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by Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Martin Crimp, directed by ted witzel

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street, Toronto

September 19-October 5, 2024

Prison Guard: “We don’t have a raison d’être”

To open his first season as Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times, ted witzel [sic] has chosen the play Roberto Zucco by French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948-89). Most Toronto theatre-goers will be familiar with neither Koltès nor Zucco, his most performed work, even though in Europe, Koltès is viewed as one of the great 20th-century playwrights. Zucco is a difficult piece of theatre both in subject matter and style, and witzel is brave to take on such a challenge. witzel has inspired such strong commitment in his cast that we admire their performances even if the meaning of the play remains obscure.

Koltès wrote the play in 1988 when he knew he was dying of AIDS. He did not live to see its first production. Koltès was inspired to write Zucco after seeing a “Wanted” poster of the Italian serial killer Roberto Succo in a subway station. Koltès’s changing the name of the title character from Succo to Zucco should show that Zuccois not a biographic play even though Koltès does use various element from Succo’s life. Succo murdered his father and mother, a police detective and several other people seemingly without motive, was captured and committed suicide in prison. One of the best scenes in the play is not inspired by Succo at all but by a hostage-taking incident in West Germany in 1988.

To this story of Zucco’s crimes, Koltès adds the story of a character known only as "Girl” who falls in love with Zucco after he seduces her. She searches for him even as he commits more outrages and tries to evade the police.

The play has 15 scenes the titles for which are shown in English and French on an electronic scrolling message board to one side of the stage. The play begins with Zucco’s escape from prison and ends with his second attempt to escape. One of the many ironies is that once he has escaped the prison, he feels he is just inside another prison. As he says in the final scene, “Don’t try and go over the walls, because beyond the walls are more walls: prison goes on forever”.

In Scene 1 and Scene 15 one of the prison guards remarks, “We have no raison d’être”. Indeed, that remark could stand for all the characters in Koltès’s world. As in the early existentialist works of Albert Camus (1913-60), the fact that we all die drains life of any meaning. Any purpose or raison d’être we may think we have is something we imagine to give our lives meaning. The Sister of the Girl thinks of her purpose is protecting her little sister. When the Girl leaves the Sister to live on her own, the Sister goes mad.

Koltès suggests that when a one person falls in love, as does the Girl with Zucco, her feeling that her life has a purpose is only an illusion. When Zucco leaves the Girl, she feels it is her mission to find him. Yet, ironically, in order to find him, she has to become a prostitute and must betray him to the police. Koltès’s view is that we live in a world of contradictions which render any act meaningless.

It is significant, then, that the gentlest scene in the play is Scene 6 between Zucco and the Older Gentleman who has been trapped in a subway station overnight. The Older Gentleman tells Zucco how confused he is to be confined in such a labyrinth underground and how being trapped overnight has now confused him about how to live his life once he is back above ground. Strangely, Zucco seems to sympathize with the Older Gentleman – the only time he seems to sympathize with anyone – perhaps because the Older Gentleman’s feeling of being trapped mirrors Zucco’s own feeling of the world as a prison.

Writing plays from an existentialist point of view is hardly new. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd like those of Ionesco and Beckett take that view. Koltès is different in choosing a real, contemporary setting, rather than the generic ones of Ionesco or the metaphorical ones of Beckett. Ionesco and Beckett choose situations that are simultaneously comic and tragic. Koltès, however, deliberately has genres clash with each other. The best example in Zucco is the hostage-taking episode of Scene 10 where Koltès contrasts the high-tension of a gun-wielding Zucco threatening a Woman and her Child with the purely comic antics of the Onlookers, who both look forward to, but claim to fear, any violence.

Not only is Koltès’s world fractured by contrasting modes of genre but also by contrasting modes of presentation. The settings of the action in Zucco belong to plays about people living in the lower depths of society in prisons, brothels, subways and decaying apartments. Yet, Koltès’s characters often speak in long, poetic speeches as if they were figures in 19th-century romantic drama. By doing this, Koltès has made contradiction in itself the main principle of his play as it seems to be in the real world.

The play that Zucco is most like is Woyzeck by George Büchner written in 1836, a play that witzel directed in 2010. Both plays tell their stories in a series of short scenes. Both contrast scenes of tragedy and comedy. In both the title character is an outsider and a murderer. The main difference is that in Woyzeck, the title character is seen as a victim of the absurd world he lives in, whereas in Zucco, the title character is seen as the embodiment of it. We hear Zucco movingly confess his wish to be invisible into a dead telephone in one scene, and then tell the Old Gentleman with total coolness a completely fabricated life story.

The play has 30 characters and has been staged with as many as 27 actors or, as here, with as few as six. To play Zucco, witzel could hardly have chosen a better actor than Jakob Ehman. Ehman is expert at playing an innocent caught in a world he does not understand. But, as he showed when he played Don John in The Libertine for Talk Is Free Theatre, he is also adept at playing a completely brutal, amoral, liar. In Zucco, Ehman combines both. He is utterly convincing. He infuses Zucco with such pent-up energy that you feel it could burst out at any moment. And, of course, it does.

The other five actors all play two or more characters. Fiona Highet is especially noteworthy for playing characters of such different, complex natures. She makes Zucco’s Mother almost as repulsive in her hatred of Zucco as she is pitiable. She is able to accoplish the seemingly impossible task of making the attraction of the Elegant Lady to Zucco believable even after he has killed her son.

Daniel MacIvor well distinguishes his many characters from the slovenly Father of the Girl to the tacky Pimp who wants to sleep with her. MacIvor makes the ineptitude of the Prison Guard very funny, and he makes the distressed Older Gentleman the most relatable character in the play. MacIvor brings out an aspect of the Older Gentleman not explicit in the text. Using only looks and gestures, MacIvor tells us that the Older Gentleman is attracted to Zucco but at the same time realizes that any overt suggestion of interest sadly would be futile.

Oyin Oladejo is excellent as the Girl’s overprotective Sister and makes the Sister’s descent to madness frightening effective. Oladejo is also excellent as the worldly Madam of the brothel whose immovable calm completely contrasts with the Sister’s hysteria.

Kwaku Okyere is so different as the Girl’s brutal, manipulative Brother some may not realize that Okyere also plays the down-to-earth Melancholy Detective. Together MacIvor, Oladejo and Okyere are hilarious as the three Onlookers in the hostage scene who morbidly find entertainment in potential murder.

The Girl is the second most important character of the play, but Samantha Brown fails to infuse her with sufficient passion. Brown’s best scene is the Girl’s leaving home over her Sister’s objections. Then Brown displays a strength one did not suspect after her long silences. Yet, when the Girl’s Brother suggests that the Girl should become a prostitute, Brown displays none of the conflict of emotions one would expect.

As a play Roberto Zucco is so open to interpretation that it has attracted numerous important productions in Europe and elsewhere. One of the most lauded, in fact, was the play’s North American premiere led by Québécois director Denis Marleau in 1993. The play was even staged by the National Theatre School in April this year. The key to a successful production seems to be a unified vision of a play that is all about fragmentation and disintegration.

For the production at Buddies, witzel uses a number of strategies but they do not seem well integrated and do not convey a unified point of view. witzel has the cast use microphones when characters are whispering, but he also has the prison guards use them, seemingly as an alienation device, when their characters are not whispering. For Zucco’s first appearance outside the prison, witzel engineers an eye-catching entrance by having him knock down a wall of his Mother’s apartment. Yet, such a superhero-like entrance goes contrary to a text that never seeks to glorify the character.

witzel has created individual scenes that are brilliant. The conclusion of the scene between Zucco and the Older Gentleman is beautifully managed. The final scene depicting Zucco’s demise is spectacular even if the set-up for it is too complicated. Michelle Tracy’s set consists of three moveable trucks that can be arranged in different configurations for different locations. Initially, they appear clever but soon enough they seem clunky and cause the changes between scenes to take too much effort. It is also unclear whether witzel does or does not want us to see that the actors mostly, but not exclusively, are given the task of arranging the set since the lights merely dim rather go to black. The question is whether letting us view the set changes is consciously meant as an alienation effect or is simply a necessity.

In other hands, Roberto Zucco could be a frightening portrait of a world gone mad where condemning one man for murder seems hypocritical when so many nations accept or promote mass murder around the globe. Here, with uneven pacing and the lack of nimbler scene changes, tension may build within a single scene but dissipates by the time of the next. Despite all this, I am very glad to have finally had the chance to see a play that has been discussed in Europe since it first appeared. As witzel says in his Director’s Note, “roberto zucco [sic] is not an easy play or an obviously queer play”. It is, however, a fascinating text and presents a major challenge well worth the attempt.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Fiona Highet as Elegant Lady and Jakob Ehman as Roberto Zucco; Daniel MacIvor as Older Gentleman and Jakob Ehman as Roberto Zucco; Oyin Oladejo as Sister and Samantha Brown as Girl; Jakob Ehman as Roberto Zucco. © 2024 Jeremy Mimnagh.

For tickets visit: buddiesinbadtimes.com.