PLATFORM. To 2 September.
Edinburgh
PLATFORM
by Michel Houllebecq adapted by Calixto Bieito and Marc Rosich
Royal Lyceum Theatre To 2 September 2006
Runs 2hr 10min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 September
Sex-trade production lacks the humanity of Minghella’s Made on Bangkok or Robson’s Mail-Order Bride.
Michel Houllebecq’s novel deals with Western Europeans holidaying in Thailand – a retired academic, a gas-worker with an eye destroyed in an industrial accident and insignificant narrator, Michel, deliberately frittering away his inheritance. They’re there for sex with young Thai women, or girls, and this adaptation takes audiences into the initially fascinating, if claustrophobic world of these self-satisfying, morally myopic men.
Barcelona’s Companyia Teatre Romea bring what adapters Calixto Bieito (also the director) and Marc Rosich call a “Dramatic Hyper-realistic Poem for seven voices and one Yamaha”. Plus, they might add, various physical features including a beer-gut and a naked woman.
Though Belen Fabra’s Marylise is metaphorically clothed in assertiveness of voice and physique. As Valerie, with whom Michel is in love amid all the sex, Marta Domingo gets to keep her clothes on. Both women imply censure of the men in their comparative youth and disengaged manner.
Bieito’s “bad boy” reputation among directors featured at the Edinburgh International Festival, gives him a spurious glamour. He’s really the EIF’s theatrical yob, his initially striking work soon becoming offputting in its monotone persistence.
Here, initial elegance soon wears off as the stage-revolve trundles round and round, its video-screen peep-show pornography flickering on (leaflets warning about this as audiences enter come a bit late if someone does object). More disturbing are the images of Thai women, young faces made lurid with lipstick or grotesque in westernising make-up.
Like an evening dunked in any obsessionals’ mini-world, there’s fascination in the detail and repugnance at the self-justifying arguments. But Platform widens to look at the relationship between West and East as buyer and seller, the sex-trade being another form of introducing currency into poor countries – without exploring who receives how much of the money spent.
Payback time comes with something like the Bali nightclub bomb. Michel’s repeated references to monotheistic Islam prefigure this, though he finally attacks closer to home. Onstage, the sudden intensity the bombing invites is too big an emotional demand. By his interminable foregrounding of production technique over humanity, Bieito makes this piece seem ultimately emotionally gratuitous and interminable.
Michel: Juan Echanove
Valerie: Marta Domingo
Jean-Yves: Lluis Villanueva
Robert: Carles Canut
Lionel: Mingo Rafols
Daniel: Boris Ruiz
Marylise: Belen Fabra
Director: Calixto Bieito
Designer: Alfons Flores
Lighting: Xavier Clot
Sound: Jordi Ballbe, Javi Gamazo, Marc Alvarez
Costume: Merce Paloma
Make-up/Hair: Samuel Fernandez
Assistant director: Joan Anton Rechi
2006-09-10 11:09:17