Big in Europe and almost never seen in the UK, Swiss provocateur Milo Rau pretty much lives up to his legend with this profound and disturbing piece of epic metatheatre.
Performed in Flemish by Rau’s Belgium company International Institute of Political Murder, ‘La Reprise’ (the repetition) is a piece of docu-theatre about a killing that rocked the small country back in 2012: that of Ihsane Jarfi, a young gay man who hopped into a car with some strangers at a club one night and whose badly beaten naked body was found abandoned in some woods ten days later.
It is *also* about theatre’s adequacy as a medium for this task: from the very beginning, when performer Johan Leysen launches into a droll monologue about the nature of stage entrances (that includes an amusingly full-on bit of ‘Hamlet’), ‘La Reprise’ is relentlessly deconstructing itself and questioning its adequacy for the task.
So we see the creative team behind the the play audition a trio of (apparently amateur) actors for the major roles within ‘La Reprise’, with surreal scenes in which the creatives probe the cast increasingly pruriently in the search of some abstract truth in their performances. And they do eventually reconstruct Jarfi’s death in forensically harrowing detail, culminating in a nerve shredding – but ultimately illuminating – recreation of the night of the killing.
But of course it’s not true: this is an imagined show about a true crime, a work of fiction detailing a real horror. The text may or may not reasonably reflect Rau and team’s process on some level, but it is very clearly not the literal ‘truth’ - Rau is not on stage, even as a character; many of the incidents detailing the creative process behind the show within it are surreal, or far fetched, or desperately unethical.
But it really works. Hand on heart, I cannot imagine a British theatre maker doing something like this and not having it collapse under the weight of its own irony, of dismantling itself too far and proving inadequate to the task of recreating Jarfi’s killing. Rau and team relentlessly question theatre’s adequacy for the task and insists on showing us the artifice behind what they are doing (via the medium of more artifice, of course). But it never descend into nihilism: ultimately theatre is seen to be up to the task. Not unequivocally, and not without bumps on the way, but Jarfi’s life and death are powerfully, horribly and respectfully illuminated.
There is more to ‘La Reprise’ than that: it’s weirder and funnier and even more intricate than I’m making it sound, with a deceptively brilliant mise en scene from Rau himself and some truly awesome blurring of the live/pre-recorded video boundary. It is a show at war with itself: and both sides win.
