So how did we get here? On stage a sad-faced woman sheathed in white is emoting. “Pouvoir,” she hisses repeatedly, staring straight at us. Or is it “pour voir”, or perhaps “pour boire”? We don’t know; our phrasebook French isn’t up to the task. Even if it were, it wouldn’t help.
We lost the plot of this angst-ridden play a good 30 minutes ago. We simply try to screw our faces into suitably earnest expressions of empathy, like the French around us — all except two small children who sit fidgeting and giggling to my left.
Welcome to the production of The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Juliet (sadly that was just about the only bit in English) by La Compagnie des Accès. Welcome to the attempt by a friend and I to imbibe some local culture while on holiday in the South of France.
We had thought that we were going to see the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet, just about the only drama, we figured, that we could follow in French. But this one-woman work turns out to be a meditation on love and loss by a half-mad Juliet now holed up in a mental ward after Romeo’s murder/suicide/banishment ... oh, I don’t know.
It’s the sort of thing that you wouldn’t begrudge a tenner for at the Edinburgh Fringe — in English. It’s well produced, save for the moment when the back-projection breaks down. The actress shoots a look of fury at her technician and a laptop has to be rebooted, broadcasting pictures of a rather cute cat and what can only be Juliet’s holiday snaps before the woe is back on track.
Advertisement
The small children are much amused ... and, OK, so are we.
The evening had originally been planned as an attempt to prise our children away from their nightly DVDs of Peep Show and Gavin and Stacey to watch something authentically French and improving. There was talk of a concert trip to the glorious Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes — but the Prodigy were vetoed as insufficiently Gallic.
The children look at me as if insane when the Juliet trip is suggested. My wife ducks out, too. Holidays are for reading biogs of Alan Carr, Paul O’Grady and other camp comedians.
So only the friend and I drive off through the lush, lazy countryside of the Gard with its vineyards and sunflowers and head 40km kilometres to Lasalle in the foothills of the C?vennes. This dusty village is off the tourist trail: no souvenir shops, no moules et frîtes at 13 euros. It is not off the touring theatre circuit, however.
Eventually, after asking directions several times, we find Juliet — and, as it slowly dawns, no Romeo — in a warehouse at the edge of town. As travellers from the land of Shakespeare, we imagine the locals will be impressed to see us. They aren’t particularly, just selling us bottles of beer, then struggling to find an opener.
Advertisement
Luckily we resist the urge to sit directly next to the makeshift performance space. The action involves games of Scrabble with audience members, which could only have turned out badly.
Two and a half hours later we return to our wives, who have spent the evening in the company of two bottles of ros? and Paul O’Grady. They are fairly sure who had the better time.