Two precious qualities mark the work of Joël Pommerat and the Compagnie Louis Brouillard. First, the ability to isolate a subject and spin it intelligently; this ability, then, to create the necessary situations and atmospheres to immerse ourselves in this subject — qualities that we have been given to see many times in Quebec (The merchands, Cinderella, The great and fabulous history of trade).
With Tales and legends, the French company is adopting a futuristic focus this time, without sacrificing any of its sensitive virtuosity. In the sketched near future, robots with human faces enter homes to accompany adults in their tasks or children in their homework, in their lives, the succession of scenes recalling the reunification of the two Koreas.
The violent altercation on a street corner between a mobster and a young girl, whom he suspects of being an android, is followed by a curtain raiser by a didactic presentation on the recent evolution of robotics. The finesse, at the rendezvous, immerses us quietly in this new world, at the same time as vaguely familiar.
Here again, minimalism is essential, nothing exceeds (idem to the writing). A piece of furniture if necessary will indicate an interior, the scenography never summoning anything but what is necessary: this music at the right time, and the right amount of harsh lighting, a white light repeating to us that it is reality that is acts here.
These clumsy robots, their heads frozen in a rigid torso—actors, one must remember, in view of the striking effect—are a far cry from the replicants of blade runner. Machines remain machines, a distance which will only make the human attachment to them even stranger: that of a dying mother who buys them from an overly attached child, this miraculous boy who embraces the opportunity to finally meet his star robot.
The androids, however, are quickly relegated to the background: it is human relations that preoccupy Pommerat, and these appear to say the least… difficult. The abundant staging of children, played by actresses and actors of the same age, adds to the uneasiness: it is their future that seems sketched out here.
Civilization malaise
If the question of the link has always crossed literature and theater, there is no doubt that Pommerat grasps something essential, eminently current. The playwright plays on the embarrassment aroused by the affection for machines, and of course a thousand examples from everyday life come to mind in the digital age and continuous access to the virtual.
Going beyond the anecdotal, the show nevertheless aims at a much deeper discomfort that touches on the very possibility of an encounter, a concern that is embodied in particular in these scenes where gender appears as a motif: this boy who displays his “fluidity”, or these boys gathered around a charismatic leader, like a re-education camp. Faced with the “complete feminization of our society”, they must be given the means to reconnect with their “inner strength”… Even if it means sacrificing what sensitivity might be lying around in them. The proposal played without too much support is chilling, where the show does not care to take a position.
The scenes multiply, as do the questions rooted in the here and now. We laugh out loud at times, in this production where tenderness is all in all rare. Effective humor is marred here and there, to be sure; nonetheless a gloomy conclusion. A latent or manifest violence runs through the relationships; impasses and misunderstanding, too, difficulty in communicating.
Robots, it will be understood, act here as revealers of our difficulty in building shared spaces. Nearly a century after Freud’s text, the malaise in civilization takes on the color of a difficulty in reaching out to others, in building something common. With intelligence and sensitivity, Pommerat and his company place their work at the heart of this era.