Local students stage French play at Erasmus Huis
By Izabel Deuff
JAKARTA (JP): As a French play is rare here, the performance of Le caillou de M.Pierre (M. Pierre's Stone), by Pierre-Yves Millot, at Erasmus Huis on Thursday and Friday deserves attention.
It is more noticeable since some of the playwright's works, quite unknown in his country, have been staged worldwide, and now, one of his plays will be performed by an Indonesian troupe.
"I learned that some students from the University of Indonesia in Jakarta planned to perform Le caillou de M.Pierre," said Pierre-Yves Millot, a 34-year-old French mathematics teacher in Seine-Saint-Denis, near Paris.
He came to Indonesia last month to meet the students and encourage them and to attend the show.
The play opens with a white room furnished with a table and a few red chairs. Four people are there waiting for something, which is the main action of the play. One of the characters, a foreigner, reads a book, while Mrs. Ermont, an old woman, coughs from time to time.
M. Pierre looks calm, and most of the time he speaks with a young nervous man called Anatole, who gets upset as he cannot understand what people say.
Two other roles which add new elements to the play's understanding, a nurse and a young lady, enter through two different doors.
The audience does not know what is behind these doors, what has gathered the six characters in that room or what they are waiting for. But as the play progresses, they will realize that dialogs which first appear nonsensical are really understandable.
Like the audience, Anatole gets confused by the meaningless answers to his questions and the weird situation in which he is involved.
He asked: "But, why are we still being kept waiting? ... It is inhuman. And I say that inhumanity, I put it in the corner of my washbasin, preferably on the right corner and I wash it with Marseilles' soap (a soap supposedly very efficient)."
All the tirades of the monolithic play are like this absurd one. The audience is given a balance between humor, tragedy and nonsense as it could do in front of a work by La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bold Soprano) by Ionesco or Der Prozess (The Trial) by Kafka, authors that Pierre-Yves Millot acknowledges influence him.
"I want the play to remain a little mysterious. And I would like people to wonder without necessarily having the answers," smiled Pierre-Yves.
His works vary from plays to short stories. He has published an essay and is working on a scenario and a novel. Since 1995, Pierre-Yves has published his works on the Internet because it is very economical and because more people may read them.
Some cyber-students in Peru and in the United States have already performed his plays.
Le caillou de M. Pierre, which hasn't been performed outside France, will be brought to the stage here by 10 students.
The students, aged between 20 and 22, have been studying French for two years to four years at the University of Indonesia's School of Literature. On Feb. 16, they set up a company together called Les Retrouvailles (The Reunion).
They met some problems not only with the organization and the language but also with the financing.
Contemporary
Even though the play is contemporary and, thus, the set limited, they still had to find subsidies, which was, of course, quite difficult in the crisis, said Azizah Fauziah Asnawi, the producer, who also plays Mrs. Ermont.
The premiere should have been performed on May 29 but was delayed because of the riots. This meant they got more time to find sponsors, such as the French Cultural Center, the French international community, their university, Total petrochemical company and Prambors radio station.
"Thirty percent of ticket sales will be given to Aku Anak Sekolah (education program) through UNICEF," she said.
Most of the time, they have had to train on their own because the director, Cedric Fassenet, was evacuated to France in May and hasn't come back yet. Thankfully, they are being assisted by Valerie Autissier, a Frenchwoman whose hobby is the theater.
"I help them to know how to move on the stage, how to express themselves and to find a good pitch. I would also like them to stress some words to express a feeling, that is to say, to meet the theatrical pitch," she said.
The last difficulty was the most tricky to solve. "Concerning the text, we encountered some problems. We had to find the right pitch or to understand French words. We also had to know how to pronounce some words, but we were helped by our teacher in phonetics," said Azizah.
The whole troupe speaks English fairly well and chose to learn French for various reasons. Dwi Priyanto Kurniawan learns French because he saw it as a "romantic" language. Azizah was also attracted, she said, by the elegance and the beauty of the language. Others referred to their parents, who speak French a little or think it is a nice language.
As French is a difficult language to learn, they were all pleased to get more acquainted with it through the theater. They dared to speak French, although they did make some mistakes and had difficulty in understanding it because Azizah had asked the director to only speak French.
"I have improved a lot. Before, I didn't speak so well. (The theater) is a good way to practice," said Dwi. Fellow student Roosella agreed: "It allows me to meet French people and to understand French better, although I don't speak it fluently yet."
There were other problems for each of the relatively new actors. Nadiah Alwi, who plays a nurse, had to overcome her shyness and had to learn to speak louder. Dwi said he had yet to understand the character of M. Pierre, the role he plays, who is completely different from him, and Roosella Umry, who plays Anatole, said she found it especially difficult to play the part of a man.
Valerie added that Roosella didn't have an easy part to play because her role's character was "very sarcastic".
"In the beginning of the play, people are more drawn to the lead, M. Pierre, because he seems to hold some truth," said Pierre-Yves.
Indeed, he is a kind of wise philosopher who has been waiting for a long time and knows what is going on.
However, through the play, Anatole steals people's attention because he is the most human character of the play. "Anatole, first a little grotesque because he is completely lost in this absurd world which turns tragic and interesting, whereas M. Pierre shows no emotion," said Pierre-Yves.
But even the secondary characters are important because they help the audience to understand the meaning of the play.
Each show will be at 8 p.m.; tickets cost Rp 10,000 each.