Though these days we prefer Reality TV for a fix of gawping at people with mental illnesses (or instabilities), in the past visitors would pitch up at the Bethlem Royal Hospital for their low entertainments. At ‘Bedlam’ (from where we get the word), the well-to-do would observe the patients for sick kicks.
In Paris, a veneer of respectability for pretty much the same show was provided by Jean-Martin Charcot, an eminent neurologist, whose popular Tuesday lectures at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital often gave a starring role to his most famous ‘hysteric’ patient, Louise Augustine Gleizes. But she has gone missing, another patient is stained with blood, another is in a trance and still another is wearing just his underwear and is confused. Worse, Carcot’s assistant Georges Gilles de la Tourette (yes, that Tourette) can’t find his gun and is drinking too much from a hip flask.
It’s not the first time that this rich mix of dramatic possibilities have been mined by a theatre company, often in the Grand Guignol style. It’s an approach the Threepenny Collective lean into with this ensemble work that often topples into Theatre of the Absurd and perhaps even hints happily at performance art. The cast (Raphael Ruiz, Fabio Goutet, Sacha Augeard, Clément Jarrige, Daniela Hirsh) work hard and there’s some evocative music by Nathan Saudek, played live, but the sum of the parts doesn’t quite cohere into a satisfying whole.
The wild comings and goings (with a bit of The Play That Goes Wrong farce about them) never quite blossoms into a full comedy; the mystery of the missing patient is too flimsy to sustain the 80 minutes or so runtime; and the resolution felt a bit Scooby-Dooesque in its hurried conclusion. Most of all, the storytelling is lost under the direction of Ariel de la Garza Davidoff and Ilya Wray.
The black box, wide thrust stage is ill-suited to all this dashing about – too often characters are facing away from us or sightlines are obscured by an impressive projector. The actors speak too loudly and too quickly for a room of this size full of hard surfaces. One line is, far too often, simply swallowed by the next – noticeably so when one side of the house laughs and the other, on the echo side, doesn’t.
Those technical issues make it hard for us to invest in the characters and the poignancy of their fates cannot become established, leaving only the madcap machinations, which are not enough really.
Of course, companies and venues like these are more interested in art that pushes towards the avant garde than they are in more conventional theatrical norms, but this rich material and a talented cast feel rather wasted on a production that feels at once too long (there’s not enough story) but also too short (who really are these people?)
L’Indiscipline at Theatro Technis until 15 November
