Review: ‘Love’s End’ (‘Clôture de l’amour’) at Odyssey Theatre is the ultimate he said/she said
- Anita W. Harris
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Having its West Coast premiere at the Odyssey Theatre, “Love’s End” — translated by Jim Fletcher and Kate Moran from the original 2011 French play “Clôture de l’amour” by Pascal Rambert — offers a scathing portrait of a marriage break-up that goes terribly sour.
Featuring two actors (Beejan Land and Ann Sonneville) who play themselves as if they were married, and set in the bare backstage of the theater where they work (set design by Stephanie Kerley Schwartz), the play consists entirely of two monologues. First, Beejan the husband says he’s done with Ann, his wife, spewing invective while mostly rooted in one spot and in a rather masculine, emotionally violent way (including bayonet imagery) as Ann is driven to tears.
After a long time — long enough that the audience may think this may be the whole play — Ann responds. But it’s not from the broken place one might expect, given what she has just experienced. Instead, Ann challenges Beejan’s assumptions about her and pointedly questions how a human being can treat another human being this way, and how he can possibly say what they experienced together was a fiction. She also offers him a way out of the miserable corner he has painted himself into with his diatribe of words.
And there are a lot of words, on both sides. In true French fashion (it’s reminiscent of Beckett), both monologues cover philosophy, art, literature, love, sex and also theater — the play somewhat metatheatrical in that sense — all in the service of eviscerating a marriage that lasted long enough to have produced three children, whom each party vehemently says they won’t give up.
Through their monologues, each of which has a certain cadence and rhythm, we are able to reconstruct much of what constituted their marriage — the children, visits to the park and beach, their theater work, the first time they met and had sex (though with different memories of that moment), their sex life since, their shared philosophical, artistic and literary understanding, how they feel about each other’s work.
But it does feel very different to the usual theatrical experience — such as Edward Albee’s similarly caustic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — and that may not be for everyone, depending on how one sees the role of theater. When it performed at the 2011 Festival d’Avignon in France, “Cloture de l’amour” won the prize for best new French-language play from the Syndicat de la Critique and the grand prize for dramatic literature from the French Centre national du théâtre. Since then, the play has been performed hundreds of times in dozens of languages.
While there are moments of humor, such as the husband saying several times that he’s done speaking and then continuing to speak, the play is much more tragic than “tragic-comic,” as accomplished French director Maurice Attias describes it.
“What happens when the chemistry is gone?” Attias asks, and apparently this is what it looks like. Speaking with Attias after a recent show, he noted that some French performances had an even more attacking male, violent right out of the gate, and that the actors remaining mostly fixed as they speak heightens the tension.
Acclaimed French writer Rambert, who will attend the final week of performances at the Odyssey and lead a post-show conversation on Friday, June 13, has said he didn’t want to pit one lover against the other in the play.
“That would be too easy,” he said. “I’m trying, rather, to draw two trajectories that, at a certain point, find a form of freedom after an impossible suffering. That story is not the same as the story of a couple splitting up.”
Rambert is also a dance choreographer, and perhaps this is seen in the way Ann especially is attuned to her body (her character embodied beautifully by Sonneville). Beejan tells her to stand up straight as he lays into her; she later tells him that her body has indeed been emptied after his gutting of their life together, and we feel it. Perhaps because she is so grounded in herself, she is able to refuse, or at least defuse, his conceptual erasure of their marriage, to remind him of their mutual being.
Whether that gets through to him or not, whether their marriage can possibly survive this explosion of ferocity and bloodshed, is another question. Whether you want to experience it depends on your disposition. But if you’d like the challenge of a minimalist play that is huge in France due to its unflinching examination of the ineffable that exists between two intelligent people, then this may be a refreshing, if jarring, change from the usual narrative.
“Love’s End” (“Clôture de l’amour”) continues through June 15 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles, with performances Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets range from $23 to $43, with some pay-what-you-can performances. For tickets and information, call the box office at 310-477-2055 or visit OdysseyTheatre.com. Run time is 1 hour and 50 minutes with no intermission.