Review | Returning to Reims at HOME, Manchester
By Will Stroude
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The stage has been turned into a sound recording studio. Voices can be heard. Two men chatting about music, bands and venues from the control booth at the back of the stage. A huge white screen dominates the wood panelling, suggesting a cinema. It stares blankly at the assembling audience as the men’s’ gossiping continues. Returning to Reims breaks cosy stage conventions from the moment the house door opens and pointedly keeps breaking them throughout the show. The effect though is gratuitous, gimmicky and banal, like a theatre studies undergraduate ticking off a list of dramatic devices to score points in an examined show.
The premise of Returning to Reims is an exploration of the memoir of the same title by Didier Eribon. The source text is a moving and insightful story of a gay man’s return home after the death of his father. It explores both the shifting political landscape of France and his own abandonment of his family and working-class background, offering searing insights into both. The book is also Ostermeier’s first attempt at adaptation of something not meant for performance. It offers an expansive range of exciting staging options.
Ostermeier, however, has eschewed all of these and instead has sat an actress on stage in front of a microphone to read the book out as if recording a voiceover for an imagined documentary. Nina Hoss has an impressive stage and screen career, but here is reduced to a soporific monotone, expressionless with the deadening rhythm of metronome. Bizarrely, she voices Eribon. Much as this might be another alienating theatrical device, the implication is wholly regressive: are gay men’s inner voices essentially female? No comment or insight is offered to explain this, despite extensive on-stage debates about other elements of the production, and the central issue of sexuality is simply abandoned half-way through.
The conceit of Hoss’s character Katy seemingly recording a voiceover to a documentary enables Ostermeier to readily deconstruct the text. This is an obvious and unimaginative way to interrupt the story-telling. It allows debate about the politics of what is being represented, but it offers little in the present theatrical moment. There is no real story between the Katy, the director, played by Bush Moukarzel and the technician, Ali Gadema. Their discussion offers no real insight to the parts of the documentary we have just seen. They awkwardly move through clunky dialogue and laboured moments of audience interaction, painfully emceed by Moukarzel.
The politics of the adaptation are semi-redundant. The book was published in 2009 and was a ground-breaking account of the rise of the Front National in France. But the moment has passed. Eight years later Macron has been elected, Corbyn almost so.
The message of the stage version seems to be little more than that the shift of the Left to the Right alienated a large section of the working-class into voting for harder right wing parties. Well, that’s been long established. When asked what her greatest achievement was, Margaret Thatcher spoke with insight and brevity when she replied, “Tony Blair”. Returning to Reims takes a lot longer to say a lot less.
This is a turgid and often impenetrable attempt to explore an already established political analysis of the recent past. Returning to Reims is an exercise in liberal elite introspection delivered in the dullest form possible, more than undramatic, actually anti-dramatic, but to no purpose or insight.
Rating: 2/5
Returning to Reims is at HOME, Manchester until July 14. Book tickets now or call the box office on 0161 200 1500
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Words by Stephen M Hornby