LA CASA AZUL. To 26 October.
London
LA CASA AZUL
by Sophie Faucher translated by Neil Bartlett
Ex Machina at Lyric Theatre Hammersmith To 26 October 2002
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 2.30pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
TICKETS 020 8741 2311
www.lyric.co.uk
Review Timothy Ramsden 18 November
Heights of passion and depths of despair fashioned from a painter's diaries into a wonderland of theatrical invention.A woman sits on a chair, her body expressing the modes of yearning; open-limbed excitement, arms out for her lover, then embracing her own body with desire, hands irresistibly moving to the genital area in physical aching. Only then does a four-poster bed emerge, as morning comes.
But following this night of desire she lies on the bed ready to slit her arm. Until her nemesis, a slight, mystic female figure appears on the bed's ceiling, before slithering through a trapdoor to lie by the woman. Suddenly the bed upends, the trapdoor becoming a window through which the woman seems about to fly.
Who but Robert Lepage could be behind this imaginative sequence? Who but he create its pre-echo when the woman the artist Frida Kahlo is visited by her new lover, the political and artistic revolutionary painter Diego Rivera, as she lies in a bath? Slowly the bath tips and revolves, until her head leans upside-down towards us, and her body is exposed, its lower parts obscured by the apparent water surface, which reddens as she details her road accident injuries.
Fittingly for a piece based on Kahlo's later-life diaries, La Casa Azul - The Blue House - is played out as a series of images behind a huge canvas-like screen-gauze, creating a semi-remoteness which reflects the two characters' sensibilities. Visual images are extraordinary. When Nelson Rockefeller de-commissions Rivera's near-complete mural owing to its depiction of Lenin, the artist takes a sledgehammer to the screen as the mural image first splinters then dissolves into a glass storm-shower.
Sophie Faucher depicts Kahlo's joy and sombreness: pain from the accident, knowledge of approaching death just as she achieves recognition, while Patric Saucier is remote and taciturn as Rivera. Lise Roy nimbly moves between roles, realising each perfectly, never more impressive than as the fate-figure Frida finally pulls towards herself through a mirror-frame, her invitation to inevitable death.
If it lacks the inner-motor of Lepage's best work occasionally the invention seems like clever ideas to enhance potentially pedestrian moments, rather than an organic part of the piece's progress - La Casa Azul remains breathtaking visual theatre.
Frida Kahlo: Sophie Faucher
Diego Rivera: Patric Saucier
La Pelona/Tina Moditti/Christina Kahlo/Leon Trotsky/Office Worker/Nurse/Russian Nurse: Lise Roy
Director: Robert Lepage
Designer: Carl Fillion
Lighting: Sonoyo Nishikawa
Costume: Veronique Borboen
2002-10-19 00:49:26