Parutions.com
http://www.parutions.com/index.php?pid=1&rid=1&srid=126&ida=5672

by Bruno Portesi, 7 March 2005


In a ruinous mansion, the vestige of a dynasty that has long passed its apogee, the two heirs, Roderick and Madeleine Usher, are visited by a childhood friend. The Friend serves as a sort of mirror to this couple of twins, to the spectacle of their madness, to the reawakening of their troubling and incestuous passions. In this house which is frighteningly anthropomorphic, made of ancestral stones and flesh that has built up over many consanguine generations, the narrative drives the couple from the depths of psychosis to death and its ghosts.

Only one hour and fifteen minutes is little time to say all that is said in this play. And yet, the challenge is accomplished, brilliantly even, because nothing is more terrifying than this hour and fifteen minutes, dense, stifling, asphyxiating, in which everything seems to be screamed and felt in a single whisper, in the perfect confluence of the acting, impeccable direction, and its innovative set, ringing true in spite of the tragic dimensions of the story, appropriate music, and all of the tension of the Edgar Allan Poe's literary genius. Terrible yet delicious because Poe is the author of these horrors, and he is remarkably and devoutly adapted here.

The spectator, truly captivated if he plays the game and lets himself be transported by the narrative, will be hit by reawakening memories of stories read long ago and too quickly forgotten: those tense and exciting hours spent, doubtlessly as an adolescent, reading the short stories of this American writer. The words are nothing without the worlds that spring up between the lines, here exhumed by a great directorial talent, masterful, distinct without showing off, playing with codes rather than artifices, to the point of being sober in its refinement. Let's hazard an oxymoron: sober refinement born, one believes, from a grave relationship, culturally serious and consequential, always employs all the tools of narrative. The set, Dalian, is made up of broken and worn chairs, upturned, above the protagonists, functionally perverted because on cannot rest on them. In the obscurity of the Vingtième théâtre, lost in the Parisian heights, the lighting and the music do the rest: blood reds, vampirish, fatal purples, and ghostly whites are the primary colors of a collapsing world, having crossed the Styx, it seems, or at least on its banks; and the original notes of Mark Deutsch, born only from strings, mix familiar sounds (violin, sitar, contrabass) with oriental airs in a quasi-macabre symphony that reminds us at times of the celebrated elegies of “Dead Can Dance,” comprise this aesthetic, poetic - “POEtic” - heavy, decadent, gothic in a word....

This set sticks like a case to the performances of the three actors, stupefying in that they maintain a perfectly suited dramatic intensity without mimicking or exaggerating the characters that inhabit them during this long hour. The beauty of the text adapted from Poe's story by Steven Berkoff is perfectly brought into perspective by these performances wherein their elocution is accompanied by audacious and well-thought choreography, eloquent miming, expressive gestures, confident interludes - everything primordial. Diana Rosalind Trimble and Shane Bordas portray two tragic twins, two fools from beyond the grave, strong characters that take the spectator hostage in the imaginary furor of Edgar Allan Poe.

If one is Parisian, one must quickly go to see this electroshock (second week of the show is from the 9th to the 13th of March) before the show leaves to play abroad, in London and New York. Because Garutti, and his company, Coincidence Theater, like to straddle the Channel and the Atlantic. The director has already received acclaim for his Roberto Zucco by Koltès and Richard III, in England and in France, and he here gives his name to a work of great maturity, revealing sure taste and a pointillist sense for detail.

(Parutions.com, 07/03/2005 )