'I am not at all optimistic about the planet. Nor am I optimistic about the optimism with which the people in my show keep finding a solution to live on despite the calamity that befalls them.' Philippe Quesne has turned that despair into a beautiful play. Full of non-cynical survivors who turn everything into an adventure.
How he does that? He doesn't put people on stage who have studied for it. He doesn't really tell a story. There is actually no dramatic tension in it. So here and there it is a tad drawn out. And then it also has a sort of happy ending. Quesne makes professional amateur theatre. Yet the play 'Crash Park' is being put on the programme by the prestigious Holland Festival. That means they are off the mark there. Or that something else is going on. Because 'Crash Park' has been a roaring success all over Europe.
Smoke machine
So what's so special about Crash Park? Connoisseurs will shout right away: Philippe Quesne. But even for those for whom the name Philippe Quesne does not ring a bell, Crash Park is still something to be experienced. I went to see and, after some struggle, allowed myself to be convinced. Then I asked him what his secret is.
Crash Park is about a crash. After first seeing film footage of passengers in a plane, we then see that plane itself flying through the auditorium. Using very simple means, such as a portable smoke machine, the actors manage to create the illusion of a real plane, plaything of the elements. A plane whose tragic remains we later see next to a not entirely uninhabited island. From those remains, the battered survivors then crawl. They save themselves on the island.
No Lord of the flies
Anyone who at that point is going to be ready for a story à la the glorious TV series Lost, or the doom-filled novel Lord of the Flies, in short: for mutual tensions, further catastrophes, murder, cannibalism and plenty of morality, will be disappointed. In fact, we are watching a club of happy people, who see every possible setback as an adventure, and don't really care about what is around the corner. Indeed, they do act very difficult about simple things, but not because it is difficult, but because it is so much fun to be difficult. They are like children.
That's right, Philippe Quesne explained to me the next morning. 'When children play with cars, or with soldiers, they always re-enact the most terrible accidents. And everyone always survives. That is the optimism with which we have been ignoring the greatest threats to our planet for 20 years now.'
Set in the lead role
So as cheerful as his performance seems, it is made from a deeply felt pessimism about where we are all headed. Our imagination is our salvation. Even from a nuclear shelter we can still make a spaceship, with a little imagination.
So we will always be children. That's in all the work of Quesne, since he graduated as a scenographer 15 years ago.
'My sets always depict something from nature, but they are also always emphatically made of cardboard. I took inspiration from the great Italian films of the last century, where the Cinecitta studios also made such beautifully artificial sets.' As happened in that illustrious period of Italian cinema, he also prefers not to work with professionally trained actors: 'In my plays, the set always plays the leading role. The people in it do nothing but deal with the possibilities of the set as humanly possible. It is a playground, which is played with.'
Clowning
Not surprisingly, seeing his work also makes you think of Jacques Tati's primeval French films. In them too - especially in the legendary 'Mon Oncle' - people who deal with the technology of a new era with a kind of wistful cheerfulness. Or a traffic jam.
But there are more sources of inspiration. Quesne is fascinated by clownery, as seen in Beckett's work, such as Waiting for Godot, in which two vagrants wait with relentless optimism for the announced arrival of one Godot, who so does not come. 'We have always trusted our leaders to be sensible people, but by now it is clear that the biggest clowns are now in power, and the sensible people are in the theatre.'
Cleaner
Quesne likes working with non-professional actors: 'I want to make theatre with people who have the right to doubt, to make mistakes, to try things. If you start with people who have the same training as you, it becomes uniform. I want different characters, a diverse company. It's my own Noah's Ark.'
So unusual characters abound. Like the lawyer, who only later in life quit her lucrative job and joined Vivarium, Quesne's company. Or the woman who worked as a cleaner in the building where Quesne rehearsed the show. 'She was very interested in what we were doing and often stayed to watch the rehearsals. Then I asked her to join us. She now travels with us and is fully included in the group.'
Yellow vests
Not that the playwright has much faith in the resolution skills of ordinary people. In the performance, people walk in life jackets, which may remind some people of the 'yellow jackets', used to refer to the French citizens' movement that manifested itself in autumn 2018. 'When we were rehearsing, suddenly the yellow jackets were in the news. That was a strange coincidence. In fact, the yellow shirts are also an example of unfocused optimism. They are angry, but totally disagree among themselves about what they are angry about and what the solution is. So that movement is doomed to fail when it comes to solving the real problem.'
That real problem is, as Quesne keeps stressing: the world, and how we are eating it out. 'Ever since earliest prehistory, that never ceases to baffle me.'
Good to knowWhat we previously wrote about Philippe Quesne:
The Great War Machine and Swamp Club: contemporary activist theatre
Bombyx Mori, a brilliant explosion between something and nothing
French theatre nerds do droll version of the Big Bang at reopening Rotterdam Schouwburg
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