“Birth”, Theatre Re touring at the Grand Théâtre Luxembourg
Dana Rufolo in Luxembourg
9 January 2025
Theatre Re’s Birth is about families. The company founder and artistic director Guillaume Pigé says he drew inspiration from The Long Christmas Dinner by Thornton Wilder, that pre-World War Two play where family members join to eat together Christmas after Christmas, generation after generation.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
Birth is similarly about ties between generations, but it also includes the sad tale of a family losing a member even before it is born. The unborn child, the never to be born child, leaves an empty place at the table: it is the chance that never became, the hope that died, the dream that turned into a wisp of chilling wind.
Theatre Re interprets this saga with “visual theatre”; mime and near-dance, gestures and a scattering of words. Billowing sheets of cloth represent the passage of time as one generation with its set of names transitions to the next (some of the few spoken lines in Birth have to do with naming a newborn child) all set at a dining table around which so many interactions happen and good food is consumed.
Among the stage props that appropriately give Birth vitality are birthday cakes galore fit for every age in the growing-up process, tiny baby shoes and, again, those billowing sheets that blur memories of details into memories of emotional and repeated events having to do with family, birth and death. But above all, the quick and nimble actors who transform one scene into another with fluidity are the centre of this melancholic piece about a super family – everyone’s dream family – which is only there to support one another, to act the perfect parent or perfect grateful child. We even find a pillar of stability offered by an Ur-mother’s diary where she writes of a miscarriage and then of the joy of having given birth later to a healthy baby girl.
In this respect, Birth works on stereotypes, for as Leo Tolstoy has written, ““Happy families are all alike”. What we see on stage does not correspond to what we live in reality, but it does correspond to our instinctive notion of the ideal. To reinforce the seriousness of this message, Theatre Re’s artistic director Guillaume Pigé incudes a scientific collaborator (Kate Jeffery) and a philosopher (Graeme A. Forbes) in the production team, and the UK-based company consulted with the charity Aching Arms. Strikingly emotive original music played on violin and keyboard by Alex Judd is an ethereal addition.
The actors, all mime artists of exceptional finesse, developed this virtually non-verbal performance by coming together to “play”, as Pigé says. As they explored the theme of loss through miscarriage or birth problems, there were flash moments when something they were trying out in rehearsals visually linked theme to action in an exciting way. “I like when something is magical by surprise,” Pigé told the audience in a post-production talk. These moments were remembered, saved and expanded upon.
In this way, slowly, the entire performance piece emerged. In January 2023, Theatre Re performed The Nature of Forgetting at the Théâtre des Capucins in Luxembourg. In it, Theatre Re demonstrate how it feels for the afflicted person himself or herself (in this case a man) to experience Alzheimer’s disease; the development of this earlier piece was identical.
