Philip Larkin’s blunt appraisal of your mum and dad reverberates throughout this 2006 piece created by Joël Pommerat and staged with English surtitles for its closing weekend at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Pommerat’s work is certainly as stark and dark as This Be the Verse in its unflinching inspection of the emotional baggage that families routinely bequeath and inherit.
A series of short scenes, performed by an ensemble of four women and two men, presents assorted parent-child conundrums. A labourer, signed off work, says he no longer feels like a father because he’s not earning; a woman apologises for not being the mother her daughter deserves; a man trembles for fear of his father and wishes his own son to be bold.
If such scenarios sound familiar, they feel continually fresh thanks to Pommerat’s precision of language. His characters confront and confide in each other with an emotional directness that feels shockingly honest. Their conversations consist of the uncomfortable truths that most of us either choose not to acknowledge in ourselves or spend a lifetime failing to express to our families.
In one scene, a pregnant woman speaks to her unborn child, promising to spoil him rotten with everything she was denied by her parents. But this promised bounty comes with a burden: the son will clearly be held solely responsible for his mother’s happiness.
The accumulation of Pommerat’s brief scenes – they’re shards rather than fragments – would become unbearably tense were it not for the deadpan humour in the jazz-rock refrain used during interludes in which the actors mime the movements of musicians behind a screen. The cast are all but silhouettes when they’re centre-stage anyway thanks to the lugubrious lighting design of Éric Soyer. The overall effect is extraordinary intimacy – and has the result of illuminating Pommerat’s words. As the expectant mother, Ruth Olaizola is lit – like all the actors – so as to emphasise the curves of her body as opposed to her obscured face. You don’t get to look these actors in the eye until the curtain call.
A character in the opening dialogue observes that “everyone needs some brightness in their lives” and the audience could be forgiven for thinking the same. One heavily symbolic scene presents a woman in labour, desperate to push her baby out into the world but reproached by midwives for withholding the child inside. The emotional push and pull continues through Cet Enfant as it does through the generations: the misery deepens like Larkin’s coastal shelf and the band plays on.
• Cet Enfant is at the Festival des Libertés in Brussels from 21-22 October 2014
