Upstage 2010

Grenoble Life’s Camille Bromley was in the audience at Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas for this year’s Upstage theatre production: Joe Orton’s Loot and Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language. Here’s what she has to say.  

Grenoble is home to a plethora of theaters running shows every night of the week, but not many of those are performed in English.  Luckily we have Upstage productions to step up to the task; every year Upstage puts on a six-day running of English language theater, performed by high school students at the Cité Internationale.  This year producer and director David Simpson presented a double-bill, Joe Orton’s Loot and Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language.  

Those expecting “High School Musical” should look elsewhere.  Although the team of actors is made up of high school students, the plays chosen confronted difficult and provocative issues. The group emphasizes that its shows are professional productions aimed for all mature audiences, and challenging plays are chosen to reflect this.  

First on the bill was the short but intense Mountain Language, a serious political play about the imprisonment and torture of an ethnic minority group and their loss of culture and identity as a result of the forced suppression of their language.  The play was written after writer Harold Pinter became aware of the treatment of Kurds in Turkey, but the play’s setting is non-specific.  Heavy subject matter and a demanding script, which the actors handled with deliberate subtlety, making the events on stage resonate even more.  

Loot, a subversive black comedy recounting a funeral, a bank robbery on the same day, and the consequent mayhem, is full of lively, sharp characters and witty one-liners.  The actor playing Nurse Fay got the character’s prim voice and maligning saunter down pat, while Inspector Truscot and Hal got through their bits with perfect comic delivery, including a Clouseau-ish French detective impression that won the house over.  

In both plays gender roles were not strictly kept to, with girls playing male roles to balance out the distribution.  To make the small number of roles available to more actors, two actors playing each role alternated nights.   

The play ran from Monday to Saturday the week before last.  Thursday night opened to a full house in the Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas, a small theatre with plenty of ambience just off of the place Notre Dame.  Many Anglophones were audible in the audience, but a good mix of Francophones was present as well.  

An impressive show, by an impressive group of bilingual students.  I look forward to next year’s.  

Upstage 2010 poster

Related Posts:

• English Talk Radio – March 10
• Upstage – outstanding English theatre in Grenoble since 1993
• Upstage presents Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – review
• Upstage 2011 – cast and crew profiles
• Anglophone Grenoble, a rough guide