Staging absurdity taken to the limit is a complicated challenge. Dark MasterCreated at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers (Hauts-de-Seine) by the Japanese artist Kuro Tanino, it is a victim of what he denounces: a form of emptiness into which the show collapses and, with it, any spectator reluctant to experience the experience of emptiness.
On paper, the project was promising: observing five residents participating in a daily life rehabilitation program under the close surveillance of an Artificial Intelligence, which speaks through an anonymous voice (viewers are equipped with headphones).
Confined to a shabby, outdated apartment (kitsch sofa, Formica kitchen, dusty lampshades and rickety bed), the guinea pigs arrive in dribs and drabs. From cooking cheeseburgers to noisy trips to the bathroom, they learn to live together, their every action filmed by cameras (the panopticon is appropriate). This pseudo-dystopian device is less reminiscent of Georges Orwell (1984) that Secret historya reality show created in 2007 that fueled viewers’ voyeurism.
A sentiment that is not really noble, but which, we might say, could at least have been felt by the theatre audience. But the malaise in Gennevilliers comes from somewhere else. From a growing emptiness of thought and an abandonment of emotion, which little by little invade the brain and take away substance from the minutes that pass, from the actions that are carried out or from the words that are exchanged.
Gaëtan Vourc’h, fabulous
The EEG shifts. It is flat. Except when Gaëtan Vourc’h, a fabulous actor, enters the scene and (finally) animates the inanimate. His fanciful presence, his ungainly body (his dancing is hilarious), the subtlety of his phrasing: a bit of theatre intrudes into this lifeless plain. But it is true that the actor has something to play, when the women, for their part, do little more than extra (or even cook).
There is something disturbing about the silent disappearance of Stéphanie Béghain, another very beautiful actress, whom Kuro Tanino condemns to wander from sofa to armchair. Something too late in the dense and incongruous appearance of Jean-Luc Verna.
Returning to the topic of The Dark Master (a show created in 2018 at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, of which he is an associate artist), Kuro Tanino, a former psychiatrist, wanted to deepen his reflection on the processes of human domination. If his aim was to point out the depersonalisation that ensues and the void of sensibilities that results from it, then he succeeded. To the point of dissolving the theatre there.
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