Going to the theatre: a cultural experience

For our first project in Discours écrits et oraux 2 (DEO2), we read a play in French called the Old Woman's Visit. It was originally written in German and is set in German-speaking Switzerland. It was actually quite funny. Essentially, there is this rundown little town that is anticipating the arrival of a billionare-ess. The mayor, pastor, policeman and other townspeople all have these grand plans for how they are going to try to persuade her to give them the money they need to rebuild their town and restart their industries. When the old lady arrives (with servants and 7th husband in tow) she doesn't take much convincing. She tells the town she intends to give them 100 billion (50 for the town and 50 to be divided amongst the inhabitants.) However she has one condition: justice.  The townspeople must kill the grocery store owner, her former lover, who, when they were younger, got her pregnant and then hired witnesses to say they'd also slept with her so he didn't have to marry her. So the rest of the play is basically the townspeople wrestling with not wanting to kill the man but also really wanting the money. It's kind of a critique of people and of justice but is also a comedy and there are some very hilarious scenes. 

Going to see the play was very different from reading it. It was at a theatre in Malley, near Lausanne, in a former industrial building (the street name literally meant: Gas Factory Path). In the dark, it was quite a challenge for my classmates and I to find it. If it hadn't been for some passing car headlights, I'm not sure we would have ever seen the sign that eventually led us to arrive at the correct building. The TKM (Théatre Kléber-Méleau) was actually pretty small and packed. Our class had great seats about half way up, but no one had paid attention to the reserved signs to we had to tell the people that they were for our class. With all the people, it quickly became very warm and I was glad I'd left my jacket on the coat rack. 

The strangest thing about The Old Woman's Visit, was the fact that all of the characters wore these ugly masks. (see below) They also had a smaller cast than the play called for so some characters were completely eliminated, which I think also took out some of the humour of the piece. The backgrounds and props were also pretty basic compared to what I had imagined and even having read the play, the people spoke quickly and it was sometimes hard to understand what they'd said. One thing that made me laugh is when the people are searching for the old lady's panther, which has escaped, they played a few bars of The Pink Panther Theme. 

All in all, it wasn't very shocking at the end to find out that a man had played the old woman and a woman had played the mayor because the whole thing was just a bit ridiculous. I much preferred the written play to the play we saw performed. This play has had quite a lot of success and been translated into many languages and I wonder if depending on the culture in which it is performed, aspects of the performance change. (Would a version of this play in England have masks, for example?)