On Insomnia and Midnight ( Archived )

Reviews

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Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 26 September

The Royal Court, which alone among major London theatres regularly brings us contemporary plays from far-flung countries, has come up with an eerie, intriguing chamber-work from Mexico.

On Insomnia and Midnight by prolific Mexican dramatist Edgar Chias, translated by David Johnston, introduces a highly individual voice. Set in nine crepuscular scenes and a hotel bedroom in some Mexican city, Chias stages a series of close, but not literally sexual or erotic, encounters between Nicholas Le Prevosts elderly, ailing guest and Vannessa Bauches inscrutable, sturdily nave chambermaid.

The fascination of the play, in Hettie Macdonalds stylised, perhaps too antiseptic but finely acted production, lies in its tantalising obliquity and sense of ritual.

An atmosphere of both intimacy and formality courses through the soulless room, which in designer Lizzie Clachans creation consists of just two single beds on a traverse stage. What sort of transaction is being arranged?

Miss Bauches infinitely fascinating maid hovers holding a glass of brandy. She begins, at the mans demand, to retell her confessional from the night before, in which she figures as the force-fed school-time victim of a sadistic Reverend Mother.

Her tense, deadpan reminiscence of passive suffering proves characteristic. On subsequent nights she reveals, as counterpoint to the mans account of his physical and mental decline, how she suffered the intrusion of voyeurism, hideous venereal infection and sexual assault by her cousin and mothers lover. The unruffled, unemotional nature of the maids narrative exerts its aphrodisiac appeal: the man has already recognised the womans masochistic potential. Le Prevost, chilling in his nonchalant casualness, attempts to convince the susceptible girl that love and desire must involve pain and hurt.

Yet in a scene awash with irony and photos, unseen by the audience, of women at the sexual mercy of men, the Maids eagerness to interpret the pictures as images of female dominance establishes her emotional ascendancy and absorbs his sadomasochistic scheme. Chias makes this process of seduction over-extended and over-emphatic. Yet the plays premonitory and dream-like elements, with the Maid discussing a newspaper story that by the finale proves to be her own, gives On Insomnia a memorable, high-chill frisson.

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Michael Billington, The Guardian, September 26

Is speed of communication eroding national identity? Although this is a Mexican play by Edgar Chias that has grown out of the Royal Court’s admirable international programme, it feels distinctly European. I am not asking for displays of rampant ethnicity, but I am faintly disturbed at the way plays from all over the world seem to be thematically converging.

Chias’s subject is clearly power, exercised through sex and language. And he illustrates this through an 80-minute play, set in a suitably anonymous hotel bedroom and featuring two unnamed characters. The man is a terminally ill, highly educated European. Each night he summons a chambermaid, implicitly – though not necessarily – Mexican, to his room to serve him a triple brandy and engage in mutual story-telling. “Are we playing some sort of game?” she asks. Indeed they are, in order to explore, through fantasy and erotic attraction, who is the oppressor and who is the victim.

Chias is a skilled technician who knows how to keep an audience guessing: at one point the chambermaid reads out a story from a newspaper that reflects the situation we are watching. But, whether consciously or not, Chias seems to have absorbed a variety of influences. Language as an instrument of power directly echoes Ionesco’s The Lesson. Intimate relationships as a negotiation for tactical advantage is pure Pinter. I was also variously reminded of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, with its inter-generational bedroom battles, and Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses involving a similarly death-haunted chambermaid.

So what does Chias bring to the party? There is obviously a political dimension to the relationship between the European male and the Mexican servant: he could even be seen to represent a dying culture and she a more vibrant, if still exploited, one. Chias also shows a mordant humour in the scene where the two of them clinically analyse pornographic laptop photographs in an attempt to explore the age-old question of sexual dominance.

Like everything else, the scene is expertly done. David Johnston’s translation is also eminently speakable. Hettie Macdonald’s production, played on a raised traverse stage that turns the bisected Theatre Upstairs audience into voyeurs, has a midnight stillness that conveys its own alarm. And Nicholas Le Prevost as the man possesses just the right air of dessicated lust and snooping inquisitiveness while Vanessa Bauche subtly implies the chambermaid’s growing awareness of her sexual and emotional power. At the end, however, I felt I had learned more about Chias’s sophisticated knowledge of world theatre than about life in modern Mexico.

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