Playing Bare

Judith Rudakoff is an associate professor of theatre arts at York
University at co-editor of Dangerous Traditions: A Passe Muraille
Anthology.

Nominated in 1990 for the Governor General’s Award in the original
French (La Repetition), this piece is a Beckettian “dramedy” filled
with the angst, anger, and despair of the contemporary psyche stuck in
the contemptible and laughable trap of reality. The play layers
potentially disparate components: rehearsing an existential drama with
actors who are not really actors but people who feel and live; working
with a woman who is teetering on the edge of an abyss overlooking
madness; somehow reconciling philosophy with reality; balancing that
which is unchangeable by virtue of its existence with that which is
assumed and therefore exists; creating art out of life and ensuring that
life mirrors art; combining them into a surprisingly coherent (if
kaleidoscopic) whole.

Nothing, the piece seems to indicate, has meaning without the
transcendence from routine to ritual. Only truth and “soul,” as the
characters are prone to calling it, can trigger this type of
transformation. And, as in the Beckett plays to which Champagne pays
homage, Playing Bare comes to the conclusion that in the end is the
beginning and in the beginning is the end; all that lies between is
subject to interpretation.

While the translation is clear and by and large seems speakable, the
intensity and ritual play of the text is not realized by the language.
While this may indeed be the intention of the playwright and
translator—to counterpoint the philosophical and transcendental
implications of the work with more plebeian language—the contrast is
jarring.