Théâtre National de Bretagne
Direction Arthur Nauzyciel
Text by Joëlle Gayot / Translation by Jonas Parson
On 17th November at 19 :00, after a hard day’s work, you should have made your way to the CCN Rennes-Bretagne to see an adaptation of Bartleby by Herman Melville, brought to the stage by Katja Hunsinger and Rodolphe Dana.
You would have come straight from the office, leaving behind all your accomplished tasks and those yet to come for an evening of fiction: answering mail, phone calls, meetings, classes, accounting, etc. Theatre being a facetious artform, you would have found yourself watching the story of a man, scrivener by trade, who unlike you, had decided to stop working.
Bartleby is his name, and his posture (or nature ?) can be summed up with the following five words : "I would prefer not to". You would have heard that sentence numerous times during the show, in every tone, in every context. It would have been uttered so many times that it would have lost its meaning, only to point to a thousand others. It would have plunged you into the depths of uncertainty, just as Bartleby’s boss balancing precariously on the edge of doubt, of patience and exasperation, of hope and despair.
And despite its common set (empty desks, 3 meter-wide coloured files piled on a single trolley, teapot, staplers, pencils, erasers, hatstand, suspended plants) the stage would not have felt familiar. For a start because it would have descended into chaos. And because what would have happened on stage would have gone from a more or less rational albeit atypical situation (a man refuses to work, worse yet, refuses to leave his desk which he squats day and night) to a state of unabashed derealisation.
"What do we do with the people who are supposed to function and obey to a certain normality when they shift physically and morally?" wonders Rodolphe Dana. Bartleby is by essence the tale of an unanswerable question. And when a question can’t find its answer, the supernatural tends to find a way in. The show would have slowly shifted towards a fantastical alternate reality in which the humming of the machines (coffee makers or printers) would have slowly been replaced by the twittering of birds hidden in exotic jungles. The confrontation between the two actors would have condensed, opacified, strengthened by layers of meaning escaping the visible to hit the sensible head on. It would have revealed the truth of a fight between an artist (Rodolphe Dana) and his actor (Adrien Guiraud), who, resisting the acting directions, escapes the directors hold.
Bartleby might have taken such a lead on 17th November at the CCNRB. One of many others, which, having not been there, you will never know if they would have sowed in your heart the seeds of rebellion and of the desire to free yourself from your alienations. The desire, on reflection, to go back to work and declare: "I would prefer not to."