Dining [UNS]-Table

Cloé Fournier offers the PACT audience an immersive theatre experience of family lunch. Or dinner. Or whatever it is that it may be. Her creation is interesting and understated, perhaps a little pushy at times, but experimental in all the best ways. Fournier is an artist working her craft and has created a piece well worth seeing.

Pre-show she chose out 11 audience members to participate in the scene as various family members, who were mostly ornamental, to pleasant effect. Fournier has a talent for manipulating the space, whether that manipulation is through spontaneous direction of the audience members on stage, the setting and un-setting of a typical family-lunch-party table, or with her own fairytale gravitas. Little English is spoken. Most of the spoken performance is in French but she avoids pretentiousness by using this as another device to saturate the audience with feeling and deny them rational means of interpretation. The result is an audience rife with self-conscious laughter and varied levels of engagement. Typical party paraphernalia (party hats, over-sized plastic wine glasses, balloons) create an uncanny atmosphere. “It’s Christmas lunch with Dad’s side of the family again.” Uncanny, too, is the feeling created within the audience through those few poignant moments where Fournier spills out emotionally in symbolic gestures with that paraphernalia, beautifully articulated choreography and tirades of French inanities. 

The experience of being part of a family is always considered sacrosanct. The Christmas lunch has proved this wrong. Fournier addresses it beautifully. A woman to watch.