Vice Versa – Based on Cock and Bull by Will Self
nytheatre.com review by Heather J. Violanti
January 7, 2011
“The abnormal becomes normal through its inclusion in the world of others,” observes a narrator in Vice Versa. It’s a fitting observation from an observer of a world where the surreal and everyday collide and coalesce with such surprising nonchalance.
Vice Versa is a free adaptation of Will Self’s novella Cock and Bull, a postmodern, eroticized spin on Kafka. In the portion of the novella adapted here, a hapless rugby player discovers an odd gash behind his knee…which turns his banal life upside down in ways he could never imagine—including a covert, torrid affair with his doctor. Self is known for his use of absurd eroticism, interior monologue, and meta-fiction—all of which can be difficult to translate on stage. As adaptors, the ildi ! eldi collective acquit themselves decently. It may be slow to start, and it’s not the most innovative avant-garde theater, but Vice Versa quietly grows into a quirky, sometimes haunting portrait of despair.
Vice Versa begins with sanguine self-awareness—fitting for a self-aware piece of theatre. The house lights at full, the creators/performers—Sophie Cattani, Francois Sabourin, and Antoine Oppenheim—mill around the stage. They whisper, they warm up, they sip water, they stare at the audience, they step into the house or the wings. It’s a familiar Brechtian trope, and it works, though by now it’s a very “garde” example of “avant-garde.” The entire piece uses standard tropes of experimental theatre: shifting perspectives, repetition, microphones, direct address, tableaux. It’s predictable, and yet it’s effective. I only wish the troupe had been more adventurous in transforming a familiar vocabulary into a new idiom, just as they’ve translated their work from French into English for the first time for Under the Radar.
Still, there is an ingenious simplicity to the work’s structure. It re-visits the same moment over and over again—the rugby player, puzzled by his strange wound, goes to visit the doctor. With each re-telling, the moment expands. We learn more information, seeing the moment from a new perspective each time. Bit by bit, the momentum builds until the piece reaches its final, startlingly poignant conclusion.
Cattani, Sabourin, and Oppenheim are self-assured performers with disciplined physicality and sharp comic timing. They have the skill and imagination to create a new theatrical vocabulary of their very own, one merely hinted at here.
