Un Mage en Été

Written by: Olivier Cadiot
Director: Ludovic Lagarde
Performed by: Laurent Poitrenau

In his blanched linen trousers and waistcoat over starched white shirt, Robinson, the titular magus played by Laurent Poitrenau, is gently iridescent against the pitch black of the Pompidou Centre stage as the lights go down on the audience. Throughout the hundred-minute monologue he retains this ethereal glow, part effect in Sébastien Michaud’s eloquent lighting design, part function of Poitrenau’s mesmeric performance, as he guides us through the brimming images of a sprawling subconscious.

Starting with a depiction of a woman standing in a river, water up to her waist, on a hot summer’s day, Robinson leads us down a stream of consciousness from a Roman villa of antiquity to musings on Nietzsche playing golf. He moves almost compulsively from one detail to the next, one topic to another, but each new idea follows as inevitably as the swelling river from the opening must keep on flowing to the sea. Poitrenau embodies this fluidity with ease and, while not explicitly miming every impression or scene, inhabits them completely with his body. Like the woman from the beginning who changes the swirling patterns in the water around her with the slightest movement, so Poitrenau alters the narrative with a subtle change in stance, its repercussions rippling throughout the following section of the monologue.

But while Poitrenau’s physical exploration of the piece is enough to keep the audience in thrall, it is his vocal performance, and the amplification and distortion effects which accompany it, which really go to the core of Cadiot’s text. The delivery combines clarity of meaning, sense of discovery and impeccable diction so flawlessly as to suggest that the voice is a distinct entity. And by taking Robinson’s voice and projecting it around the auditorium through speakers so that it circles us, disappears, reappears behind us and finally returns to its onstage narrator, director Ludovic Lagarde frees it from its physical body and consequently, from spatial and temporal constraints. The ideas, pictures and words thus tumble into one another of their own accord: the piece becomes a meditation about the nature and limits of imagination, memory and creativity – how these forces are not bound by the conscious self, but rather govern it in ways it cannot understand. Indeed, at one point, overwhelmed by the visions and sensations which possess him, Robinson denies he is a magus at all in order to escape the sensation overload which his ramblings have brought upon him. Frightened by the potency of the world he imagines, and possibly recognizing the hubris of thinking he could control it, he admits he is merely a physical being, made up of molecules and atoms and quarks. But no sooner has he finished this confession than he is gripped again by his inventions.

Thus, Cadiot’s text is essentially reflexive – though it appears to be describing a vast external reality, it is a study of a creative mind at work and, by extension, the act of writing. And while it probes into areas such as the boundaries between memory and imagination, what it could mean to be original, and what it is about certain thoughts or pictures that transports us to another place, it never provides any straightforward answers. One thing, however, is certain: whether or not they are truly magi, this fresh, intelligent and poetic collaboration between Cadiot, Lagarde and Poitrenau has more than a hint of magic about it.