LES FLEURS DU MAL
Adapted from Baudelaire’s poems
By The RIVERBED THEATRE
Art direction: Greg Quintero
With Felicia Huang, Li Mei Chung, Heui Ling Jan, Su ling Yeh,
Gillian Hemme, Guy Magen and Cheryl Quintero
June 2010/National Theatre, Taiwan
Avignon off 2010
Welcome into the depth of the flowers of evil
Greg Quintero is with Su ling Yeh one of the founding members of the Riverbed Theatre and with this new creation, he proposes his own reading of Baudelaire, showing to the audience what is hidden behind the words. The show is inspired by surrealism and onirism, Shakespeare and Edgar Poe. Without any words, except two poems declaimed in a ‘grave’ atonal voice (among them,the Spleen) and another one named La Charogne said in a more cheerful voice by Greg Magen, the director of Centre Desnos in Paris, who appears suddenly on stage, the skirt half open, as if he were leaving his lover after a burning night.
During the show, we can follow the tragic destiny of the romantic figure of Ophelia, the drowned deceived lover, embodied with an unusual and delicate sensuality by Felicia Huang in a blue nineteenth century dress, facing her despair with a white empty look, becoming Hyppolite’s lover in the scene where Su ling, dressed like Greek heroes with a brown tunique, stare nearby his lying lover. The scene reminds us one of the forbidden poems Baudelaire wrote.
Between two scenes which makes us think at Pippo Delbonno Creations, we can see different strange characters, among them, the girl with a white and red dress, hiding a knife and pretending to suicide herself with the knife and gas; another one carries some black earth, symbol of death and lost; the Mother, incarnate by Gillian Hemme, whose words flows as the barking desolation and misery of a crying dog, whom fate is to see the death of her beloved daughters.
In a very symbolic way, the show presents different kinds of lost and death, one of the main topics of Baudelaire who always saw in each woman the putrid body she would become. And the music, like in Portishead songs, offers to the show a puzzling and mystifying atmosphere, both heavy and soft, awe and odd as death can appear. So, even the reader addicts can be deceived by the show – not so many poems declaimed-, one can’t agree with the very deep qualities of the creation itself, both in the respect of Baudelaire thought than in the stage acting: one can notice the beauty of the stage designing made by Joyce Ho and the cleverness of the art direction in showing Baudelaire’s obsession in women – the face of the bad mother and the bodies of the beloved ones- and in the understanding of Baudelaire’ Spleen.
Mortal memories, Dark pleasures of the flesh, under the sight of Eros and Thanatos, beyond all words… .DVDM
