Compagnie Maguy Marin, May B Review ★★★★★

Maguy Marin’s May B is impossible to pigeonhole. It’s not quite dance, at least not as we ordinarily conceive it, although it involves movement, a lot of movement. It’s not exactly theatre, although it occasionally calls on the human voice and has a kind of sporadic narrative. It is, rather, an absurdist construct, which has absorbed the world and spirit of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and mixed them with daring European experimentation.

It is an entrancing 90 minutes, as avant-garde today as when it first shocked audiences at its 1981 premiere, since when it’s been performed in over 40 countries and reassessed as a seminal, ageless stage work.

READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH MAGUY MARIN HERE

It starts in absolute darkness, an initial silence broken by a male voice singing a Schubert lied. Very gradually the stage, a part-lowered curtain reducing its height, becomes dimly lit and we are able to see what initially appear like blurs of ectoplasm, assembled in groups.

As in the works of Beckett, silence is key, and that first scene, with the light going up painfully slowly evolves in complete silence, something audiences are not comfortable with, so that it elicits quite a lot of performative coughing, which is as unnecessary as it’s irritating – but is it, perhaps, the predicted response to a deliberate provocation?

A shrill whistle breaks the silence and what we can now discern as 10 performers start slowly shuffling. Their whitish clothes are shabby, shapeless and dirty, their faces caked in white clay, features distorted.

Their coordination is impressive, as they slowly move to form a circle. They pant loudly and rhythmically. And then they utter in French the Beckett sentence that will recur at the end, book-ending everything that goes in between: ‘Finished. It’s finished. Nearly finished. It must be nearly finished.’

Throughout the piece they will keep moving, the uniformity of their movement contrasting with the diversity of their bodies: tall, short, young, older, solid and spare.

There is one bout of energetic simulated masturbation, after which, bodies bent in postures of desolation, they seem to cry. Then, over manic circus music they squabble like children or launch into what looks like a demented version of a village square afternoon dance somewhere in deepest France.

Schubert’s music returns. Now dressed in equally shabby street clothes they hold a birthday party for a blind man.


Compagnie Maguy Marin, May B. Photo: Hervé Deroo
As they slowly file off stage through doors cut into the forbidding dark brown back panel it suddenly appears to be all over; but they return, this time in coats and hats, carrying shabby belongings – are they perhaps a group of refugees? – shuffling across the stage to Gavin Bryars’s insistent chant “Jesus blood never failed me yet’.

Eventually helping each down from the stage into the stalls and running off they appear to have escaped; but they return, until only one of them is left, repeating Beckett’s words as the stage light slowly goes down and darkness reigns again.

It’s stunning performance and one that, granted, you’ll either buy into and love or hate. No prizes for guessing which side I fell on.