“L’Addition” at Battersea Arts Centre
Tom Bolton in South London
8 November 2024
As part of Forced Entertainment’s continuing 40th anniversary celebration, co-founder Tim Etchells has devised a two-hander with performance duo Bert and Nasi in which reality is pushed to its breaking point through the basic mechanism of a classic farce set-up. In L’Addition (“the bill”, in French) a restaurant customer sits down at a table, the waiter offers him wine, pours a little, he tastes it and nods approval, then the waiter pours him a glass – but he carries on pouring until the glass overflows across the table. There’s mild panic from both, before the waiter sweeps up the tablecloth with everything on it. Then they begin again.
From the moment they walk on stage, the performers Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas are a comic time bomb always threatening to go off. Bert (the waiter) is English, bluff, matey, confident, and usually wrong. Nasi (the customer) is French, smooth, conciliatory, and also usually wrong. Together, the pair are a well-oiled machine displaying comic skills that are a joy to behold.
Much of L’Addition is very funny. The comic scenario breaks apart continually under examination, becoming more and more ludicrous and hilarious. The performers know how to hold back comic gratification so that, when it comes, it is a true release. At one point Bert, constantly laying and relaying a tablecloth, finally loses it completely and performs a strange, wild dance with the cloth which seems to continue for several minutes as Nasi looks on, astonished. The audience are beside themselves.
However, like all classic comedy L’Addition is buoyed on a tide of existential sadness. The underlying themes in Etchells’ piece are barely stated, but it becomes apparent that the show is concerned with existence, ritual, and death. There is a moment that stops everyone in their tracks when the pair fast forward to a point 50 years in the future, when they are still performing their skit. Then it dawns on them that much of the audience will no longer be alive, at which point it sinks in with each of us too.
The process of ritualizing and mythologizing existence is examined too, as the scene becomes something different through constant repetition, a tribute to its original self enacted by people who cannot remember the original, or why they are doing it. But they know they have to, just as we know we have to eat, sleep, repeat to exist.
L’Addition, which was originally presented in French at last year’s Festival d’Avignon and then in English at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer, is a brilliant piece of theatre. Etchells, Bert, and Nasi work together with a precision that most performers can only aspire to. In the influential tradition of Forced Entertainment, the show’s power is in inverse proportion to budget, complexity, or pretension. It belongs to the tradition of silent film comedy, of Samuel Beckett, and of entertainment that takes nothing seriously, but means everything. It is assured, side-splitting, and unmissable.
