Theatre Festival Review

Fintan O'Toole reviews White Star, by the Belgian company Victoria, at the Samuel Beckett Theatre

The test of a piece of avant garde theatre is not that you know what the performers are doing. It is that you feel that they know what they are doing.

The avant garde has always been in some respects more realistic than the mainstream, for while the latter imposes a narrative order on the messy discontinuities of life, the former declines to do so. It presents life the way we experience it outside the theatre - fragmented, jagged, without an easy meaning or a neat story.

But its paradox is that in order to be art at all it has to suppose that some shape or pattern will eventually emerge. As an audience, we need to be convinced that the apparently random motion is really a journey, even if we don't have a clue where it might be going.

White Star by the Belgian company Victoria is a rough, disconnected piece that shuns the pleasures of emotional or aesthetic comfort, but it passes this test.

A programme note mentions the director Lies Pauwela's reply when asked if there was any kind of theatre she dislikes: "Yes, theatre."

In White Star you see what she means, for the piece is an assault on the very basis of theatre: pretence.

Theatre is essentially people pretending to be something they are not, and the whole piece questions a culture in which people do precisely that. Inspired ( like another show in the festival, I Am My Own Wife) by the story of the East German transsexual Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, it seems more to decry than to celebrate the openness of human identity.

The figures who emerge from a constant maelstrom of movement on an abstract set that suggests a church, a cabaret stage, a circus ring and an ice rink all have a more or less psychotic tendency to assume other people's physical and psychological deformities.

A man who looks North African opens proceedings with a neo-fascist rant against Africans. A woman has distorted her face with sellotape and claims not merely to have been hideously burned but to have lost most of her internal organs.

A man who has earlier pretended to be physically disabled climbs on top of a cross, strips naked and thinks he is Jesus. Later, he appears with one leg strapped up so that he seems to have lost it from below the knee and dances a pas de deux with a man who lights candles and prays to become left-handed. Against this backdrop of assumed suffering, the figure of Charlotte, with her genuinely double identity and her real sorrow, seems like the normal person in a mad world.

There is a dyspeptic bleakness to all of this and there is certainly nothing amiable about White Star. But it also has a fierce integrity and a physical commitment that make it compelling.

Having eschewed pretence, it also has the courage to steer clear of another staple of the theatre, emotional manipulation.

Even the apparent uplift of the ending is poised between sincerity and cynicism, leaving the audience to respond as it will.