A three-hour durational show with a three-minute pause rather than an interval is a daunting prospect. However, Lacrima gathers its pace meditatively before it begins to hurtle and then becomes devastating viewing from which you can’t look away.
The marriage of an unnamed British princess has been announced and the making of her wedding dress, by a British designer, is under way. He enlists a Parisian atelier that outsources its most labour-intensive work to an Indian tailor. The dress is a wildly elaborate concoction of embroidered silk, handmade lace and a 200-metre train of 150,000 pearls.
Using four languages, with English surtitles, the production initially seems like a documentation of processes and the invisible labour involved in such an illustrious commission. We variously follow Marion (Maud Le Grevellec), head seamstress at the Paris workshop, a group of lace-makers in France, and the ageing tailor, Abdul (Charles Vinoth Irudhayaraj), who works quietly, relentlessly, with needle and thread. There are video calls with the princess and interviews with French lace-makers who speak of inheriting their dying craft. A French official delivers pedantic rules to an Indian manager and it becomes clear the international codes of conduct offer no protection to Indian workers, serving only the French atelier.
Written and directed by Caroline Guiela Nguyen, the human drama emerges to take gradual hold until it is a chokingly emotive story of overwork and enslavement. The creation of the dress contains a world of suffering, devotion and conflict. Scenes of Marion’s abusive marriage to Julien (Dan Artus), an insecure pattern-maker at the workshop, are masterfully enacted and horrifying in their realism. The sight of Abdul, who sits sewing pearls on to the dress’s train, slowly going blind through the intensity of the work, is deeply moving.
It is almost too painful to watch as characters feel the crushing pressure of their jobs, all emotional and family life squeezed to the sidelines. Yet many regard the work as a vocation, dedicating themselves to the creation of beauty. It does not erase the circuit of exploitation, but makes this story all the more emotionally complicated. The making of a single dress gains shades of Greek tragedy.
Alice Duchange’s set design transforms by turns into the Parisian atelier, the world of the lace-makers and the workshop in Mumbai. There are video split screens above the stage that draw your eye to a face or a pair of hands engaged in lace-making or embroidery.
It is clear that the show has been comprehensively researched and that information is deftly sewn into the drama. It has some extraneous strands – a subplot involving an elderly lace-maker and a hereditary illness is perhaps overcomplicated, while the sweary British designer sounds slightly off-key. But this is a monumental, magnetic production.
At Barbican theatre, London, until 27 September, then touring internationally.
