A theatrical experience that visualises the layers of memory - Les Émigrants by Krystian Lupa
Waiting for Les Émigrants, 13.01.2024 Théâtre l’Odeon, Paris Mehmet Kerem Özel
Lupa has adapted The Émigrants from the book of the same name by the Austrian writer W. G. Sebald. The book consists of four long narratives, which are biographical essays about the lives of four people whose paths are crossed by the narrator in the first person, somewhere between reality and fiction.
The narrator has based the lives of these four people on his own encounters with them, their diaries, photo albums, conversations with their relatives and friends, and visits to the places where they lived.
The narrator also mentions all these sources in the texts, so we can say that these narratives are examples of meta-text. In some places Sebald has included the direct words of the person whose life he is recounting, or the words of relatives and friends, or extracts from diaries.
The method of using the material can therefore be seen as a kind of collage or bricollage technique. The resulting narratives are therefore multi-layered portraits with different perspectives.
As in Sebald's other books, the text is accompanied by photographs taken by Sebald himself or found in archives, which adds another layer. But even though these narratives are multi-layered and multi-perspective, it would not be wrong to say that the texts are dominated by a voice and an atmosphere that we know from Sebald's other works; quiet, meditative, uninterrupted, traumatic and sad.
It is no coincidence, of course, that these four stories have been brought together; the protagonists of the stories have in common that, like Sebald himself, they are immigrants. Immigration includes not only the physical but also the idea of being an immigrant in the spiritual world, through the alienation and marginalisation of people from the society in which they were born and live.
Lupa chose two of the four texts. They are called Paul Bereyter and Ambros Adelwarth. What these two texts have in common is that they contain more gaps and uncertainties about the lives of the people they describe than the other two texts. In fact, Sebald hints at the beginning of his text about Paul Bereyter that the text will contain fiction as well as his own memories by saying "[...] I decided to write his story, which I did not know, on the basis of the good memories I have of him", although it is debatable how much of the memories are real, due to the tricks our memory plays on us. So we can think that Lupa is inspired by Sebald's flexibility to create a fictional narrative about real people whose lives he follows, and that he is acting in the same vein as Sebald.
The content of the gaps in Bereyter's and Adelwarth's narratives is also common: they are about their relationships with people they both loved enough to change their lives. As readers, we intuit what might be behind these gaps through the implications of the narratives; in Sebald's narrative, we can catch Paul Bereyter's admiration and passion for Helen in a single sentence, and we intuit that the relationship between Ambros Adelwarth and Cosmo Solomon is more than friendship and that they are homosexual, but Sebald does not name it at any point in the narrative, he does not explicitly verbalise it, he leaves it ambiguous.
Lupa, on the other hand, brings to the fore precisely the points that Sebald left out, namely the love affairs in the stories of Bereyter and Adelwarth, and does not leave them to our intuition, but reveals them in detail and meticulously.
The stage is an interior space surrounded on three sides by walls with doors and windows. The parts of the walls rise in such a way that they give the impression of being destroyed or unfinished. The fact that the place is ruined is significant for the content of the story, since the first story is also about ruined cities. The incompleteness of the place is also significant because Sebald tells about the people he deals with through his own memories and the memories of his relatives with whom he has spoken; any memory is inherently incomplete.
Due to the use of projection, which is a hallmark of Lupa Theatre, a white curtain, which forms the fourth wall of the space, frequently rises and falls in front of the stage during the performance. Not content with this front layer of projection, in some scenes Lupa creates a second layer by projecting onto the three walls surrounding the interior space, and sometimes a third layer by making the walls of the space transparent and revealing the spaces behind them through lighting design.The projected images are also varied: black and white photographs taken verbatim from Sebald's narrative, photographs reproduced from the book, colour or black and white moving images taken outdoors, images taken live on stage... Lupa sometimes uses projection types and content individually, sometimes two or three, sometimes all together. The scenes in which the layers multiply are semantically as powerful and impressive as they are visually; they offer unique viewing moments in which the past, which comes from different times, places and memories and is simultaneously revived in memory, is visualised and the stage space acquires a multi-layered and palimpsestic quality.
Although I think that Lupa creates a masterly Sebald atmosphere on stage, I am not so positive about the show as a whole. In the show, which lasted 4.5 hours including a 15-minute intermission, I think Lupa faltered most when filling in Sebald's empty spaces; the dialogues between the lovers in both parts, which included long, meaningless silences and went nowhere, detached me from the atmosphere of the show. The white curtain that descended from above the stage, sometimes fully, sometimes halfway, was often used for very short periods and then removed, slowing the pace of the show and making it tiring to watch.
Similarly, the lighting design was tediously over-detailed. For example, the LED lights around the windows were briefly blue, then yellow, then blue again in successive scenes. Many scenes like this were full of lighting and projection choices that had no effect or meaning, but seemed to have been made for reasons known only to Lupa. However, Lupa used light, especially dim light, so well and simply in some scened of the show that I couldn't help but wonder if there was a need for such complicated and tiring lighting design. For example, the scene where Sebald/the narrator (the incomparable Pierre Banderet) talks about his primary school teacher Paul Bereyter (the impressive Manuel Vallade) in the front part of the darkened stage, while Bereyter stands motionless as a silhouette against the wall, like a shadow in memory, at the very bottom of the same space where the darkness becomes more intense, was visually, semantically and theatrically worth many sequences of the show.
Applause for Les Émigrants, 13.01.2024 Théâtre l’Odeon, Paris Mehmet Kerem Özel
This point is linked to the public aspect of the show. The technical team of the Comédie de Genève, after a turbulent rehearsal period from March to May last year, announced a week before the June premiere that they would not work because they were uncomfortable with Lupa's behaviour towards them. As a result, the show had to be cancelled and removed from the Avignon Festival programme announced at the time, even though tickets had already gone on sale. In its announcement of the cancellation, the Comédie de Genève referred to the differences between the technical team and Lupa in terms of "work philosophy" and "values", while an article in Le Temps stated that the technical team was "mentally and physically exhausted" by Lupa's attitude during rehearsals. In a response published in Libération, Lupa apologised for his two violent outbursts during rehearsals, but argued that technicians should "at least try to adapt" to a director's creative process. The Comédie de Genève's technical team responded in a lengthy public letter, citing "numerous instances of disrespect, scolding, ridicule, drunkenness and humiliation, as well as the chaotic planning of the process". At the same time, the nine actors in the production regretted to the press that they had been deprived of the opportunity to present the result of their work on stage.
Stéphane Braunschweig, artistic director of the Odéon - Théâtre de l'Europe, who is one of the co-producers of the project and who has included the show in the programme for the 2023-2024 season, and who has invited ten Krystian Lupa shows to the institutions he has directed over the last 20 years, put his own technical team in place and ensured that a protocol was signed with the director, the actors and the entire theatre team to ensure the smooth running of the rehearsals. As a result, Les Émigrants, which cost a total of 930,000 euros, was finally able to go on stage, but no touring schedule has yet been announced for the show beyond the performances between 13 December 2023 and 4 February 2024 at the Odéon.
At the opening night's bow, Lupa called the entire technical team on stage and repeatedly pushed them to the front of the stage, which was significant for the audience, which was well aware of all the details of the process and which included mainly the top actors, critics and artists of the French theatre, such as Isabelle Huppert, while the members of the technical team looked surprised but cheerful.
[The original version in Turkish was published in Tiyatro Tiyatro Dergisi.]
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