They say of Isabelle Huppert, for years the most beautiful and mysterious appearance on the movie screen, that she has the look of a dead zebra finch live. I had at least heard about that, but had never experienced it in real life. Until Friday night 3 June at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg at Un Tramway in the Holland Festival.
And so it is true.
Seen live on stage, from row ten, Isabelle Huppert is a haute couture-clad dead zebra finch. Watch her on-the-spot image, however, projected behind her on a Polaroid frosted glass pane, and you see the fabulous, flamboyant, ethereal woman you know from the cinema. Same woman, same movement, same moment, but a totally different world.
What ís that anyway?
Is there such a thing as the magic of the silver screen? The camera that adds its own dimension to all that is flesh and leads to a special chemical reaction in some people? That question occupied my mind during the performance, and fortunately, it provided every opportunity to work quietly on the answer.
Because we have to say something about this performance, even if reluctantly. After all, Polish director Warlikovski, for several years the darling of the international festival market, has put together something very strange with 'Un tramway'. He edited all highly flat, then philosophical monologues between scenes of Tennessee Williams' classic 'Tramline Desire' and also added a slightly elderly post-punk singer, who can sing very long lyrics in a very shrill, terribly in-tune voice, to hideous seventies kitsch music. Must be a statement, but what about it escaped me.
In the set, which unfortunately did not fit well in Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg and therefore deprived the first-row seats in the Stalles of the view, distance and coldness prevail, as in the play. Sexual concealment, THE stylistic device of Tennessee Williams, is here replaced by explicit rutting. Too flat and distant: it goes just a little further than the intellectual exercise shown by the Woostergroup later this festival in Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carré. So where somehow it does work.
Remains: that miracle of Isabelle Huppert and the camera. Of course, the coarse-grained lens and overexposed CCD chip at disguising details of age, but it can't just be that. As the number of scenes in which the miracle occurred increased, the penny dropped.
In each of those scenes, Huppert focuses her eyes not on the audience, but on the lens. This is quite tricky, because those cameras are thus somewhere on the first balcony of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg. Whether she gets a signal or senses it is unknown, but it is exactly that gaze that strikes the viewer like lightning via the camera.
That viewer thus gets a nice compensation for the fact that Huppert herself makes no attempt to make contact from the stage. She entrusts her world, her soul, to the camera and only the camera. Which we will therefore only follow to the end of days.
'Un Tramway' with Isabelle Huppert. Seen on 3 June at the Holland Festival. Still there on 4 and 5 June. Booking
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Interesting review. I'm very curious because in love with Huppert for years (for which there is little recognition in the Netherlands, most don't even know her) and so now full of expectation at the end of vd month to The Hague (A was sold out).
I expect a lot from this but may have to temper it a bit. If I think of it, I will post here again at the end of the month.
From the weekend then saw Isabelle Huppert in The Hague.
I understand exactly what Wijnand Schaap meant in his review. In this piece, you see the actress live and behind on screen. It is interesting to see that Huppert is indeed more mesmerising on screen than in real life. I did compare it with the other actors in the play, and this was somewhat the case with them too. I wonder now if it is therefore not also because of the years of archive we have built up of Huppert in our heads. Perhaps it is disappointing that she turns out to be a flesh-and-blood human being we could touch.
I disagree with Wijnand Schaap about the contact she made with the audience. I thought she played with the passion of a novice actress in front of the audience, was tremendously close and gave her all. Huppert could have enveloped herself in a mysterious air for years and wallowed comfortably in all the admiration.
I know of no other artist who is so arrived at and yet wants to be so close.
That she still comes to our small country and turns her inside out for us moved me greatly. She gave her younger unknown fellow actors every possible space. This play confirmed my suspicions about her, she really only cares about the essentials. Huppert passionately loves humanity in all its guises and weaknesses, and it is her passion to celebrate this on stage, which is comforting. In my opinion, this is the essence and purpose of theatre, and art in general.
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