Life X 3
by Yasmina Reza
State Theatre Company
of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse.
Until 2 September, 2006
Murray Bramwell
When the Finidoris – Hubert and Ines – knock at the door of Henri’s apartment his wife Sonia describes it as a catastrophe. They have either arrived a day too soon for their dinner invitation, or Henri has got the date wrong. In any case, it is a cock-up. There’s no food in the house except chocolate fingers and crispy Wotsits. And to drink, in a desperate effort to raise the spirits, there are seemingly unlimited bottles of Sancerre.
As in her hit play, ‘Art’ – about the complications of male friendship – Yasmina Reza creates a social microcosm in Life X 3. She has a keen eye for pecking orders, or what is currently called status anxiety, those nuances of micro-behaviour that determine whether the ever-jostling members of the middle class are on the rise – or on the slide. Henri is an astrophysicist who is hoping to break a publishing drought with a paper on the Flatness of Galaxy Halos and he depends on the overbearing Hubert’s recommendation for promotion.
The stakes are high, and the dinner party was to be the crucial occasion, hence Sonia’s sense of impending doom when the plan comes unstuck. Reza, through Christopher Hampton’s acerbic translation, shows what happens when the thin veneer of civility is peeled off and the characters’ true thoughts and impulses are revealed. In three separate takes on the same set of events we see a sequence of gaffes, treacheries and painful revelations as spouses betray confidences, and carefully managed hypocrisies are exposed in all their inglorious duplicity.
Director Adam Cook, in his program notes, considers setting the play in a living room on one of the rings of Saturn, an idea developed by designer Dean Hills into a large halo-shaped lighting rig which presides over the colourful lounge setting, scattered toys and occasional tables, while the disharmony of the spheres is represented by large wire-mesh orbs suspended high above the action.
The performances are astutely managed as the play hovers between excruciation, metaphysics and farce. This is the comedy of bad manners, the kind of encounter staged in a different key in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. We even have the same Albee tropes – Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests – and, if the marauding Hubert has his way, Hump the Hostess as well.
Geoff Revell does well as Henri, trapped between expedience and his true self, exasperated by Sonia ( played with dashing insouciance by the excellent Caroline Mignone ) but more than a little pleased to see the alpha Hubert (William Zappa in swinish fine form) brought down a peg – even as he brings the unwelcome news that Henri’s monograph has been gazumped by some Mexican researchers. Carmel Johnson, as Ines, the long-suffering Mrs Finidori, lobs some nicely timed verbal missiles into the proceedings as well as offering some of the Big Picture cosmic perspectives that Yasmin Reza has in store.
And this is where Life X 3 starts to take itself too seriously. Like a number of recent plays which invoke brainy science (Proof comes quickly to mind) the invocation of galactic uncertainty – chaos theory and butterfly effects – is actually more decorative than thematic. Life X 3, particularly with Adam Cook’s well-paced direction, is an unsettlingly diverting farce about the beastliness (and brittleness) of the bourgeois. But it is long step from black comedy to dark matter and string theory – and Reza’s text comes up well short on those speculations.
The Adelaide Review, August 30, 2006.