In the intimate room of Usine C, under the banner of La Fratrie, Alexa-Jeanne Dubé and Patrick R. Lacharité stage Lack, a text created in 1998, the fourth of five plays that the Briton Sarah Kane gave before taking her own life in 1999 at the age of 28. After rejoicing at the idea that young artists dare to appropriate Kane’s theater, a repertoire as demanding as it is necessary, we have to admit that the re-reading offered, without being devoid of qualities, is lacking in value.
While the themes covered are always somewhat the same, starting with the suffering inherent in love, Lack is stylistically closer to 4.48 Psychosis than’annihilated, that is to say more introspective, having less recourse to the representation of violence, this provocative aesthetic which made the fame of the theater “In-Yer-Face”, and more to the evocation of the psychic fallout of rape , incest, pedophilia, anorexia or drug addiction. The translation chosen here, that which Philippe Ducros produced in 2003 for a show staged at the MAI by Stacey Christodoulou, has lost none of its relevance.
Filled with allusions to The Bible and to wasteland by the British poet TS Eliot, fragmented at will, resistant to any attempt at summary, the piece lets us hear the interior monologues of four sick minds, the fruit of the meticulous intertwining of four voices composing a quasi-musical work, an oratorio which demands from the performers an absolute rigor, a virtuosity which Fanny Migneault-Lecavalier, Isabelle Miquelon, David Strasbourg and Alex Trahan unfortunately do not achieve. The distress of the characters, boarders in captivity, men and women devoured by guilt and remorse, despair and anger, all this, yet so significant in the text, does not pass the ramp.
Relying on a bifrontal scenic device and a 360-degree sound environment, giving pride of place to backlighting and chiaroscuro, smoke and live video projections, the staging does not shine by its originality. — the influence of the Franco-Austrian designer Gisèle Vienne is flagrant — no more so than by her power of elucidation. Indeed, 50 minutes of cries and complaints, of prostrations and grimaces will have given little more than outlines to these four souls in pain.