Le Mariage

France 2007. The new president Sarkozy has just introduced a target of 25,000 illegal immigrants to be deported by the end of the year. But not everybody is willing to turn a blind eye. Some resist, like the characters in David Lescot’s new play le mariage for example. That’s why the Woman arranges a fake marriage with the Man, an illegal immigrant of Arabic descent. For a year, they will spend one day per month together in order to get to know each other intimately, in order to prepare for the questions that inevitably will be asked once they break up. The Woman (Miriam Heard), highly strung with a tendency towards obsessive-compulsive behaviour, already has a precise plan for their life together.

Twelve days to learn everything about a stranger. Twelve aspects of a story not to be lived, but to be constructed. Lescot’s writing is inherently theatrical. He understands how to integrate a heightened and abstract structure into a seemingly naturalistic narrative. Consequently, le mariage is both realistic and symbolic, both about the clash between a man and a woman, and the clash between oriental and occidental society.

The Woman tries to take control of the situation from the very beginning. It is as if she claims the right to speak for herself alone when she lays out the details of their agreement and when she starts constructing the story of their first meeting. The Man (Karim Saleh) remains taciturn, apparently accepting his victimised position. After all, is he not dependent on the Woman? All of this fits perfectly into the postcolonial discourse. Western society is constructing a narrative while denying other cultures of a participating voice.

All of the twelve days that the Man and the Woman spend together are doomed to be fake, because their need to plan, observe and remember precisely stands between them and the direct experience of the moment. The conundrum is similar to the activity of video-taping your activities: in order to capture important moments forever, you actually relegate yourself to a second-hand experience, living your life through ‘simulacra’. In these considerations, Lescot shows himself (consciously or not) to be concerned with the same problems as his compatriot Jean Baudrillard. However, Lescot and his director Michael Gieleta always ground these highly abstract thoughts in the concrete human characters on stage.

The play is not only about the West telling the story it wants to hear and the East struggling to express itself, it is also about two people, strong on the surface but with deep hidden yearnings inside, who create in their narrative the fantasy of a life they will never have. It might not be a story consisting of factual truth, but it conveys the kind of truth that lies at the innermost centre of desire.

Miriam Heard as the Woman and Karim Saleh as the Man are perfectly juxtaposed in their sensitivities. Where she is intellectual, orderly, and controlled, he is sensual and impulsive. This has the faint aura of cultural stereotype about it, but Lescot’s dialogue is strong and individualised enough to banish that spectre. The actors’ interaction is full of tension: cultural, political and sexual. Sometimes, this leads to the outbreak of feelings the characters are trying to suppress. The Woman makes some Freudian slips, such as calling the Man ‘my little rag head’, that betray how deeply entrenched some notions of cultural superiority are, in spite of her liberal veneer. The Man cannot withstand the sexual attraction created by their enforced intimacy. He eventually loses his self-control and scrutinizes her body when she is asleep (though we cannot be sure if she is just pretending to sleep). Heard’s and Saleh’s quiet concentration keeps the ambiguity of this scene alive, by letting it oscillate between the threatening, the exciting, and the sexy.

It is a pity that this tension is not sustained until the end. After their pre-planned fight that initiates the breakdown of their relationship, the Man leaves the Woman alone on stage. Since the last scenes are pure monologues, they fall short of the concreteness of the rest of the play. Instead, they indulge in a mostly discursive perspective that betrays the individuality of the characters to the demands of an abstract theme. Whereas the larger world was conspicuously absent in the first two thirds of the play, it is now introduced in rather hurried and broad strokes, and thus fails to materialise in one’s imagination.

However, despite this failure of balance towards the end, le mariage remains a play to be seen, thought, and talked about!