| Review - Invisible at the Théatre des Capucins last week
- 352luxmag Our good scribe G.C is delighted with what he sees and hears in Tena Stivicic’s play |
| Frankly my antennae were set somewhat quivering by the pre-publicity for Tena Stivicic’s play ‘Invisible’ at the Théatre des Capucins last week, with its stress on the problems of immigration, especially illegal, in the contemporary world, and references to the writings of Berger and the Suarez-Orozcos. Whichever side one might take on such themes, moralising and philosophising about the ubiquity of natural forces doesn’t tend to produce great or even interesting drama.
Luckily and happily therefore the play itself, as produced by the touring company Transport, for the most part avoids all such traps. Like Steinbeck in 'The Grapes of Wrath', or Kantor and Sherwood in 'The Best Years of Our Lives', Stivicic simply focuses on the lives of a handful of people as they find refuge in Britain. Two of them are brothers, Anton (Krystian Godlewski) and Stefan (Liam Bergin), escaping from massacre somewhere in the Balkans, where their father (Mark Jax) and sister were killed. One, Sera (Bridgitta Roy) is seeking her husband who has migrated earlier; two others, Lara (Anna Elijasz) and Leyla (Gracy Goldman), appear to be migrating just because things will be better there, and finally there is Malik (also Mark Jax) older and on the whole unexplained, except that he left ‘because the border moved’. What then makes the play a dramatic success is that our sympathies are engaged with the characters as they are developed for us through the plot. In a self-contained part Sera has only a phone number to contact her husband; and the phone number is wrong each time she tries a new version, or tries to deal with the immigration officers at interview. She continues to try, but we know she isn’t going to get anywhere and will end up in a detention centre – which is what happens, in Hitchcock fashion. She is invisible because she is locked away. Stefan by contrast is as wide as they come, linked to the organisation that smuggled them in, with access to news from home, and able to produce all kinds of comforts by ‘rubbing a lamp’. He presumably is invisible because he chooses to be. Malik surfaces briefly to put into words the feeling that he is passed unnoticed in the street: he is invisible because he has no role to play, as he did in his home village. Leyla pretty well vanishes from the play after reaching England leaving Lara and Anton to find jobs as a cleaner and window cleaner respectively, and to set up house together, despite their differences in temperament. The moody Anton experiences his invisibility directly, as he cleans the windows of a conference room and looks in, while nobody inside notices him outside, whereas Lara, happy enough as a cleaner bringing home gifts from her employers, taking lessons to improve her English, but still hoping for work as a seamstress or even a designer. She is not confronted by her invisibility until … but that means backtracking a bit. For in the meanwhile another plot has been developing in the succession of short scenes that make the play. Here much the same actors redeploy themselves as Felix (Jon Foster) a Englishman making money from installing wind farms in Rumania, riddled with generalised angst leading him to consider moving there; his wife Ann (Bridgitta Roy) with professional ambitions who refuses to leave them; Gerry (Mark Jax) a boozy and repugnant English expat also in business in Rumania and Bulgaria, who extols the delights of living there; and George (Liam Bergin) and Louise (Gracy Goldman) who are about to move to America. The intent appears to be to emphasise the universal nature of emigration in search of a better life, but the result unfortunately severely unbalances the play, because it generates no sympathy for the affluent migrants; indeed Felix, the main protagonist, becomes a rather wearying, even boring character in his meandering, self-analytical soliloquies. Anyhow, the device pays off in enabling the denouement in which a chance meeting of Felix, Gerry, Anton and Lara in a West End club leads to a struggle in Anton and Lara’s home, and Anton being knocked down by Felix, and suffering brain damage. Later Lara turns up at Felix’s apartment: Felix, conscience stricken, assuming Lara is there because of Anton, is driven to report himself to the police. And then finally, Lara tells him she is only there to work: she has been his cleaning woman for a month, and he has never therefore recognised her, since cleaners are of course invisible. The immigrants into England have all now turned out to be invisible. But Felix and his friends are far from any such invisibility. The message that comes through is, if it is anything, that the poor are invisible to the rich, a view that Shaw and Wilde could well have espoused generations ago, not that immigrants are invisible to the existing residents. In the production, all of this is impeccably directed by Douglas Rintoul, stylistically reminiscent of his earlier direction of ‘Closer’ in the same theatre, moving the action around the stage in short takes, but using the non-speaking cast to make more dramatic and ritualistic patterns of movement. All the cast were convincing enough in their various roles, with the tricky business of maintaining the distinguishable identities of the separate characters each plays, even over the rapid sequence of scenes. I had no fault with anyone, but the one separable scene – virtually an independent sketch – in which a Lumley sound-alike Gracy Goldman struggles to explain herself to a voice-over US immigration official was, to adopt a handy and topical phrase, Absolutely Fabulous. A very satisfying theatrical experience emotionally and technically. If the audience is left to itself to determine what lessons should be drawn from it, perhaps that is the way it should be anyway. http://www.352luxmag.lu/ |
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| More pictures at the end of this page |
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| photos: www.boshua.com |