August 16, 2006
Murray Bramwell
Life X 3
by Yasmina Reza
Translated by Christopher Hampton
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
August 15, 2006. Tickets $ 15 – 50. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until September 2.
When dinner guests arrive 24 hours sooner than expected, it is described by the hostess as a catastrophe. Of course, that is an excessive use of the word, or is
it ? In her comedy of micro-manners, Life X 3, Parisian playwright, Yasmina Reza, gives us three perspectives on a dinner party turning into psychic chaos.
The higher the stakes in a social situation and the more self-important the players, the greater the chance for comic disarray. That is what fueled the boulevard farces of Feydeu in the buttoned-down 19th century and even the seventies comedies of sexual shenanigans from Ray Cooney. When the noises off become noises on, position and reputation are in peril.
The focus may shift but, at any time, pecking-order sensitivities are acute. Many kinds of sexual impropriety matter little now, but career and “cred” certainly do. Yasmina Reza has a radar for 21st century status anxiety. She hit big with ‘Art’ (her play about men and their friendships) and in LifeX3, which first played in 2000, she peels the lid off the duplicity of social interaction.
In his program notes, State Theatre Company director Adam Cook ponders setting the play in the living room on one of the rings of Saturn and, to an extent, designer Dean Hills has imaginatively obliged – with a lounge suite in orange and blue on a disc-shaped performing area edged with fluorescent tubing and dwarfed by a halo-like lighting rig. Large spheres in scrunched-up copper wire are also suspended high above the action.
All this ties in with the fact that Henri (Geoff Revell) is an astro-physicist about to publish a career make-or-break paper on the Flatness of Galaxy Halos and his overbearing boss Hubert Finidori (William Zappa) and out-of-sorts wife, Ines (Carmel Johnson) have arrived unexpectedly, in part to divulge that he has been pipped at the post by some Mexican researchers on the same theme.
Adam Cook keeps clarity and good pace with the unraveling situations and the performances are witty and nicely timed. Geoff Revell’s animated style captures both the comedy of Henri’s predicament and his excruciation, while Zappa relishes his task as the marauding alpha Hubert. Caroline Mignone has a delicious sharpness as Sonia, gazing from one male egoist to the other, and Carmel Johnson throws Ines’s social grenades with aplomb.
LifeX3, especially in Christopher Hampton’s friendly translation, gives us plenty to goggle at. But when Reza shifts gear to a more philosophical and metaphysical plane, it is unconvincing, even pompous. It is certainly superfluous. After all, pulling back the curtain on the not-very-discreet charm of the bourgeoisie is achievement enough.
The Australian, 17 August, 2006.