.

This time, the actor appears to delve much deeper in the human psyche. He incarnates the self-destructive impulse of the individual who knows he does not belong, and will never belong and whose alienation becomes worse and worse as time goes on. He is a hopeless case, fighting tooth and nail to survive, who, in spite of the bruises and the fatigue after walking all night, tells us about his encounters, in the vast underworld of the big city.  His physical aspect is almost frightening but the way he performs the text and changes moods sparks our interest and brings the text to life. This is not a dialogue although he is clearly speaking to us and perhaps even provoking a reaction. His narrative is punctuated with pauses, with ironic smirks, with the intensely fierce glances of a caged animal, tossed into the audience, He is playing to us and with us, especially as he speaks of his world of sexual misery that comes crashing down around us. He tells us about the disturbingly funny escapades of “the whore” on the fourth floor tossing  the clothes out the window. His desire to find a woman accelerates into a long breathless outpouring of words that sometimes cross over into the realm of nightmarish fantasy and near hallucination.

The moods shift, the rhythms evolve, and the final terrible encounter on the metro where he is beaten up by hoods who try to rob him, becomes all the more pathetic when he yells that no one made an effort to stop them.  His loss of hope is complete. Past moments of naiveté and provocative humour give way to an uncontrollable rage which the actor roars  across the room from his corner in the garage, telling us  he now  has to act, to react, to  attack,  to be aggressive if he wants to survive, or else just run and run and run..

This was an extraordinary performance by an actor who captured the essence of a text that evokes the state of exclusion as a disease that devours  the human animal from the inside. That is what makes the text so timely and what Sébastien Ricard and Brigitte have understood so well. We think of the immigrants around the world; we think of those who are not allowed to fit in or integrate for whatever reason; those who are eternally foreigners, misfits, outcasts of all sorts.  The play has become a statement of the human condition of the twenty-first century and the challenge for an actor is immense but this production has made the message very, very clear.

La Nuit juste avant les forêts

By Bernard-Marie Koltès

Directed by Brigitte Haentjens

Interpreted by Sébastien Ricard
Lighting by Guy Simard, costume by Julie Charland.

Produced by Sibyllines, Montreal