THIS smart, sensitive and extremely enjoyable production by Andy Lavender’s Lightwork company hinges on a peculiarly funny family curse. “We kill French intellectuals in traffic accidents,” the middle-aged geneticist David Rée explains in an introductory voiceover.
Rée, played by Eric MacLennan with an endearing mix of repression and discombobulated unease, is en route to Paris to speak at a scientific conference. His ailing (and unseen) French-born father accompanies him. When Dad goes missing, the son takes an unexpected detour into the past, both his own and that of three famous Frenchmen — the composer Ernest Chausson, the physicist Pierre Curie and the philosopher-critic Roland Barthes — in whose real-life accidental deaths Rée’s ancestors are said to have been unintentionally implicated. The show, which is touring Britain until March 4, is subtitled “a genetic detective thriller”. It is a scintillating comedy, too, but one with a melancholic undertow based on themes of chance, fate, mortality and lineage.
It is also a model of how to place technology at the service of a production, rather than have it be the raison d’être. Douglas O’Connell’s video designs possess a magical beauty, wit and flexibility. The deceptively simple set features a back wall for projections and three easel-like panels. The narrative slides with protean elegance and ease from one location to the next.
The piece is more than just visually engaging. Dan Rebellato, the author, has a fine ear for absurd situations and human idiosyncrasies. One moment he is sending up the pretensions of the French intelligentsia or the linguistic and behavioural gulfs between Gallic and British culture and in the next he is reaching for the poignant and poetic. Save for one key transformation, MacLennan confines himself to playing Ré e. He and the other actors bring plenty of expert and often comic detail to their performances.
Among them David Annen, Paul Murray and Danny Scheinmann split a succession of surly waiters and eager scientists, suggestive concierges and traffic cops. Each also embodies one of the aforementioned trio of celebrities, each of whom describes and enacts in a stylised fashion his own demise.
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If the payoff to this complex and slippery tale ultimately seems a little muddied, no matter. Lightwork’s collaborators have created a resonant entertainment that appeals to the mind, the emotions and the eyes.
Tour details: www.lightwork.org.uk