Sans tambour

One year after Peter Brook’s tragic passing, the new musical performance by Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord graces the stages of this year’s Festival de Otoño. Peter Brook (London, 1925) distinguished himself amongst the greats in a variety of theatre genres: theatre, opera, cinema, and writing. He left us in July 2022 at the age of 97 and spent the last 40 years working with Bouffes du Nord in the French capital. Samuel Achache’s evocative work was brought to life in Bouffes du Nord. He is a stage director who has not stopped flirting with classical musical repertoire since 2013, when, together with Jeanne Candel, he directed Purcell's Dido and Aeneas , which won a Molière Award for Best Musical Show. In 2015 he premiered in Avignon and a year later he collaborated for the first time with Bouffes du Nord with the staging of Orfeo / I died in Arcadia. On this occasion, together with the musical director, saxophonist, and clarinettist Florent Hubert, he presents a work where theatre coexists with Schumann's lieder.

“Everything starts with collapse. A couple’s collapse. A house’s collapse. Their story. They speak or sing, which is two sides of the same coin at the end of the day. The end of their story is the beginning of ours: rebuilding on the fallen pieces to create something new.” The powerful metaphor that is so often used to refer to the end of a couple, that of the collapse of the building, is made literal on stage, where we see the walls of a house fall to the dizzying rhythm of the last and final discussion. With the pieces scattered on the floor, the piece is built on destruction, in a fragmentary way, exploring very freely the links between theatre and music. Samuel Achache crosses the patterns of collapse and rebirth, in a fragmentary piece worked with Schumann’s Lieder, which continues to freely explore the links between theatre and music. A ritual where there is room for circus burlesque at times, the clown’s melancholy, humour, tenderness and pain, laughter and that tear that slides down our cheek which we cannot hide.

Sans tambour is a non-linear performance born of decomposition, a piece is constructed in the form of paintings that pass through different eras, even reaching the Stone Age, assembling pieces of lives associated with that house. Layers of the past and traces of the present, the singing comes out of the ruins and the musical instruments from the rubble. Lieder have rich, colourful harmony and frequent modulations with common poetic themes of love, longing, and the beauty of nature. As an ancestor of the composition style, it is an ideal vehicle to talk about love, a slippery feeling that cannot always be grasped with reason. The performers work with the rhythms and the rhythms work with their performance. If they must have music or song as a means of expression when words no longer serve, each will find their own way of doing so, of reweaving nets from the loneliness that grips the broken lover.

All the performers are impeccable, and the symbiosis between the two modes of communication makes the show irresistible. At times, it is so nonsensical that it could derail, yet it finds a way to enchant the audience and take them from the joyful to the poignant with astonishing simplicity. Love is eternally present: sometimes it flows with surprising ease and at other times it becomes devilishly complex. At both extremes, we often find that music becomes our vessel of expression, without really knowing how. When the world is turned upside down by love, a song can accompany us in the pit of our suffering or help us get our heads out of all the chaos and feel reborn.