Theatrical Duality in Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces

 

Theatre has always been fascinated with the relation between the make-believe world onstage and the reality of everyday life. According to Erving Goffman, when in a theatre, performers and audience agree to assume the make-believe world onstage and ignore out-of-frame activities that do not belong to this world. It implies a double awareness on the audience’s side that many scholars have addressed. In an eighteenth-century essay on ‘illusion’, Marmontel points out that theatre spectators are simultaneously seeing a fictional story and a real event (95). This is echoed by Pavis who names it ‘the double game of illusion’, in which theatrical illusion and reality or ‘disillusion’ can never stand alone but appear ‘always as a pair’ (178). Walton describes the experience of theatre going as between two poles: one distanced from the represented world and the other immersed in it (273). His observation reveals that this duality is not a dichotomic relation, but rather a continuum between illusion and reality. Theatre works may situate in different places on this continuum of duality. One could say that the naturalist drama is one of the closest to the illusory end, for it endeavours to absorb the audience in its story world as an alternative to real life. Towards the other end, for example, Brecht’s epic theatre intends to keep the distance by its V-effect techniques.

This view of varied distance of theatrical illusion and reality is shared by Fischer-Lichte, though she focuses largely on audience’s perception of the performer. According to her, the spectator is always in ‘an inbetween, or liminal state’. To them, the performer onstage is constantly oscillating between a phenomenal being and semiotic signs (41). Féral also recognise the audience’s ability to see through the dual nature of the performer. While acknowledging the fictional characters of the dramatic world, she says, their ‘double-edged gaze penetrates the actors’ mask’ to evaluate their art and skills at the same time (100).

In Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces, the children actors have stunned the audience with their art of acting. And I would say their art lies exactly in demonstrating the range of this theatrical duality. The 2016 work of Rau’s is based on the life of a real serial child killer named Marc Dutroux. But instead of staging a direct and realist representation, the play has a frame structure: a director casts children to enact the Dutroux affair. The story is recounted in the form of monologues by various people related to the crimes e.g. police officer, parents of victims, father of the murderer, etc., intersected with discussions between the director and children actors on various topics such as crime, life, death, and theatre itself.

Except for the director who is played by an adult, all the other parts are played by young children aged from 8-13. Some deliver very natural performances, other, though not in an unnatural way, show traces of acting such as laughing and forgetting lines. The one who laughs most often (but not as part of what his character should do) is a boy who plays the police officer. Every time he is performing, I could not help thinking how adorable the little boy is, though his role is a serious-minded policeman investigating a criminal case. There are some other alienating devices to distance the audience from being totally immersed in the story, but at certain moments I felt I was allowed to do so and forget that these are children playing adult characters. Especially when a little girl playing a victim about her age, who is kept in a basement and sexually abused by Dutroux, it becomes so realist and emotionally intense. This is the moment when one feels that the performer is closest to the character, i.e. most ‘in character’. We might be familiar with the conventions of all kinds of genres of theatre which deal with the distance between theatrical illusion and reality differently. But it is really rare to see such a range in one performance.

Though Rau displays superb use of Brechtian techniques in this play, the children appear to have little need for such skills because they are natural embodiment of the actor-character duality. And unlike Brechtian performers who are expected to show a dialectical relation between actor and character, these children demonstrate a kind of duality that is more elastic and non-confrontational. In other words, it seems they can be flexible to move between the two ends.

  

REFERENCE

Féral, Josette. ‘Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language’. SubStance, translated by Ronald P. Bermingham, vol. 31, No. 2/3, no. 98/99, 2002, pp. 94–108.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies. Routledge, 2014.

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Penguin, 1975.

Pavis, Patrice. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Marmontel, Jean-François. ‘Illusion’. Éléments de littérature. Verdière, 1825, pp. 89-98.

Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press, 1990.