Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Theater legends Brook and Estienne austerely mull crime/punishment, right/wrong in the elegiac, confounding, but quietly spellbinding THE PRISONER

• By drediman
• December 22, 2018
• No Comments

Hiran Abeysekera in the title role of Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s “The Prisoner” at Theatre for a New Audience. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Over the last few weeks or so, I caught Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord’s production of legendary theater artists Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s elegiac The Prisoner. After having played Paris, Yale Rep, the National Theatre in London, among other destinations, the production recently found itself in New York – the production has since moved on after a brief, limited run – at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn (Mr. Brook and Ms. Estienne were last represented in New York at BAM’s 2016 Next Wave with their gorgeous Battlefield).  The short play tells the story of a man who is sentenced to prison for killing his father in order to protect the honor of his sister. However, after a while, it becomes clear that this man – and not society – has been inflicting punishment on himself, to the bewilderment and dismay of those around him, including the sister whom he initially set out to protect.

Despite work’s simple, parable-like form, the moral dilemma(s) at the play’s heart is anything but straightforward. It mulls over, à la Dostoevsky, the nature of crime versus punishment and right versus wrong, taking these debates to the extreme (creating somewhat of a knotty philosophical conundrum) and dramatizing it all via the semi-absurdist theatrical traditions of Beckett. Matters aren’t helped by the production’s severely austere staging – complete with pregnant pauses that would have made playwright Harold Pinter proud – which opts to keep the protagonist’s thoughts close to its chest and his heavy soul opaquely veiled.

Much like their recent output, Mr. Brook and Ms. Estienne here utilize a meditative, economical approach to theater-making that has become their trademark. Combined with the The Prisoner’s deeply ambivalent text (the play was also penned by the co-directors Brook and Estienne), it’s not too much of a surprise that the results are confounding; there are no easy answers here. Nonetheless, The Prisoner makes for quietly spellbinding theater, akin to the timeless – if elusive – brand of theatrical poetry that has made the works of Beckett so seductive, especially in performance. In no small part, the success of the production also had much to do with the calm intensity of the admirably game and totally straight-faced (and refreshingly ethnically diverse) cast.

RECOMMENDED

THE PRISONER
Off-Broadway, Play
Theatre for a New Audience
1 hour, 15 minutes (without an intermission)
Closed