Fringe Review: Acte

Acte, a play by Lars Noren (translated from German to French by Jean-Marie Piemme and Sabine Vandermissen), is one of the more sombre dramatic offerings of the Fringe Festival this year. The two characters are a female prisoner and a male interrogator who claims to be a doctor there to do a routine examination of her. In the opening scene, the prisoner disbelieves his assertion and accuses him of being a torturer and a Nazi. She asks him repeatedly whether he has ever been to Auschwitz, and what he thought about it when he was there (he admits he was, claiming it was part of his medical studies).

The prisoner, the program tells us, is Ulrike Meinhof, the one from the German terrorist organization the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who died in prison in 1976. Her death was officially called a suicide but some alleged was an assassination. Her name is never mentioned in the play, and the details about her are pretty general: she is a militant anti-nazi, possibly roughly Marxist, in post-WWII Germany and is in prison for murder. Almost nothing is said of her philosophy, though perhaps her militancy and anti-authoritarianism is supposed to tell us something bigger about her ideology. No details are given of her political or terrorist activities. The only details are about personal and possibly fictionalized events, a family vacation to Naples, a boyfriend in Paris.

And strangely, for a play about a historical figure’s encounter with a fictional doctor, the play is much more revelatory of his character than of hers. From her, we get confusion and reversals, quite understandable for someone who’s been in solitary confinement in a cell where the lightbulb is on twenty-four hours a day for years on end. Her reversals are in themselves mundane: sometimes she is truculent, sometimes she submits willingly to the medical examination (if that’s what it really is). The interrogator also reverses himself, but in more telling ways, first saying that his father died when he was three, then that the father runs a chicken farm, a place that the doctor calls a concentration camp for chickens. When the prisoner points out his contradiction, he claims that the farmer is an uncle, who cared for him and whom he called father. He then goes on to tell us that this uncle’s father used to beat him for the slightest reason, and that his brother raped him frequently, leading me to wonder, would this brother then be the doctor’s own dead father? He also tells the prisoner that he cries when he thinks about his sons having to grow up and live in this terrible world. Perhaps the point is that she is a better interrogator than he is.

And the questions about who he really is are never resolved. He claims to be there for a general check-up, but after he asks the prisoner many probing questions about herself (which she mostly avoids answering), she accuses him of being a psychiatrist, to which he says, no, no, I’m a medical doctor, a heart specialist, soooo, how’s your heart? and sounds super sketchy. He is also aggressive and mean, though he generally attempts to be formal and polite. He says it would be impossible for him to desire her sexually because “un être humain ne peut s’accoupler a un animal.” And he refers to “les idées judeo-marxistes,” lending some credibility to her assertion that he is a Nazi. But what to make of all this? He isn’t a torturer, because he’s much too weak. He could be a cadet or a torturer trainee, at the most.

There are some tense dramatic moments in the play, moments that make you shudder, for instance where the doctor forces the prisoner to her knees and unbuckles his belt, standing behind her. He then moves away and rebuckles; we are unsure what we’ve witnessed. It is especially ambiguous since many of the other actions in the play, which are described, are also only very minimally acted out, for instance when doctor tells prisoner to cover her left eye and read a line of text. She stands, reads it without acting out the covering of an eye, and he says, good, now do the right eye. Despite the dramatic moments and the localized eddies of interesting development, the play is generally flat, arcless. They meet, they do the exam, they part. In the end, nothing has changed, emotionally or even informationally, no new knowledge has been established, no character has been illuminated or even fully described, and we are all exactly as we were when the play started. This is the presumably the play’s intention, not to hand out any easy resolutions or pat dramatic structures. And it’s not bad. The play is a reasonably interesting fifty-five minutes. The acting is good, although André Perron tripped over his words a few times during heated moments. Maria Pirrera made a convincing and likeable revolutionary. Word of advice: if you go see this play, sit far away from the slide projector. It makes a ton of noise.