EXQUISITE PAIN. To 18 March.

Tour.

EXQUISITE PAIN
by Sophie Calle.

Forced Entertainment Tour to 18 March 2006.
Runs 2hr 15min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden at Warwick Arts Centre (To 18 January).

Theatrical minimalism used to make maximum impact.
In January 1985 French artist Sophie Calle’s lover dumped her. She’d been on a 3-month study visit to Japan, less because she wanted to go than as an assertion of independence (the lover, ‘M’, had said he would not stand for the break). He was older than her, very attractive and her doctor-father Bob’s friend - enough there already to start questions about the relationship.

M had arranged to meet Calle in a New Delhi hotel. Instead she received a ‘phone call saying there’d been an accident and he was in hospital in France. He was, but only for 10-minutes having an abscess on his finger treated. It was caused by a splinter, a foreign body, which is how Calle came to feel when, after 10 hours trying anxiously to reach him by ‘phone he let her know within 3 minutes he had a new lover.

Calle spend the next 3 months telling her story to friends and strangers, asking for their worst experiences in return. Forced Entertainment’s new piece consists of 2 people sitting at separate tables reading the transcriptions of these statements (different Forced artists perform in various locations; amazingly such a simple production is billed as a co-production between institutions across most European countries).

Both actors employ a deliberate flatness; the result ought to be a struggle to concentrate. It isn’t. These stories are, after all, about emotion-drained experience. There are recent events, others going back decades, losses that have never been stilled. A few seem trivial, others offer more permanent markings than Calle’s own.

Against this patchwork of pain, Calle’s repeated account arcs through the process of a single grief. In Terry O’Connor’s performance slight changes make major impacts. The facts become tedious, M never. She emerges from his shadow and guilt (at first she seduced him, then shared her love) turns to anger or reflection. Late on, the other woman becomes a stick to beat M with – more admiring, more docile.

With simple images backing each story, colour-drained apart from Calle’s red hotel telephone, this is a keen distillation of emotional agony.

Performers (Warwick Arts): Richard Lowden, Terry O’ Connor.

Director: Tim Etchells.
Designer: Richard Lowden.
Lighting: Nigel Edward.

2006-01-19 16:50:32