Even before the actors take to the stage, the visual impact of Laurent Brethome’s production of Hanoch Levin’s Les Souffrances de Job is strong. A long, empty white banquet table stands towards the back, and an array of plastic bottles covers the floor – testimony to the cult of transience and excess. Enter Job (Philippe Sire), a proper representative of affluent society, complete with bow tie, who asks “What is a satiated man? He is finished, lost. What more can he hope for?” Yet the relentless passage of time will inevitably relieve him of this burden of over-abundance; render him light, empty and hungry for more.
Once Job and his guests have had their fill of the feast, the beggars enter to consume the remains, but even the beggars have their own hierarchy: first beggars, then beggars of beggars, then last of all, the beggar of all beggars. Brethome’s rendition of this procession towards nothingness is striking. Hands emerge suddenly from the banquet table, reaching up, with one beggar seen naked from the waist up, speaking for the rest. The second round of beggars are at first represented by one hand, with one beggar’s head peeking out; then all five heads pop up and speak. The ultimate beggar walks out, covered entirely in what appears to be dark mud. There aren’t even any bones left for her, but that’s all right – she doesn’t have any teeth. Yet her presence is beautiful, the movements of her dark body, the delicate gestures of her hands recall classical Greek sculptures, and her role is, in some sense, that of a prophetic chorus. Resigned to wait until someone vomits so that she can drink those ghastly remnants, she exits, singing, cheerful in her affirmation that sooner or later, someone is bound to vomit.
There is a constant tension between excess and deprivation – Job indeed receives more and more as the play unfolds, accumulating losses: his wealth, his children, and ultimately, his life. Levin’s stark poetry with its harsh precision and witty assessment of human existence is given a sensual, aesthetic expression in Brethome’s interpretation. Brethome employs minimal means – plastic bottles filled with paint – to create a brightly colored, symbolic representation of Job’s loss and suffering. The play is imbued with a sense of ceremony and ritual. Yet the references are not necessarily those an Israeli audience would tend to associate with Levin’s work, or with the story of Job, for example, when Job cradles the dead body of his son, their figures evoke the image of the Pietà.
Each new pain displaces the previous loss, survival is the name of the game and almost everything, even a dying man, has the potential to become a lucrative commodity, a spectacle in a grotesque cabaret. Brethome and Le Menteur Volontaire convey a contemporary sensibility to Levin’s work in this production, capturing the cruelty, evanescence, and vulnerability of our lives with beauty and humor.
Les Souffrances de Job by Hanoch Levin, directed by Laurent Brethome and performed by Le Menteur Volontaire Theatre will be performed May, 3, & 4 at 20:30, The Cameri Theatre, 19 Shaul Hamelech Street, Tel Aviv. Tickets: 03-6060900.
