Review: Horvath, Figaro divorces

I am again about the idea of death. this is just phantasizing for the moment, but the dark thought that there is no real place for me in this realm is coming to knock to my brain again. And I am finding it somehow seductive. And it was in an attempt to divert my attention from this circle that I invited myself to the Comedie Française tonight, havung a nice ticket for 5.50 Eur. A real deal. Someone told they are good at traditional French theatre, such as Molière, and very bad at the rest. This is a lie. I saw tonight "Figaro divorces" by Odon von Horvath, a Hungarian Jew dead at 37 in Paris in 1938. It is a pièce about a couple of aristocrats forced to fleed when French revolution irrupts in their town. Their respective personal servants, Figaro and Susanna, drive them out of trouble and lead their journey. The story is delicate and sharp enough to give you the sense of a disapted life, the one of the fleed noble, who lets his wife die because he is not capable to adapt to a "bourgeoise"; who, being abroad and drunkard, when coming back to his country, loses the hope in a new life, after having lost every goods and tries to die on his land, on his bare dark land, under a nightly forest rain. It also gives you the sense of what it means to be a foreigner, an immigrant, in a place where you are (almost) the only one - what I am also somewhat experiencing here. The best role is played by the male aristocrat, not by the opportunistic Figaro - and the interpretation of the actor at the Comedie Française was very good - it transmitted the paradigmatic idea of an obsolete beauty, and let the public smell the honour of a remote ethic and world. The staging is excellent, with a rotating machine acting as scene-setter, as the only machine of the theatre and as the fulcrum of scenic effects - a very effective device, used since Greek tragedy times. The end is spectacular, with actors receiving the plause of the public while standing on the borders of the rotating base of the machine - like a chinese plate in the middle of the table.