The contemporary French playwright Sébastien Thiéry is not so well known outside France as Yasmin Reza, so our playgoers should be grateful to Anthony Aquilina and the Alliance Française for making a fine Maltese version of Comme s’il en Pleuvait possible.
The play, translated to Xita ta’ Flus, was put up at St James Cavalier. It is difficult to classify the type of play to which this work belongs, and perhaps I should not try to do it. Tragi-comedy, as the programme terms it might give a wrong idea of a play that for much of its duration is very funny but then ends like a Jacobean tragedy. However, it might be a more fitting description than ‘very dark comedy’, a genre to which this play might also be seen to belong.
Thiéry certainly owes a debt to his fellow national Ionesco, once so popular. His indebtedness to Harold Pinter is perhaps less obvious.
For much of its duration, the play did make me think of a breathless French farce, though its small cast would make it an unusually condensed farce. In any case, the play is not about sex at all, but is more a trenchant satire of today’s Western civilisation, with its ugly addiction to money and shopping for goods that appear so shockingly desirable. It is also about and the way this addiction has affected inter-personal relationships.
The main character is Bruno (Anthony Ellul), a professional anaesthetist who is much dissatisfied with his earnings and envies all the great money-makers he sees all around him. The author has chosen this profession because unlike, say, the surgeon whom he assists, his role is speedily forgotten by patients. Nobody thinks of rewarding him for the important work he does every day. As far as he knows he has never caused a patient to die, but still remains, he feels, scandalously unrewarded.
He is politically a left-winger who believes in social improvement and contentment. His wife Laurence (Nanette Brimmer) passionately reminds him of this, and the couple’s help Teresa (Alba Florian) even says she likes working for the couple because they are caring leftists. These reminders become more and more necessary as the play develops, because of Bruno’s growing reaction to the mysterious appearance of bank notes that the couple start finding in the house.
A trenchant satire of today’s Western civilisation, with its ugly addiction to money
For a number of scenes the two are not just puzzled but also terrified by what is happening, suspecting that someone is trying to get them in trouble with the police.
They scare the wits out of the initially cheerful Teresa by insinuating she might have been guilty of planting the money in the flat, but her innocence is only too obvious. Matters, however, start becoming serious when a young and fierce-looking neighbour (played by Nathan Brimmer) in the same flats, comes barging in.
He informs them that someone unknown has been stealing all his property, brandishes a revolver and warns them of the violence he would inflict on anyone he catches robbing him. He makes a menacing departure but leaves his revolver lying on the couple’s coffee table – an unconvincing lapse of memory.
Laurence is strongly against their using any of the money for their own needs and makes her view strongly felt again and again by Bruno.
But soon, we are allowed to see how deeply Bruno has been corrupted by the sight of all this much money seemingly within his ownership. At the opening of one scene we see him surrounded by shopping baskets indicating purchases from famous firms like Gucci. When his wife joins him and is shocked at the sight, Bruno argues he has done no wrong and insists on Laurence trying on a gleaming Gucci gown. While he is delighted when she comes in wearing it, she says she is feeling like one of the nouveaux riches she despises.
When the neighbour comes in furiously brandishing an axe, roaring that all his property has now disappeared, matters speed up until they reach a very bloody climax. As the play ends, a whole fountain of bank notes pours down from the top of the stage.
The satirical import of the play should be obvious to any member of the audience. The mounting frenzy of the performers, under the firm direction of Lino Farrugia, made the 90 minutes of the production move swiftly, save for a few central scenes where the performers seemed to lose their zip.
The cast, however, was mostly excellent. I was impressed to see Ellul and Nanette Brimmer cope so skilfully with the constant vocal and physical exigencies of their roles.
Ellul was a man whose long-repressed anger he allows to explode. The sight of all the money first makes him fear it has been planted on him by an enemy. This fear is succeeded by a fierce determination to make full use, legal or not, of all the wealth now within his grasp, and to prevent anyone from depriving him of it.
The professional who never lost a single patient now forgets this, as he ruthlessly destroys any possible obstacle.
Nanette Brimmer is also in top form as Laurence. She has never lost her integrity and never tires of telling Bruno vehemently how strongly she disagrees with him, as he sheds the values for which she has loved him for 20 years. Like Ellul, she is too good a professional ever to play for laughs, but they both get laughs again and again as we see them so completely overwhelmed by what is happening to them.
Nathan Brimmer’s Neighbour (a character that is not given a name in the script) is a well-judged portrait of a man driven insanely violent by the loss of all he owns. But he is still able to weep, in moments when the cruel depths of his situation become particularly obvious.
Florian is a hit as Teresa, the pleasant Spanish house help who finds herself innocently in the eye of the storm, and succeeds during her few scenes in making the character come truly alive.
Xita ta’ Flus runs today at St James Cavalier, Valletta, at 8pm.
www.sjcav.org