To the Source of the Absurd
Éve Dumas
La Presse, Montreal, Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Caption: It’s amazing what can be done with two walls, a column, a staircase and artfully conceived lighting (though it is a bit too Technicolor at times) by designer David Perreault Ninacs. It is twenty sets in one.

They really give it their all, these Russian artists! They approach art with the same rigour with which they approach sport. At the end of a performance directed by Alexandre Marine (Hamlet, Ne jetez pas de cendre par terre) or Oleg Kisseliov (La Leçon, Songe d’une nuit d’été), the actors are covered in sweat and the audience is out of breath.

Élizaviéta Bam, a play by Daniil Harms adapted by Oleg Kisseliov for Diving Horse Creations, is no exception to that rule. The actors are not Russian speakers, but they are familiar with the esteemed “creative impulse method” developed by the director. The results are more visible than ever in this stunning show, which ruthlessly plunges the audience into the utterly mad world of Daniil Harms, who died in 1942 at age 36, incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

This has been an amazing season for this Russian playwright, poet and thinker. No one or almost no one here knew of him before Émilie Vanantin and her puppet theatre showed up at Espace Go last fall during the France-in-Quebec season with the superb play J’ai gêné et je gênerai. In fact, Harms most likely wrote the first lines of the theatre of the absurd, preceding Ionesco and Beckett. Élizaviéta Bam was written in 1927 and has been termed a “tragedy of language”. Ordinary words and usual meanings are smashed to pieces, as in this exchange between Ivan Ivanovitch and Piotr Nicolaievitch, played by the marvellous duo of Jocelyn Caron and Alexis Roy:

Ivan Ivanovitch: Today I am getting married.
Piotr Nikolaievitch: What?
Ivan Ivanovitch: I said that I’m getting married today.
Piotr Nikolaievitch: What are you saying?
Ivan Ivanovitch: To-day I am get-ting mar-ried.
Piotr Nikolaievitch: What’s that? Mar…?
Ivan Ivanovitch: Married!
Piotr Nikolaievitch: Ried? What the hell is that?

Rest assured, the whole play is not like that, and there is a semblance of a story. We are in a house – or are we imagining that we are? – the home of Élizaviéta Bam (Caroline Binet, whose gracious, assertive bearing brings to mind Chiarra Mastroianni and Gena Rowlands). She is besieged by hostile characters who attack her and accuse her of a crime she knows nothing about. Her father (the excellent Gaétan Nadeau) would really like to know whether there is life after death and in order to get an answer, he conducts all sorts of dubious experiments. Her mother is of no help at all, plunged into her own hysteria (an impressive Phoebe Greenberg), not to mention the unclassifiable Leonardo (the mesmerizing Warren "Slim" Williams), a sort of shaman with an imposing voice and extravagant gestures.

From this repressive frenzy that is both tragic and comic, in keeping with the tradition of the absurd, very little meaning prevails. One is left instead with the impression of having taken part in a memorable experience. The set design (based on a concept by Kisseliov) is an admirable affair of variable geometry. It’s amazing what can be done with two walls, a column, a staircase and artfully conceived lighting (though it is a bit too Technicolor at times) designed by David Perreault Ninacs. It is twenty set designs in one. Indeed, these young Russophile companies master the art of giving birth to marvels using next to nothing.

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