Dealing with defeat is part of being a revolutionary. In March 1871 the working people of Paris took over the city. Women stood shoulder to shoulder with men on the barricades of the Paris Commune. By the end of May the uprising had been suppressed. The defeat was bitter, none more so than for the 4,000 revolutionaries deported to the French Pacific island colony of New Caledonia, where the indigenous people, the Kanaks, were treated as subhuman. In 1878 the Kanaks rose up against their French rulers. Which side should and would the former communards take?
From this sliver of history, the Guardian columnist Paul Mason fashions a frustrating, clunky but always intelligent drama focusing on the women in New Caledonia, and particularly the revolutionary Louise Michel. While her comrades take refuge in drink and hopes of appeal against their sentences, Michel keeps the red flag flying. She recognises that the oppression of the Kanaks and of the Parisian working class are one and the same.
It’s meaty stuff, but most of the actors are largely reduced to filling in back story and providing contrast to the heroine, played by Lisa Moorish with a ferocious and yet dreamy intensity that suggests a modicum of inner life. Tension between Michel and the others splutters occasionally but too often the dialogue is utilitarian and without emotional scaffolding. If the production never comes alive it’s mainly because Mason is more interested in the politics of the situation than he is in individual characters, apart from the hard-to-like Michel.
- At the White Bear theatre, London, until 20 May. Box office: 0333 012 4963
