Tabac Rouge Photo: Prudence Upton
James Thierree’s latest work to grace the Sydney Festival, Tabac Rouge, is by far his most ambitious and, in many ways, his most serious. This is not to say that the whimsy, warmth and comedy we’ve come to expect following his previous Sydney productions, Junebug Symhpony, Bright Abyss and Au Revoir Parapluie, are not all present as well. But the dystopian sense of impending doom that has always lurked outside has now fully occupied the stage and is threatening to crush its frantic, fragile and demented occupants.
Held together – just – by the charismatic physicality of Thierree and his troupe, and the skeins of classical and popular arias, woven between post-industrial static and ominous rumblings, the show dramatises the painful, self-denying downfall of a despotic ruler, long passed his use-by date. As romantic as all his work, this is a hellish kingdom of lost innocence, as if the industrial revolution and its postscript that extends to our information age was a Mephistophelean pact on an unforeseen scale: all souls exchanged for boundless longevity and materialism.
James Thierree’s Tabac Rouge Photo: Jamie Williams
Though barely holding on to power, and at times reluctant to continue, the ruler’s minions are as invested in his leadership as himself, and complicit in their fate. The main set device is a massive scaffold, which the acrobats climb through, over and under, and which tilts from vertical to horizontal, then whirls, breaks apart and is noisily reassembled. The mechanism of the set becomes a character in its own right. Moving beyond post-modern posturing about seeing our entrails, now it’s the only bit that can be counted on. But as infrastructure it’s also a cage, and a weapon.
The clamorous dissonance of the set also acts as a metaphor for an unyielding materiality in which all meaning is externalised and nothing exists unless it can be sensed, traded, consumed, recycled and discarded. This poses a problem for physical theatre: how can it be distinguished from the object of its critique? Yet the bodies of the troupe might reply to this tyranny with a more flexible version of itself, one that is self-knowing, disciplined, modest and, above all, funny. By shifting the focus from productivity to play, from logic to absurdity, we can step outside and resist the pull of our growth-obsessed economy, if only briefly.
Thierree’s is an analogue world, with its Walkman, sewing machine, typewriter, paper and fax, a worktable carried not only by wheels but the body of a dancer, a massive broken loom, a decrepit piano keyboard, and a tripod with camera and detachable flash. In their various stages of disrepair, they’re like charmingly recalcitrant children.
Tabac Rouge Photo: Prudence Upton
Underlying the joyful, mischievous and heartrending calisthenic mini-dramas, there is a steady critique of the enslaving conditions of production processes we take for granted, and which divide us, despite our digital means to allegedly connect. Tabac Rouge unveils the human cost of our Walmart bargains. What we eat, are carried by and live in, are all irreducibly material. By celebrating the strength and agility of the body, its fluidity and resilience, rather than reducing it to its instrumental or productive capacity, there might, after all, be hope for spiritual renewal. The journey of the cigarette that lends its name to the title is beautifully and subtly realized to this end. Poisonous status symbol, or a light in the darkness? We get to decide.
Some reviewers have criticised Tabac Rouge for being narcissistic in its focus on the character of the ruler played by Thierree, and its apparent absence of a unifying idea. My feeling is that the show is itself a critique of narcissism and the attendant loss of unifying ideas upon which to build compassionate, interdependent lives. The mirrored scaffold is like a monstrous toy that saps the players’ energy and distracts them from their fate, providing the ultimate selfie of consumption without meaning.
Tabac Rouge
Sydney Festival, January 8-23, 2015
Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay
