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Foreign folly

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons
Soho

The Internationalist
Gate

The Black and White Ball
King’s Head

You can tell when a culture has lost its way because it starts handing out awards. There’s a small club of annual prizes that have some legitimacy. Oscar, Bafta, Booker, Olivier, Nobel — all provide worthwhile verdicts on the disciplines they attach themselves to. But adding to their number cheapens the entire enterprise. Like prophets and fire drills, the more awards there are the more they get ignored. Little surprise, then, that the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad has collected so many trophies that he has to scramble over heaped ramparts of silverware every time he leaves the house. Aged 34, he was granted a lifetime achievement award by some august French body that apparently bungs out gongs with its eyes blindfold, a bit like pinning the tail on the donkey. Mouawad, now 40, has been hailed in Le Monde as ‘one of the world’s most talented French-language playwrights’, God help the world’s French-language play-goers. His latest doodle, Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons, is set in a Lebanese town during an aerial bombardment.

It looks good to start with. The Cro-Magnons’ flat is set on a steep rake, with foreshortened angles, and one wall blown apart with a snaggly missile hole at roughly serving-hatch level. Enter a mother and son. They start bickering aimlessly and making lots of jokes that aren’t funny. The air-raid barely gets a mention. A friend drops by and the tedious chitchat continues while an off-stage hysteric barks repetitive questions through the serving-hatch. This turns out to be the family’s mad daughter who suffers from narcolepsy and sexual delusions and is convinced she’s engaged to be married. That’s the plot. The family don’t believe the groom exists but they nevertheless prepare for the wedding. They put on nasty shiny clothes, produce the finest china available from the local pound shop, and lay on a beast of a feast. The beast in question is a sheep which they tie up and drag to the landing outside their flat where they execute it, slowly and with much blood and merriment, using scissors. What the sheep felt about that can only be imagined. But, hey, it’s a sheep. The family that slays together stays together. More incoming fire strafes the town and the family dash for cover, turning their backs on the audience. At this point a trio of bored spectators gathered up their things and, with admirable good manners since the cast couldn’t see them, tiptoed into the night. Wise move. Those of us who stayed were finally rewarded with a surprisingly effective last-minute twist. Had it come after five minutes rather than 85 this might just about have been a decent sketch. Still, the Soho Theatre is doing some good. This Franco–Lebanese folly, alongside last month’s shocker from Poland, represents the finest possible advert for homegrown playwrights.

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