This past Friday I attended the avant-garde play Les Chanterelles, held at Le Magisterieux, in Rouen. This was day one-hundred twelve of the production; a lifetime in theater terms. This longevity speaks not only to the essential quality of the play, about which I’ll speak more later, but also about the uneasy, complex, and at times contentious relationship between regional French theaters and the capital city of Paris, which captures almost all artistic attention in France (and indeed, Europe). Rouen, in fact, is among the smallest of the regional theaters; the city’s population barely surpasses six figures, and yet is home to a vibrant artistic scene.
When assessing the reasons for this, Paris, of course, figures large: without Paris as counterpoint, the regional directors and playwrights would likely lose some of the combative motivation that results in output like Les Chanterelles. Paris is the sun, the center, the gravity well, capturing light and heat. To make a name for themselves, regional centers must needs abandon tried-and-true formulations, me-too second runs, and produce an essentially new creative spark.
The playwright and directeur of Les Chanterelles, one M. Toilé, has done just that, with a baffling, epic production. At 8:10 PM I filed in to Le Magisterieux with about 250 others – locals, mostly, but, owing to the growing reputation of the play and the director, also many out-of-town critics from places like Berlin and New York and St. Petersburg. I was warned beforehand by the proprietress of the hotel I was staying at that black tie was absolutely the fashion, and I was glad, for the rule was ostentatiously followed. Again with an eye to the larger sister to the southeast, the crowd was formal, aggrandized, overflowingly so to my Seattle eye. Like many American theater crowds with which I am familiar, among the audience there was much craning of necks and wide-eyed, unsubtle analysis of each other prior to the curtain – a shared transatlantic preoccupation, a bourgeois comparison. Whispers are exchanged, low and urgent; one never knows what anyone else is thinking, but a gestalt emerges, that of an audience overly concerned with self-image and style.
Apparently the norm in Rouen is for men of a certain age to leave their wives at home, all fleshy arms and sagging bosoms, and bring mistresses twenty years their junior, bedecked in resplendent gowns, sparkling jewels, pale swanlike necks standing out in sharp contrast to the jowly countenances of the bankers and opticians that make up the merchant class in town. I am not sure what to make of this other than as yet another attempt at visible ostentation.
The lights dim, once, twice; the curtain is drawn. Immediately one is confronted with a Fauvist explosion; elephants, oxen, great swaddling pelicans on pink leashes parade across the stage, keepers swathed all in black, deprecating, imploring the animals to not trample each other, the backdrop, or (god forbid) the audience. Girls dance and twirl about, throwing bright ribbons high in the air; from the pit comes a clash of trumpets and great booming drums. Spotlights swirl and weave menacingly. All is confusion for ten minutes. Not once did I (knowingly) see the same animal being led. Where do they stable these beasts? What sort of municipal negotiations must have taken place to allow this amazing display to take place.
Then, silence; dark. A more sedate scene follows, in which lovelies of various heights and stage of dress take places on stage right and alternately beckon and vamp to the audience, or standoffishly look off into the distance, pointedly distracted by their hair or nails or the straps on their extravagant footwear. From left, accompanied by yet more drums, come a shambles of hirsute, older men, forties or fifties perhaps, carrying hammers or pickaxes or large plumbing wrenches, some rolling large stone wheels, others carrying furniture. Motorcycles and televisions in various states of disrepair are set about in random patterns. Shirtless and sweating, they make a show of workmanlike obsession over their various implements, casting longing looks leftward at the now incautiously interested actresses, some of whom perform complex intertwined arabesques, orbiting closer and closer to the men. An odd sort of sexual tension begins to develop as these young women pose and gesture and lean over suggestively as they approach nearer and nearer to the men, whose interests are obviously heightened. One can almost smell the mixture of male sweat and female perfume from the middle rows. There is a coquettish aura, and one wonders at the seriousness of the ladies, but the interactions become more and more physical, always – always! – directed by the women. Crude attentions grow more and more pronounced, in the form of pawing and groping.
And then, all of a sudden, the interest wanes. The women retreat to the right; the men, making a show of confusion and hurt, return to hammering and manual labor for a minute or two, then wander off, eyes occasionally cast back over hairy shoulders to reassess whether anything,can be made of the attentions formerly paid to them. Nothing is forthcoming. One marvels at the change, the interruptus, as it were. As soon as the last bureau is carried off stage left, the women spring to life, in an audience-participation mode, and engage the first several rows in leering displays of physicality – daring displays of thigh and breast and shoulder; opened mouths showing glistening white teeth; tongues and eyelashes and fingernails all using every flirtatious trick to get the viewers to reciprocate. And they do. Women lean forward and expose décolletage; men leer, gape-mouthed, and roar and growl and paw the air. The cacophony swells to the very rear of the house, a frenzy of invitation and bluntly suggested carnality. And then, abruptly – darkness again. The Grand Tease, as this scene is known to the critics, shuts off.
(I am told that the male roles are mostly drawn from the ranks of itinerant laborers or out-of-work tradesmen. Despite the meager pay (twelve euros per evening), and the built-in embarrassment of appearing shirtless, hairy, and emasculated evening after evening, the line to audition stretches around the block on Tuesday mornings.)
This back-and-forth, hot-and-cold is intentional. M. Toilé has stated as much. In an interview with Le Monde, he was quoted:
Unpredictability is the key to Les Chanterelles. With unpredictability comes power. As in Nature, which is subject to the laws of entropy, in which all falls apart, devolves, decomposes, we establish an anti-order in our production, and the audience is compelled to give their allegiance, as it were, to the mirror we hold up. The unpredictable – the chaotic – cannot be controlled, guided, or influenced; it is arbitrary, capricious and in a way mirrors our conception of God, the god of shifting moods, of terrible vengeances intermingled with great kindnesses. It is for this reason that I think we have had unrivalled success thus far.
To serve the purposes of unpredictability, on certain alternate nights the play’s format shifts. On the evening I attended, the focus was on the ensemble, but other evenings the female presence is personified by a single individual. Sometimes she is a dark, venomous character, sliding balefully in and among her male counterparts, blackly condescending to expose herself physically and coarsely; on other nights she arrives as a sylvan maiden, trailing fairy dust, with a retinue of dwarves representing frogs and butterflies and other peaceful forest-creatures. Children stand with arms clasped high overhead, index fingers pointed heavenward, waving slightly to and fro (they are lilies). Pale skin plays off the dark backgrounds. On these nights, the female lead still engages the audience, and the effort required for a single person, no matter how sexually endowed, to engage an entire theater in a a gasping, panting furor is such that the female leads require one week’s rest for each night they perform. M. Toilé must have secured the services of every beauty in northern France to pull off such a stunt for so many months running.
What to make of the production? It is a spectacle, to be sure. Repetitions of the basic plot – crude and clueless male attention, calculated female unpredictability – repeats itself across two acts, in varying ways and intensities. Clothing and skin are more or less interchangeable, most nights. The play is suffused with sadness – real feelings, individual feelings, are submerged to the needs of the collective, the body, the symbolism. However, I am heartened that an attempt so unusual – let’s face it, so abnormal – has garnered the attention and success it has, in a provincial outpost like Rouen.
It is curious that a playwright like M. Toilé, raised in the divertissement school of French theater, should have created a play so unamusing, so lacking in frivolity. Even the nominally absurdist elements, like the parade of animals, evoke not smiles, but a wary concern.
Next for M. Toilé? Uncertain prospects. To say that Montmartre has yet to come calling is an understatement; in fact, the cold reception to Les Chanterelles in the mainstream Paris press is pointed and unflinching. There are rumors of a production in the making in Lyon, or perhaps it is Marseilles. It is certain that the trendy and fickle American audiences in New York or (especially) Los Angeles, with its Francophile-worship, would welcome M. Toilé with something more than a warm embrace, should he decide to make the trip; but he seems serious about conquering his home nation first, evening by evening.

