ARTS The last time I saw Michel Piccoli on stage, he was an energetic King Lear carving up his empire and coping pretty well in the storm. Now 83, he’s back with the same director (André Engel) and the snow is still falling (upstage). Piccoli is the Minetti of Thomas Bernhard’s play, named after a celebrated German actor. But this Minetti has not acted for 30 years, and waits for a director who never comes, to play the part he acts out daily in his mind... Lear.
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| Immense pathos: Michel Piccoli |
But against this formal backdrop Engel ramps up the whimsical echos. One guest passing through is blind and goes by the name of Gloucester, another a harrumphing dwarf with a hint of Lear’s fool. The girl waiting for her lover (Julie-Marie Parmentier) played Cordelia to Piccoli’s Lear. Shakespearean depths of loneliness are brought out by the desperate drunk (Evelyne Didi), whose nearest brush with intimacy comes from fingering the old man’s scarf.
In the end, it’s down to one actor. Even by Bernhard standards, this is a long monologue (80 minutes). Piccoli announces his arrival to the bellhop in a frail voice but soon belies his age as this meandering tour de force gathers pace. By circling musical repetition, he plunges into the mystery, obsession and paranoia of a (failed) artist who ran away from the classics. Laid bare are the pain of exposure and ridicule, the frustration of small-town ennui, the bitterness of exclusion.
At times Piccoli loses contour and crispness and his energy flags, though the diction stays pretty pitch-perfect throughout. But in spite of being a theatrical colossus in his own right, he succeeds in capturing the immense pathos of a life full of regrets and now winding down – of a time when it’s too late even to play Prospero.
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