The Stage

The Orphan Muses

Published Monday 13 September 2004 at 14:00

Barons Court Theatre, London

September 7-12

Author: Michel Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau

Director: Chris Thomas

Producers: C10, Altered States Theatre Companies

Cast includes: Sarah Breton, Geraldine Cottalorda, Paul Piris, Paddy Ricard

Running time: 1hr 30mins

Translated by Linda Gaboriau, this is the UK premiere of a highly successful play from the pen of Canadian writer Michel Marc Bouchard. A fairly dysfunctional family gather together and begin to learn the truth about each other and the parents who abandoned them years before. From the opening, skeletons are rattling around in closets and predictably jump out, often in rather spectacular fashion.

The performances have a certain louche style that rather adds to the tension, with Sarah Breton on wonderful form as the vaguely neurotic elder sister/mother replacement to the retarded Isabelle and the churlish, cross-dressing Luc. Breton plays a woman on the edge of both society and a nervous breakdown and neither sibling is making her life any easier. As Luc, Paul Piris excels as he pompously flaunts his eccentricities in the villagers faces while Geraldine Cottalorda as Isabelle never quite manages to completely convince as the woman with the mind of a child. Paddy Ricard as Martine, whose arrival helps put the family into perspective, gives a brilliant performance in perhaps the most complex role as the sister who escaped.

Bouchard’s play has been a success both on stage and screen and Gaboriau’s translation sparkles with equal amounts of humour and pathos although it seemed a little hampered at times by the heavy Gallic accents. This is a thoughtful play about the falling apart of the family unit and as such, it could quite easily have been set anywhere in the Western world.

Paul Vale