Georgia Series: Hilda

The next day of the festival started off with Hilda by French playwright Marie Ndiaye. This production is a collaboration between the Marjanishvili Theatre and the London based company Caravanserai under director Giles Foreman, and can be seen at the Arcola Theatre in London on the 30th and 31st of December. A Georgian actress (Tea Kitsmarishvili) joined the London cast (Fiona Bell, Merlin Leonhardt) to produce this heated, microcosmic text originally published as a novel.

The plot is simple: Upper-class lady Mme Lemarchand (Fiona Bell) visits the handyman Franck Meyer in order to hire his wife Hilda as nanny and maid. From the beginning, there are hidden implications that her real intention is to sleep with Franck – implications that were unfortunately spelled out only too largely in this production.

In Fiona Bell’s delivery, Mme Lemarchand’s sexual voraciousness, driven by a feeling of power and superiority, is continuously visible. Moreover, Bell’s performance starts at a high and hysteric pitch and remains on that level throughout the evening, thus precluding any further emotional development or even tonal nuances. This makes it difficult to follow her arguments – a serious defect given the discursive nature of Ndiaye’s script. It stands to question whether director and cast have fully penetrated the French tradition of the argumentative dialogic play. If performed in this way, it certainly emerges as a weakness, giving the impression of a lack of theatricality and an unbalanced predominance of language.

Franck’s (Merlin Leonhardt’s) performance was similarly one-dimensional. After having hired Hilda (who, by the way, is never seen on stage), Mme Lemarchand begins to invade their private space, and estranges Hilda step by step from her husband, to the point of coaxing the absent character to live in her house. Leonhardt expresses Franck’s emotional and later physical pain by being bent double most of the time, and usually plays with a rather vacant look supposedly meant to express the magnitude of his emotional suffering.

Tea Kitsmarishvili as Franck’s sister-in-law Carine was the one discovery of the evening. Her portrayal of a feisty and caring character willing to take over her sister’s responsibilities with her family was completely convincing. In contrast to the other actors, it was a relief to see Kitsmarishvili’s restraint (a curious reversal of the difference between a generally heightened Georgian style in comparison to the more psychological British one). Emotions registered on her face, but she was not thrusting herself on the audience. Instead, her character was more concerned in getting on with her life.

And that is exactly what Franck and Carine end up doing: they accept Hilda’s total appropriation by Mme Lemarchand and decide to build a new existence out of the scraps of their former lives. This strikes me as the most interesting aspect of a play that otherwise – as text and production – seems to be curiously limited in scope.