Mouawad fails, but in an interesting way

Ciels

Written and directed by Wajdi Mouawad
Starring Stanislas Nordey
At Festival d'Avignon
in Avignon, France

Over the past 14 years, Wajdi Mouawad has written a series of epic plays - Littoral , Incendies (a success in its English translation as Scorched ) and Forêts - that he now groups as a trilogy. Each features a young protagonist who, having lost a parent, embarks on an odyssey to discover who they really are. And their pasts, inevitably, turn out to be steeped in blood and broken promises.

For this year's Festival d'Avignon in France, Mouawad has remounted these three generous-spirited works in a highly acclaimed marathon run, and debuted a fourth chapter, Ciels ( Skies ), which was unveiled this weekend after much anticipation. Together, the four form what he calls "a quartet": Le Sang des promesses ( The Blood of Promises ).

Mouawad had warned that Ciels would be different, a counterpoint. But I don't think any of his fans - and he actually has to dodge autograph-seekers in France - could have guessed that the conclusion of this saga would be a cross between Sophocles, The Da Vinci Code and 24. .

With his designer, Emmanuel Clolus, Mouawad has created a unique and immersive setting for Ciels . On the outskirst of Avignon, they've built a small theatre within an exhibition hall, an enclosed white box with 250 bar stools in its centre. The audience sits on the stools and swivels around to watch the action, on stages and on video screens, happening 360 degrees around them.

But while the setting is truly exciting, the plot is straight out of a generic summer blockbuster.

Ciels concerns the francophone chapter of an elite, international anti-terrorist squad called Operation Socrates.

In a remote bunker, Blaise Centier (Georges Bigot) leads a team composed of antisocial computer hacker Vincent Chef-Chef (Olivier Constant), surveillance expert Charlie Eliot Johns (John Arnold) and token woman Dolorosa Hache (Valérie Blanchon), a master linguist, the Uhura of the bunch, if you will.

(National Arts Centre's English Theatre director Peter Hinton appears in a videotaped cameo as the head of the anglophone squad, though why the code-busters of Socrates are divided into teams by language, like the NAC theatre, is left unexplained.) At the start of Ciels , the francophone team's fifth member, expert cryptanalyst Valery Masson (played by Genie-winner Gabriel Arcand on video), has mysteriously committed suicide. His friend Clement Szymanowski (Stanislas Nordey) has been brought in as his replacement - and to help access his password-protected laptop.

It is thought that Masson was close to figuring out the details of an upcoming terrorist attack, which is being planned by a worldwide, shadowy network of 25- to 35-year-olds - perhaps Islamic extremists, perhaps anarchists - and is somehow related to Renaissance artist Tintoretto's painting, TheAnnunciation . The clock is ticking, and the pressure is on Jack Bauer, er, Szymanowski, to break the various codes.

The trappings could not be more different from Mouawad's sweeping, character-filled trips through the war-torn 20th century in Litorral , Incendies and Forêts (though the use of multimedia, and the interest in painting connect this play with Mouawad's recent solo, Seuls ).

But there are similarities - a dead character giving instructions from beyond the grave, the Greek tragic themes of fathers and sons at war, and shocking paradoxes, in this case, a pregnant child-murderer.

There is also much elaboration on a point made by the photographer/sniper character introduced in Incendies - that the creation of art is not inextricably connected to good. Mouawad once again raises his fear that violence and art are easily intertwined, and that beauty can be a destructive force.

Mouawad performs wonders with his special effects, including briefly placing the audience in the centre of a terrifying bombing raid, and producing a video effect of snowing letters, straight out of The Matrix . But the beautiful monologues he has crafted simply end up sounding ridiculous in this setting full of hackneyed Hollywood characters, clichéd power struggles and an implausible network of poet-terrorists.

There's a fundamental disconnect between what is said and the two-dimensional characters saying it - especially Nordey's Clement, played as a wild-eyed, impenetrable genius, and the obstructive villain Vincent.

Dolorosa is much more fascinating, but only revealed to us in brief, expositional monologues, while the comical Charlie Eliot Johns, who we see interacting over Skype conversations with his teenage son in Montreal, is the most human of the bunch.

While Ciels works to a certain extent as entertainment, Mouawad is obviously striving for something more - most notably at the end, in a final monologue that is not spoken but wailed across generations, an intermingling of death and birth cries. He wants to evoke emotion of an almost operatic intensity. Unfortunately, his gambit fails - but fails big and in an interesting way. Ciels fails in the way you want artists to fail, in a way that almost seems like a win.

Ciels has its North American debut in Ottawa's National Arts Centre in May. Production of the entire quartet is scheduled for Montreal and Quebec City in 2010.