'A feeling of pointlessness'

Photo: Arno Declair

Thomas Ostermeier directs the world premiere of Returning to Reims

Returning to Reims

HOME, Manchester to July 14.

BORN of German niche theatre director Thomas Ostermeier, its leading actress Nina Hoss and a team of film makers, Returning to Reims tries to get into the head of modern French left-wing philosopher Didier Eribon. Well, up to a point.

In 2009, Eribon's memoir of the title, which mused on his return home for the first time in years on the death of a father he hated, examined how the working class people he grew up with managed so completely to reject their Sixties Communist leanings and turn today to the hard right.

If he had asked he might have learned that people, not activists, follow promises: then, Communism seemed best for "the workers", today the right seems to offer more.

Instead he deliberates on his working class roots, on his homosexuality and on post-war French politics in general, and comes to no great conclusions.

This is fairly clear from this work, which pretty much dispenses with Eribon at the half-way mark, veers off into French politics in general then spends the last half hour looking at the otherwise very watchable Nina Hoss's home movies.

These depict ­- conveniently, from her telephone ­- the father she, unlike Eribon, clearly adores, a Communist activist and later Green politician and bringer of clean water to indigenous Brazilian tribes. In fact he seems more interesting than the navel-gazing Eribon.

The trouble with this self-indulgent and soporific two hours, presented without a break even though there is an obvious stopping point, is that it is barely theatre at all. Documentary? Radio play? Certainly. Theatre? Hardly.

Set within a voiceover studio, for the first hour we watch Hoss read her lines to sync with the film we see projected above, with interjections from the film's "director" (Bush Moukarzel) and bizarrely, for two rap numbers from third cast member Ali Gadema.

As the evening wears on there is at least the movie to watch, but Hoss's voice is too relaxed for too long, interest in the images, and certainly in the politics, falls away and the close brings with it a feeling of pointlessness.

If this is the sort of work Manchester's new Factory complex will produce from 2020, and if MIF director John McGrath believes this is cutting edge theatre, then I reckon the Arts Council should ask for some of its £38 million back.