L'Affaire rue de Lourcine, Labiche
Норильский Заполярный театр драмы им. Вл. Маяковского, Norilsk, Russia
„Happy is he who can forget
what can no longer be changed....“
A night of excessive drinking. The morning after. Black out. Still in the claws of alcohol, but without any memory of the events of the past night, the wealthy bourgeois Lenglume awakes in his bed. How did he get home? And who the hell is snoring under the blanket next to him? Can it possibly be that he had brought someone home? A woman? A man?! - There is a deep gap in his memory, which he by no means is able to close.
In his nightmarish comedy of 1857, Eugène Labiche playfully shows the filthy shoals, which are to be found behind the clean and decent surface of bourgeois morality. The stranger in Lenglume's bed turns out to be his former school friend Mistingue. But the joy of reunion doesn't last long: everything indicates that the night before our two friends, lost in alcoholic delirium, have assaulted a young coal-selling girl and subsequently murdered their victim in a most brutal way. In panic they try to wash their coal colored hands and to eliminate all traces. Shedding false tears for their innocent victim all they care for is to save their own existence.
In an amusing way, Labiche shows us the fine cracks in the shiny bourgeois façade, thus revealing a profound, existential horror: the discovery of the capacity towards evil within ourselves, the shock of an upright citizen realizing what he might be able to do. Struggling to cover-up all evidence, Lenglume and Mistingue slowly are transforming into the monsters which they actually want to prove they are not, since for maintaining their seemingly clean slate, they do not even blench from murder.
Eugène Labiche's L'Affair rue de Lourcine is a black comedy about the alleged beast in each of us, about murder and asocial instincts and the corset of bourgeois morality, with which we try to keep them down.
starring: Sergey Rebriy, Larisa Rebriy, Nikolay Kaverin, Alexandr Glushkov, Yulia Novikova, Alexandr Zhuikov, Polina Belyanina
stage design: Femistokl Atmadzas
costume design: Olga Atmadzas
translation: Ekaterina Raykova-Merz