Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch’s fourth collaboration is numb by design. A camera crew scurry around the set of an anonymous hotel room, live-feeding the images on to a large projection screen above. Filmed in greyscale, The Man (Nick Fletcher) pays The Woman (Laetitia Dosch) for sex. Adapting Marguerite Duras’s 1982 novella of the same name, La Maladie de la Mort is a clinical unpicking of intimacy through dissociation.
Both characters are broad: one who has loved and one who has not. He pays her in the hope of understanding intimacy, believing from overuse of porn that the answer lies deep and hard inside her. She visits every day, time rolling into one long, dull night.
The Woman is largely submissive, a dead weight flung across the bed. But when allowed to speak, she shreds him, taunting him with what he has not had. Does it make you feel less lonely? she asks. Do you feel joy yet? From the side of the stage, Irène Jacob’s narration (in French, with onscreen English subtitles) goads, directly addressing his insecurities. Numbed from what? Porn? Society? Mitchell and Birch don’t seem interested in him as an individual; he is many men. His emotional sensitivities are fatigued, or perhaps simply never practised. As a consequence, to him, she is utterly opaque.
Mitchell’s camera direction focuses on the male gaze. He slips his phone lens between her and the camera, zooming in on body parts like a Renaissance poem entirely devoid of romance. Yet she is used to this, as women are, and the most striking image comes as all cameras focus on his body, with tight, cropped shots of his skin.
La Maladie is the creation of two of the most razoring voices in British theatre, yet it rarely feels radical. Birch’s conclusion suggests that people are the product of single factors: The Woman the impact of a tragic memory (with brooding seascapes and trite prerecorded recollections), The Man the construct of a societal obsession. A lack on stage can feel gaping, but La Maladie is just dulled. When it eventually tries, it can’t kick its way out of its stupor.
- At the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 19 August.
- At the Barbican, London, 3-6 October.
- Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.
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