“Forced Entertainment’s naughty love letter to theatre”
Two actors onstage: one as a restaurant customer, the other as a waiter, pouring wine into a glass. After a taste, the glass overflows, spilling wine across the table. The waiter cleans the cutlery and fetches a fresh white tablecloth to dab it, and then they swap. And then they swap again, and again, and again. Agonising? Maybe. Directed by Tim Mitchell and performed by the performance duo Bert and Nasi (Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas), Forced Entertainment’s recent production L’Addition has earned them widely split critical reviews. For some, it might be an alternate Waiting for Godot in its worst form, with lifeless, unbearable looping where “meanings” and “stories” are nowhere to be found. For some others, however, from the moment the duo
awkwardly explains to the audience “your right… is our left” in their humorous but wordy “prologue”, or as they ask themselves “if we both stood up, then who are we?”, they already know what kind of rabbit hole they are expecting, or more precisely in this case, what kind of wine will be served.
In short, this 70-minute performance uses this simple scene — a customer waiting for his waiter to pour wine — to metaphorically signify theatre as a phenomenon. For instance, one clear parallel is between those who stand and those who sit. As the duo asks, if both were standing, then who’s who?
This frustrating question has been unexpectedly yet magnificently called back near the end. In the middle of an absolute silence, a random audience member stood up and walked away, right in front of the duo. They stared at him intently, with the rest of us laughing our head off. This is a surreal and hilarious meta-theatrical moment that may not signify definite “meaning”, but certainly serves as a brilliant footnote, reminding us our absurd yet fragile theatrical subjectivity.
To some extent, L’Addition is an insiders’ play. The moment the waiter uses fork and knife to do tap dances on the table, you know it’s avant-garde theatre where forks are not forks and knives are everything but knives. When both pretend the wine to be excellent while leaves it flooding everywhere, hey, you, the no ordinary “customer”, the critic, can you still laugh so loudly? Do you feel your responsibility, not to tell the lie, and not to conspire with the theatre makers in crafting a façade of prosperity?
Although funny and maddening throughout, Bert and Nasi still provide some moments of sensation, referring to the art of elegantly pouring wine as “poetry”. But such sentiment is soon undercut by a most pragmatic question: who’s going to pay? With constant cuts to art funding, our industry suffers more than a diner getting his crisp white shirt and dark grey trousers stained by flooding wine. “It’s on the house” becomes a naïve yet sincere plea for governmental generosity, more difficult, yet more important, than a glass of free wine.