How do revolutions begin? Or: how did the protests of 1789 in France catch fire to become revolutionary? More than 200 years later, what can that seismic moment in Europe teach us about rising up to power, and about power itself?
These are some of the questions that Sam Ward’s 90-minute romp through French history raises. Enacted as a pumped-up satire to a backdrop of house music, shadow-play (great work from lighting designer Han Sayles) and a bouncy castle, it is a bold reduction of history. But what is it trying to say and do?
We are taken from the storming of King Louis XVI’s palace to the transformation from absolute to constitutional monarchy, the republic, reign of terror, and on, until a short final scene swerves to the present day. It is January 2024, at Davos, where the elite gather to enjoy “saunas, spas and high-class food”. It plays out as an off-stage dinner party and strains for parallels between Louis XVI’s monarchy and today’s one per cent. The gulf between rich and poor now is hardly comparable to then, and the dinner-party setting seems more an indictment of the middle-classes than the super-elite – is this an echo to the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of the peasants in 18th-century France?
Devised with Joe Boylan, Paul Brendan, Sha Dessi, Jessica Enemokwu and Alice Keedwell, who perform, and directed by Ward, it could be a five-star show, but in its current state it is an intelligent mess.
Stock characters such as Peasant and Aristocrat wear their generic names around their necks, which seems rather trite. The slapstick comes at too basic a level: peasants smile as they are thwacked by the elites, the king flounces and performs Molière-esque flourishes with his hands, the aristocrat shouts rather than speaks. A couple of monologues about pain and hunger step outside the comedy and these provide the highlights, bringing an underlying savagery, and poetry.
The violence of revolutionary regime change is underlined, leaving the wavering question of whether it is too high a price to pay. But in the last scene, when a guillotine is assembled on stage during the dinner party, you wonder what this is saying? That we are heading into revolutionary violence in the face of current world inequities? It is an enormous, unexplained leap.
It is hard to decipher any coherent meaning from the sequence of events. Either it is convoluted, or else too arcane to grasp.
• At the New Diorama theatre, London, until 14 December.
