Review: La Cantatrice Chauve

As Mrs Smith delivered her first line, I was momentarily perplexed as to why I was hearing French. The stage perfectly resembled a distinctly English sitting room in the suburbs of London, complete with afternoon tea crockery and a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen. After the chiming of Big Ben had ended, the French sounded very odd. But of course, Ionesco’s most famous play La Cantatrice Chauve is very odd.

Allegedly the play’s inspiration came from Ionesco’s attempts to learn English through textbooks and listening to tapes. Many of us who have learned a foreign language will remember sitting in the classroom, listening to meaningless dialogues read by notably underwhelmed voice actors. There’s always one kid in the class, almost driven insane by the monotony of the task, who, after hearing ‘Le singe est sur la branche” for the nth time, challenges the teacher with “when will this ever be useful!?” The madness of the dialogue in this play and the inability of the characters to meaningfully communicate with one another is clearly derived from the experience of language learning, when our first contact with a foreign language is bizarre phrases and sentences learnt by route.

The dialogue was often well delivered and very funny, but received reserved laughter form the audience, who at times seemed too confused as to what was going on. This was clear at the end of the play when the applause was delayed, despite the lights having gone up. This is perhaps testament to the production itself, which certainly succeeded in baffling the audience. Strong performances were required to keep absurdity and hilarity clear and Lea Duchemin’s flamboyant portrayal of Mrs Smith was particularly enjoyable, managing to sustain the laughter throughout, as well as complementing her husband’s dry but equally amusing manner. Although the scene between Mr and Mrs Martin was one of my favourites, and one to which the audience quickly warmed, I would have liked to see Jeannette Viens more fully embrace her character and project more.

Laura Francis’ performance as the saucy French housemaid got the audience laughing, especially when she and Moritz Kleine, who played the Captain of the Fire Brigade, horrified the household and delighted the audience with their sexual lust.

The Buchanan is a difficult stage to work with, but the use of the space was impressive. The action often surprisingly spilled into the audience, enveloping the spectators in the madness with bizarre and hilarious phrases being screamed from behind, while the characters on stage seemed to lose whatever last scraps of sanity they had previously possessed.

A word should also be said about the subtitles, which thankfully were provided at the side of the production. Subtitles can be notoriously distracting when they fail to keep up with the play. But this production was clearly well-rehearsed, and the subtitles simply made for a sharp and well-executed addition.

The play’s ending felt like a Kafka-esque nightmare, in which all of those out of context and peculiar French phrases from school swam around my head in one sitting. As the lights went down, the following scene mirrored the opening scene as if the tape had been wound to the beginning again as if we were about to start all over again: “écoutez les conversations de Mr et Mrs Smith et complétez les exercices …”

Congratulations to the French Society for this enjoyable production. To anyone who is interested I thoroughly recommend watching this absurd pièce de theatre tonight, 7:30 at the Buchanan Lecture Theatre.